As you can see from the images below I have been working on this site again. These pictures were taken on my phone and uploaded directly to Ping.FM, which in turn posted them to Flickr. I had thought that I could make Flickr post them automatically to this site, but apparently I was wrong. So, I’m going to find another way of doing it. Maybe Ping.FM has a hook which will allow me to post directly here or something. Hmm… have to check that out.

So, where to start then. This may be the longest I’ve ever gone without posting before, so you’ll forgive me if it’s all a little random. The last couple of months have been pretty hectic, and with a little luck that trend will continue. More about that as it unfolds.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned it on here before, but I bought a mac last year. A what? Yes, a mac – you know, the lovely looking computers with that terrible operating system and the whole “locked down so tight you need special screwdrivers to open them”.  Anyway, I bought the basic model MacBook Air, and I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised at the machine. For one thing, it is completely silent. There is a fan inside it somewhere, but in six months I’ve only heard it turn on once.  It is also blindingly fast. It has an SSD (albeit a small and slow model) inside which is a huge improvement over the usual mechanical disk.  However, it only has a couple of gigs of ram, and the SSD is very small at 64Gb.  Still, it does what it says on the tin, and I’ve found myself using it for class notes more and more often.

I’ve also installed an SDD in my desktop machine. This one is a bit bigger at 120GB, and blindingly fast (last year’s fastest disk on the market). It is an OCZ Vertex2, and if you can find one on the market they’re very cheap at the moment. OCZ have released a newer Vertex 3 this year and so the Vertex 2 has dropped significantly in price.

I’ve moved this domain from a hosting company in the UK to my own server here. I had previously hostedhttp://dnawebdev.net here and it has been running for about a year now without a problem, so I decided to move this domain too. There was a little bit of messing around looking for a good email hosting plan, but I ultimately settled on fasthosts, whom I use for my other domain. So, this box is now hosting 4 domains, including both of the sites mentioned, and a couple I use for other things. One of them is dwu.me, on which I have an URL shortening app installed. So, if you see URLs from me which are something likehttp://dwu.me/d then you’ll know what it is.

Okay so I'm back, and I've got coffee. I’ve no real excuse for not posting except for being really busy.  That and the inevitable blog-apathy that comes in early every year.  If you could graph the frequency with which I posted I’m sure you’d come up with the winter being the least populous.  Right, so after typing that last sentence, I did just that.  I was wrong.  My least frequent posting is done during the summer. Here is the average number of posts I’ve made every month for the last nine and a bit years.

Naturally enough, I also drew a pretty graph about it. So what can we tell from all this?  Well, I’m not the most prodigious of posters, that’s for sure.  That’d be about it really.  I do find it strange that the most frequent time of year for posting is actually in the Autumn, but that’s just me.  Anyway, the reason I was able to get all this data into Excel really easily is that I’ve been working a little on a new design for here.  I know I’ve been talking about this for months, I do have a good excuse for not rolling it out sooner.  I’ve just been really busy with other things, and not in a position to do significant typing with my finger. So, even though I’m still in this cast, here’s a rundown on everything that’s going on at the moment. 

I finished watching Buffy last night.  The ending was good but lacked something I think.  Then again, I was used to having each of the series end with a cliff-hanger, and this one nicely tied up all the loose ends.  It left something for the future, but I guess that never panned out.  Overall it was a brilliant series.  There were high points, such as “Once More With Feeling”, “The Body” and of course “Hush”, and… well not much in the way of low points.  “Once More With Feeling”, was an episode that was filmed as a musical and was so good that I can’t get the music out of my head. Its very Sondheimey, and brilliantly written.  I also have the entire six series of Angel to watch, though I’m a bit tired now, so maybe that can wait for a few weeks. Awesome series though, I have no idea why I didn’t watch it years ago.  If you don’t already know, the guy who created the show is called Joss Whedon. He the one who created both Buffy and Angel, and also Firefly with its spin-off movie Serenity. He also created the excellent series Dollhouse, which is airing right now.  I had been a fan of his long before I knew who he was.

