It’s that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues.

• The Microsoft Update Product Team has a white paper called Windows Update Explained (direct download: .docx) which goes into how Windows Update works and how IT professionals can customize it.
• Arvin Wu compares Excel 2007’s limits against that of its predecessor. Sure, you can get basically the same information from the Excel specifications and limits Web page, but I like the historical comparison.
• Stephen Toulouse explains the RRDF: The Redmond Reality Distortion Field.
• The Microsoft Research Machine Translation Team explains how mistranslations sneak into the system. That’s one of the consequences of using Statistical Machine Translation.
• ::Wendy:: points out that in spite of the increased sense of panic which has overcome the Western world over the past few years, England welcomes bus spotters. See, public safety officials? Don’t shoo away loser dorks; use them to your advantage.
• The Image Composite Editor not only stiches together panoramas, it also generates formats that can be used by HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.
• Deven Kampenhout tips us off that you can use Microsoft Expression to make CSS-tinkering easier.
• The Windows Presentation Foundation SDK blog describes various ways applications get custom window chrome, and how you can do it with WPF.
• Brett Roberts draws our attention to the use of MAVIS (the Microsoft Audio Visual Indexing System) at the Washington State Digital Archives. MAVIS allows you to perform searches on audio files. Okay, so right now all they have are committee meetings, but still it’s a pretty cool use of technology.
• The Visual C++ team has some C++ puzzles for you.
• Mike Fried expands on the same topic as one of my previous essays: You don’t know what you are shipping unless you know what you are not shipping.
• Scott Olsen debugs a crash and traces it back to a single flipped bit.
• Jim Glass posts a short item on the high-tech sorters used to separate recyclables. Longer article. Q&A about recycling in the City of Seattle.
• Kevin Remde’s “Full of I.T.” blog (great name, Kevin) reminds us that even DHCP can be improved.
• The Office Sustained Engineering Blog answers the provocative question, Why doesn’t Office just fix all of the bugs before they ship it?
• John Guin gives a real-world example of postponing a bug. (Which, as he notes, did get fixed eventually.)
• Robert Mitchell has a series on the Ask the Core Team blog on The Four Stages of File Growth: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. (The fifth stage is acceptance.)
• John Mullinax lets us know that Surface devices are now available in retail channels. And as an extra bonus, when you buy a Surface device, you also get a yacht attached, absolutely free.
• On the Microsoft Malware Protection Center team blog, Peter Ferrie posted an interesting story about the lengths virus writers will go to.
• Tony Schreiner shows how to open Web pages in a tab in IE programmatically.

Updates: Fixed name of product Microsoft Expression (no “s”). Also, I think Arvin’s blog is still up—it’s just being masked by a doppelganger. Will update as information becomes available.