I figured that 27 test posts were enough to actually publish one.

This thing hasn't even reached feature parity with v1, but if you both see this post in ye olde aggregator, I've at least made some functionality progress.

edit: Houston, we have liftoff.

I just got back from the gas station to get some sodas before everything runs out, and this is what I saw:

My little phone wasn't able to get the entire line of vehicles, but it was at least 6 deep for every pump. The parts of the Houston metro area that are closer to the coast have been issued a mandatory evacuation, with a voluntary evac for everyone else. They say it's going to be nasty. We'll just have to see I guess.

[ Currently Playing : Emotion Sickness - Silverchair - The Best of: Volume 1 (6:01) ]

P.S. Thanks to all those who wished me well on my previous post. I really do appreciate that (molto gratzi:)

Just to let both of you know - I'm expecting some downtime this weekend for www.chrisfrazier.net . See, I live in Houston and we've got a little storm coming our way. Since I host my site on my own on-site server, that means that I've got to unplug it and put it in a room with no windows. Ya know, just in case.

So now you know why my rss feed won't work this weekend. Don't you just feel all squishy inside now? As for me, I'm heading to the hill country for the weekend. Just in case, feel me?

[ Currently Playing : Caress Me Down - Sublime - Stand By Your Van - Live (4:22) ]

I took Ethan and my cousin Cody to the beach today. I got them some du-rags and ninja swords, so they could play pirates. They had a sword fight on the ferry ride to crystal beach.

I was even able to get a resounding "Arr Matey!" out of Ethan

When we were at the beach, we did what everyone should do at the beach every once in a while. We buried each other. We probably should have gone from biggest to smallest, but we started with Ethan.

This is definitely filed under "As if you cared". My friend Peyman had a little gathering at his new house in Austin this past weekend. I've been to quite a few parties in my day, but I can honestly say that the girl that swung balls of fire around herself was a first for me at a house party. (every time I've seen/done something similar in the past, the lit part couldn't burn you. glowsticks are good that way;)

I intended to stay only one night, but circumstances dictated that I stay until Monday morning. At least I got to get a good glimpse of the only state capital bigger than the federal government's building!

Eric is my friend Peyman's roommate in Austin. He's a stand-up guy. Trust me on this.

Ha! Look at that! I totally called it.

[ Currently Playing : All You Need - Sublime - Stand By Your Van - Live (2:44) ]

Ah, the joys of writing open source software

I had been working hard on v2 of PostXING, but somehow development has stagnated on my end quite a bit. I brought it about 90% of the way towards the direction I was hoping to go. I even got an offer of help from a fellow Houstonian, but it seems I've dropped the ball. My bad.

Fortunately, as I said I've completed most of the grunt work, now it's just a matter of gluing everything together and creating a different provider than the Metablog API. It was still evolving when I last hacked on it, so I may only be 85% done, but at any rate, if I can get that fire going back under my ass I should be done in no time. I hope

Since nobody but me is clamoring for v2, I can at least take my time and do things the way I want them. It's nice to be able to work on a software project without any stinkin time constraints. Another pitfall is that the latest v1 rev works well enough that I haven't felt the need to develop v2. I just want to. I want to make PostXING a better program. We'll see how it goes.

Yesterday I realized that I was having issues with anonymous users posting comments to my CS site. After going over the code a little bit, what I didn't realize is that the bug is a custom skin bug. (ie a skin that I wrote was missing one line containing a specific control.)

After a little searching I found someone with a similar problem, and Alex Lowe pointed them here: http://communityserver.org/forums/491886/ShowPost.aspx#491913

And it worked. Yay.

[ Currently Playing : Seed - Korn - Follow the leader (5:54) ]

 I noticed that I haven't gotten any comments on my blog in a while. Granted, I haven't posted in a while, either, but come on! There's gotta be at least one post I've made that's been worth comment since July, right? no? Well, I'm going to track this down anyways.

Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.Weblog.EnableNewComments(WeblogPost post, User user) at CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.CommentForm.btnSubmit_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) at System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) at System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain()

User Agent / IP Address
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR / 70.120.179.36

Path
/blog/blogs/comments.aspx?App=blog&PostID=1320 as HTTP POST

Referrer:
/blog/comments/1320.aspx

no wonder I haven't gotten any comments lately. That's gotta be annoying for both of you.

