A cute programming languages quiz.

It'd show you 12 snippets of code, and you'd have to guess the programming language the code is written in.

If you have only started coding in the late 90's then you're in trouble.

heck, even if you have started on late 80's. I mean, really.

As I've been exposed to programming from a very early age, on the first half of the 80's, and my father being and old time punching-cards hacker, and I also tend to reach for the new stuff these days, I managed to score a nice rounded 12/12 100 points.

Can you?

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

My poor old laptop has had a lot of problems lately, priming at ignoring any network connection yesterday and having many problems with svn and git sessions when the network was on, so I decided to re-install.

'twas 1am, so I thought 'what the heck - let's try this vista thing at last'.

It was surprisingly a smooth experience. The initial setup identified almost all of the drivers, but the sound-card and the SD card reader. However, the auto updates (which took over an hour cuz there was apparently a lot to update) took care of the sound, and I got the SD driver from Texas Instrument's site.

What I had to install to make the machine workable for day-to-day work:

• Antivirus (AVG)
• VS2008
• R#4
• msysgit
• Windows Live (Messenger + Mail + Writer)
• TortoiseSVN
• FF3 + Firebug + IEtab + FireFtp + Google Toolbar
• Notepad2 (and making it a notepad replacement)

still missing (no time) but essential:

• SnagIt
• Camtasia Studio
• Launchy

btw, since I've installed VS2008 without going 2005 first and without the full SDKs, I ran into a problem with NAnt 0.86b1 - complaining about missing .NET 2.0 stuff.  It appear to be a known bug in NAnt, that has been fixed back on late 2007, so I've just switched to a nightly build of 0.86b2 and the problem did go away.  I need to make sure that it won't affect my Castle build.

Didn't have much to say here. I consider it a test post (see if Writer will work from Vista) but it beats the crap out of "TEST POST PLEASE IGNORE" ...

There's this startup company named DotSpots. They are hiring, and as a Fizz-Buzz test they have come up with challenges for prospective candidates to solve.

I currently am not into looking a new employer, but just for the sake of the puzzle, I wish I had some spare time to knock off these challenges. On first look they appear to require some sort of a backtracking greedy algorithm, so that could have been a great opportunity to get messy with F# ...

(via Roy)

This is a piece of screenshot that you probably hopefully won't see on sites I'm involved with:

All I wanted was to find a decent hotel in Barcelona, with the aid of my buddy Firefox

(from http://www.mygrouptour.com/)

No explanation is needed

Let's talk about these three activities, or rather on aspects of them.

Assuming one want to get from London to Cambridge, by car. The directions would be something like "Take the M11 to north, leave at Junction 12 toward Cambridge and you're there".

One might require slightly more explicit instruction, such as "To get to the M11, you'd need to leave the M25 on junction 27", or "On junction 12 you'd want to turn to the right toward Cambridge".

At no point would someone need to be told to "Turn the steering wheel to the right" or "Do not forget to use the clutch when changing gears".

When driving, there are:

• intention:
  either implicit ("Leave ... toward Cambridge") or explicit ("you'd want to turn to the right toward Cambridge")
• mechanics:
  Turn the steering wheel, use the clutch
• infrastructure:
  The steering wheel's movement is transferred to the front wheels, which turn to the desired side, then the various physic powers are causing the car to make the turn

When flying a small aircraft, there are several things that affect it's movement:

There's the Elevator which affects horizontal shifts, controlled by the moving the stick backwards and forwards.

There are the Ailerons which generates rolling motion, and controlled my moving the stick sideways.

There is the Rudder which controls the nose position, and controlled by kicking pedals with the pilot's feet.

And on single motored aircraft, even changing the engine's speed affects the "steering" as the radial movement of the propeller is inflicting different airflow on the wings, causing a slight difference in the elevation.

However, flight directions include things like "Fly to point A, use bearing X, keep altitude Y". At most, a flying student would be told to keep the aircraft's Nose at a specific position in the Horizon.

I remember that in flight school, when we were being taught about simple manoeuvres, the language used by the instructors was of the implicit intention kind. However, there was a guy that kept asking "so what am I supposed to do with the stick now?". He of course was one of the first to be kicked out of there.

