An old saying I’ve been using a lot lately is the old saw “A shoe cobbler’s kids go shoeless”. Basically, it points out how difficult it is to keep one’s own affairs in order when it is one’s job to do so for others. As an example, my company is in the business of building fantastic technology solutions, but our own website is rather neglected. This is something we see as a real problem and will address soon.

Well it took a bit longer than I thought it would, but we’ve finally put the final touches to Subtext 1.0, code named “Nautilus”! One of the primary goals of this release was to make it much easier to setup and use than .TEXT, and I think we’ve accomplished that.

I have never worked as part of a shrink wrapped product team, which makes working on Subtext the closest thing to the experience. When a product team releases a product, they often stamp it with the acronym RTM, Release to Manafacturing, which is more and more becoming a misnomer as the only manafacturing being done is the manafacturing of hyperbole by the marketing team.

This week, I’ve had the pleasure of being pummelled in soccer not once, but twice.

Just wondering, but are there any non-techie readers of this blog (besides my wife of course)? The reason I ask is that I am noticing that I am writing less and less about what’s going on in my life. In part, because I think my audience is almost entirely tech readers and google searchers.

Intro

For simple ASP.NET applications that do not employ URL Rewriting, stepping through the code that handles a request is fairly straightforward. For example, given a request for http://localhost/MyProject/Page.aspx, simply open up Page.aspx and look at the code-behind file to see what code handles this request.

So I spend my time writing up a hopefully useful guide to Subversion on SourceForge and all this one reader from Spain (¡hola!) wants to know is where I got my theme from?

Good news! SourceForge now supports using Subversion for source control!

Steve Harman points out some registry keys and directories to backup if you wish to re-use your Visual Studio 2003 settings on a fresh installation. For those of you who are lucky enough to fully abandon 2003, you have the benefit that Visual Studio 2005 fully supports importing and exporting settings.

If you are like me, you “learned” source control in a very informal manner. Perhaps you learned via what we used to call the “Commodore Shuffle” back in the day (what is the modern term for this?) in which you clicked around and figured it out by trying to use it.

Just had a short power outtage at home, which sucks because I work here. I was taking a short break downstairs reading when the lights suddenly turned off. I had that feeling that must go through the head of the lone security guy just before Sidney Bristow busts his head with her fist.

Well I am ready to mix it up at the Mix 06 conference. This will be my first conference of the year and my coworker Jon Galloway will also be in attendance.

The local newspaper sports a comic strip that enjoys every opportunity to mock the modern university’s emphasis on diversity. The strip holds diversity accountable for lowered standards and educational quality. However it ignores the danger of a lack of diversity, namely that a student might not be exposed to new ideas that challenge pre-existing assumptions that would improve the student’s overall education.

I was reviewing some code when I ran into code that fit this pattern all over the place (simplified to make a point).

Read this interesting post by security expert Bruce Schneier on how Valentine’s day is the day when cheating spouses are most likely to trip up.

By now just about everybody is ooh-ing and aww-ing over this demonstration video showing multiple users on a single touch and pressure sensitive graphical user interface.

Jon Galloway has a useful post on how to prevent windows from automatically rebooting your machine during automatic updates. Useful information if you like to keep programs running.

I’ve joined a group of soccer players attempting to form a team to get into a 30 and over league that hosts games on much nicer fields. These are the fields with that really nice high quality artificial turf, a huge difference over the pock-marked dirt/grass fields of my current league. The play in this league is also at a much higher level than my current league and they are very particular about which teams they let in. They judge teams on ability, sportsmanship, and organization.