Robert Scoble I'm onto you. I know you are Mr. Mini-Microsoft. Now, now before you roll your eyes and move on thinking this is just another half-hearted accusation lets go over my evidence. You see, I've been doing some Scobleizer and Mini-Microsoft blog forensics and have found some small facts that create some decent theories which lead me to believe that you are the person responsible for Mini-Microsoft. It's all good, I'm a fan and a reader of both but you challenged us Scoble... You wanted to be anonymous. Being anonymous begged us to find who was responsible. That person is you. I know you know! But now the world must know. This is what I know:

It's easiest to explain by walking through a timeline. So I'll start from the beginning:

Theory #1
Scoble was hired by Microsoft in 05/2003 and started blogging shortly after in 09/2003. Mini-Microsoft was started in 07/2004.

In theory, after blogging for nearly a year with fear of losing his job for saying too much Scoble decided to find a better way to say what he wanted without that fear. Thus, Mini-Microsoft was born.

Theory #2
Wordpress vs. Blogger. Wordpress for Scobleizer,  Blogger for Mini-Microsoft. They aren't the same. Switching it up so that we see no similarities. Subtle Scoble, subtle. You almost had me there!

Theory #3
This is my favorite piece of evidence. It was right there in front of us but we were too lazy to put the pieces together! We all know that Robert's Mom grew sick and passed away in 05/2006 (I'm sorry Robert, my thoughts and prayers are with your family). During this time of support for his Mom Robert left work to be with her and if you follow his posts you'll know that he wrote some occasional heart-wrenching posts about his Mom and his feelings as he went through this tough time. Mini-Microsoft went dry during this time. Here are the ever-so-convincing post timelines:

May 7th
Scobleizer: Last Microsoft/tech related post
Mini-Microsoft: Microsoft related post

May 8th
Scobleizer: Does a personal post about Mom's condition and how he's heading to Montana the next day

May 9th-18th
Scobleizer: No Microsoft/tech related posts. Only posts about the current Mom situation.
Mini-Microsoft: Absolutely no posts. Nothing. Nada. Why would he? He's preoccupied!

May 19th
Scobleizer: He posts Back in the land of bandwidth and cell phones
Mini-Microsoft: He posts Still here

Theory #4
The post times don't overlap. For example take this sampling of post times (as received by NewsGator):

Scobleizer	Mini-Microsoft
Thu 7/20/2006 8:50 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 8:32 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 8:11 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 5:50 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 3:25 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 3:23 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 3:20 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 2:49 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 11:13 AM
Thu 7/20/2006 10:58 AM
	Thu 7/20/2006 8:22 AM
	Thu 7/20/2006 8:16 PM
	Thu 7/20/2006 6:05 AM
	Thu 7/20/2006 2:52 AM
	Wed 7/19/2006 8:14 PM
	Wed 7/19/2006 11:30 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:57 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:33 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:15 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:15 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:01 AM
Tue 7/18/2006 5:20 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 4:37 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 3:28 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 3:19 PM
	Tue 7/18/2006 3:18 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 12:57 PM
	Tue 7/18/2006 11:21 AM
	Tue 7/18/2006 11:10 AM

Theory #5
Duplicate coverage of news between the 2 blogs didn't happen often. For example when Bill Gates decided to leave Microsoft Mini-Microsoft mentioned it but Scobleizer didn't. Odd, why wouldn't the Scobleizer mention somebody he respected and worked for?

Theory #6
Since Scoble quite Microsoft on 07/01/2006 there has been no juicy inside info on Mini-Microsoft. The posts are thoughts on information we all were already privy to.

So there you have it... I think Scoble wanted to be exposed though. He got sloppy, but he's too smart to be sloppy! He didn't care anymore. 

Now that you have the monkey off your back Robert you can now breathe a sigh of relief. The calm will eventually come but not too soon. Yes, you will be overwhelmed with questions, yes your integrity may be challenged, but this is nothing new for you and you perform well under the pressure. I believe that what you did is right and was in Microsoft's best interest. Thank you for making Microsoft better Mr. Robert Scoble a.k.a. Mini Microsoft.

