If you are using Subtext, or are using .TEXT and plan to use Subtext I need to ask you a few questions.  Please answer as your answers may determine whether or not some features are removed for the sake of simplification.

From the 37 Signals blog I find out that reflections are the new dropshadows.  Unfortunately I didn’t get the memo, but at least there is a nice simple javascript library to add reflections to images.

If you’ve read my blog you know I have a bit of a thing for Microformats.  I once wrote a little special effect script to highlight links to your friends when marked up using the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) Microformat used to denote relationships to people you link to.

I found out recently that many of my family members and friends who used to read my blog stopped doing so because most of my blog posts were pure gibberish to them.  Apparently not everyone is fascinated by topics such as how many CPU cycles it takes to make a method call in a dynamic language?  Neither are they enthralled by matching HTML with Regular Expressions.  Go figure.

Some computer scientist by the name of Donald Knuth once said,

Of course that assumes that Joel wears a size 9 and a half.

Joel Spolsky follows up on his earlier remarks about scaling out a Ruby on Rails site with this post on Ruby performance.  I’m afraid it is a thoroughly unconvincing and surprising argument.  He states…

Just a little shout out to my wife to wish us a happy anniversary.  We’ve been married for four years and each one has been better than the last.  I love you honey!

Update: You can click on the images (except the vegas one) to see larger pics.

Tonight at Soccer practice, we scrimmaged for a while then ran through some drills.  We have an English guy and a Scottish guy (who hardly anyone can understand) on the team who are a laugh a minute.  You can imagine their surprise when we started a shooting drill and our team manager tells them that we all have to shag our own balls.

Seems like all sorts of open source projects have been releasing lately.  Darren Neimke and Keyvan Nayyeri proudly announce the release of BlogML 2.0 on CodePlex.  Here’s a list of new features on Keyvan’s blog. With a bit of luck and lots of persistence, BlogML will hopefully be a key component in breaking vendor lock-in when it comes to blogging engine. 

Darren Neimke apparently is not one to shy away from a bit of trash talk.  He IM’d me via MSN recently to warn me about a new SUB, ready to take down Subtext. In this case, it is his newly open sourced blog engine, SingleUserBlog or SUB, which is now hosted on CodePlex.  Darren has been on a roll lately with the recent release of BlogML 2.0.  Now SUB enters the scene with torpedoes blazing!

This past weekend my wife and I drove up to San Francisco to attend a friend’s wedding, which ended up being a lot of fun.  We always like visiting The City because of the many friends we have in the area, though being there reinforces the fact that it is not a place where we’d want to live (no offense to anybody who lives there, it’s just not our style).

I mentioned several heuristic approachs to blocking spam in my recent post on blocking comment spam, but commenters note that I failed to mention CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).  At the moment, CAPTCHA is quite effective, both at blocking spam and annoying users.

As a follow-up to the recent release of Subtext 1.9, I would also like to introduce a little something I put together at http://subtextskins.com/.

Well my friends, it took a bit longer than expected to get Subtext 1.9 out the door, but we did it.  When we released Subtext 1.5 back in June I said,

I am still continuing my experiment in running as a LUA (aka Non-Admin).  Let me tell you, it has been a total pain in the ass and now I totally understand why more developers do not do this, which feeds into the vicious cycle in which apps are developed that do not run well under least user privileges.  When I have some time, I will write up my experiences.

Let me start off by noting that Subtext 1.9 requires ASP.NET 2.0!  Thus the upgrade process from a prior version of Subtext (all which run on ASP.NET 1.1) will not be quite as simple as before, but should hopefully not be overly complicated as is the spirit of Subtext.

Scott Hanselman sets the geek-o-sphere abuzz with his latest (and apparently now annual) Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows.  The publishing of this list usually coincides with a productivity drop for me as I find many new toys to play with.  Unfortunately, many tools don’t work so well when running as a non-admin.

Scott writes about making DasBlog work on Mobile Devices.  The approach he takes is to programmatically detect that the device is a mobile device and then present an optimized TinyHTML (his term) theme.