It's extremely frustrating for the Delphi Win32 developer to read blogs like Steve Trefethan's post on DALs. I appreciate Steve sharing his experience with various DALs on .NET, as it led me to SubSonic, which I write about here. But the fact remains that Delphi Win32 doesn't have a modern DAL in the box.

One of the things that I miss from Rails in ASP.NET applications is its ActiveRecord implementation. After reading Steve Trefethen's blog regarding DAL's, I decided to take broad look at the various options in the .NET space for making Data Access more palettable. Well, I wasn't disappointed.

I had just posted about not being able to synchronize my mobile phone to google calendar without a middle man. Well, my wife has known about my complaint in this regard far longer than I have blogged about it.

Over the past 6 months, I've been reading my email from a USB flash drive. I use a portable version of Mozilla Thunderbird that's available at portableapps.com. I can't tell you how happy I am with this solution.

Ben Smith, the new CEO of CodeGear has stated the following here: "We're also working on plans that can help developers take advantage of growing and emerging areas like web services, Ruby, Python and Ajax."

CodeGear was announced yesterday. It's a wholly owned subsidiary of Borland. We don't know much, but I'm not terribly optimistic about the situation.

I'm also excited about what Huw Collingbourne and Dermot Hogan are cooking up with Ruby In Steel. I already own VS.NET 2005, so purchasing a plugin isn't a big deal.