So I’m ditching my home grown blogging software in favor of………… DasBlog.

I looked at a couple of other options.  I really wanted to go with Community Server, since it’s roots were in .TEXT, and I really liked that piece of software.  But I downloaded Community Server, and it just didn’t do it for me.  Don’t know what it was, it just didn’t feel right.  I also looked at DotNetNuke, but it seemed like a bit much for what I wanted.

Anyway, new site, same old address.  If you visit with a web browser, you won’t see anything different.  If you aggregate me, then you’ll want to reset your RSS feed too http://www.johnarmitage.net/word/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss

Hopefully this will be pretty painless, and you’ll keep reading.  Also, I’m hoping to post a little more often in 2006.

So I have been playing around with the Tablet PC SDK a lot lately.  It’s pretty damn nice.  Makes me wish that I had bought a convertible laptop.  I’ve got the speech SDK as well, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it much.

Tonight I finished watching the boxed set of Band of Brothers.  That is a kick ass mini-series!  I got this set from the library.  I’ll have to buy it though.  I can see myself wanting to watch it every now and then.

So while I was all immersed in watching the movie, I was thinking that I still need to put together a shadow box of my awards and medals.  Not wanting to run out and find a hobby shop at 10:00 at night, I decided to throw together a virtual shadow box.  Here’s what I came up with.

Dear God....... according to this survey (What band from the 80's are you), I'm Peter Cetera.
I probably shouldn't have admitted that.
Didn't he specifically write songs to be added to the soundtrack of Karate Kid movies?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about mug shots lately.  Not that I've had mine taken recently, mind you.  But I'm thinking about how they are captured, stored and used.  Doing some research, I stumbled upon these sites:

Mugshots.com

Arresting Images (from The Smoking Gun)

I also noticed this Sheriff's Office web site.  I like the look of it.  Seems to be pretty clean and provide useful information.

if you grew up in the late 70's or 80's you can probably relate to a lot of this stuff.  I had forgotten about a lot of it.  Now excuse me while I go do some searching on Ebay.

I usually head out to the pumpkin patch this time of year.  It's a pretty fun place.  Pumpkins, petting zoo, CORN MAZE!  I'm really looking forward to it this year because Riley is two and he should get a kick out of it.

I found this site concerning the corn maze...er maize... uh MAiZE.  I thought some guy had just tromped around and busted down some paths through a field of corn.  Actually though from the overhead shot, you can see that they really put some thought into it.  Of course you won't catch me going in there.  I can see it already.  Some punk 12 year old kid hides in the maze...MAiZE... jumps out to scare me and I leave a John shaped path directly to the nearest (newly created) exit in the maze.  MAiZE.

postings will be kind of slim for a while....yeah, like they weren't before.  Except for today.  I have a couple already on tap for today.

Also the blog will be moving.  But there will be more to come on that.  Hopefully before this site expires.

You know, I hate using the word blog.  Especially now that I hear news anchors use it every day.  “The new fad, blogging”........ “How blogging will effect this election”

at least according to this survey.  via chris

our distinct personality, The Shepherd is to tend to your human flock. You understand the needs of those for whom you are responsible. Shepherds are vigilant and reliable. You realize your obligation and commitment to the well being of those entrusted to your care. Shepherds are very dependable. You engender a feeling of comfort and stability to those within your charge. On the positive side, Shepherds can be empathic, caring, understanding, practical and realistic. On the negative side, you may be manipulative, close-minded and sentimentally rigid. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today's corporate kingdoms.

I used to use a Kryptonite Evolution 2000 lock on my bike.  Not anymore.  Check this out:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/7796925370303347/

More specifically, how long can the Name for that control be?  A coworker swore that she had gone over the allowable limit today and was getting some strange errors.  I told her that I didn't think that there was a limit, or that if there was one it was probably too large to really worry about.

I did some research and couldn't come up with anything on the web that explained how long a web control's Name could be, so I started working on the solution myself.  What I found was if the name of the class behind your web control is over 155 characters long, you start to get errors on the .resx file for that class.  155 characters is ok, but at 156 you start to have problems.  Now, the .ascx file can actually be named something that is over 155 characters, but the the class that it inherits from cannot be.  So, it's either something in the class, or in the CodeBehind specification in the aspx page.

This is a saw!

The site is in German I think, but that's not too important.  I was just impressed by the pictures.  It looks like something out of Mad Max.

These apps have been floating around for a while now, but I thought I would mention them anyway just in case there was somebody that hasn't heard about them.

