I should have posted this last week, but I had saved it as a draft so please understand that I am not actually writing about BlogEngine.Net in Sweden.

The latest version of BlogEngine.Net was published recently.  There are a lot of improvements behind the scenes, and the overall speed should be greatly increased. There is new support for semantic web formats such as FOAF, SIOC and APML, and a new extensions engine. There are some bugs though, which will presumably be resolved in the next few days. The extensions engine also breaks the proto gallery I use, so I’ll need to do something about that.  Overall the benefits are many though, which is nice.

I have had some difficulty getting it all configured properly.  Some of that difficulty resulted from my hosting environment and some from the software itself.  However, the only real error was resolved for me within a few hours of reporting it to Mads Kristensen. So with one exception, everything is working perfectly well now.  It should be even faster than before, so for those of you in Ireland / England you’ll see a much faster page-load time.

Okay, so everything here is potentially error-prone at the moment.  If you click on a link to open an entry you’ll get an error, and it’ll take you to a page saying that the page wasn’t found.  Thanks, I know about it and I’m working on it.  There was an update to BlogEngine.Net which doesn’t seem to work on IIS7.  I’m trying to get some help on it now. Of course, it doesn’t help that we’ve got an all-day party tomorrow and are going away on holidays to Sweden on Monday.  ::sigh:: Such is life.  Normal service will resume on Sunday at the latest.

Somehow I never realised that my host has servers in Europe. Maybe its a new feature, but they never told us.  Bah, blaming them isn’t really the right thing to do – they have servers in Europe (London I believe), and I’ve just signed up for one. The transfer is already done and took about an hour to complete. So now I have IIS7 running in London, and its fucking fast!  The speeds are awesome : 3815kbps (EU) versus 1915kbsp (US) download speeds and 1338kbps (EU) versus 1221kbps (US). That’s about twice the speed to get data from the server than it was before.  Nice!

Recently I discovered a fabulous project called ybox2.  It is a very small set-top box that you have to self assemble.  By very small, I mean that it fits inside an “Altoids” box, which would be slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes to those over this side of the Atlantic. It comes with a TV output, an Ethernet connection and a lot of interesting programming capability.  Most interesting to me is the Twitter app that receives updates from your feed.  There are some other good applications available too which might make it worth the investment in time.

The original YBoxes were made for Yahoo’s Open Hack Day and subsequently sold off for about $130. One of the guys at the event was a designed called Robert Quattlebaum, who subsequently hacked together some updates and released them to the public.  His updates weigh in at less than half the price of the original, and are supposedly more flexible.  The only drawback that I can see is the reliance on television to handle the display.  Now, there is another option which seems to be to buy an old portable DVD player and use it for display purposes.  That’d likely double the price though, which isn’t really the goal of this project. 

It comes with a built-in web server, which does give it some interesting possibilities.  It has 32k RAM which doesn’t allow that much storage, but the CPU is very powerful and does have enormous potential. Oh, it fits inside an Altoids tin, did I mention that? 

An interesting thing happened over the last twenty four hours.  I had saved this post as a draft and went away to do other things.  The concept really excited me however, and I wanted to do something with a small device that would display interesting information to me.  It had to be separate from any of the PCs I have here, and I had to be able to display a Twitter feed on it.  That was my main motivation really.  I wanted to be able to keep up to date with the news without having to start my PC or switch to a different application. Then it hit me. I have something that does this already. Not only that, but it has an operating system that I can write applications on. It is of course my Pocket PC, my trusty iPaq that I have had sitting here for ever.

I recently updated it from Windows Mobile 5 to version 6, which has resulted in a substantial speed increase.  This version also allows remote display of Windows Sidebar applications, which has a lot of potential for.. well play really.  I would post screen shots and a mini review of it, but it unfortunately doesn’t work with the Toshiba Bluetooth drivers on my laptop.  I presume there will be a fix however which will deal with that issue soon enough.

I'm typing this on the balcony, on a beautiful summer evening without a cloud in the sky.  There are some kids playing football on the grass below, and its all really idyllic.  So what's new then?  We just bought some furniture for the balcony; a very low table and some large cushions to sit on.  The table is rich dark solid oak, with heavy legs but not so heavy that it can't be moved around easily.  The cushions are low enough that you could sit on them and under the table at the same time. We also bought a bunch of coloured glass candle holders to provide illumination during the evenings.  Its all pretty cool really. 

