Once again this post will begin with something like “it seems that I haven’t posted in ages”.  So, here goes.  It seems like I haven’t posted in ages.  There actually is an excuse this time, which is nice.  I have a bunch of updates to post here which I’ll either do in this post or over a couple of posts.  Lets see how it pans out…

I mentioned that I had been busy.  This freelancing thing is starting to get serious, and I find myself with far less time than I used to have.  That’s the good part.  The not-so-good part is that the difference between what I earned in my old job and what I’m earning now is huge, and not in a beneficial way.  However, I’m getting more regular work and some customers are coming back for repeat business so its all going in the right direction.  Its just slow. The rate of increase in business is (not unexpectedly) very slow, and I wish I had concentrated on it more about three years ago.  Just in case you didn’t know, when I freelance I do so under the moniker DnAWebDev.  Eventually I may turn that into a company name, but for now that site is just my freelance portfolio. 

So in a week we’re going on holidays.  We’re doing a three week driving tour around the eastern part of Germany, and western part of the Czech Republic.  Its a road trip of about sixteen hundred kilometres which is going to take us three weeks.  We’re staying in some places longer than one night, which is why it takes so long.  While on the trip we’re going to meet some of Anna’s relations in eastern Germany.  Map of the route is below, courtesy of Google.  If we change it dramatically on the way then I may update it from somewhere.

Summer 2010 Road Trip (click for larger version)

Right, so then… Happy New Year.  Glad we got that out of the way, no need to belabour the point.  I haven’t been blogging at all lately, though in fairness the last couple of months have actually been busy for me.  I have been working.  Sort of.

We have been just over two and a quarter years living in Germany and in all that time I haven’t earned much money, nor do I have a full time job.  I’ve done some freelancing stuff for a couple of companies back in London, but never enough to ensure our monthly expenditure was lower than our income (actually, there was one month, but its only one out of twenty seven or twenty eight).  Over the last couple of months I’ve picked up some more solid work from some online freelancing sites, and its possible that its all turning around a bit right now.  I have two things on the cooker, that might prove to be worth pursuing right now.  One of the two is potentially fun, and involves building portals (and plugins) for OastOne.  We have a nice test version up and running right, which I won’t link to because its ephemeral.  The second is setting up a company with some guys I know online (one of whom is a customer from one of those freelancing sites I mentioned earlier, but there’ll be more about this in a later post).  Actually, I have three things, but the third is just to continue trying to build up freelance customers and jobs as best I can.  I’ve also built out a small portfolio site with which I hope to establish a presence on teh interwebs.  So, with all of this you can see why I haven’t been blogging as much at all over the last couple of months.

We were in Ireland for Christmas, and took a three day trip to The North at the start of the trip.  I have to prefix this by saying that I had never before been further north than Newry (and that was with my dad¹ on a technical call at some point).  We drove to Belfast and stayed there in an incredible hotel that was cheapish, new and incredibly comfortable all at the same time.  (I can’t remember the name, but if anyone is looking for a place to stay in Belfast in the near future then let me know and I’ll dig it out.)  Belfast is a pretty cool city. I’m not sure what I was expecting really and I guess my perceptions were clouded by twenty years of looking at the Troubles on the news. I just had a really interesting segue through Wikipedia there.  Anyway, so my perception of Belfast was completely different from the reality.  It’s a lovely city, and one I would visit again should I have the chance.  One thing which we couldn’t do was see the Titanic museum in the Harland & Wolff shipyards, or the graving docks for her or her sister ship; the Olympic.  We did get to see the huge cranes (Sampson and Goliath) and the whole rebuilding of the docklands, which looked much the same as Canary Wharf does in London.  I also re-discovered Subway!  I had stopped eating in Subway about twenty years ago because I hated the bread they put on their rolls. Turns out that after twenty years you can be wrong about something – and I had a monster sub with just about everything on it :-) 

