Watched this on the news today and had to check it out. Telecom are finally upgrading the Broadband plans. Yay! Now it's taken quite a while for this to happen I think but it's finally happening, and I believe there is now room for it to be even better. The even better news - for businesses that is - is that the plans and prices are the same for both!!.

To see the range of the new plans offered by Telecom go here - the plans are effective from April this year.

Ok so on the same day IE 7 beta 2 preview is released a bug is found!! According to PCWorld here. An independent researcher only needed 15 minutes to find to find the first bug in the beta 2 preview.

The interesting thing is that "Ferris's discovery is one of the quickest such bug-findings on record". I personally dont think this is bad news tho. I mean the software is not even a beta yet... and discovering bugs early leads to having a better, less vulnerable final product.

More details on the bug can be found here.

Update: here's a post from the IE blog regarding the issue.

Just read about one of the nice new features available in VS 2005 - Code Snippets! In VS 2005 you can select code from a list of commonly used patterns and  "What makes code snippets really cool is that you can easily create and define your own." as Scott says.

The snippets are not available in C# by default but you can download them from here

See Scott's post for more detail on this here

A couple of days ago I got a Windows Live Messenger invitation and been using it since. Over all it looks good and has some nice new features new user interface ...etc, but here's the one that caught my attention. In Windows Live Messenger you can actually send offline messages to people when they are not online so that they'd receive them on their next login, very cool! This used to be one of my favourite features in ICQ and I'm glad to see it in Windows Live Messenger now. I havent tried MSN Messenger 7.5 but I'm sure that this feature was not available in MSN 7 and earlier.

To send an offline message just right click an offline name or just double click the name...

Update: I also just noticed that you can now also talk to people while you are appearing offline, nice!!! I wished for this feature long time ago to be on MSN...

Here's one of the funniest emails I've received in a while. So thought I'd share

"A man joined a big multi national company as a trainee. On his first day, he dailed the kitchen and shouten into the phone:"Get me a cup of coffee, quickly!" The voice from the oder side responded: "You fool; you've dialed the wrong extension! Do you know who you are talking to?" "No" replied the trainee."It's the managing director of the company, you idiot!"

The trainee shouted back: "And do you know who YOU are talking to, you IDIOT?" "No!" replied the Managing Director angrily.

"Thank God!" replied the trainee and put down the phone.

A new version of the GPL - the first major revision in the last 15 years - is coming soon. A draft was recently released here. According to Computerworld the changes are designed to designed to "address two increasingly important issues in the software industry: software patents and DRM (digital rights management). " Will be interesting to see the outcome of this...

See the full article here

Here's something nice to have a look at as the year 2005 comes to end. I came accross this list of the 50 greatest gadgets in the past 50 years on PCWorld recently.

There should be a lot more gadgets joining this list in the next 50 years I think. It's also interesting that Sony has 7 presences among those 50! Good job Sony!