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but the quality of housing here in München is so far in advance of London that it scares me.  We are paying overall substantially less here than we paid when living in London.  Not only that, but the quality of just about everything is better than it is in London.  Our apartment is in a managed building, so one of the tenants (called a Hausmeister) has a full time job to take care of things here.  He cleans all of the public areas (corridors, lift, cellars, washing-machine room etc), makes sure the rubbish gets taken out and collected, organises the recycling, keeps the heating running (not necessary at the moment!) etc etc.  Its all so very clean.  Even the underground parking has a car-wash in it. 

My one complaint, if you could call it that, is that the walls are too solid.  Wireless signals have to be boosted for every room or they just don't work.  Infuriatingly the signals travel better through the ceilings than they do through the walls.  I could therefore connect to several of my neighbour's WLANs with better reception than I would get on mine if it wasn't boosted by a second router.  In time, I'll change the whole thing over to 802.11n, but I really want to wait for the standard to be ratified first. The problem is that they don't expect the standard to be fully ratified until 2009 (yes FIVE years in the making).

So anyway, have to sand down the new table now, as I oiled it this morning...

There are three PCs at my desk at the moment. The first is a self-built desktop - Intel Core2 Duo E6600, NVidia 8800GTS, 2GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 (5-5-5-15), Coolermaster iGreen PSU @ 580W all on a GigaByte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard. There are currently two disks in it, one with 500GB and one with 400GB.  It runs the Vista Ultimate edition I received for beta testing that operating system.  It has a 20" Sharp flat panel display, 5.1 surround sound, a Saitek X36F HOTAS joystick and throttle, and as you can imagine its pretty sweet when playing games.

The second machine is a server that sits under the desk.  It has an eight drive hardware RAID 5 array in it, comprised of seven 300GB drives (all WD RAID Edition drives drives of the same model number) and one hot spare which would be used automatically if one of the drives in the array fails. It is a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with HT and 2GB RAM.  It currently runs Windows Server 2008.

The third is of course my laptop.  Its a Sony Vaio VGN-CR11Z/R detailed elsewhere, but suffice to say I do most of my work on it.  My desk is laid out so that the laptop is to the left of the keyboard, mouse and screen that controls the other two machines, which are linked with a KVM switch.  I prefer it that way as it means I have the best view of both machines at any one time. More specifically, I don't see as well on my right periphery as I do on my left, so while I'm looking at the monitor on which the desktop machine is running I am usually pretty much aware of what is happening on the laptop at the same time.  This is useful as I use a lot of smaller apps on my laptop, which update frequently. Case in point would be my Instant Message program; Twitter, and my social networking tools like Witty and twhirl.

I tell you all of the above merely to set the scene : My office / spare room has a fair bit of hardware in it, and I'm pretty sure about how I like it laid out. Last week I ordered a stand for my laptop.  The ergonomics of the desk weren't (and still aren't) perfect, and I was constantly switching to different levels to get to different systems.  The position of the laptop left a lot to be desired from the perspective of my wrists, as I had to raise them up slightly higher than the desktop keyboard.  So, I bought a Coolermaster Notepal S. It is a combination adjustable stand and cooler for laptops. It has actually made a lot of difference to how comfortable I am while working here.  I have support now for my wrists while working on the laptop, and the range of movement allowed me is enough to fully cover the whole keyboard.  It also raises the laptop screen up to my eye level which is better for my posture and more comfortable.  I now have both monitors on the same level. 

Unfortunately I still have to do something with the keyboard for the desktop and server.  It is under the  desk on a slide-out tray, which seems like a great idea until you realise that the mouse doesn't fit alongside it. If it did then I could very easily adjust everything to be optimally positioned.  While writing this post I have been experimenting with slightly different layouts for the desk, but I still can't find one that really works.  The desk itself is fully adjustable, so I can raise or lower it substantially. I think the solution is going to be to raise it slightly so that I fit  well under the keyboard tray, and then to lower the Laptop slightly to compensate. If all of this sounds a little hard to imagine, this photo shows how it is currently setup.  I'm probably making it sound more complex and indeed uncomfortable than it actually is, but often minor changes require the longest descriptions.  So, on with the adjusting...

