Installing the beta was on my list for this weekend, but looks like the folks over at Cerulean Studios are ahead of me.  Last night, they released some final bits for trillian.  Very cool. 

If you don’t use Trillian you should at least look at it.  It is a fantastic program that combines all of the popular IM clients into one, and does it exceptionally well.  I have been using it for years now, and could never go back.  The new version adds quite a few features based on the product tour, so I’m pretty siked. 

Ear candy: The Cosbys - aly-ellen-izumi-paula-rachel-s

I’m a big fan of football.  There’s nothing I would rather do on a Sunday then sit around and watch football for like 9 hours.   Of course that never happens, but thats another story.  Oh, and GO COWBOYS!

Back to the topic at hand.  I found out a couple nights ago from a friend that NFL sold it’s video gaming soul to EA.  EA’s intentions are obvious, and I can’t fault them for trying.  The NFL, on the other hand, what the fuck are you doing?  I can not believe that you would agree to this, and just snub all of the other game developers who have worked hard building, and marketing their games, which in turn markets your brand. 

I’m disappointed to say the least.  Congrats EA, great move for you I suppose.  Although my guess is next year I’ll be playing with the Ft Worth Cowmen with players like Julius James just so I don’t support this move.

Boo hiss.

Ear candy: The Roots - Sacrifice (Feat Nelly Furtado)

Saw this over on Loren Halvorson’s blog.  How timely, too.  Deployed to a test server yesterday, and then everyone is yelling and screaming that this or that doesn’t work.  Well, it all stemmed form the fact of how we were handling the different config files.  This seems like an ideal solution, 1 config file that renders itself appropriately for each environment.  I’ll need to see how this can fit into Nant.  Hopefully in the next couple days too, don’t want that to happen again.  Either way, check it out here. 

Ear candy: Soul Coughing - Pensacola

Sometimes caching at the UI isn’t always ideal.  Of course you always try to cache in the presentation layer, but sometimes I’ve been left with the feeling that I wish I could cache lower down the call chain.  Here is a post from Peli’s blog about doing just that, and wanted to post about it so I don’t lose the link  :)

You do have the overheard of a ContextBound object, so caching fast methods may even degrade performance, but for that highly intensive method that may be called from 5 different ui’s within the next 3 minutes, this may be an ideal solution. 

Ear candy: Method Man And Redman - 1212

Bah.  More and more people are using 2k3 as a workstation.  Although not it’s intended use, it certainly works, and offers additional functionality to the advanced user (read developer).  I got the idea after seeing some MSCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) consultants used it for development.  They did not give me a recommendation to do it, I just thought it was a great idea. 

Now what I don’t understand, is why cripple where the toolbar suite can be installed.  I can understand the reasoning for an AV company, but not a product like this.  Maybe there is a technical reason way in the bowels of 2k3, but I really doubt it.  It’s still NTFS, and my mail is in the same OST/PST it would be on XP.  Bah

I’m hoping this is adjusted in subsequent releases, or someone find a hack.  I don’t see a business reason to not allow it on a 2k3 server, and highly doubt its a technical reason.

Anyway, no msn toolbar for me.  Good thing I uninstalled the google one first huh?  :)

Ear candy: The Doors - Ghost song

[Edit]

Man blogs are great.  Within 5 minutes of my complaining, I find this, which may or may not work for the installer, but at least worth a shot.  Updates will be coming.

[Edit2]

Found the answer here.  Just finished the install.

All the rumors were correct.  MSN has released their own desktop search agent.  I’m downloading as I type.

This is good since last week I was just complaining about the google one.  Not that its a web server, not that it’s on my google home page, but just that I didn’t find everything.  I would search outlook for “xxx” domain term, and find at least 50 emails.  The same search in google, although 100x faster, would return 12.  Not quite sure why, didn’t look into, just frustrating.

So either way, I’ll be at least trying out the msn offering.  And news over the weekend shows Yahoo coming to the plate soon too.  Lots of competition firing up. 

Check out the MSN toolbar here

Ear candy: Coldplay - Don't Panic

From scoble, Google has released a beta of an autocomplete search box.  I type in asp. and it knows asp.net.  Not really helpful in itself, but it also shows the number of documents matching the term.  Very cool.  Check it out here.

Ear candy: Jay Z - Change Clothes and Go

As you can see, I wasn't a very good crook.

Priceless

No, thats not really me, but classic either way.

Ear candy: Sublime - Hope

I was at the last one, and I’ll be at the next one.  Great technical content, free stuff, and best of all, free.  Check out the details here

Ear candy: qtip - qtip - Moving With U

Another dev here showed me this cool trick where if you enter javascript:alert(document.cookie); in your address bar it will show your cookies.  So I quickly added a shortcut to my links bar and now I'm 2 clicks away from seeing my cookies on any page.  Very easy and cool.

