Jeff Albertson

aka : comic book guy

Moved old .text articles to new wiki

In an attempt to move towards my ideal personal publishing portal, I have setup a wiki and moved my articles from .text to a new site, CategoryArticles

In the past when I setup a wiki, I didn't put any thought into it, and installed flexwiki. This time, though, I took some time and did some research, and ended up going with Wikka Wiki. Of course this decision had to come just 1 day after I cleansed my system of mysql and activeperl from my abandoned MovableType blog. Oh well. After a couple more hours of struggling with PHP and MySql, the wiki was up and going.

I choose Wikka because I really liked how it works compared to flexwiki, plus it has built in FreeMind integration, which I just found phenomenally cool. Wikka itself was very easy to setup, and just as quick to get up to speed using it. I'm also a big fan of how it handles security per page, basically keeping a separate ACL for each page where you can specify who can see, edit, and comment on the page.

I think the future direction will be to publish more and more to the wiki, and probably have blog categories that correspond to wiki pages. For example, iceip will probably get a new category, and a new blog category (probably needs a re-write more then this :). The wiki will act as the homepage, with the category as the feed. I'll do the same for DotText2DasBlog, and anything coming up in the future. Seems like a very logical way to organize my online content.

Which brings me to the subject of tags. There will be a lot more coming out of me in the way of tags moving forward. I read this article about TagWebs, and I don't know what it is about that article, but it really got me thinking about tags. Expect to see this blog start exposing explicit technorati tags (since I don't think categories as tags is good enough), and maybe the wiki will expose some tags. Call me crazy, but after a few multi hour DeliciousTrips, I really see value in tags.

Why tranqy?

Over the years many people have asked me about my nickname, tranqy. The story is rather boring, but at least now I'll have an answer.

The story starts not too long after I got my first IBM pc. I had an amiga before that, but thats another story. I remember that packard bell 486sx33 very well. I was in high school, so I had alot of time on my hands, and a friend of mine (Mike with no blog) introduced me to the BBS world. So, I got hooked pretty quick, and started my online experiance as Turok. For those that don't know, before the video game, Turok was a comic book charachter. That being said, even amongst the BBS folk I got some ridicule for the nick.

Being the self concious person that I am, I went on the hunt for a new nick, and didn't take the task lightly. I mean, this is the identity I might just well have for years. I remember even getting the dictionary invovled for a bit. Finally, it came to me. The nick was cool, and I thought it was a good representation for me. I was happy. Tranquility.

Nice huh? It rolls off the tounge.

I ran with Tranquility for quite a while, but sooner or later my fingers got tired. After a few minutes of contemplation tranqy it became, and has been for.. pause for some math.. 11 years now. Some of my old friends still use it as a nick in person too.

Moral of the story, well, there isn't one.

Now hear this

I usually spend my lunch reading blogs. Today, as I was running through my bloglines, I saw a post from Brady Gaster, what have you heard?

I spent the rest of my lunch answering random questions, and trying to finish reading this, but will tonight. Not to be preachy, but, you should too.

Channel9 IRC channel

Rob Chartier points out there is a new irc channel dedicated to channel9, and even Scoble has stopped by so far. I used to use IRC a lot more when I was coding from home, but now have officially converted to a lurker. When I was just a wee coder, I found it to be an indispensable resource, despite it's sometimes seedy perception. In fact, Rob assisted me quite a bit. Thanks! :)

Rob also points to this thread on channel9, where he plugs a few other irc channels (#mscorlib, #ms.net, #asp.net, #asp) that I also idle in. Check 'em out if you get the chance.

O'reilly's safari

I'm always surprised when I meet a developer or IT professional that doesn't know this site exists, so I figured I would post it up here. O'reilly is one of my favorite publishers, and they also offer an online book service, safari. I have been using safari for a long time (with about a 4 month hiatus when I thought I didn't need it, but boy was I wrong), and continue to love the service. It's a pretty simple service. You pay $x a month for x number of books. Once you subscribe to a book, you have to keep it for 30 days, after that you can drop it at any time or replace it with another book. Although not every tech book is available, there is a huge selection, with some really high quality books. I've found safari a life saver when you need some specific information, but can't get to a book store. I've used it to save my ass a few times, and even now am using it to read up on some CSS and HTML, where I wouldn't buy a book on it since I do so little, but really need the content right now. Highly suggested.

Protecting idle software ideas

I think about technology a lot.  Some would probably argue that I do so too much, but I have a feeling this is a problem that is shared by most of the people in our industry.  Hell, if I didn't think about technology as much, this blog would be even more boring then it already is.