All of the above apply to programmers, too.

In forums and mailing lists, sometimes someone asks a question, that gets answered with the needed intention, but that someone keeps asking for the exact mechanics. For example:

Q: How can disable the controls on a web page after a certain button click?
A (implicit intention): Hide the whole page with another, transparent element.

Q: How do I do that?
A (explicit intention): Use DOM manipulation and DHTML to add a div with the size of the entire page, positioned over the page.

Q: How do I do that?

A (more explicit): some pseudo code.

Q: I tried to run this code you've sent but it throws errors. Can you please send me the correct code?
A (mechanics): function disableControls() { ... }

You get the point, right?

If not?

a. When asking for help, expect to get the intention. That usually should be enough.

b. If you really can't figure out the code (at least to create an 'almost working' implementation) out of intention, then you probably are in the wrong business.

As for infrastructure - a driver does not have to know anything about Newton's Laws of Motion. However a professional racing driver has to understand the basics of that in order to be as good as he needs to. And definitely not being troubles by the angle of the steering wheel. That should become naturally. Just as transferring intentions into working code should come naturally for a programmer.

Another quote:

Please don't use table even though they work fine,
when it comes to indexing they give searches a hard time

and also

Check in all browsers, I do it directly,
You got to make sure that it renders correctly

This should be in the curriculum for any webmasters 101 course

We, at Castle, are occasionally getting bashed at the lack of documentation. I think that the area most users are complaining about is Windsor and MonoRail, (as these two are evolving in the most rapid way).

My personal view on the matter is that since the whole Castle stack, and especially MonoRail and Windsor, are all about "zero friction" and "Convention over Configuration", the easiest way is to lay hands on sample or oss code and apply that you your solution.

Anyway, in the Alt.NET uk thing that was at Conchango/London last month I've met one Symon Rottem. It appear that this guy know his way around tech-docs, and he had picked up that errand, and started putting effort in improving the overall documentation level for Castle, especially the User-Manual part (as the API actually is being generated and is quite good).

I'd also recommend his (young yet promising) blog. It's on my Google-reader blogroll for quite some time, and I really need to add "Import OPML" to my blog so I'd be able to update the blogs list on the side panel here.

Last Thursday I was informed by the organizers of alt.net UK conference that they have managed to squeeze me in, so I immediatly booked a flight to London, and have attendet.

I was superb, and I've written a few posts, but since I was not online during the last few days I had no chance of publishing 'em. Hopefully they'll get during the next few days.

A lot have also been piling up on my MonoRail and AspView "desktops" so I appreciate the patience of the users, and I promise to do my best to keep up with the requests and patches being sent to me ...

I wonder. Would this babe come with a T7700, 4GB and a 7200RPM?

Problem:

• The output you get from Windows Live Writer is not XHTML, i.e. unclosed br and img tags.

Possible causes:

• When you've setup your blog in Windows Live Writer, you have used a version older than Beta 3
• Your blog's style couldn't have been detected by WLW
• Your blog's style was been detected correctly, however you do not have a valid XHTML DOCTYPE declaration in your blog

Setting XHTML output manually:

• Weblogs | Edit Weblog Settings | Advanced | Markup Type

Thanks Mr. Joe Chang, from the Windows Live Writer team, who have pointed that out for me.

I'm writing this very post on Windows Live Writer.

In case you'd ask, I'm using the latest public version, which is not a Beta anymore (I think):

I've also just recommended WLW for a new blogger.

however, there are still some annoying things here, that I might've liked fixed.

1. XHTML output. I said something about it, then Joe Cheng from the WLW team commented:
    
   However, I'd like to show you a bit from this very post :
   
   Now you believe me?
   I believe this is a fairly simple thing to fix, as those two (img and br) are simple tags, so no need to handle nesting tags, etc.
2. Search and Replace (Ctrl+H).
   Come on, even Notepad.exe has it.

How I wish it was an Open Source product ...

Sorry.

I need to do that, at least for a few days.

If you want to leave a message, mail me:

blog at the-domain-name-of-this-blog (without the www part, of course ...)

I think I'm going to like this one, since he showed some (simple but interesting) ILDASM output on his second post.

Found him through JoeyDotNet.