Cropper
Brian Scott has written a really killer app called Cropper.  It's a nice little app for grabbing images.  Get it here (you can get the source too):
http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/archive/2004/09/09/3085.aspx

Paint.net
Another nice app (again with the source code available) for doing some simple image manipulation.  So help me, if you are still using paint......well there is just something wrong with you.  Get Paint.net here:
http://www.winisp.net/rbrewster/pdn.html

Jeff Key
Yes, Jeff is a useful app, in that he is consistently pumping out great tools.  The list is too long to list here.  So just go to Jeff's site and look at the menu over on the right.  Plenty of useful stuff there.

You know, I never really even thought to question what happened at the Pentagon on September 11th.
Watch this video and see what you get out of it:

 http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon121.swf

The college football season starts this weekend!

Either there isn't a whole lot going on for me to write about.....or there is so much going on that I don't have time to write about it.  I haven't figured it out yet.  Right now, I'd have to blame it on the fact that every evening I sit on the couch, watch the Olympics and fall asleep.  Only a couple of more days and I can break that addiction.

I stumbled upon the Oregon Blogs site.  I don't read them as much as I check out the pictures down the right hand column.  I've managed to grab a couple of desktop images from that list.

The title of the last post mentioned peaches, and then I never mentioned them in the actual post.  Maryhill has some great peach orchards all around it.  It's a good place to go if you are looking from some fresh peaches (or plums, or corn, or berries...)

So I posted that blurb about trying to debug with sql, and I haven't touched the subject since.  I guess things are running just about normal around here.

Went camping at Maryhill Sate Park this past weekend.  Two things that really stick in my mind after we got back.  1. Sometimes the Columbia River can be really nice to ski on.  That far up the river, the water can be completely flat.  Not nearly as choppy as it gets down near Portland.  2. Camping in 100+ degree weather blows. 

and a bonus number 3.  A melted chocolate bar, refrozen in the cooler, still tastes pretty damn good.

You know, every article I can find on-line that talks about debugging a stored proc from Visual Studio makes it sound easy as hell.  Too bad it doesn't seem to work so easily for me.  Visual Studio is on my pc.  SQL Server is on my pc.  Debugging is turned on in my project.  So what the hell?

Hmmm....

I'm thinking that I need to flip a flag on SQL Server somewhere.  I'll be damned if I can find it though.

I haven't been posting much lately.  I've been trying to do some more work on Flashtastic, as well as rewriting the software that this blog runs on to something that I am making myself.  Not that .Text doesn't do what I want it to do.  I just want to use something that I've written myself....and something a little more basic.  Plus I want to make a type of photo-blog feature in it as well.  All that, and the fact that the weather has been really warm recently have kept me pretty quite on this site.

I just got done reading the Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now article on MSDN.  I wanted to note that here so that I will know where to look to easily find it a month from now.

It's pretty toasty in Portland these days.  103 degrees yesterday.  It's supposed to be close to that today.  What in the hell?  Isn't it supposed to be overcast and cold in Oregon?  With heat like that comes smog warnings, clean air advisories and the like.  What can you do?  Look here for ideas.

Does anybody do their part to help out?  Not me.  I pulled my boat up to the lake, and spent the day trying to break my wife's arm by dragging her around the lake on a ski.

We went to Sand in the City today.  It wasn't really that much fun.  It was neat to see all the sand sculptures, but over all it was just a ton of people packed into Pioneer Courthouse Square.  Maybe going on Friday or Saturday when they were actually working with the sand would have been more fun.  I don't know.

I never even thought to go to the contest at Cannon Beach.  I haven't been to that one since sometime in the 80's. 

One final thought.  What the hell is with the weather people these days.  It seems like they have been really off this year.  If it hadn't been for their claims of thunderstorms the afternoon/evening, we would have been out on the boat today.

One day I'll write another post that has something technical in it.  But this isn't going to be that post.

A few years ago the Air Show was removed as one of the Rose Festival events.  These days it's called the Oregon International AirShow.  It looks like the Blue Angels are back this year.  We'll surely be going as Riley is completely infatuated with planes right now.

I thought it was getting on toward that time of year.  The time of year when you really love living in Portland, or the time of year where you'd like to go on vacation for a week or two.

The past couple of years I've avoided downtown like the plague during Rose Festival.  May venture down to see the ships with Riley this year though.  Just watching the news now.  Huh.  A week of rain...during Rose Festival.  Looks like another Trailblazer just got busted for drugs.  Everything sounds like business as usual.

Holy crap!  May went by with only two posts.  I've been a little too busy to write anything lately.  Been writing lots of code, but that's about it.  I have a bunch of links to go through (maybe tonight) so I might toss out one or two of those later on.