German classes are of course ongoing, though a little slowly at the moment.  There were so few applicants for my course (ie: two) that they decided to change the times around to once a week instead of two.  On top of that, our teacher has been out for the last week, so apart from some homework (which I got mostly wrong!) there’s fuck all happening there.  I thought I had a complete handle on the meaning of the words in the homework – obwohl, falls, wenn, dass, weil, um, damit etc.  English translations would be although, if, that…, at…, with etc, and it turns out I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did.  I actually though I had nailed the meanings of these words about a year ago and had no problem with them. Until now.  Oh well, there’s a major re-learning session coming up I think.

I’m going to be potentially doing some interesting work for James soon, if a couple of quotes that we have sent out are accepted.  More on that as it happens, but there’s a chance to get better at some things I’ve been familiar with but never used extensively in the past.  Oh, and in the next post I’ll tell you about my new mobile.  I’ll start that in a while, just have to go do some things first.

The business cards I spoke about in a previous post have arrived.  Actually they arrived a couple of weeks ago, just after I had posted about the design we were going to use for them.  However, I never had the time to sit down and write about them in detail.  The design is as you can see on the left.  I would recommend clicking on the link and taking a look at them in more detail.  James did a magnificent job on the design, which is very effective at the same time as being uncluttered and easy on the eye. I can’t recommend James’s company enough if you’re looking for some design or web work.

The cards were printed by OvernightPrints.de who also have a presence in a bunch of European countries and the US.  Their rates are very reasonable and the quality is better than I had expected for the cost.  I think I mentioned it before, but I’m going to re-work the design of this site soon to include the new logo.  In addition to that, I’ll be paring back the CSS to make it lighter.  The style sheet alone weighs in at 30Kb for this site, and it isn’t totally compatible with all browsers.  It works, but some sites show it slightly mangled at the top.  So, its time to pare it back and throw out a load of that shit that has been hanging around for a long time.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had won some business cards from Janko Jovanovic and that I was having James design them.  Well, it didn’t work out as I was expecting (through no fault of Janko I should add) and they wanted to charge me $39.50 to send them to Germany.  For that price I could have had twice the quantity printed here in Germany, and shipped overnight, individually wrapped and carried by a thousand camels.  It pissed me off a bit that we (James) had gone to all that work for naught, so I went and ordered the cards from Overnight Prints anyway.  I just read an email from them that they had been printed already and are on the way, and UPS tells me that they are in Kirchheim which isn’t that far from here.  In fact, they’ll get here on Monday at around 10am.  Living in Germany is wonderful from that perspective… I KNOW when UPS are going to get here!)

So, here’s what they look like. On the left you can see the front of the card.  Per James’s recommendation, we went minimalist on the front.  Only the salient information is visible, and the design is simple and easy to read.  The colour swapping of my surname is clever, and the overall effect is professional and very cool.  The front is going to be printed without a gloss coating.  The text at the bottom that you can’t properly read says “High-end web and application development”, which is of course exactly what I do.

The back however is a different kettle of fish.  James originally thought that some of Leonardo daVinci’s drawings would be good here, but then came up with some very basic and really effective BASIC code :
10 CLS
20 PRINT “DAVEWHITE.NET”
30 GOTO 10
RUN_

I liked that quite a bit, but it wasn’t modern enough, so I changed it into a C# routine that would print the website and email address one hundred times. You can see that on the right, and its going to look lovely on the card.  The back is bring glossed, and as it is a vibrant red colour graduation it should look fantastic.  Kudos and massive thanks to James for his great designs!

Along with everything else, James went and built multi-colour variations for me as well as some mini icons.  There are print (CMYK) and screen (RGB) versions of each so I’m going to freshen the look of this site soon.  This design is quite heavy and dark, so I’m going to strip out some of the dross.  For example, the titles of the posts are heading level three (<h3>), but should really be heading level 2 (<h2>).  I also want to make this design more accessible and then release it as a theme for BlogEngine.Net.