UPDATE:

The link to D. P. Bullington's blog is now fixed.

The idea behind Hidden Networks is great.

They've added that simple job board (here, on the right. If you're on a feed reader, go the HTML version and look it up) that shows openings near the reader's (that's you) location.

That way, recruiters gets exposure on the places where developers who are interested in Learning New Stuff hang out.

If they read Ayende (or me), then you might want them for your team.

And now - there's a promotion code.

Quote that: 100OFF0710

And get a 100$ off your first ad.

This offer is good until the end of the month (31/10/2007).

It's time to reveal one of my major handicaps, that didn't make it to my "five things you didn't know about me" list:

I can't dance.
I hate to dance.
I won't dance.

Therefore: I am getting bored at weddings.

Yesterday at a wedding party of a good friend of ours, I found myself sitting at the table by myself, with only my old PDA to accompany me.

So I wrote a post about the new release of AspView.

I would've written that one, too, however the PDA went low on battery, so I've had to find something else to do.

That was, drawing some domain design concepts for a portion of my new project at Music Glue, not on napkins, but rather on the back side of my checkbook ...

When we went home, the happy groom and bride hugged and thanked Sarit who was dancing all night like a party animal, and then gave me The Look. Yep, That one. That say "You'd better leave a fine present as no happiness came from your's tonight".

Needless to say that I did not like that message at all:

I liked the old UI better. Why can't I continue use it, and just skip the new stuff?

Just been back from a few days in Ireland, where I went with Sarit for a vacation, and for getting to a clearer state of mind. At least on that level it proved to be very productive, as I came back with more than a few solutions to problems I've been facing ,and even some new ideas for expanding the line of services that we, at Music Glue, can provide.

Just so you'd understand how muse-ful can Ireland be:

and:

(All pictures were taken on a Canon S3 IS Camera - a perfect thing for a photo-newbie like me)

I'll upload some more pictures in the next days. Actually, I guess it is high time I'll get me a proper image sharing service subscription.

Any recommendation of a free (or low cost) ones?

I guess my priorities would be:

High availability;

Fast;

Easy to use (allow multiple uploads, allow easy post-upload tagging);

More pictures to come ...

*Craic: Irish word for fun/enjoyment that has been brought into the English language. usu. when mixed with alcohol and/or music. source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=craic

I've just tried the type speed test that I had read about on Aaron's blog.

My results (not excelled I'm afraid):

YOUR RESULTS ARE:

Number of words typed: 145
Test duration: 3 min
Speed: 48.6 words/min. (243 keystrokes/min.)
Error penalty: 10
Accuracy: 93.1%

For my defense I'd add that although I'm typing English since I was about 6 years of old, 90% of that typing was inside of some kind of an IDE, and it was in languages such as BASIC, C and Pascal, rather than English. Only on the last year when I started blogging, the last half of a year when joined the Castle community, and the last couple of month of working at Music Glue, have I really done some proper typing in English...

So, maybe I typed slowly, but it was maintainable and testable.

Some of you might know that it's Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) tonight.

I wish you all a great year, filled with happiness, joy, and high quality code. May you need not debug code horrors this year ...

A year of improvement and becoming better at being who you are, and what you do.

And thank's to Idan Gross (WWW.IDANGROSS.COM) for the lovely picture.

Just read Joel Spolsy's interview at ACM Queue (through his blog).

I especially liked part 3 where he explains about Evidence Based Scheduling.

For example - why overestimated tasks won't cover for underestimated tasks:

But when you think about software tasks, when things go wrong, they take three or four times longer than expected. If I told you I've got an eight-hour feature, it's about eight hours of work. Now, could it take eight hours? Yes. Could it take six hours? Sure. Could it take two days? Definitely. Could it take a week? Yes, probably with a 10 percent probability because you've discovered some huge problem, and it's a new thing you have to write code for, and you just completely forgot about it and it's going to take you a week.
Now, could it take zero? No, that's impossible. Could it take negative 32 hours? It could never take negative 32 hours. You can go over 32 hours; you just can't go under by 32 hours because that would cause you to go backwards in time.

Well said and written down, I'm going to show that to the next manager who'd insist on a months long schedule, based on hours long tasks.

