Here's an interesting article on the process of writting software for the space shuttle....Line for line it's one of the most expensive in the world, but the results are they find 85% of coding errors before formal testing begins, and 99.9% before the program is delivered to NASA. I have to say the process sounds quite stifling, I'm not sure I would be cut out for that level of formalisation :-)

I was looking for new or newish M5000 Smartphone on eBay a couple of weeks ago, and found that eBay supported RSS. Once you have made a search there is an RSS link that gives you updates on the search. I found this really cool for keeping an eye on good deals for the M5000 via FeedGhost. I'm making use of this feature looking out for a dummy case for my old phone, so that I can give it a newer look and hand it down to one of my son Sam. The case in question doesn't come up very often, so using the RSS feature I'll get an notification when one becomes available.

On a side note I had a little poke around in the XML produced by eBay and noticed that they add some extra fields (auction ending, price etc) that would be really nice to appear as columns in the news list when the subscription node for eBay is clicked. Currently we can't do this in FeedGhost, but it's something I would like in there...

Most RSS Readers follow the traditional tri-pane look as can be seen below, and indeed is the default layout that FeedGhost uses:

In the above setup we see the subscriptions tree on the left followed by the news list and the articles pane. I rarely change my subscriptions, so once I've set them up I like to the have the tree collapsed, and instead I make use of the News Lists grouping functionality grouping by Date and Feed. This gives me a semi-tree view as can be seen below:

Because I have lots of subscriptions and consequently lots of news items to read, I like to flip the News List and article views so that are stacked left to right. This allows me to speed read the News List and read the articles that interest me on the right:

One last tip, I like to keep focus on the news list as much as possible, so when I want to scroll the article view on the right, I press the alt key down whilst pressing the up or down arrows (depending which way you want to go). This scrolls the article whilst leaving keyboard control on the news list, allowing me to move onto the next article without leaving the keyboard (You need the build 167 for this alt key behavior).

Lee