August 2006 - Posts

31 August 2006
Going Away For A While
The culmination of the events from the past few weeks (months actually) have lead to some unwanted side effects, and I've decided that now is a good time to...well, take some time off and unplug for a bit. Unplugging as in literally pulling the plug from my machine and heading off into some well deserved Jay time. Alone. Sans computers and internet and all of that fun stuff. I'm just taking a hiatus to go off and better myself. Think " Walden " or other such fun stuff, though I will never achieve that level of continuity...one could only hope. So, so long for now...I'll catch all of you guys on the flip side. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer.” Cheers, and I love you all. Stay tuned, I'll be back soon. Read More...
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23 August 2006
Heading Down To Dallas
A couple of the CS MVPs ( Rich and Rick as of now) are going to be in Dallas (that's the location of Telligent HQ for anyone not in the know) towards the end of September (22nd-25th); if I can find a ticket for the right price I will be heading down as well. If any other CS enthusiasts in the area are interested in meeting up let us know (or hell, if anyone feels like flying in to meet up)...we plan on: Crashing the Telligent office on Friday (if they'll even let us in the front door). Getting to know Jane (and the Telligenti, in that order). Eating way too much Texas BBQ. Enjoying the end of summer in warm and sunny Texas. I love Texas...it's been years since I've visited and am definitely looking forward to heading back down there. We'll try and stay out of trouble, but inevitably trouble ends up finding me. Read More...
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23 August 2006
I'm Either The Last One To The Party...
Or no one has thought about this yet: The more I've pondered this piece of news the more convinced I am that it's a fake request. Too many things just don't add up (and at the risk of making a fool out of myself I will not list them here...I have listed them on another popular news site and if it does indeed turn out to be bogus I will link back along with the obligatory "told ya so"). I hope it's not, but I think someone has pulled a fast one on us. Guess we'll see what happens. Read More...
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23 August 2006
Scam Update -- It's Never Going To End
Just a quick (interim) update before I post another in depth piece about "Da Scam" (as I'm affectionately calling it now). Too many strange things are happening lately for it all to be coincidence, including: My ISP finally managed to track down some traffic logs from my IP address, and sure enough they said there was an "interesting" amount of traffic generated from my machine to IP's located in various parts of the world (generic eh? they are passing the info on to the necessary authorities) several weeks ago, over a period of about 6 weeks. The amount of email spam I'm getting in my spam folder is through the roof...I normally don't check my spam folder that often but decided to have a look; holy crap! 1500 messages in 2 weeks! (I normally get maybe 100-200 a week). Blog spam...sigh, blog spam. I'm getting about 50 a day, whereas this time a month ago I was getting zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada (I've since scanned through my log files and guess where... Read More...
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23 August 2006
Detailed List Of CSS Changes For IE7
From the IEBlog ( full post here ): We are currently locking down IE7 for shipping and I wanted to give an update on the CSS work that went into IE7. Chris originally outlined our plans for IE7, and we listened to a lot of feedback ( blog , connect database , conferences , our WASP partnership etc.) to help us address the most grievous bugs and prioritize which features to put in for IE7. I like to thank especially the contributors on this blog for their participation. Your feedback made a difference in deciding what issues to address. We understand that we are far from being done and we know we have still a lot of work ahead of us. IE 7 is a stepping stone in our effort to improve our standards compliance (especially around CSS). As an example, in the platform we did not focus on any proprietary properties – though we may try out new features in the future using the official –ms- prefix, following the CSS extension mechanism. We also work very closely with the W3C CSS working group (which... Read More...
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22 August 2006
Microsoft Invites Firefox Development Team To Redmond
Via Ars Technica ( full post here ): Microsoft wants to help aid in the development of Firefox. It sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? If you're still here, let me tell you that it's not as bad as it seems. Sam Ramjii, Director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, has extended an invitation to the Firefox and Thunderbird developers asking them if they'd like to visit the company's open source research center. Microsoft's hopes are that, in a four-day span, the company can provide the open source developers with enough information to get the popular web browser running smoothly on Windows Vista. Of course the tin-foil hats are out in full force with their conspiracy theories, but my guess is that MS wants to promote their upcoming WFP/E technology to make sure the FF devs get it right (which will be a very good thing *cough* flash killer *cough*). It looks like they invited the Opera folks over to Redmond recently as well. Regardless, if the FF team chooses not to go, it'll make them (and... Read More...
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21 August 2006
Use Generics To Improve Performance
Via Keyvan Nayyeri ( full post here ): Generics were of one of main new features in .NET 2.0 languages. In .NET 1.x developers had to use System.Collections strongly typed collections to save their objects but no type checking were occurred for them. Therefore they had to do a type casting when they were retrieving their objects from collections. Now that Microsoft introduced Generics as a type specific alternative for those old means, life is pretty easier for each developer. One of most important reasons to use Generics instead of strongly typed collections is performance. As you don't need to cast an object as what you did when you read it from a collection such as ArrayList your performance will be improved. Obviously each and every developer should try to use Generics in his code but what's the actual effect of using them on performance? In this post I want to write some test codes with Generics and strongly typed collections then run them and use Visual Studio performance sessions... Read More...
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20 August 2006
CS Tidbits #21: Exploring The CS Spam Blocker
Blog spam...it's the new (well, not so new) scourge of the internet. On my site alone I get several hundred attempts a day from spammers wanting to leave their garbage on my blog. Fortunately Community Server ships with a built-in spam blocking tool; unfortunately it's not very well documented and can be a bit vague to new users/site admins. In this Tidbit I'll attempt to clear up any ambiguity about the Spam Blocker and demonstrate how to get it configured properly so that site admins can (hopefully) rid their sites of spam. CS uses a rules based scoring system to try and identify potential spams; when CS receives any type of content it has to go through the rules configured in the Spam Blocker (content meaning a blog post, a comment on a blog, a post to a forum, gallery, etc...anything and everything that can be posted to your site by users). Within each rule itself you can specify how to score the content by assigning points (I like to call them penalties) based on criteria that you... Read More...
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17 August 2006
CS Tidbits #20: Add Basic Stats To Your Blog
I pulled a Ken in that I wrote a basic BlogStats control quite a while back and simply forgot about it, and it actually fits perfectly into my current series of CS Tidbits. So I busted it out of Vault and cleaned it up a bit and added it to my current (soon to be published) CS Custom Controls project. In a nutshell it's a simple control that can be dropped onto any of your individual blog's skin files to get some basic posting information such as is displayed in the image on the left. Very basic, but useful enough IMO. If anyone can think of other useful information that should be displayed let me know and I'll add it. You can download it from here , there is a readme file included with detailed instructions on how to install it. I'm also cooking up some other nifty controls, so stay tuned. Read More...
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17 August 2006
Calling All Geeks Named Scott
While I was setting up my mirrored content section and adding blogs, I counted no less than 5 blogs belonging to a Scott (and I'm not even done adding content yet). I guess Scott is to geeks as Jason is to American males in the 25-35 year old age range ( read my Sidenote here ). So calling all Scott's! If your name is Scott and A) consider yourself a geek B) have a blog, leave a quick comment...let's see how many of you guys are out there! Read More...
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