I've been anxiously awaiting word that the DNR crew had released their movie, and hot damn it's here.  Tried to order it Sat but my wallet was all the way in the office with my CC, but I was in the living room.  Good thing they are taking Paypal now so I don't have to stand up to buy it.

Why are you still reading this? Go order it!

Been thinking about the blog, and where I might like it to go in the future, and the one feature I just keep thinking about is wiki functionality.  For my uses, I think it would be a natural fit.  There are already quite a few bliki's out there, so I figure there has to be a few packages that might be worth checking out. 

So I started searching, and found a few options.  I found that some people use some WikiTalk to get FlexWiki to act as a blog.  Interesting idea, but I can't see myself ditching .Text for that.  I found a couple other bliki's, but nothing that seemed to stand out, until I found SnipSnap.  SnipSnap looks really interesting.  I'm certainly not convinced, but I'm going to play with it for a bit to see how it is.  It's not .net, though, so it will be a hard sell either way (anyone know a cheap router that does forwarding based on hostname?). 

In either case, my research yielded all kinds of crazy requirements and ideals for a system I wish I could just download.  I'd like to say I'd build it, well hell, maybe I will. 

• Must have a blog.  Full support for all the various syndication and API standards. 
• Multiple users, each who has their own blog.
• Each blog can be skinned and modified independently.
• All blogs share common wiki.
• Blog entries have categories.
• Blog posts use wiki dialect.
• Each blog has articles.
• Ability to attach files to wiki or blog pages.
• Ability for wiki sections to be marked private/roles based access.
• Ability to publish wiki page to blog or article.
• Winforms app that works like notepad that stores away wiki pages to be “synced“ later.
• Would be nice if wiki was blog context skinnable.
• Blogs have comments that turn off in n days.
• Color my code for me please.

The list got a little longer in type then it was in my head.  I could have kept going too.  Either way, anyone know of any other bliki's I should check out?

Just finished up on another article for the blog.  I'd like to publish a few short technical papers with ranging topics just to get some more in depth technical content up here. 

In interviews, there is no doubt, I will ask someone what an interface is, and to explain uses for them in the .net framework.  The answers are usually interesting, and wrong.  Experianced .net developers usually have a very firm grasp on interfaces, as well as the rest of the tools needed for OO design in .net, but newcomers often have issues hitting the ah-ha! moment with interfaces.  I hope this article can help people understand their many uses.

Check it out here

Anyone else notice the gmail spam filter just seems to have turned itself off this morning?  I woke up and found quite a few emails that were obviously spam in the inbox, and they haven't stopped yet. 

I have been pretty happy with gmails spam filter.  I do go through it myself since it catches a couple things I wish it didn't, but it's not really that much of a hasstle.  Not catching spam, though, is a huge hasstle.  Did the spammers maybe change something last night?

I started reading ASP.Net v 2.0 - The beta verion yesterday, and have started back up in whidbey.  After I started a new web site I had a project with a new default.aspx and a default.aspx.vb codebehind.  Odd, I don't remember selecting a language.  Well after thinking about the new no project model, it made sense as to why I could just specify the lanuage when adding a new file. 

ps. I quickly deleted the default.aspx in favor of its {sexier} version  :)

pps. Picture whidbey doesn't usually come through on this feed, but since I haven't done it in months I wanted to let anyone new know it's there. and hopefully more active.  Also, feel free to submit screenshots

UML can sometimes be a conflicting topic, but I feel it can definitely add value during the design phase.  I have had some thoughts about this for a while, and figured I would finally jot them down.  Turned out to be a more then a blog entry, but not something I'd want to submit to publish, so it found a home here in the articles section.

Design Abstractions intends to explain some of the design UML methodologies I use for some of the smaller things I do.  This article speaks to creating design artifacts with a limited design time, or small team.  For example, this is the type of design I do for my own “stuff“.

Feel free to comment as it could certainly become somewhat of a living document.   

Link

So I was hunting around for some articles today, and happened upon 15seconds.  To my surprise, right on the front page, it lists the most popular article, and holy cow, it's my build system article.

Being my first professionally published article, I'm pretty siked.  Now it's time to roll up the sleeves and write another.  Thanks everyone who read it, and thanks to those who have emailed me about the article!

I've complained before about this, and it still plagues us here and there.  Basiclly, large vb.net projects that bomb out the IDE from time to time.  Somedays I never restart the IDE, sometimes I restart it a couple times an hour.  Nothing like an intermitted problem that stops everything to boost productivity.

Well, unbeknownst to me, MS released a patch many months ago to help combat the issue.  I will apply this today and see if it helps at all. 

Thanks Panopticon Central for the heads up