I have recently arranged to acquire an awesome tote (shopping) bag from DiscountASP.Net.  They’re my hosting company for this site.  The PDC is happening in Los Angeles at the moment, and DiscountASP.Net have some representatives there.  Takeshi Eto who is their VP of Marketing and Business Development mentioned that their staff would be going around the conference with tote bags, and I’m ashamed to say that I blagged one from him.  Very kindly he agreed to send one, which is nice for me.  Since moving here I’ve actually started to use these bags a lot.  Unlike London or Dublin you get charged here for bags in a shop.  Therefore I have an extensive collection of fabric shopping bags I’ve had to buy, as a result of having gone to the shop too many times without remembering to bring a bag with me.  Recently I’ve found a favourite bag – one that is large enough for all my typical shopping, and heavy enough to handle the loads I put in it.  I’ll post some pictures as soon as I get the actual bag.  Props to Takeshi Eto for organising this!

Updated: I forgot to add that DiscountASP.Net have a blog here.

DiscountASP.NET Blog: Any Customers Going to the PDC 2008?

Carrying on from last night, I was going to tell you about Wave 3 of Windows Live Writer.  Microsoft has recently released a whole slew of their Live apps.  Writer and Photo Gallery are both programs that I use on a regular basis, and I’ll give you a quick overview of Writer here.  Writer is a cut-down word processing package that is used only to create and edit blog posts.  It does this with a range of different user interface styles, and it works with your blog’s theme to handle styles.

There are three different modes of editing and writing posts – one each with and without your blog’s theme, and one raw mode.  Editing and composing with your theme applied is as close as you can get to WYSIWYG composition as I have ever seen.  The fonts are rendered as you would see them on your web page, and the HTML elements are mostly perfect.  I say mostly only because some of the options aren’t completely compatible with my theme.  For example if you right align a paragraph then you end up with a perfectly normal html <p align=”right”> tag at the start of the paragraph.  However, that doesn’t work properly with XHTML where all of the decorative layout is done using CSS.  I could potentially change the mark-up to transitional XHTML 1.0, but that seems a little excessive just to me.  In all fairness I don’t ever actually align my paragraphs to the right anyway, so it really makes no difference. 

Where there is a slight issue that does make a difference though is in how images are posted.  You can insert pictures into your blog posts and they work perfectly.  Writer however doesn’t allow easy justification of those images.  For example if I want to align an image to the right then it automatically adds align=”right” to the image tag and that isn’t XHTML 1.1 compatible.  So I have to manually edit the mark-up before posting to use my method of getting an image to align on the right – I add class=”photoright” to the tag and strip out the alignment before posting.  Its clumsy but it works.  Writer also uploads a couple of different versions of the images to your blog.  So, if you click on the image to the right of this paragraph, you will see a larger version of the same image.  That one will be the original sized screen capture that I took, while you only see a small thumbnail on this page.  It saves bandwidth and makes it easier for the author as you don’t need to resize images manually before posting them to your blog. That one feature was enough to get me to switch in the first place, and it has only gotten better over the subsequent versions.

One of the neater functions of Writer is the Preview Mode.  This mode takes your post and puts it into the context of the rest of your blog as you would see it if you had browsed to it.  I’d do a screenshot but there’s no point really.  If you’re reading this post through a web browser as opposed to an RSS reader then you’d see exactly what I see when looking at this post in Preview Mode. There’s a bunch of other fun things in there too, such as an on-screen word-counter for those who get paid by the word, and the ability to save drafts either locally or straight to a blog (if that’s supported).  Naturally enough you can also embed a variety of objects in a blog post. Writer makes it easy to embed images, maps, Technorati tags and videos of many different formats.  It is also extensible with plug ins that can be downloaded or written from scratch should you have the desire.

All in all I have to say that its well worth taking a look at.  The newest version, in addition to being slightly faster and looking better in Windows, is also much more robust. Despite my previous reports about having technical problems getting it setup correctly with BlogEngine.Net, once I had it up and running the issues evaporated.  I have also been in contact with someone from Microsoft who has assured me that they have the problem fixed and will post a hot fix soon.

I interviewed recently for a really interesting job.  The position is ostensibly called “Web Architect” which doesn’t tell you much until you realise that some of it is about putting web solutions together for a company and specifying the technologies used.  There’s an element of coding too, some administration, some presentation and some marketing.  All in all it struck me as perfect, and I want it.  There might be another interview soon, so we shall see how it pans out.