So of course if you think about technology alot, you have ideas.  Some good, some bad.  Throughout the years I've had my share of hairbrained ideas/apps that I thought would be the next big thing, that I forget about 2 days later.  I get very excited (inside) for a few hours, think, think, and think some more, and then get sidetracked which usually wipes out the idea.   This happens alot, like a few times a week.

Last spring I actually tried to help solve this issue by setting up an "idea" portal. I invited a few friends, and for about 2 weeks there was decent dialog about a few ideas.  But much like before, it died, rather quickly (and there are still viable ideas on there).

No matter how much I love the code, at the end of the day I code to make money, as we all do, and I think thats why in the past I have always tried to be secrative about ideas.  Of course my next idea is going to make me a million dollars.  Well, I still don't have my million dollars, but I do have a bunch of half baked ideas that never came to fruition, and probably never will. 

So I figure it might be time to blurt some of them out here to maybe start a dialog in the community.   Out of the hundreds, maybe one will spark a conversation.

Finally, the idea that prompted this post.

I see alot of value in a bliki.  I've posted about this before, and would still love to be running on a blog package that was more of a bliki.  As I continued to think about it, though, a personal bliki is nice for expanding on concepts to myself, but doesn't have the community feel of a wiki.  So the idea expanded a little.

My thoughts where to have a bliki, but that it's not really its own package.  This package could aggregate posts from a number of blogs, and then render the text as being wiki minded.  So take DotText2DasBlog for example.  Say there were other developers on the project, and each of the developers already has a blog.  We could of course setup a blog, and a wiki for the project, and everything would be happy go lucky.

Or, we could each setup a category on our own blog, and then tell the "aggregating blog" to syndicate all of the posts that each of us put in that category, thus giving us a unified view of all the blogs.  Then, when rendering the pages look for CamelCase words and render links for the wiki.  This would allow each of us to conitnue using our own blogs, and seamlessly post to the aggregated blog.  It's kinda like crossposting, but with a pull methodology.

That concludes the first idea.  Maybe I'll dig through the idea portal for another one later this week.

Blog rollover complete

Just finished up moving everything over to the new blog.  The old feed url should redirect now, but you will get some dupes.  The old url forwards to the new url, but all of the old permalinks will stay active at least for now.  Comments are now turned off on .text also. 

I took the shortest path from A to B to make this happen.  To handle the redirects I added an rss.aspx file to .text, and edited the default.aspx to include redirects, and removed the handlers for those two files from the web.config.  I couldn't find a backend way to turn off all the comments, without leaving them visible, so I just set the visibility of the comment submit button, and added some verbiage on the page linking to the new blog. 

The old blog will no longer get updates, but will be up for at least a little bit. 

If you find any issues with the new blog, please drop me a comment. 

Last night's CT .net sig

I went to my first .net sig last night.  Of course I was a little late, and left a little early.  Nothing like good first impressions  :)

Already a fan of Mark Miller, I had pretty high hopes for the talk.  Although I think he had good intentions of speaking to component based development, the whole crowd never let him talk about it.  Of course he had his share of tangent's too, but I think most of the presentation was consumed by the audience oohing and ahhing coderush, and for good reason.  To see what Mark could do with what seemed like almost no typing was amazing. 

Besides Coderush, Mark also spoke alot to context and UI design.  You could tell that he loves usability just by how excited he got talking about it, and some of the concepts he was throwing around were very good, and I will certainly be taking some of his suggestions into consideration next time I have to lay something out.  Man I wish I had his knack for usability.

I had tried to try coderush before, with no luck.  Come to find out, it was something that has since been identified and addressed.  So, last night I installed the coderush trial.  I'm siked.  I can't wait to play with it, and I have some ideas on how to extend it.  Oh, that was the other thing.  Mark was showing us how to extend DxCore which is the free core to CodeRush.  Although I didn't see the end product, it looked like extending coderush was a pretty simple task. 

Anyway, I've rambled on enough.  If your a local I hope to see you at the next SIG, hopefully I'll be a regular now.  If not, then go try coderush if you haven't yet.

Podcasts worth checking out

As I've mentioned before, I have had the chance to listen to a number of podcasts lately.  I try to fit new ones in when I find them, while catching up on older episodes of some of my favorites. 

You'll notice that on the new blog I have a list of podcasts on the right.  Those are on my current “must listen” list.  Most are technical, minus Monday's, which teeters on technical sometimes.

A new addition to this list is Software as She's Developed.  I found this podcast earlier today on podcast.net, and was hooked immeditely.  I listened to the four about agile processes right away since they were all related, and was looking for more.  Too bad I didn't have the time to listen to the last one on interfaces (damn football).  Even if you don't listen to podcasts all the time, but are interested in some details in agile programming methods, snag these.

