November 2007 - Posts
I created a little utility program to help me move the blog entries from my old blog sites / engines to this one. The utility works OK for the most part. So far there have been a few posts that it wouldn't convert properly, but that's OK. I'm probably getting about 90% moved across successfully.
The Posted date is a bit problematic: most of the time the utility uploads the correct original post date. But some of the posts are getting stuck with today's date... As a result, all the posts aren't exactly in chronological order.
Ah well, it's not that big a deal. I could debug it, but it's really not that important.
But I've had a blast going back and re-reading some of the long-forgotten posts.
I've recovered all the posts from my very first blog (started July 2003) on blogs.msdn.com. Amazingly that blog still lives over there http://blogs.msdn.com/jblizzard.
The last entry in that blog is a pointer to my (now defunct and non-working) .Text URL.
I've moved all of the dasBlog 2004 entries from dasBlog over here. Still have 2005 and 2006 to do, but I'm going to take a break for about a week.
I still have that .Text database, but I haven't moved those entries over here yet. . . So I have a gap from September 2003 - Feb 2004.
Yes, I could modify my utility to crank through all the entries from all my old blogs automatically, but I don't want to spew all over my current blog in case it get the utility wrong. . . There's no real way to test the thing in a sandbox environment. (Or rather, I don't want to set up a sandbox environment to test it.)
I used VS 2008 to write the little Windows app. It's totally hacked together code... never going to be posted anywhere for anyone to see it.
I used Fiddler to help me figure out the proper XML payload format for the MetaBlog calls. Cool utility.
I wrote the post routine myself instead of downloading one of the MetaBlog DLLs that are available.
Fun stuff.
Not such a bad statement... unless "i" happens to be zero. In that case, the statement does absolutely no good when used as a loop counter increment. . . .
No. No, I didn't accidentally code something like that and spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why the program wasn't working. No, not at all.
I was walking through the office today and discovered the mice had assembled themselves for a meeting. Must be their Wednesday morning SCRUM.
No, no ice fishing here, but the water temperature was down to a frigid 66 degrees, compared to the soupy 90 degrees from a couple of months ago.
Pam & I went out for a few hours on a gorgeous Sunday morning yesterday. The guy at the bait shop said the spotted sea trout were back in town, hanging out near piers and docks. We didn't feel like being cooped up near any structures, so we headed to our favorite spot in a secluded channel.
We didn't find any sea trout there, but we did find fish. Pam caught the first fish of the day, a small flounder. And the second fish of the day, another flounder. And the third fish of the day, yet another flounder! What's up with that?
Final score:
Pam: 3 flounder, a bunch of ladyfish
Jim: a ton of ladyfish
Pam & Jim: 1 pompano (cast by Pam, expert landing by Jim)
The pompano came on our very last cast of the day. Down to our last shrimp, Pam made the cast then handed me the rod. She's so sweet. The line gave a couple of gentle tugs, Pam & I conferred, and decided to take our time with it.
Then it hit. Nice and strong. The drag was still loose, so I let it run a bit - it was our last cast after all, and wanted to make the day last just a bit longer.
Without seeing it we could tell it wasn't a ladyfish. It took a run deep and away instead of heading to the surface and putting on a jumping exhibition like the ladyfish do.
It put up a nice fight. And I took all the credit for landing the fish. (Hey, Pam got to take the picture.) :)
The camera phone was hard to work with. Pam got a picture from nearly "above" the fish, so it's hard to see how tall it really was from dorsal fin to pelvic fin. (It was about as tall as its "standard length.")
(Healy, I put a shirt on for you.)
Thanks to everyone who attended my session at SQLSaturday in Orlando today. Here's a link to my slides:
Click here to download
Resources for more information about DB Pro:
Ever stumble across something like a tiny screw, and wonder, "Where did that come from?"
That happened to me this morning.
I'd been working at my desk for a couple of hours when I stretched my legs out underneath the desk.
When I did, I felt something stick me in the toe. I crawled under my desk to find it, and there it was - a little screw.
Innocent looking all by itself.
But where did it come from? Is some piece of equipment going to fail when I need it most? Or has it been there for years, left in the house by the previous owners, who doesn't know what peril they might be in.
I'll probably never know.
My toolbox is full of things like this...
Yeah, it's nice here.
I've been receiving a LOT of comment spam on one of my blog posts. Daily, over 150 spam comments were being left behind.
As a result I turned off auto-publish of comments, but couldn't find anywhere to turn off comments for the post.
So each morning I would spend about 5 minutes deleting all the spam comments, trying to make sure I didn't delete any legit comments in the process.
Frustrating.
I noticed that Community Server uses the blog post title as part of the URL. So I thought I'd change that blog post's title to something else, and mess with the spammers a bit.
I made the change to the title, but unfortunately the old post URL remained.
Rats.
But, while I was editing the post from the web instead of from within Live Writer, I noticed an "Advanced Options" checkbox. Hmmm. Hadn't noticed that before. I checked it, and a set of tabs appeared. One of the tabs is named "Advanced Options," the first of which is to enable / disable comments to the post.
Hurray!
I turned off comments for that post. My life is complete. I can sleep well tonight.
[Update: I checked this morning - no comment spam! Yes! Also, I checked the blog dashboard and saw that I'd overlooked one of the options in the Global Settings | Advanced Post Settings. There is an option to set Comment Day Limits. (Knew this had to be in here somewhere.) So, I'm going to be daring (ooh, makes me tingle) and remove the comment moderation for a while, and see if I can control the amount of spam in these other ways.]
Just uploaded a video of the basics of how to automatically generate test data for your database from DB Pro. Enjoy.
A couple of nice lists posted at .NET Tip of the Day, here and here.
It took quite a while for me to create / produce / upload my first Silverlight streaming application. And the results were pretty low tech.
After talking with Healy, I discovered the process can be simplified tremendously, and the output can be so much nicer (mainly because of a media player skin template I included during the encoding process).
Simple - just took a couple of minutes. . .
Very cool.
I'll post notes later. (One hint - in Expression Encoder, Profile | Video, select the "Source profile" video profile. Thanks, Mike.)
What do they have in common (besides they live in / near the water)?
They all ended up in my belly yesterday.
The gator is on the left, little nugget things. The frog legs are on top in the middle there, looking like. . . uh . . . frog legs, and the catfish is on the right.
Healy and I stopped for a bite at a rustic place on the St. John's river, on the way back from Melbourne.
The gator and catfish were great. The frog legs were earthy. I tried to pretend they were just funky looking chicken wings, but it didn't work. They had a definitely swamp-thing taste to them. After we chowed down those goodies we each had a plate full of the best fried sea trout in the world. Yum.
The REAL Florida. . .
Funny how this is what Florida used to look like all over. Yet only 30 miles east is mega-theme-park-world in Orlando.
Best news of the day, though?
You guessed it: I didn't explode from gastric funkiness on the way home.
It took me a little while to get used to the new Office 2007 ribbons. Now I wouldn't give them up.
But, (and there's always a 'but' in there somewhere), there's one drawback.
I'm trying to save my eyesight, so I've started running my monitor resolution at only 1280x800 (instead of the 1920x1200 microscopic resolution it was at).
And at that resolution, the ribbon takes up a huge amount of real estate.
If there were only a way to minimize them.
That's what I've always thought, but now it's become a real issue.
So, yesterday afternoon I took a shot and pressed the right mouse button while the cursor was over the words that identify the ribbon tabs. And there it was: "Minimize the Ribbon".
I've had the ability all along.