I took a week off from reading blogs last week (as is evidenced by my responding to week-old posts). I ended up having about 600-700 unread posts in RssBandit.

The UI took care of it pretty well, since I have my opml separated by category I could zip thru most posts and decide whether or not I wanted to keep it around in the aggregate view. It got me thinking about how this would scale for a web app, tho. I don't remember how Bloglines handles this (don't you just get what's available at the time if there are unread feeds available?) but it seems like an interesting problem: how do you keep a rich experience in a web app without sacrificing performance or content that I may want to read (mark all read is not always optimal for me (I always feel like I'm missing something golden (I did subscribe to the feed, after all)))?

By the way Torsten has started an RSS Bandit new logo design contest and we'd appreciate your comments. It seems a lot of our users who use RSS Bandit from their place of work feel our current smily face icon and logo are unprofessional. I don't mind changing our application icon but would probably like to keep the smily bandit in the logo.

[Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life]

I can't really offer anything original per se, but here's the icon I use in ObjectDock for RssBandit:

Okay, so I just slapped an eye patch on an existing image I found somewhere on the net...isn't that what the current icon is, too?

Anybody else find that MS has so much crap going on that it's hard keep tabs on a single, solid, resources to use to keep up to speed on things? (And don't even send me to msdn.microsoft.com - that thing is 1) schizophrenic (is it a developer resource, or a place to buy subscriptions and stuff?) and 2) complete sensory overload. )

[Via AngryPets.com :: Blog]

It is pretty worthless unless you are looking for controls - even then, the contol gallery has broken images and dead links everywhere.

I've found that unlike the asp.net community, it's pretty much yo-yo (you're on your own) when it comes to winforms development. (and I complained loudly about it when I embarked on my first winforms project)

CodeProject has a lot of interesting tidbits, but I've yet to find a complete solution in any of the articles there. Bits and pieces, yes...

Another good resource is the dotnet-winforms list on discuss.develop.com. There are at least one or two winforms PMs that hang out there.

Lastly, get Chris Sells's book "Windows Forms Programming in C#" (or VB.NET, whatever.) That book has basic examples of almost everything you would want to achieve in a normal winforms project. Anything else is up to google skillz.

Check out this code project article with code for a Google Maps .NET control. very cool and handy stuff. and there are some demos here.

[Via Tiernans Comms Closet]

I read thru that, and it seems very useful to be able to manipulate things in codebehind like that. Once the lat/lon overlays are included, I may even check it out.

In other mapping news, I was contacted recently by the mappoint webservice team b/c I haven't made any requests to the webservice for a while. I told them that the current webservice doesn't buy me a whole lot in terms of functionality from the current solution that I use that simply has a mapserver control on my webserver and asked if virtual earth may be rolled into the webservice (since virtual earth currently only has licensing for non-commercial apps). They didn't tell me one way or the other, but my mappoint account was reinstated. Could this mean virtual earth goodness on the horizon? I hope so.

A few weeks ago I wanted to release an update to my own blogging engine and, because there was a minor data change I thought that it would be nice to export the data before running the update, change the files and then re-import it afterwards.  As I looked into this more I decided that I really should do it in a standards-compliant manner (if possible) and so then set out to: A) talk to people about it, B) rtfm some of the existing formats and C) write down my requirements.

[Via MarkItUp - Thinking Products]

Very seldom does someone come along who has simple ideas that can work coupled with what it takes to make those ideas reality. Darren is one of those people.

BlogML may not be the best thing since sliced bread, but it's an idea that is brilliant in its simplicity. Why should a task - importing and exporting blog content - be shoehorned into a spec that was never meant to do this in the first place? Isn't that the reason that atom was designed itself? To rehash the failures and stick with the successes of past specifications dealing with blogging? So is BlogML IMHO to import/export of blog content.

Keep up the good work, Darren. Although we live on opposite sides of the globe, you are always welcome to ping me with these crazy ideas of yours, if for nothing else than to talk them out.