CurtBlog : Tech

Feedburner

skills0 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:38:43 GMT

It seems like every time I move my site or change Community Server versions, there is always some reason why it is difficult to keep my rss subscription feed url intact. I'm sure eventually I could figure it out, but it's a pain trying to figure out url rewriting and redirects, especially since I run Community Server in a subdirectory and in a single blog configuration already. So there is already a bunch of url rewriting going on.

Anyway, I've looked at Feedburner a couple of times in the past. Community Server 2007 has really good integration with it now and it also mostly solves the problem above, so I'm going to give it a try. Those few of you that are already subscribed to my blog might want to make sure you resubscribe using the Feedburner url.

Subscribe to my Feedburner feed

New web host

skills0 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:48:00 GMT

After a fairly long run with WebHost4Life, I finally got tired of them constantly messing stuff up and have mostly completed a move to Re-Invent. It was a toss-up between them and DiscountASP, but Re-Invent is celebrating their 8th year anniversary and offering hosting packages that are just too good to pass up. Plus, I was going to try to use SQL Server Express, but just couldn't figure out how to work it in a hosting environment for Community Server so I really wanted a SQL Server 2005 database available. So far I've found they don't offer quite as many features as WebHost4Life and things aren't quite as automated, but the price is better and they seem to be on top of the latest Microsoft stuff, already offering features like Silverlight and .NET Framework 3.0 features. We'll see how it goes. It's a shame about WebHost4Life as they were awesome when I first signed up. But the last couple years have seen them steadily go downhill in the expertise and timeliness of their tech support. Also, I've been having lots of issues with performance, to which their answer is to keep changing servers every couple months and inevitably stuff doesn't get migrated properly. I've also had issues with them installing fixes or making changes that break stuff and they never even tell you they are doing it, much less make sure they didn't break something. So I'm just getting tired of it. I know these shared hosting accounts don't make them much money, but that's not my problem. It's a commodity market and there are plenty of hosts, so buck up and provide the best service and you'll keep customers, which is how these companies make money in the long run.

Amazon Unbox

skills0 — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:26:00 GMT

So Amazon released their new video download service Unbox a few weeks ago and I gave it a try over the weekend. This fall I'm especially interested in download services since I gave up my cable and my Tivo won't record from my over-the-air HD box. I grabbed an episode of Anthony Bourdain's new show "No Reservations", which I couldn't get on my cable lineup anyway. Hooked my Thinkpad up to my TV using S-Video and it really looks pretty decent. The Amazon player has a full-screen mode that looks pretty good, all things considered. It's not HD by any means and S-Video wouldn't output that anyway, at least not well. But it's definitely good enough to watch TV shows. In other download news, Apple just bumped up the resolution of their video downloads as well to 640x480, so they should look a bit better on screens other than the video Ipod. here's hoping. if both of those fail, there is always BitTorrent. I'm willing to pay for the shows I want, so it's up to the networks to provide content in the format I want as far as I'm concerned. and it seems like they are starting to get the hint.

ASP.NET Versioning and running 1.1 applications

skills0 — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 12:10:00 GMT

Well, apparently you can't run a 1.1 ASP.NET application under a ASP.NET 2.0 root. IIS Manager allows you to set the target framework at the application level, but the 1.1 application will still bubble up through the 2.0 web.config and fail to validate. So until I can get Community Server running under ASP.NET 2.0, I can't use my standard blog set up. The guys at WebHost4Life recommend setting it up as a subdomain and setting the version on the subdomain. This works because IIS thinks the folder is actually a root node and so it sticks with ASP.NET 1.1 and works fine. The only problem is I lose all my inbound links, feed subscriptions, etc which sucks. I'll probably be able to go back to the old links at some point, but for now you'll have to hit my blog using:

http://blog.swartzentruber.net/CurtBlog

Please update your RSS aggregators and links accordingly. Here is the new direct URL to the RSS feed

CurtBlog RSS

Oh and I can't do a redirect with an Http 301 Response because if I could get that working, I wouldn't have this issue in the first place.

New blogs at work

skills0 — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 20:18:00 GMT

I have been working to set up blogs for Clarity, my employer and we are about ready to go. I will probably start posting more of the technical content over there now and keep this personal blog a bit more on the fun side. May still crosspost some tech stuff as well.

One thing I've been working on is enabling global categories and I think it is pretty much working. This will allow any of the bloggers at my company to post on a particular topic and visitors will be able to subscribe to any topic of interest and get all posts on that subject. Pretty cool. I think this is coming in a future version of Community Server, but I might post the information on how I did it once I'm sure my implementation works reasonably well.