Anyway, the next day we headed north around the coast road for Antrim.  We stopped for lunch in a place which worried us (actually just me) when we discovered that we were two of the only four customers in the place.  Turns out the food was amazing.  Its a little off the beaten path (actually its about 5 miles off the coast road, at the end of a cul-de-sac) but totally worth visiting if you’re in the area.  Again, ping me for more details.  We eventually got to Portballintrae, after driving through the highest snow I’ve ever seen in Ireland.  There was a good metre of it up in the hills.   There we went to see Dunluce castle (awesome, and very very cold), and finally the Giant’s Causeway.  Twenty years of living less than two hundred miles from this amazing feat of nature tells me that I really am fucking stupid for dismissing such beauty without ever having actually seen it.  Its breathtaking.  The weather really helped too – it was fucking cold, and misty, and the sea was rough.  It wasn’t the kind of day that I’d suggest going to the beach on, but it was just spectacular. The picture really doesn’t do it justice (it was taking with my phone), though I think even with my SLR I couldn’t have captured the heart of that place at that time.  We walked the long way back to the car, heading further around the bay, up the cliffs and then back over the top to the car park.  The view from the cliff path was… white.  We could hear the sea breaking below, but couldn’t see it because it was all hidden by this carpet of low-lying fog. I loved it there, but you probably got that already.  Anyway, we headed back to Trim after that, stopping off in some huge (by Irish standards, tiny in comparison to Leesburg corner or Jersey Gardens for example) outlet mall for some retail therapy.

Okay, I’m going to post this now, because I have to get some homework done for tomorrow, and its getting late.  If I have time, I’ll start the rest of this post a little later.  If not, then it will be tomorrow.

¹ SceneMaker.eu is very much currently under construction. In February and March 2010 it'll be broken and down while we figure out exactly how it's going to work.

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

The process of going through this blog and re-tagging / categorising every post is a long and relatively boring one.  However, some interesting posts have come back to me.  One of them refers to a post I made on May 21st 2002 about blogging at work. Another is about being demoted the same week, and a bunch of others all grouped in the same month.  That period in my professional life was a time of great change and stress.

My entire team had been transitioned into another department and we were very fucking annoyed about it for many reasons.  We felt that we were coming from a different culture into something more stifling than we had previously experienced, and we didn't like it.  I was ostensibly the team manager, although I think there wasn't much management needed with the guys I had working with me.  We were a very hard-working bunch of guys, and all seriously good at what we did.  Consequently we liked to play hard as well as working hard.  It was our way of letting off steam.  Our work culture was very stressful, and conducive to burning people out, and we really needed an outlet valve.

The department we moved into wasn't like that.  They weren't typically under the kind of pressure we experienced in our team.  Part of the reason for this is that we were working to schedules made by our parent company in the US, and they had the luxury(?) of making their own.  So, while there was a general bad feeling on our new floor, we felt particularly abused because of the change in circumstances forced upon us.  I know I thought some pretty awful things about my manager at that point.  With hindsight, I regret those and am glad I never actually said anything to him.  It would have spoiled what eventually became a pleasant relationship with a very interesting guy.  Anyway, at the time I got seriously disillusioned about my job, and the company I was working for. I stage-managed the creation of a new position for myself in May 2003 and deserted my team.

I just wanted to say I'm sorry.  I suspect at the time you all thought I was maybe a bit fucking selfish to leave you all in the position you were, and I wholeheartedly apologise for that.  We have all moved on to better things (except you Sparky, get your arse in gear!) and have all kept in touch over the years, so I don't think any permanent damage was done. However I don't ever remember asking you all how my leaving affected you.  I hope that you don't think I wasn't thinking of you all, for it simply isn't true.  I hope you can understand why I had to leave.  I had to get out of Technology before I ended up coming in one day and going postal.  That wouldn't have done any of us any good.

One more thing... you absolutely should take the photos Dave.  The reason the Killing Fields are still around and have not been built on is that we need to remember just how fucked up mankind can get.  We need to remember so we won't allow it to ever happen again.  Take the photos, make them good ones, and never forget.

I spent eleven years of my life working at AOL.  That's just a little under a third of the time I have lived.  In all that time, we made some pretty cool things.  We made some pretty shit things too, and I helped to make a lot of them.  The mail guys from Dulles went and build a version of AOL Webmail using a technology called SilverLight.  SilverLight is a Microsoft product that is roughly equivalent to Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash.  It allows rich Internet applications that typically run in a browser.  It is cross browser and cross platform compatible, which means it should provide an equal experience on all browsers and all operating systems.  It has just hit version 2.0, and while the first was very limited in what it could do, the second seems to be awesome.  I'll be playing with that a bit in the near future I think.

This product was demonstrated at MIX08, and you can view that presentation here.  You should be aware that this is a very technical demo, with only a few minutes close to the start where they show you the new UI.