Jeff has a great post in which he compares UML to circuit diagrams and then asks, why doesn’t UML enjoy the same currency for software development?

So after a few humiliating losses (in both soccer leagues I play in), we finally have a convincing win last night (5 to 2) in the Olympic league (the more competitive one). I even had a goal off of a dangerous cross that the defender tried to stop, but ended up deflecting it into the goal.

I love working with other developers who are really excited about technology and the work we are doing. As is characteristic of such an organization, there is a constant flurry of IM messages and emails with links to interesting new technologies and topics.

My blog now supports CoComment tracking. Let me know if you run into any problems with posting comments.

Steve Harman reports that Subtext reached 1000 downloads just recently on SourceForge.

Joel Spolsky totally nails it this time with his article on the Developer Abstraction Layer. This is one of his better articles. It is a tad on the long side, but well worth the read. Try to get it in your manager’s hands.

If you are seeing duplicate posts from my blog in your feed aggregator, my apologies. I am dogfooding the latest development version of Subtext straight from the Subversion repository. Unfortunately, my unit tests did not catch the fact that I changed the link and guid elements from fully qualified to virtual URLs.

Eric Ramseur who works on the Rainbow 2.0 Portal project looks like he has made progress inimplementing Subtext as the blogging module for Rainbow. That is pretty sweet.

This is one of the most ingenious methods of self promotion I have ever seen. Not to mention an interesting way to obtain a house.

Jayson emailed me to let me know that my PageRank is now

1. That puts me up in the ranks of the big guys like Scott Hanselman. Woohoo!

There are a lot cool javascript libraries floating around the Intarweb these days that add cool behavior to web pages. My favorites are the ones that you simply add to the head section of your website and control via markup. It is a great way to enhance structural html markup with Javascript.

UPDATE: The script now uses regular expressions. This fixes the problem where it translated met to me.

Lightbox JS brought a new level of hotness when it came to displaying pictures on your website or blog. Reference the javascript file in your html page, add a rel="lightbox" to a link, and voila! You have a sweet way to display pics. I even implemented it on my blog as evidenced by the image below. Go ahead, click on it (assuming you are not reading this in an aggregator).

Since I was called out, I went ahead and quickly implemented CoComment for Subtext, but I have yet to deploy it to my personal blog. It will be released as part of our upcoming interim 1.0.5.0 release which is focused on bug fixes and a few developer goodies thrown in.

I was recently approached by some people I know purely through blogging and IM conversations to write on a topic for a book they are putting together. Of course I was honored and appreciative that they thought of me, even after finding out there would be no payment for the work. Doh!

Despite the apparent hype factor of “Web 2.0”, I am really starting to get into the whole Web 2.0 phenomena. I think it really clicked when hearing about it in various panel discussions at Mix06.

In case you were wondering how such a loudmouth as myself could be so quiet for four days and three nights, my wife and I were in Puerto Vallarta enjoying a real vacation. By “real” I mean completely devoid of work. I didn’t so much as walk into a cyber cafe (though I did peer real hard inside).

I apologize for writing up a roundup for the Mix06 conference several days too late, but I was not in a good condition to blog during the conference. In part it was due to a cold I was fighting which left me unmotivated to blog. You might think that the lack of sleep and drinking would have contributed, but the strange thing about Vegas is that the less I slept, and the more I drank, the better I felt.

You Europeans ought to appreciate this one.

Scott Hanselman asks the question, Is Open Source a Crap Idea. I sure hope not.