During the 30 or so minutes I took me to write the previous paragraph I encountered some issues.  Firstly, the latest version of Windows Live Writer comes with an interesting bug in it.  It is a late beta, so that’s pretty much expected.  However, this is one that I have never seen before with this product, and it only happens under a specific set of circumstances.  Your blog must be using the MetaWeblog API as an interface, and you must not have upgraded this version from a previous build.  When you try and detect the blog, it will take you through the entire process before throwing an exception.  I haven’t gone to the trouble of running a trace on the XML conversation, and to be honest I think this error happens in the code after the conversation is complete.  I was talking to Joe Cheng who works on the Live Writer team at Microsoft, and he said they had found the bug and would release a patch soon.  Can’t give you an exact timeframe on that though.  So, if you are thinking of installing the latest build of Live Writer (the “Wave3” betas) and use BlogEngine.Net then make sure that you upgrade rather than fresh installing. 

The second issue was that the ping services tab in BlogEngine.Net was all of a sudden empty of entries.  I don’t know why, but they had all been erased.  While trying to update them, I discovered a problem with the identity field for the table that holds the ping servers – it was setup incorrectly.  I think something happened when I copied the data from my dev to the live server a few weeks back, but because I was only posting from Live Writer I hadn’t noticed it.  At some point I have to draw up a smoke test for BlogEngine.Net that goes through testing for ALL of the functions before rolling out live.  Anyway, in addition to the table issue, I had to go and get a new list of ping servers as I noticed that a few have gone inactive.  One thing that I noticed is that Microsoft still don’t have one for their live search, though they do allow submission of a site map.  However, the transaction causes a nicely handled exception which dumps out the results to a log file.  Anyway, here is the new list of ping servers I have gathered:

http://api.moreover.com/rpc2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rpc2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/rpc2
http://rpc.pingthesemanticweb.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/rpc2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

I was just thinking about the steps required to get this blog from one format to another over the years.  I started blogging in March of 1999, storing my data in the following ways:

• HTML pages, sequentially built and edited by hand.  IIRC these were done in something very basic like Notepad or UltraEdit.  There was no interface for adding / editing posts at that point.
• Access databases took over very quickly.  I was pumping the data into the database by hand first, and then with forms a little later.  Access was implemented here in late March, and took a couple of days to get sorted out. There were two main pages – one to display the first ten or twenty posts, and one to display the “Archive”.
• SQL Server 2000 was implemented on my web host in December 2000 and I immediately jumped at the opportunity to use it.  I had been programming with it in work for a few years at that point, but it was always a very expensive option for a host to supply. It was a pretty basic database server, but it managed pretty well under load.
• SQL Server 2005 was rolled out in February of 2006, around the time that I was starting to think about moving to a new hosting company.  I used this at work a lot more than on DaveWhite.Net.
• SQL Server 2008 has just been released, and is available as an option to me.  I’m not going to take it straight away though, as I didn’t take part in the beta test and don’t really know that much about it yet.

The data been been available on the web with probably not more than a week downtime since March ‘99.  That really isn’t too shabby for something that didn’t start with a design plan… it was more of an organic growth from page to a fully fledged database driven back end.  It is only this year that I have started letting “someone else” be responsible for how I handle the data.  Before this, I had complete control over the database structure.  Now, of course, I am using an open source blogging system, even though I own the data, I didn’t specify how it was setup.  It was a scary thing to do I can tell you… and I think I still have the original blog tables in my database, just in case!

Quite some time has passed since I started to change my blog to the new comment system.  It mostly came about when I switched to using BlogEngine.Net and and started to tag each entry in addition to using the categories.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to get the old categories integrated with the new engine. The were stored in a separate table from the blog content and linked through their indices.  So I figured “what the hell, I can go through it and do it by hand eh?”.  Stupid me. It took longer than I thought, and I have been at it on and off since April 14th.  So now on August 7th the job is finally done.  All the entries have been tagged and categorised, and all new entries will be as a matter of course. Time for dinner now.