I used to get a lot of spam through pingbacks/trackbacks, so I turned them off. Actually, on my current blog engine, they are not even implemented.

Reading this post from Joel Spolsky, I am thinking about disabling comments altogether (I do not get many, anyway), so if anybody would like to comment, she'll send me an email (to 'blog at mydomain-name') or use a "contact me" form, and if it will be something worthwhile, I'll do a followup post with the important comments that my alert reader has sent me.

What you think? (you can say that in an email, and even through a comment ;) )

Following Scott's post, here are my listings (is four okay?):

Four things I learned about software (in University, not College):

1. If you'll help a friend with a red-black tree implementation in C++, he'd eventually help you with an assembler precompiler in C.

2. Software Engineering is the only course where you can write a fully working program, with no compile warnings, with all tests green, and still get 60 out of a 100. (I'm sorry that my printing method was named ToString, while supposedly in ADA I should name it Put to keep convention with the language)

3. The good looking gals usually do not attend CS classes. If they do, they take DB Basics and DBMS implementations.

4. Watefall / BUFD is the ONLY WAY to manage software projects. I've had a 6 points course that dealt almost only on that. And they gave me 10% off the grade for doing a final design document without the proper fonts and colors.

Three things I learned about software while not in the university:

1. A code you write alone is bad. At least get someone to do code-review, and at best, pair program, or open-source your code so it'd get looked at.

2. You can either eat Pizzas, or have a loot of sugar-loaded-coffe mugs. If you do both, you'll get fat. (that ofcourse, unless you are a gal who attended a non DB related CS course, and then you're screwed anyway).

3. O.O. languages is not the only way to go. Static typing is not always the best thing. Javascipt is actually a programming language.

4. Scrum / XP / TDD / IoC / DI / MVC / UnitOfWork

How strange.

After the GoogleReader failure last week, now it seems that every google site is down. I cannot access google.com, google.co.il, gmail, reader, or calendar. my own search page that uses google ajax search api is down, too.

So I'm bound to use live.com for now.  Not too bad it is, however a bit slower than google.com, and way slower than my own google-driven kenegozi.com

I hope gmail will be back soon.

UPDATE:

google analytics is down, too. It's making my blog uneasy.

Just a thougt. Is it happening only here? has my router started disliking google to the point of refusing network connections?

UPDATE:

google is back, alive and kicking.

I can finish the email I'm was working on when it went down, and finally send it. Smashing. (hey - it's 3:30am here, so cut me some slack)

That's why Steve Yegge is my favorite blogger.

I say that one should not only know WHAT he's talking about, but one should also know HOW to say what he has to say.

 No, it's not a hosts file hack, but rather a true incident of yellow screen in one of microsoft's sites.

Happened to me last week, I think while trying to log into hotmail. 

A rather different programming language

http://lolcode.com/

Funny.

(from codeproject's lounge)

It's so funny. Almost chocked on my dinner over that one.

Would you have notified the poor bustard of his mistake in time?

I say it's a clear case of Zabasho.

(found it on Roy Osherove's blog).

This one made me laugh. Apparently, meetup is trying to convince potential employees that working for them is even better than working for Google.

One of the best recruitment ads I've ever seen.

If they were not java-ing, I'd even consider applying ...

A little excerpt:

G: At Google, after you consume all the Google Food you can eat, you will enjoy Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.
You will not be forced to interact with those without ample access to Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.

M: At Meetup, there are no options when flushing the toilet.
You will be forced to interact with the un-cleansed and un-oscillated.

G: At Google, a few Googlers wish they were at a fast-growing company where they can personally still make a huge difference.

M: At Meetup, some Meetuppers wish we had a toilet like the Googleplex.

(saw it on http://www.joelonsoftware.com/)

As you already have probably noticed by now, I did some renovation on my blog.

Among other things, it is now being served from a SQL Server database, rather than form the daBlog xml files.

One caveat of this, is the fact that backuping the blog's content became much harder. Since I have no access to db backups, I neede to find a way to generate the INSERT scripts that will enable me recreationg the content if it would be needed.

My first try-out was the Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard, that I saw at Scott Gu's blog

This tool is meant to create the script form a local dev db, in order to make it run on the remote one. Actually you can make it run on the remote one, nd save the generated sql file locally, for backup purposes.

