I love Halloween because it makes for great parties. What makes a party great? Costumes! This past weekend I drove up from Los Angeles to San Jose to stay with my friend Kyle and his wife Cara. That evening we drove up to San Francisco to attend a house party in a large four story house in the hills. It was about the perfect size for the 100+ people in attendance, and they hade a few top-notch local DJs spinning.

Jeff Atwood points out several problems with using blacklists (specifically Akismet) to prevent comment spam.  He makes the following point:

Steve Harman points out another bug in the upgrade process.  I feel really terrible that this one slipped through, though as far as I can tell so far, it may be mostly cosmetic in its effect.  It apparently converts some comments to trackbacks.  While this is not desirable behavior, since we show both comments and trackbacks in the comment section, it might not have a huge negative effect.

In the essay entitled Hold the Mayo, 37signals points out the obvious fact that most surveys ask users what features they want added to a product.  They rarely ask what features they want removed.

Actually yes, I would like a little cheese with that whine.

Now that 37signals have put their book Getting Real online for free, I’ve finally gotten around to start reading it. And so far, I **love it. I think there are a lot of great lessons, reminders, ideas in here that will help me make products I work on that much better.

Well if you’re the punk malcontent who found my wallet yesterday, you go on a shopping spree…at Rite Aid, Vons, and Ralphs (a convenience store and two grocery stores). 

As I mentioned in my last post, someone reported a bug with deleting posts in the admin tool.  That posts also describes a quick and dirty workaround.

Someone reported that they cannot delete posts in the just released Subtext 1.9.2. I am mortified that we do do not have a unit test for this function!  To our defense, we did start with 0% code coverage in unit tests and have now reached 37.9% and rising!

Making the world safe for trackbacks again!

Dan Appleman takes the .NET focused custom search engine idea one step further by grabbing a great domain name for his search engine.  Now why didn’t I think of that!  Sometimes that’s all it takes between a search engine that will get used alot (his) and one that won’t (mine).  I’d be happy to throw my support over to his, though I’m keeping my baby.  The one key difference is I plan to leave my search engine open for others to contribute sites.  Perhaps the two will complement each other.

Having trouble sleeping lately. Thought I’d start an intermittent blog series about the questions that keep me up at night.

UPDATE: A bug was reported that blog posts could not be deleted. We have updated the release files with a fixed version.  There’s also a quick and dirty workaround.

In response to question about integrating my custom search engine with the browser, Oran left a comment with a link to a post on how to implement searching your FogBugz database in your browser via the OpenSearch provider, which is supported by Firefox 2.0 and IE7.

Last night I went to the “World Famous Viper Room”.  Gotta respect that their website makes sure to mention the World Famous part.  I suppose you’d have to have a real club inferiority complex to promote your club as The In This Neighborhood Sorta Famous Viper Room.

Google just launched a neat build-your-own-search-engine feature.  You can choose sites that should be emphasized in the search results, or even restrict search results to that list.

Here’s a little trick that I didn’t know about till Steve told me about it.  So that’s what those other tabs in the Remote Destkop dialog are for!

Jeff Atwood writes a great post about The Last Responsible Moment. Take a second to read it and come back here. I’ll wait.

Dave (a Subtext developer) just blogged about a project template he created for creating Atlas applications using the Web Application Project (WAP).  This is wicked useful for those of us who prefer Web Application Projects over Web Site Projects.

When I was a bright eyed bushy tailed senior in college, I remember wading through pages and pages of job ads in Jobtrak (which has since been absorbed into Monster.com).