Best of the blogs: Paul Venezia is taking his first crack at the new OS. “After five days or so, I find that it’s certainly more attractive than Windows XP, and certainly more annoying with the constant barrage of confirmation dialogs, but I don’t hate it. In fact, I’m liking lots of it so far.” He shares 10 of his thoughts on Vista beginning with “it’s very pretty” and circling back around to, well, those same words in that exact order. Just not without substance in between. Podcasts: With far and away the best intro music I’ve heard on a tech podcast, Oliver Rist laments living in Jersey while his host ‘casts from sunny Florida. Guests include Tom Kampfer, president of Iomega, then Ryan Malone, vp of Zetera, and InfoWorld contributing editor Brain Chee. “Storage and virtualization apparently go hand-in-hand, but I don’t know if that’s ever gonna come down to where we are out of the big old datacenter.” Tune into Emerging Enterprise. The news beat: Microsoft issues a sample application to demonstrate what it considers to be the key architectural principles of SaaS. Hewlett-Packard appoints a new general counsel, Mike Holston, who replaces Ann Baskins since she retired in September amid the company’s spying scandal. A flaw is discovered in the Firefox browser that could let an attacker into local files. And Nokia offers free mapping and phone search. Video: Senior editor Paul Roberts speaks with Peter Houston, senior director of identity and access management in Microsoft’s server and tools division about what the company is announcing at the RSA show, identity lifecycle management, the technology pieces Microsoft has in that space, and life after the password. Watch here. Software Development