I tried it up, but it send some nasty .NET break dialogs. It however managed to create A script, that I'm yet to check for it's usability.

Nice tool. But I'll look for something that is pure t-sql so it'd be easier to run (maybe automated every once in a while)

My dear Sarit is going this Sunday on a business trip to IBM offices at Budapest, Hungary.

So we sat today to get some info on the hotel she'll be staying at (Mercure), and the distance from there to the main attractions (a.k.a. Shopping Malls).

Since I was already on a live.com page (I signed her up to a new messenger account since she likes the messenger UI), I went to look for the address on maps.live.com.

The first thing I have noticed is the slick design and cool UI features. It just looks good.

So I went on for the search. Typing the exact address "1052 Budapest, Váci utca 20, Hungary" (note the explicit inclusion of the words "Budapest" and "Hungary"), sent me here:
 
focusing on the funny part:
 

Hmm. not so promising.

Without further ado, I found myself typing "maps.google.com".

The same old boring/ugly/simple google-y look.

Now, typing the same query in the input box gave me:

focusing on the place itself:
 
Ta Dam.

I then tried it with different typos. The "Did you mean" thing worked like a charm.

Once again, it seams that MS is concentrating the efforts on the slick UI and cool features, while google is more concentrated on the actual service.

I'd say it's clearly a knockout.

btw, the shopping mall turned out to be VERY close:

I'll be joining her next Friday for the weekend. Anyone for the good thing to see/do on Budapest? (I'm going for the less toured and more exciting things)

Another dumb error message.

While installing ActiveWriter, it asked me to install DslToolsRedist. Trying to do so raised the said error message. I was on my way to shot the admin, but then googled a bit, and found out on http://www.appdeploy.com/messageboards/tm.asp?m=8872&mpage=1 that it is caused by prior installations of he same product that was not fully removed from the registry while uninstalled. Searching "DSL"  in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\  showed me that a previous CTP left some dirt in my registry. Removed that key, reinstalled DslTools and the ActiveWriter magic could finally started.

It's real. I took it from SQL profiler on a production database, of a very popular HR software. 
The query should search for people with given name and surname.

WHERE
(
    1=0
OR ( Name = 'Ken Egozi' )
OR ( Name = 'Egozi Ken' )
OR ( Name = 'Ken Egozi' )
OR ( Name LIKE '%Ken Egozi%' )
OR ( Name LIKE '%Egozi Ken%' )
OR ( Name LIKE '%Ken%' AND Name LIKE '%Egozi%' )
OR ( Name LIKE '%Egozi%' AND Name LIKE '%Ken%' )
)

A good laugh what I like for my birthday. (according to the Hebrew Calendar, it was yesterday)

Moran has decided to move on, so now we're hiring a new teammate for my team.

What do we do?
The team is an in-house startup (which means that we have no V.C. no our back, and the funding is based on the other branches of the corporate - so we have a kind of freedom to do really exciting stuff, and use cutting edge technologies that WE choose). We are currently working on several websites that lives in the area of public-content and social networking. Call it web 2.0 if you like. The team is small and intimate, and contains the corporate V.P. Business Development, me, and you. In addition to our main line of work, we also do some maintenance for the corporate's IT systems, mainly on the integration of our recruitment site (www.gotfriends.co.il) with the inner H.R. system, HumaNet. 

Where are we located?
We are placed at the Diamond Exchange Area, in Ramat-Gan, Israel.

What technologies we currently use?
- On the client side: cross-browser valid XHTML, Javascript (using prototype.js, script.aculo.us, YUI and other cool js libraries);
- On the server side: Castle MonoRail, which is an ASP.NET port for RubyOnRails, with AspView as view-engine, and Castle ActiveRecord over NHibernate for OR/M. The main language is C# 2.0, but any CLI compliant language is okay (that means currently VB.NET and Boo, and also PHP5 and Ruby since they now have compilers for .NET in alpha/beta stages);
- On the DB side: SQL Server 2005;
- On the source control management: Subversion, with TortoiseSvn;

What will you do?
You will become in charge of one of the websites. That means that you'd know it's architecture, it's ERD, it's Javascript hacks and whatever. You'll be a part of the decision making process for the site's development, and the main coder for that project. In time, you'd do code-reviews on my work, just as I'll review your's. You'll investigate new technologies to incorporate in our development process.