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about the Notepal.  If you're looking for a good laptop stand that is adjustable and acts as a cooler then this could be the device for you.  It is adjustable to six different heights and seems to be pretty sturdy.  It comes in black or silver and feels very sturdy.  As passive coolers go it works just fine - there are slats at the back through which air can flow so the outside of your laptop should probably have a lower temperature then when it stands on a flat surface.  So far I'm pretty happy with it.

Interesting new product going into limited beta from Microsoft.  Its called Live Mesh, and it is apparently going to form the basis of their new internet-based file system.

Playing with Live Mesh: First Experiences | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

One very good reason why I used to use my own blog was that I could be fairly confident in the security of my code.  I wrote it, and I knew that I had to keep the code as safe as possible from the obvious known hacks.  It also afforded me a chance to learn a bit more about how sites are hacked and what you can do to prevent it.  So it came as a surprise to me today to learn that there was a patch released yesterday to plug a very basic vulnerability in BlogEngine.Net.  I guess we can't all be perfect.  In fairness to the guys, the patch was released the day after it was reported, but its still worrying.

I guess I have to let go of my innate distrust of other people's software and trust that they know what they're doing.  Its either that or I have to start getting serious about looking at the source code I put on my server right from the start. The problem with that is that there is actually quite a lot of code to look at, and the codebase is getting bigger.  I've been looking at the new releases as they come out, and playing with them on my dev server.  However, I have been waiting for a major update before upgrading the code on my live server.  I guess this counted as that!  Anyway, passwords are now changed everywhere... just in case ;-)  Back to our regular scheduled program.

I'm trashed tired.  We were out all day in Bad Aibling with Anna's grandparents and have only just gotten back.  So last night I was looking at the categories for this site. Previously they had been the typical categories that you would find on a blog like this, but I've started to change them.  Now, I'm using less descriptive and more generalised categories, and using tags to sub-divide them.  The categories I have decided on are as follows :

• Being.  This will cover me, Anna, us, friends, the general state of existence.
• Building.  Web sites (typically this one up to now), Hardware, sometimes Software when that's not covered under Programming.
• Generalising.  It isn't really, but the word fits.  It'll contain those posts that aren't specifically something else.
• Happening.  Current affairs, gossip, things going on at the moment in our lives.
• Learning.  Never stops, but its nice sometimes to write it down.
• Listening.  Music, people,
• Playing.  Computer games, card games, drinking games, whatever!
• Programming.  Most posts with coding stuff will be categorised here.
• Reading.  Books, web sites... its not hard to figure out.
• Technologising. Had to invent another word here for this - all things new and technology related.
• Travelling.  Planning, getting there, being there, getting back, and airports.
• Using. This will mostly be a computer thing.  I use Windows, Visual Studio etc...
• Watching.  TV, movies, people.
• Working.  The thing I do to make money.

I'll use tags to give the categories more granularity.  So, under Being, there'll be tags called "Anna" and "me" which will handle those respective ideas.  The page that shows the previous posts isn't quite up to serving the tags in the order I want, but I'll take a look at it in the near future. Changes are you're going to read it in reverse chronological order anyway.  For now, this should do.  As this blog isn't mono-topical its a little hard to figure out the best way to handle multiple topics, but it should all fall into place soon.

This is a test of the XFN Markup. XFN is a MicroFormat for signifying relationships on the web. As it stands at the time of publishing, you won't see any difference with these links.  Visually they will look like any other link on the page. However, when I upload the new style sheets you will see small icons to the right of each of the links below.  Those icons will illustrate the relationships between me and the (fictional) people below. MicroFormats are very small additions to standard HTML that are used to signify things like relationships (and other concepts) to people who can read them.  Typically they require something to indicate their presence (like the images you can't see below), but that doesn't require any additional software.  I've got some cool graphics to be uploaded that will show these relationships really well.

This is a friend I have not met.
This is a friend I have met.
This is a colleague I have not met.
This is a colleague I have met.
This is a sweetheart or muse I haven't met.
This is a sweetheart or muse I have met.
This is me.