For now, get yourself some Gilligan or A-Team.

So I have written this down a couple of times, and edited it, and rewrote, and finally have given up trying to make it not sound like a rant. 

Basically, I won't be flying United Airlines anymore.  My wife was recently traveling from Portland, OR to Indianapolis, IN.  First the flight was delayed, and that happens.  But it was late enough that she (and my one year old son) missed their connecting flight in Denver.  So she's stuck in Denver for about six hours until they can fit her on another flight.  Again, it happens.  BUT, here's where I have a problem.  What did United do?  Nothing.  Nothing except threaten to refuse to help my wife because she was getting a little frustrated at the whole ordeal.  Now I know my wife, and I know what she's like when she gets upset.  It wouldn't surprise me if she raised her voice a bit.

Monday, May 10, 2004 9:30:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) | Comments [0] | OldSite

The cheap gas station by my house finally hit a price over $2.00

Time to take the bus.

So this guy takes a BMW Mini, and builds a robot out of it?  It looks pretty amazing.  Unbelievable even.  If you watch nothing else, be sure to view the Car Stopping video.

Holy Crap.

I threw together a little flash card program to help me study for my certification.  I couldn't find anything suitable out there already so I started hacking away.  I have an early version available if anybody is interested.  I'll warn you, right now it's not pretty...code-wise anyway.  It runs.  You can add data, save card decks, view the cards one at a time, edit and delete cards.  I need to put in some shuffling and randomization still.  As well as some kind of printing capability.

Work in progress, but feel free to use it if you want.  Requires the 1.1 .NET Framework.

source and all is here

feedback is appreciated.

I installed Sourcegear Vault tonight.  Really nice tool.  So far I haven't done anything spectacular where I would see a noticable difference from what I was using for source control before (VSS).  Nothing but basic Visual Studio intigrated checking in and checking out.  Hopefully I'll find some time to put it through the ringer the next couple of days and see how it handles.

The client tool seems to have about the same functionality as VSS.  It looks a lot nicer though.

The admin tool is no comparison.  Vault gives you more, and gives it to you in a much more intuitive layout. 

Yes, through technology we have now figured out how to keep people from losing a finger while cutting wood.  I stumbled upon the site for SawStop tonight.  SawStop is technology for woodworking tools.  Basically, when being used with a table saw, it can detect if it is cutting wood or not wood (for instance a finger).  But my question is this:  Without a cranky old three fingered wood shop teacher, how are kids going to learn to fear and respect that damn table saw?!  This technology won't save the numbnut who tosses a piece of wood on top of the table saw (and on top of the blade), turns the saw on sending the blade spinning, and wood flying resulting in a mighty blow to the breadbasket.  If you have never seen that, then you're really missing out.....

Just watch the video for yourself.  I thought it was pretty neat.

http://www.sawstop.com/video.htm

Now you can drive one of the Mars rovers!  Well, kind of.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/m2k4/driverover/frameset.html

The above link will let you drive around on a virtual Mars and discover interesting objects.  Good way to glean a little bit about what has been found up there.  They didn't have cool stuff like this when I was a kid.  Hard to drive a Mars rover with an Encyclopedia though.

Clackamas County, Oregon, has a website were you can check out some of the people with Warrants out for their arrest AND sex offenders that may be in your zip code.

http://co.clackamas.or.us/corrections/wlist.asp

So....Washington County will tell you who is in jail, Multnomah County will tell you who has been released, and Clackams County will tell you who they want to get as well as a few “notables” that might be in your neighborhood. 

Shouldn't there be some kind of standard?

I just noticed something funky in .Text (the blog tool that is running all of this).  I wrote an entry titled “Getting out of jail”.

I started writing that last Friday.  I just typed in a couple of notes and saved it.  I finished it up tonight and finally checked the little checkbox that tells .Text to publish what you have been typing.  .Text posted it with the date and time from last Friday.  Huh.  I wonder if there is an easy way to change that?  I don't see one in .Text. 

I notice weird stuff late at night.

So I mentioned in an earlier post that I had installed Whidbey, and then I couldn't seem to debug any web apps in Visual Studio 2003.  I tried a couple of quick fixes and nothing seemed to work.  So it's Sunday night and I'm trying the standard stab in the dark approach (ie. search Google and find anything pertaining to our sounding even remotely similar to my problem and attempting to do whatever that person did to fix the “kinda” same problem).  Well, nothing was working.  The clock struck......sometime late.  I don't know.  Long after I had wanted to go to bed.  So I decided it was time to stop guessing and figure out what the hell was going on.