Our blogs are going to be running over at blogs.claritycon.com

What happens when we run out of fossil fuels?

skills0 — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 02:09:00 GMT

Good Rolling Stone article about the very real possibilities of life in the US when we start facing fossil fuel shortages. Could happen in most of our lifetimes, in fact it's highly likely. A rather sobering thought. One of the most interesting thoughts that comes out of the article is that food production is suddenly going to become much more important (both land and the skill of farming). And it will need to be much more localized since it could get prohibitively expensive to ship food all over the country. We are used to cheap produce from Latin America, cheap manufactured goods from all over the world via companies like Walmart, easy access to all kinds of specialty foods and other items from other cultures. The good news is that we are going to be forced to work as communities again, to help each other, to barter for goods potentially, etc. I'm not sure if I'm hoping that we solve this with new technology or if I'm hoping it completely disrupts our way of life. It might be just what America needs. Here's the article online:

The Long Emergency

The pleasure and the pain of open source

skills0 — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:01:00 GMT

I'm on a short project and having a chance to work a bit with a couple of open source products I've heard a lot about: NDoc, NAnt and log4net. It's pretty cool because I've been curious about all of these, but really didn't have a big reason to try them out for any personal site stuff or anything like that. NDoc is pretty great, if you write good C# comments, you can spit out some really nice looking documentation in no time. On the project here they are starting to run builds through NAnt and CruiseControl and that seems to be very flexible. You can do a ton of automated stuff and the syntax for the scripts seems pretty reasonable. All xml stuff of course.

I've worked the most over the last couple days with log4net and I have very mixed feelings about it, mostly positive. It's really a flexible way to log and once you get the concepts down, it's fairly trivial to use. One nice thing that is built-in is being able to change configuration on the fly, so once you have logging set up you can add additional loggers (log4net calls them appenders), change your logging level based on event types, etc. There are a lot of built-in appenders, including the basic Windows event log, text files and even things like udp that you can hook listeners up to. My biggest gripe is that once you get beyond the basics, the docs pretty much suck. For instance, I have a scenerio where it sounds like using a Respository is the right way to go, judging by their description of it. The only problem is, there is no sample or example showing me anything about how to use one, set one up, etc. Looked through Google, looked through their newslist archives, looked through blogs, can't find a single thing. This to me is still the biggest shortcoming you run into with open source. I could potentially post a question and maybe get an answer from one of the contributors, so that's pretty cool in some ways. But it would be nice to have some concrete examples for each thing they mention in the API.

Installing Suse 9.2 to VirtualPC

admin — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 05:33:00 GMT

I'm briefly on the bench at my company, so I'm getting to evaluate and set up a couple things internally for the company to use. One of the things we are curious about is how usable Mono (the cross-platform port of the .NET framework) is by now. So I'm setting up a couple Linux distros on VirtualPC. I've played around with Linux very briefly, but I don't know a ton about it. Here's one thing that you can if you look hard enough in the VPC newsgroups, but it took me awhile to figure out. I wanted to do an FTP installation since Suse doesn't have ISOs to download and that seemed better than waiting a day to get everything local. I was having a hard time getting the network to even communicate with the outside world though. The trick is that VPC doesn't emulate whatever is in the host computer, it uses the old Intel Tulip driver under the covers no matter what you have in the host. Once I found out that little tidbit, my network fired up just fine and I was off and running. I guess if you work with VPC enough you probably already know that, but of course I've mainly been installing XP and Windows Server 2003 onto VPC and I have the installation media. And the install usually sets up the networking just fine without me doing anything. We'll see how it goes from here.

First post using Community Server

skills0 — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 19:45:00 GMT

My blog has been migrated to Community Server 1.0. For now, I'm just using the blogging stuff. I think I'll wait until the next release to play around with the Gallery piece.

A CSS tip

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 04:59:00 GMT

On my current project we've been doing a conversation more towards CSS, although we still aren't there a 100%. Was able to remove a significant amount of markup though, compared to the previous version. The site zips along now. After the launch, we were running into some issues with Mac users and of course there are always cross-browser problems with CSS. But I was able to fix some major layout formatting issues by simply using the full DOCTYPE reference to the w3.org in both Safari and Mac IE 5.2. It's weird that in most Windows browsers I was using (Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, etc, as well as IE 6), simply having the DOCTYPE without the link was sufficient. But the Mac browsers want the link to the DTD at w3.org. Good to know.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">