G'Day world has also skyrocketed up my list of favorite podcasts.  They are doing fantastic work, and grabbing huge names like Scoble, and Doc Searls.  This is some great stuff people, don't miss it. 

In the Trenches offers the view of the world through the IT side of the industry.  The techchats produced by Kevin are also excellent, and every so often even have a developer spin  :)

New blog almost done

The new blog is almost done, and now public.  Here is the link.  Not sure how I am going to handle funneling traffic from dottext to dasblog as of yet, but will figure that out soon enough.  I think Mr. Hanselman's suggestion should probably work nicely since I decided to move the blog. 

This blog will stop getting updates sometime this week.  When that happens, I hope to have a redir on the feed and homepage so that everything but the permalinks will just flow through to the new blog.  I'll give some warning either way when this happens.

DotText2DasBlog now with comments

New release, now with comments.  The commentapi support was staring me right in the face the whole time. 

The new release will now move comments over via http.  The comments will not include the original url of the user that posted, and the html that worked in dotText is not allowed in dasBlog, so comments that include HTML will look as you would expect.  Trackbacks also come over, but only with the name of the site, not the url.  I didn't see these things in in the commentrss feed, but honestly I didn't look very hard yet.  Getting this functionality in was enough for this snowy weekend.

I would like to clean up the issues above by either exploring the commentrss in more depth, or adding comment importing from SQL.  Other then that the next few features are up in the air.  I would like to have something that maps my .text urls to dasblog urls, but thats a pretty vertical need.  If others would be interested in this tool expanding to support multiple blogs, speak up and let me know.  Most of the blogs support some sort of interface in, and it should be pretty straightforward to add support for other blogs into this app.

As always, the source is in cvs, and you can also get it from the urls below.  Please let me know if there are any issues.

Source Here | Binaries Here

[WARNING] 

When importing entries, please be sure to check the setting for outbound pings.  If you are importing your blog, and do not want outbound trackbacks to be created since they have already been created for these entries, be sure to turn off the feature in dasblog before importing!  Don't send bad trackbacks like I did.

Erroneously creating trackback spam

My apologies to anyone out there that I may have created some localhost trackbacks to today.  My test blog was configured to pump out trackbacks, and I have been working with a blog import utility. 

I have configured the blog to not send out the trackbacks, and also changing to a test .text as a host with no real links.  Again, my apologies for any unwanted spam.

 

Book review : Visual Studio .net Tips and Tricks

When I got this book I was skeptical.  I spend more time with vs.net then really anything, so what could this little book tell me about my closest companion?  Well, I was sadly mistaken, and feel cheated, almost like the environment was hiding something from me all these years. 

This book is littered with time saving tips that I had no idea existed in the IDE.  I read the book cover to cover, but find its real value as a reference while I code.  The book is very well organized, making it easy to find the tip you need quickly.  Tips cover the code editor to debugger, and everything in between.  The last chapter covers Whidbey exclusively, which serves as a nice introduction to some of the upcoming IDE improvements.

As you read through this book, even if you are aware of the feature being covered, Minh often adds some additional thoughts to how it can be used effectively.  The majority of the tips are hidden gems within the IDE, but Mihn sometimes covers process hints, such as how he debugs asp.net pages.  These tips are also very solid, and worth the read. 

As Minh states, the majority of the book is already documented someplace, but having the compilation of all of it in one handy book has proven to be quite an addition to my toolkit.  Since I never explicitly went looking for tips like these, a lot of the book was new to me.  If you are a keyboard shortcut fanatic, and have read every source already published on the subject, you may not find this book quite as valuable.  Otherwise, I would highly suggest snagging a copy of this book.

Amazon link

 

cold

its. so. cold.  damnit.  Makes me wonder if I really need that nicotine.

brb

Pillars of the tech community giving back
I saw over on Clemens Vasters blog that a number of pillars in the tech community are going to be auctioning off services, with all proceeds going to help Tsunami victams.  This is just a fantastic way for these individuals to help the tsunami victims, bravo!  I'm sure more details will be forthcoming, so be sure to watch Clemens' blog, I know I will.

Mark Miller speaking at CT .net sig

How did I not know this yet?!  Mark Miller, of CodeRush and Monday's fame, will be speaking next Tuesday at the Farmington MS office.  Kick ass.  I have become quite a fan of his listening to him both on Dot Net Rocks, and Monday's, and am now really looking forward to the talk.  Maybe I can even get it from the horse's mouth when we might see a public Refactor! beta for those of us not priviledged enough to have a subscription  :)

Details here

DotText2DasBlog release

Just updated the source and binary local links.  Source is also in CVS.  I really need to start releasing on sourceforge.  Anyway..

Only update is it works with categories now.  Like works, not funky works, but works  :)