Really interesting development from ScottGu today. Microsoft have announced a new program called WebsiteSpark, which basically provides some tools to allow fledgling web developers get off the ground.  Tools include licenses of VS2008, Expression Studio and Expression Web, and a license for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Nice tools, and they’ll only cost $100 for three years of use.  After that three years, you can opt to purchase them direct from Microsoft.

Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program - ScottGu's Blog

I guess it had to happen eventually.  I’ve just wired some of our apartment for network.  There’s now a 10GB (Cat.7) link between the router in the cupboard and the office.  Originally there was a wireless bridge, but in order to set that up in such a way that we had good coverage I would have needed to have four routers and a bridge functioning all the time.  Now I just have one router and one bridge.

The original idea was a a good one, and one that should have worked perfectly well.  I have a router in the cupboard in the hall that handles the internet connection.  Its relatively central in the apartment, and so would have been the perfect candidate for a base station for wireless.  I would then have three more wireless repeaters in the office, bedroom and living room.  Unfortunately I use (and already had two) Netgear routers. It turns out that when bridging with them that a) the base station can’t be connected to from a PC, and b) the base station wasn’t actually able to handle three dependant routers without seriously degrading the network throughput. 

So there were two ways to proceed.  I could fuck around with more expensive routers replacing the ones I had, or I could lay a cable to the office.  We have parquet flooring here, which made it both simple and more difficult to work through.  There is space under the floor for some cabling, but I would have had to lift a lot of floor to do that.  The alternative was to go around the walls, using the small gap created between the wall, parquet and skirting boards to store the cables.  However, in order to do that I would have to rip out the door sealant and handle some tricky corner work close to the office.  I managed it though, and it has worked out pretty well.  I’m going to need to add a then second layer of sealant to the one I’ve already put there, and get some parquet pins to re-secure some of the skirting boards, but other than that its finished.I now have gigabit cabled Ethernet in the office and 802.11n wireless throughout the apartment!

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.

Okay, so the change I made on Friday was completed easily enough, and very quickly.  This newer version was having problems with the older database on my dev server, so I decided to do a complete backup and then erase everything before upgrading. I thought it would actually take several hours, bit it was all done in about 40 minutes I think.

There were two causes of concern for me.  The first was that I needed to erase the tables in the database and start again.  There is an upgrade path, but it wasn’t working properly for me.  User Profiles and Extensions weren’t being handled properly and the relevant pages were causing errors.  The last time I handled this large a series of SQL transactions it took several hours as the database was in California.  This time however, the server is in London, so was much faster for me.  I probably spent no more than 15 minutes getting the SQL server stuff done.  Steps were as follows :  I had to backup the entire database and copy it to my development SQL Server here.  Then I had to drop the tables and recreate them using the “New Installation” script that comes with BlogEngine.Net.

While the above was going on, I had erased all the files from the server and started to upload the files from the new installation.  I had to be careful not to erase the photo gallery, so I moved that elsewhere while the upgrade was going on.  I had to edit only two files – the web.config and the sitemap.  Web.Config needed only two small changes – one to handle the database settings, and one to ensire strict XHTML conformance (which is slightly broken even now, will get that fixed soon). By the time the files were uploaded, I had taken the backed up SQL data and installed it as a new database on my development server.  That allowed me an easier migration path for the old data, as I could use the SQL Server Import Wizard to handle it all for me.  Once I had the tables done, I changed the settings to match what I had used before, and then tested everything. 

I have to say, this version of BlogEngine.Net is far better than the previous release.  Many of the bugs that were plaguing my installation have been fixed, and there is a noticeable speed increase too.  From my perspective (considering I use Windows Live Writer to write and edit blog posts), there only remains one bug, and that’s fairly minor.  So, hopefully this should all work better and easier for you.  Oh, if anyone is using the RSS feed to read my blog, could they let me know?  I’m going to be playing with that a little soon and I need to know how many of you ready it on a regular basis.  Feedburner says there were sixteen active subscribers… is that really the case? Let me know!

I’m upgrading the engine and database behind DaveWhite.Net in the next several hours.  The database change is going to take longer than the code, so come back tomorrow and it’ll be done.  It had better be finished by then, because I won’t be here from 10am…

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...