• Step 1:  Realize that I had thus far neglected to check the System event logs
• Step 2: Check the System event logs
• Step 3: Find out that every time I try and run a web app in Visual Studio 2003 there is a message being entered into the application log saying “Event message:WebErrorEvent:Configuration Error"
• Step 4: Look at the source of the message.  ASP.NET 1.2.30703.0.
• Step 5: Yell “DEAR GOD!  THERE'S THE PROBLEM!“
• Step 6: Sneak upstairs and make sure that the kid and wife are still happily asleep.

What was the problem?  Installing Whidbey forced IIS to associate all ASP.NET applications with framework version 1.2.30703 which is the early version of framework version 2.0.  When you are running a project in Visual Studio 2003 you want to be hitting framework 1.1.4322.  Damn.  Easily enough fixed.  All you have to do is run Aspnet_regiis.exe (each .NET framework has it's own) to update the script map for you ASP.NET application.  If you need more help (and by you I mean Me a month from now when I have forgotten this), you Me can check out the following on-line article:

Monday, March 22, 2004 12:21:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) | Comments [0] | OldSite

I installed Whidbey on my dev box at home the other day.  It installed fine and is running great.  The only problem is that VS 2003 is now jacked.  More specifically, I cannot debug when I run a web app.  Crapolla!  They tell you in the ReadMe.txt file “Do Not Install This Side-by-Side with VS 2002 or 2003.”  I've read a couple of fixes out on other blogs but none of that seems to be working for me.  The server is set up right.  The web sites are set up right.  I even ran a utility to fix VS 2003 and the framework 1.1, but none of that worked. 
Then this morning driving into work, I realized that I didn't delete my pdm.dll file before running the fix.  Maybe screwed up the fix?  Hopefully, I'll be able to put some more time toward getting it fixed this weekend.

I've seen this mentioned a few places already so most of you who care have probably already heard.  But, on the slim chance that you don't already know...... head over to O'Reilly's Windows Dev Center.  I've always liked O'Reilly books, although I don't think I have any .NET specific ones.

Now that I'm thinking about it, wasn't Tim O'Reilly supposed to be speaking at a PADNUG meeting or something?  Did I miss it?

Get your free hot sauce here.

It kind of slid through the media pretty low and quick.  I know I didn’t catch it until today.  But GM has recalled 2.5 million cars.  Is yours one of them?  Look for recalls here.  Also while you’re at it, maybe learn a little something about your VIN.  via Marq

Once again, my name was not called.  So I pretty much inhaled the ADO.NET book that I was talking about in a previous post.

Highlights Of The Day

• Had a very old gentleman sitting next to me, reading a copy of People and laughing like Butthead for about an hour.
• Found out that even though I can use my County ID badge to go in the side door to the Court House when I go there to work, I'm not supposed to do it when I go there for jury duty.  One more employee perk down the drain.
• Watched part of Pulp Fiction on some guy's laptop
• Had lunch at the mall food court again, and saw a mouse run across the floor in the middle of the lunch hour crowd and almost get smashed.

Well, there is eight hours of my life that I'm never going to get back.  I spent the whole day sitting in the “Jury Pool” room waiting to have my name drawn to go to a court room.
But it never happened.  So I spent the morning playing cards and reading a year old Sports Illustrated issue.  Had lunch at Pioneer Place and bought a PC Magazine so I could spend the rest of the afternoon reading it and gazing longingly at all the laptops in that issue that had WiFi.  The “Jury Pool” room has WiFi. 

One day I'll find the exact computer I want and buy it.  But until then I will continue to gripe about it.

Jury Duty, day two is tomorrow.  I guess that I've finally found some time to read that Pragmatic ADO.NET book.

Did you grow up in Portland, Oregon like I did?

Did you grow up watching some of the old breed of wrestlers, like Rip “The Crippler” Oliver, Mean Mike Miller, Playboy Buddy Rose, Curt Henning, Billy Jack, Stan “The Man” Stasiak,  and Rowdy Roddy Piper?

If so, you might be interested in knowing that Portland Wrestling is back!  Granted it's not quite as cool as it used to be (either the wrestling isn't as good now, or my taste has refined a bit in the last 20 years), but it can still be a really fun time.  And hey, it looks like The Grappler and Moondog Morretti are still around.  So it can't be that bad.

If you are interested, here is the info you need:
Where: Kliever National Guard Base, 10000 NE 33rd  Portland, OR
When: Saturday, January 31st @ 4:30pm
How Much: $5  (only $5 for good wholesome family entertainment?!)

I'll see you there!