What you'll need to know to be productive on my team?
- Javascript , to the level of prototyping;
- C# 2.0, including Anonymous Delegates, Generics and Reflection;
- Strong OO knowledge and concepts;
- Design efficient and normalized DB schemas.;
- SQL to the level of complex nested queries, advanced SQL 2005 features (WITH, PIVOT, etc.), and complex data constraints using triggers;
- ActiveRecord and MonoRail, including Hibernate's HQL language;
You'd have working skills with all of the above, and master at least two.

Who are you?
You are a person with a passion for coding. You have high learning capabilities, and you really believe that you are, or can be, a Great Developer. You always seek to learn new things. It is probably not uncommon for you to try and find a better queue algorithm while you're at the supermarket line to the cashier. You are not afraid of new programming languages. And most important, you are a easy-going and friendly, and able to remain like that even when on tight schedule or after discovering a horrifying  bug in your code, at 10pm.

What you have done so far?
You did some web development., and know your way around XHTML, DHTML, Javascript, etc. You are proficient in a mainstream high level language, preferably one of those: .NET (C#, VB.NET, Boo), ruby, java or python. You are skilled with at least one Server-Side technology, be it ASP.NET, J2EE, PHP, RoR, or ASP3. You have Good SQL skills. Not only CRUD stuff, but also knowledge of a mainstream DBMS DDL, nested queries, triggers, system tables, etc. MS-SQL Server 2005 is preferred. It will be nice if you have some experience with ActionScript or any other Flash language.

How do you apply?
Just send me an email, to "kene AT sqlink dOt com" .

Oren has blogged about his "10 rules" for that.
True words.
My 0.02$ are:
11. Believe in yourself and in your ability to become a "great developer".
12. Be able to accept changes.
13. Be able to accept that the solution you are familiar with is not the "silver bullet" for every scenario.
14. Do not be afraid of new technologies - there are programming languages without curly brackets, and they be a better solution for your problem.
15. Set high standards for yourself.
16. Motivate yourself to keep those high standards. You can either start a blog, initiate a tech-y startup, or marry someone with a Polish mom. Anything that would drive to to excel.

Must it? Are you sure?

Well, this is a screenshot taken today by my colleague, Moran Benisty (aka the localhost blogger):

Sorry. To much spam.

I've read an interesting post today on Scientific American.

They say that researchers are after a way to deliver power wirelessly to devices.

So in the near future I'll be able to use my laptop without worrying for power supply cords. Just turn it on and start to work. no need to dim the screen or scale down the cpu.

Omer Van Kloeten has initiated (with Ayende) an Israeli Bloggers Dinner.

If you're intersted, leave a comment on his post.

A nice page made available by NASA is showing an astronomy related picture each day.

I liked today's and yesterday's pictures a lot.

Here is a warning that IE7 poped up on me on hattrick:

This website wants to run the following add-on 'MSXML 5.0' from 'Microsoft Corporation (unverified publisher)' ...

huh?

For all of you HDTV / 10MegaPixel Cameras / 22" 5000X4000 screens - you should read this about the human eye's resolution

It relates nicely to the single pixel camera thingie.

On a small debate with a friend, about weather he should design and implement a Data Access Layer himself, or use an existing framework, I came across a piece by Ayende about 25 Reasons Not To Write Your Own Object Relational Mapper.

I'd like to add a quote from Code Complete 2 about programmers who are reluctant to read (and use) existing solutions to known problems (on p. 823):

... even if you want to reinvent the wheel, you can't count on success. You might reinvent the square instead.

It's definitely not a Dave Barry kinda funny punch line, however it's very much to-the-point.

I've been on a trip to Rhodes for the last few days, so no progress on Monorail or any other technical stuff was happening, but I do have a few pictures to share. It would take some time to post, since I have some projects that needs some working on, but eventually you'll be able to see the great pictures (taken on my lousy nokia phone's camera) and read some (not so funny) stories.

UPDATED:
The linkes that was reported broken are now fixed. I hope.

