.netguy

What Have I Done?

Comment spam is infecting the blog world, because blogs have high page rank. People will embed URLs in their comments, when allowed (either via HTML or auto-linking) as well as with their name. So, in the interest of cutting down the abusers of blogs, until the point in time in which I can REALLY fix this with new software, I have done the following: Some posts will be set to “no comments”, at my discretion…

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.netguy

Categorization and New RSS Feeds

I’ve set about categorizing the blog. It’s going to take a while (650 back posts to categorize), but all new posts will go into the new categories as appropriate. A new set of category based archives will be online shortly as well. As promised, I made new RSS feeds, which are: All posts: New posts and comments (unified feed) New posts New comments Technology posts: New posts The “All posts” feeds will contain posts in every category.…

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.netguy

CruiseControl.NET

I got CruiseControl.NET working this weekend. Although we don’t use NAnt as our primary build tool at work, it was trivial to hack together a .build file that used the <solution> task to build all our project files. It doesn’t even rely on having Visual Studio on the box, which is a nice bonus (just needs the SDK). You have to sort of twist your brain until you get it right. Watching Kris Syverstad give a demo of it…

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.netguy

Martin: Use Subversion

I love Subversion. Martin Fowler has come to the same conclusion. On the basis of my informal conversations with my colleagues, Subversion is a better [source control] system than all the commercial tools except Perforce. So if you’re using something else, you may want to consider a switch. He also points out a common complaint: lack of plugins. However, one of the nice things about Subversion is that it works on the edit-merge-commit model. This is different…

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.netguy

Squid is Clever, so Squid Sucks

At perhaps a rate of a dozen a week or so, we get errors from our web site about invalid URLs. They always look like this: Alright, so here’s the funny part. That’s not a page on our site, and there’s no link anywhere on our site to that URL. There’s no referer header, so I have to guess that Squid is scraping it out, but it doesn’t really matter. See, here is the link we have:…

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.netguy Audio

Some DVD-Audio Ripping Success

Mike Sax wrote: Let’s not forget that when Microsoft encounters smart competitors, they have a hard time competing. Quickbooks and Quicken still blow away anything Microsoft has tried. Adobe dominates in graphics, fonts, and document exchange. Google is still the clear number one. Play Station 2 blows XBox away in market share and game support. My boss is fond of talking about markets by using the picture of the bell curve (my apologies if I butcher…

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.netguy

Homeward Bound, Yes She Is…

Lisa comes home today after her two week whirlwind tour of the east coast. Her plane lands in 5 hours (in the intervening time, I’m building and releasing a version of our product today to a custom who is being trained in 6 hours… whee!). On this trip: she met our baby niece, reconnected with her brother while getting to know his wife, hung out with old friends and new, celebrated her dad’s birthday, saw her step-mom’s wall color vision…

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.netguy

Denver Pragmatic Practitioners, July Meeting

Date: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 5:30 PM-8:00 PM Location: (map) Interlink Group Offices 2nd Floor Conference Room 98 Inverness Drive East, Suite 150 Englewood CO 80112 Topic: Interviewing Sooner or later, every developer is asked to participate in the interview process. Or, when developers become managers, they must oversee the interviews for new members of their teams. How can you effectively interview someone with just a few hours of face to face time? Does being an…

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.netguy

It’s not NewsGator, it’s MozGator

My love/hate relationship with Outlook has spilled back into “hate”. Unfortunately, this means no more NewsGator. Well… does it? I’m a subscriber to NewsGator Online Services. I tried to live with another aggregator all day (sorry, but I still can’t stand RSS Bandit) and I was plain frustrated with the ways it wasn’t acting like I expected. Greg (the NewsGator author) told me to try out the POP edition, since I’m already paying for it. Sure enough,…

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.netguy

Virtual PC, Windows Server 2003, and Sound

I did manage to get sound working in a Virtual PC image of Windows Server 2003, but only after a fashion. The drivers are installed, and it does make sound, but quite badly. Playing back MP3/WMA files is out of the question, because it’s apparently CPU starved or data starved or something, causing the sound to go staticy and slow down. However, even if I never get it to play music happily, at least I…

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