I've been playing around a lot with FreeTextBox.  It's a really nice control that was created by John Dyer.  If you use .Text as your weblog of choice, then you've seen FreeTextBox already.  When you are adding a new post or article, that's what you are using.  I'm writing a simple weblogging tool for my friend, and FreeTextBox came in very handy.  If you are in need of a web control that will give your user a Word, or FrontPage WYSIWYG experience, then this may be the tool for you.
NOTE:  When working with FreeTextBox, pay close attention to where you put your image files.  I've found that the ImageGalleryPath property doesn't quite work as I would have expected.

Governing.com has created a report talking about how all of the 50 states in the U.S. are taxed.  They also gave each state an overall grade.  Very interesting read.  Especially if taxes are right up in your face all the time like they seem to be here in Oregon.

Dear God, “It” has spread even further than anybody could have imagined.  (via scoble).

Here's the evidence.

Do you use and RSS aggregator too keep tabs on your favorite web loggers? Want to share your list with the world? Want to see what other people are reading?

Sign up here: http://feeds.scripting.com

Wow, glad I got out of Indiana and all that cold weather. 

yeah.

right.

This Christmas I'm all about the classics.

and by classics, I mean Elf Bowling.

It's looking more and more like I may be working on a pretty big VB.Net project here in the near future.

Besides brushing up on some basic VB knowledge from a previous life and getting used to this menu, it's also clear that I will need a pretty hefty supply of eggnog to get me through these times.  A quick search produced this recipe.  But then there is always the low carb thing that I have been doing lately.  Another search led me to some low carb eggnog.  What will they think of next?  Excuse me, while I "get my nog on".

Ok.  Let's try this again.  I'm gonna push the save button, and we'll see if this post is saved, or posted.

a test post from my newsgator client.
I didn't even know this existed until I read about it on Bliz's blog

Doc Searls gives some pointers about presentations.  via scoble.

So, I have been tinkering away with datagrids for a little while now.  For the last few years most all of my projects have had at least one datagrid, usually quite a few.  Throughout all those projects we made use of the base datagrid functionality.  Show data.  Put an add button on there to add a blank record in a new row.  Put an edit button on there to set the EditItemIndex and allow the user to modify data.  Put an update button to actually trigger the update (or add) to happen.  And toss on a delete button for deleting. 

Recently though, we moved on from this simple “update one row at a time” approach, and started using the grid to help us update multiple records at a time.  It works great!  At one time, though, I was asking myself, “How in the hell do I set more than one row into edit mode at the same time?”  That's the kind of thinking that can have your head spinning and make you spend countless hours searching down the wrong path, for an answer that is never to be found. 

How do you do it, you ask?  Well I was going to write a lengthy post about the subject but after doing some more in depth research I've found quite a few people have already written about this very thing (how didn't I find these earlier).  While most all people have the same basic idea, and some even have a small working example, I'm just going to point you to the guys who can tell it to you like it is.  The Visual Studio Team.  Find the answers to the Top Ten Questions about the DataGrid Web Server Control.

I do, however, need to give Scott Hanselman a plug for Bringing Data Along For The Ride.  He has some good insights into the grid and I made use of decorating some of my objects with attributes where I stored s

Lots going on the past few weeks.  Soon I'll drop a post on here about some grid work that has been done.  For now though, it's a race to get everything done before I take a little time off for Christmas and New Years.

If you're feeling really bored though, you can always go read George Bush's blog.

check out this 360 degree view from the top of Mt. Everest.

*Note, requires QuickTime

I don't know what got me looking through some old links I had tonight, but I'm pretty glad I did.  I came across a link to some Star Wars fan movies.  One in particular that is really good.  If you are in to such things, you might want to check out Art Of The Saber.  It is easily one of the best fan films that I have ever seen. 

And remember, nothing says Thanksgiving like a good lightsaber duel!

Finally, a standard we can all get behind.
yeah......behind.

Old news really.  But good news if you are like me and didn't have a very good understanding of  C# Generics.  Juval Lowy wrote a really good article over on MSDN to get you up to speed.

If you want even more examples and if you can understand VB, Carl Franklin has been doing some work with generics as well.

Since my birthday is coming up, I thought I would make it easy on everyone.  Just get me a Bombardier.  Also note that after holding discussions with colleagues, it was determined that the proper way to ride this vehicle would be while wearing a cape and WWII flying ace type helmet and goggles.  I'll need those as well.  My current cape just wouldn't work.  Also, we came to the conclusion that striking the heisman pose while riding would be optional.

found this church sign generator on Scoble's site.
nice.

Happy Belated Birthday Marines!!!

This year's ALMAR.