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.

No, this isn’t a revisionist history account attempting to insert the role of software in the Crusades. Today we take a look at Religious Wars in software. Sometimes also referred to as “Flame Wars” and “Holy Wars”.

So after reading this post by Scott Hanselman, I just had to try it out. He writes about a site called MyHeritage that attempts to match your face to celebrities and relatives.

Recently I added some seemingly innocent code to Subtext within the Application_BeginRequest method of Global.asax.cs that I adapted from this blog post by Darren Neimke. The purpose of the code is to provide culture aware formatting of dates, times, and numbers specific to the user reading the blog.

If you’ve started on module development with DotNetNuke 4.0 and above in Visual Studio.NET 2005, you might run into a problem with trying to add a Web User Control (*.ascx file) to a class library.

Lately I have been spending a little bit of time performing maintenance tasks on my blog’s SQL Server. I noticed that OdeToCode’s Scott Allen was in the same mood.

I got a 1099 for my blog yesterday. Now that is a weird feeling. Google giveth, the federal government taketh away.

I love this idea from 37 Signals in handling abusive comments. Rather than simply deleting them, they will take the approach of shaming the abusers with a Troll Cap. Though it is doubtful that those who troll will really feel much shame, at least it serves an educational purpose of teaching others what is considered trolling behavior.

Looks like Jeff Atwood is not content to let dead dogs lie when he revisits Edit and Continue.

One common approach to having a script method run when a page loads is to attach a method to the window.onload event like so…

Intro

There is something really satisfying about having a beer after soccer. Especially when you can sit down with a Newcastle at the computer and blog about it. I’ve heard many marathoners say that a beer after a long run is helpful for replenishing lost carbohydrates. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s a health drink!

The great thing about being involved in a couple of open source projects is that they provide great opportunities to learn and to teach, especially through the vehicle of code reviews.