From Jed Farr: An annual survey by The Sunday Times tracked the UK's best companies to work for, with 10 tech companies in the top 100 -- including the top spot which was taken by Microsoft.

Once I got some help from the friendly tech support, I'm finding that having my RSS feeds right inside of Outlook is very nice and. I miss the toast from FeedReader, but overall I'm enjoying NewsGator.

Check out this Outlook Add-In that checks your emails for angry words (and attachments and Reply All and a bunch of other stuff) before you send it.

The Transaction Processing Performance Council has posted non-clustered tpmC results for the pre-release WinServer 2003 Datacenter edition that shows it to be w/in 5% of the top spot (Solaris 8) for less than half the price. The machine running WinServer 2003 was a 32-way NEC Intel Itanium2 box, while the Solaris machine was a 128-way Fujitsu SPARC64 box, which probably accounts for the difference in price/performance ($12.98 vs. $28.58, respectively). The big news is that with WinServer 2003 Datacenter, MS jumps past the IBM/Oracle best of 427,760 tpmC and $17.75 price/performance.

"Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!" David Stutz, ex-VB architect and ex-Rotor architect has some parting advise as he becomes an ex-MS architect. [jepstone.net]

In attending a summit on code quality recently, we each shared the techniques we use in screening/hiring a programmer. This story provides a summary.

From Craig Andera: I'm sure someone, somewhere has already written this, but I figured it out on my own today, and it's just too cool not to share. Basically, it's a bit of code that lets me store objects in my application or web configuration file, and all I have to do is write the type that holds the values.

Here's how my full quote [1] was cut down for publication. That'll teach me to be thorough. : ) [1] http://www.sellsbrothers.com/spout/#mspatents