Readers, is it a load of BS?! You be the judge. The data is the data. The theories are... well theories. Time will tell. Either Scoble confesses or we decide with further evidence (e.g. Mini-Microsoft gives us no more juicy inside info since Scoble is no longer on the inside).

So I was visiting friends in Redmond this week and happened to run across Robert Scoble on a street off of highway 908 in Redmond:

I took this picture with my wife's camera phone as we were passing. Seeing him in Redding surprised me because I thought he left for California? So what is the REAL story Scoble? Were you "Laid off"? Are you still working at Microsoft? Are you staying in Redmond to maintain the low-profile Mini-Microsoft blog from local internet cafés? He seems to be in high spirits so he must not be too bad off. It's nice to see that he is maintaining his positive attitude during his time of change.

Has anybody else had a Scoble sighting in Redmond?

Coworker Scott Hanselman and Rutger Smit have given WatirMaker an overhaul and renamed it WatirRecorder++. Read more and download it here.

At this time this appears to be the only recorder for Watir, there was a Watir WebRecorder but for some reason it has been deemed "unavailable until further notice".

If you just started looking into Web browser automation make sure and give SWEA, C#, and NUnit a try; I think you'll be more impressed with this solution if you're in a .NET environment.

The bad guys are using the FireFox extensions as a means of piggybacking FireFox to steal sensitve user data.

Once FormSpy is executed, it installs itself as a component of the Firefox Web browser.
The FormSpy spyware then gleans sensitive information, such as credit card and bank account numbers, from the user's browser and forwards it to a malicious Web site. But this Trojan is capable of other tricks, as well, McAfee noted.

Read more here.

The IE team has posted about a new Internet Explorer 7 feature that allows you to enable or disable IE add-ons (toolbars). The feature seems to have been created with the purpose of troubleshooting add-on and IE integration issues. More on No Add-on mode can be found here.

My coworker Alex Ginos sent a link the other day to an XSS (cross site scripting) cheat sheet at ha.ckers.org. This cheat sheet is amazing; it has a LOT of XSS examples and also lists the browsers that the attack is "supported" by. I thought my XSS attack list was pretty good until I saw this list. To say the least, I'll be adding a ton more XSS attacks to my current test case repository. 

ha.ckers.org is also a blog with some really great posts about hacking and security. Another interesting post that I enjoyed was Attacking Applications Via XSS Proxies. Subscribe to this blog, these guys are freakin' smart.

eWeek.com has published a pretty good set of screenshots for the Windows Vista build 5472. Get a preview of the good, bad, and ugly here.

Jeff Attwood over at Coding Horror has managed to shrink a fully patched Windows XP Virtual PC down to 641 megabytes.  He gives you full details here. Good stuff. Thanks Jeff!

In the latest StickyMinds.com eLetter (Tool Look) Scott Barber talks about how he got into performance testing and gives some simple advice on how to select the appropriate performance testing tool for your application. Read the Tool Look article here.

I've been semi-quiet on the blogosphere lately due to the evenings being filled up with the season end of my boys' baseball and writing my first magazine article!

Yep! Too cool, I've been asked to submit an article to Better Software magazine for their Tool Look column. If all goes well you should see it later in the year. Wish me luck!

Borland sent out a pointer to another SQA paper, this time the paper is entitled Software Quality Management and gives an overview of:

• How to define application quality goals and metrics that match your objectives
• How to measure quality status and progress
• How to manage software quality to keep up with changing situations, emerging technologies and new regulatory requirements
• How to improve software development and incorporate quality into every step of the process

As always, the paper is written to lead up to the use of one of their tools; for this paper the tool is Borland SilkCentral Test Manager. I find their lead ins, which are usually more than 3/4 of the paper, are very well written and speak well to real problems we have with software development and quality assurance. It's a great informational read that can be downloaded here.

Using keyboard shortcuts makes you a faster tester (well, at least it does me...). However remembering shortcuts for your favorite applications is not so easy. Leslie Franke over at http://lesliefranke.com/ has created a nice little cheat sheet of FireFox keyboard shortcuts and Tips/Tricks. It's available in HTML and PDF format and can be downloaded here, Get faster in FireFox, print it out and hang it on your cube wall!