Steve Yegge has done it again.

I mean, he is starting another war, after the one he started on his notorious post: "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns".

Now he's after the Agile stuff.

You can agree with him, or disagree, but you must accept that:

a. He is a very funny writer,

b. He has a point. If you think the opposite way, you should be familiar with his arguments, in order to know yours better,

c. It seams great to work for Goggle, eve though he insists that he's not working as a recruiter.

I'd warmly advise on reading his blog rss-ly, so you won't miss any of his witty stuff.

on dasBlog 1.8 it didn't work for me for some reason, so now I'm tetsing it on 1.9.

The features are cool. It's nice to work offline on my desktop, but have all of the css as I'm writing directly to the blog's page.

I've downloaded a few Code Highlight Formatters plugins. The one that seams less buggy is Highlight4Writer. It's Nice, and I could easily edit the template it's generating, to add a div with class=Code so it'l get the nice CSS I've applied for code blocks.

This is a test: 

class Test { void JustASimple(string test) { to = test; ThePlugin(); } }

EDITED: It's buggy, too. all of the line brakes and spaces was removed when I moved to Html View and back. I'll have to find another one.

Now I'm testing CodeFormat from ThinkStar.de

   1:  class ThisIs

   2:  {

   3:      void JustAnother(string test)

   4:      {

   5:      }

   6:  }

A lot better. I've added some stuff to my theme's style.css file, like removing padding and marging from <pre> tags, and applying all of Code class attributes to the generated CodeFormatContainer class. I like the line numbering option, too.

Trying some aspx stuff:

   1:  <asp:TextBox runat="Server"></asp:TextBox>

less cool, but still works.

I'd like to teach it Boo and brail. Hope to have a little time for that.

Now I'll add an image and test the upload ability:

Like a charm, and note the nice drop shadow.

tags: Windows Live Writer, WLW

I'll describe here the fix I've applied to the VoidClass2 theme, that was supplied with dasBlog 1.9, and that I use here.

The problem: When viewing a post with it's comments, the comments and the comments box (where you can add new comments) are hidden way down the scroll. You click on "view comments" and you see only the post, until you'll scroll a bit downward.

The reason: The theme uses css positioning instead of table positioning, and the sidebar (the one with the blogroll, categories view, etc.) is floating *over* the main content area. The good thing is that when the sidebar has ended, there is a lot more room for the content, but since the comments are taking a 100% width of the content area, and there is no room (since the sidebar takes some room), the comments are pushed down below the point where the sidebar ends.

The solution:

Edit the CommentViewBox.ascx file (on the blog's root):
1. Fixing the "add comment" area width - note the new width value (highlighted):

Edit the style.css file from the theme's folder, and add the following text:

lemme know if it didn't work out for you.

So I've had some issues with perrmisions.

I've had some issues with the forms authentication, I've changed the path attribute to /Blog and it screwed everything up. changed back to "/" and now it works.

I've have to do 3 more things, all related to the theme.

1. Setup the google analytics thingie into the hometemplate.

2. Fix the annoying thing with adding comments. I guess the textboxes are set to width=100% or something like that, and since the right colums seams to be floating and taking some room of the main div, the "add comments" section is pushed downward and it look "buggie" (hey, I wanted to add a comment but I see an empty content page. Oh, I should scroll down, Hmm Silly me.).

3. Do some styling.

I like this theme for it's relatively clean HTML and css based positioning.

I've mention before that my current DasBlog installation isnt very stable. Some of my readers have complaints about slow responsiveness, problems with commenting and other stuff that do not work as smoothly as should.

I was on the verge of trying something else (.text or even implementing a light blogging engine as a MonoRails showcase), but I'll give DasBlog 1.9 a shot, since it has loads of features that I do not have the time to implement right now, and I do find DasBlog as a darn great piece of code.

You can find a detailed post on the matter at Scott Hansleman's blog.

So, my site can be unstable for the next few hours (days?) until I'll finish the upgrade (including the backup of the current folders, and uploading the new version on a 96kbits upload stream from Israel to the hosting farm located at Seattle, WA. I hope the files can swim all they way up there :) ).

Without furture ado - let's the upgrade begin