.: Archives :.

Friday, February 28, 2003

It's been a year? - [4:54 PM]

A year ago on this day I was experimenting with OPML and Visio. I haven't had the time to go back to the experiment.

Another odd thing about that post, check out the movie line for that week. It was from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. How weird is that, considering the answer to yesterdays movie line post?

BlogX - [12:25 PM]

I've been hearing a lot about Chris Anderson's BlogX lately. Maybe this is the solution I've been looking for?

Chris we need to talk... I hope I didn't offend you. That wasn't my intention.

I have a Win2k server sitting in a rack just serving up a few pages. Maybe BlogX would fit nicely into the mix?

Movie line of the week answer - [10:58 AM]

Yesterday's movie line was an easy one but not many folks took the time to play.
I had three guesses, all correct. The winner was James Snell, congratulations James!

The correct answer was...

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Don't you just love the tagline?

If adventure has a name... it must be Indiana Jones.

If we'd had a son we could have named him Indiana, honey what do you think?

Thursday, February 27, 2003

Radio bug or other? - [10:38 AM]

I'm having trouble getting Radio to publish via the MetaWeblog API to a category. Everything I publish goes to the main page instead. I'm using a third-party client called PowerBlog to talk to Radio. I've documented the problem here. Thanks!

Movie line of the week - [10:14 AM]

I've been stuck in merge hell this morning. I think everything is fixed up now.

This movie has some other choice lines but this one stuck with me after seeing it for the first time. I remember my brother talking about this scene a lot after the movie, apparently it stuck with him as well.

Ah! Dessert....Chilled Monkey-Brains!

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Yes, I know it's an easy one!

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

I couldn't agree more - [6:21 PM]

SlashDot [via InstaPundit]: "Boston, Manhattan, San Francisco, and Seattle. What do those cities have in common? Some of the highest rents in the country (as well as inflated costs of living, which required higher salaries)." - I've been asking myself, and others, this question for quite some time. Why can't we have a great tech company in a rural setting? Once I asked my sister-in-law to pitch Visalia to her company as a possible location for a data center she just laughed. I was serious. Why not, honestly?

On the summer must see movie list... - [5:52 PM]

Blockbuster time is just around the corner, believe it or not!

Just saw the trailer for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, woooooo it's gonna be cool.

Ramblings cont. - [10:42 AM]

Another thing a new blogging backend should support is programmability using VSA. If someone wants to do more than is provided by a backend he should be able to do it in a familiar language. Hopefully we'll be getting more and more language support for .NET, it's there if folks will take advantage of it.

Question for the .NET heads: Could someone constrain how an add-on to a .NET based system accesses the system? Meaning if I did have a blogging environment and you could plug into it could I NOT allow access to the operating system level functionality and just limit the add-on developers to what's provided by the blogging system?

Ramblings on Blogging - [9:37 AM]

There's some blogging going on inside Microsoft these days, well at least it's being called blogging. It's very basic and missing some very key elements but people are starting to see it's uses. I only hope if we venture into these waters we don't hijack the name and do something totally screwed up. I would happily work on a team creating a blogging solution at Microsoft, just need to finish the next Visio first. It's probably not something we'd consider because people don't see the power of it yet.

What I want in a blogging tool: Thin client for composition with a thick client for more complex operations is where it's at IMHO. I also want synchronization between client and server. I want to be able to host it on my box or on a box sitting in a rack somewhere. I want to be in charge of my own nightmare so to speak. Rambling, yes. I'm just spewing out what I want so it's written down somewhere, why not here. Honestly I love the way Manila works because it offers a very rich feature set. Now if I could only extend it the way I want, which means language of choice, then I'd be in heaven. I also think the thick version of the client is a natural to be hosted inside of Outlook, Outlook Express, or [insert your favorite triple pane app here]. Just another node on the tree called Weblogs. While you're in there RSS should also be added, see NewsGator, it's exactly the right thing. I want to be able to compose my blog post just like an e-mail, click the "Post" button and send it on it's merry way to MY backend of choice. Manila, Blogger, MovableType, [once again insert your favorite blogging backend here]. Maybe SharePoint could be "enhanced" to do this, I dunno? I'd also like that client to be smart enough to synchronize with the server in case I've made posts while I was away from my main blogging tool, there's the thin client tie-in. It sounds so simple doesn't it? It's just another part of that digital dashboard thing we talk about, right?

Maybe we should consider buying Manila?

Interesting - [9:33 AM]

I knew you could extend Manila with plugins but I've never investigated it. The reason I'm saying this is Dave is pointing out the Manila Plugins Developers Guide this morning over on Scripting. I haven't read through it yet but I wonder if I could write a plugin to Manila in my language of choice?

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Great quotes - [3:07 PM]

"Running your application in the browser is like having your office in the elevator"- Alan Cooper

"That's because he's a brainless git!" - Ron Weasley

The wisdom of a great software designer and Harry Potter's best friend, in one post. Who could ask for anything more?

On .NET - [10:03 AM]

Richard Caetano's StronglyTyped: "But I think the most useful feature in the framework is .ToString()...." - Richard's been running around in the CLR, C#, and VB.Net for quite some time. He's recently back from VSLive where he learned some new tricks. After all that it's funny what you'll find to be the most useful thing about a technology. I remember when I went from a 16-bit to a 32-bit architecture. My new joy in life was being able to use GlobalAllocPtr instead of a combination of GlobalAlloc and GlobalLock for memory allocations. Then when I made the leap into C++ I thought new and delete were the cats meow. And encapsulation, what a concept! The first thing I wrote was a string class that had an (LPCSTR) operator so it would work with Win32 API's, without casts! Wow!

Now we have the .NET CLR. Honestly it is that wonderful. My pet projects have gone so well with it. I'm very productive and I've been able to sit down with my brother and bang out the functionality of his PK Calculator real-time, of course there's been cleanup after those coding sessions, but they were very productive. There is no way I could have done that with C++, we'd do it on paper first, then write the code. (Yes it's designed first, but design to code is very rapid.)

Try it, you'll like it. I'm hoping someday soon I'll be writing code in C# on a daily basis. Wink, wink.

Monday, February 24, 2003

More Radio/PowerBlog goodness - [12:03 PM]

I asked in my earlier post if I could use categories and the answer is a resounding YES!

Jon pointed me to the Category combo-box in the article window. This combo-box isn't pre-populated but you can type in a category name and it then sticks. So I typed in TestingGround, which is one of my Radio categories, and POW it published to the correct category!

Excellent!

PowerBlog+MetaWeblog=Great Radio Client! - [10:08 AM]

Jon has added support for MetaWeblog to PowerBlog and it seems to work just fine!

Now my big question is how do I post to different Categories? Does MetaWeblog support posting to different categories? I haven't looked.

Keep it up Jon, it's looking really nice!

.: Microsoft Bloggers :.
Andrew Conrad
Benjamin Voigt
Chris Anderson
Chris Hollander
Dare Obasanjo
David P. Cole
David Weller
Don Box
Douglas Purdy
Greg Franklin
Harry Pierson
Jimmy Grewal
Joe Beda
Joe Bork
John Lambert
Joshua Allen
Keith Ballinger
Matt Williams
Michael Murray
Michael Winser
Peter Drayton
Sascha Corti
Tantek Celik
Tim Ewald
Wolfgang Manousek
Ziv Caspi