This is something very small that I hacked out for myself a couple years ago. It allows you to select an un-linked URL on a web page, such as “scottisaacs.com”, and easily navigate to it. What you do is highlight the URL that you want to visit, right-click, and select “Open Highlighted Link in New Window”.
This will modify your registry and if you don’t know what that implies, then you probably won’t want to install this.
Use this at your own risk! Here is the ZIP download.
I found an interesting site linked from here.
I found BlogMap by accident, but thought it was pretty fun. So I added it to my left navigation.
If you register your blog here, the link they give you shows a map of bloggers that are in your area. It’s using MapPoint technology (the map image says “Evaluation”), and it’s a pretty interesting use of the technology. I’ve yet to decide if there is a real benefit to this, but I thought it was cool anyway. 🙂
Well, Deeper in .NET 2005 has come and gone now. Friday night blurred into Saturday, which blurred into Sunday. It was finally Tuesday when I started feeling rested. It was an awesome day, though. The speakers were great. The crowd had good questions. The box lunch was… ummm, the speakers were great!
In my last post, I mentioned all of the speakers that were coming and a few of their topics. I really enjoyed them all, and I learned a lot too. At lunch, there was an open forum to ask pretty much any question to the panel of experts, which included four of the speakers (all except for Rocky who had to leave) and Tom Lindley (sp?). Scott Guthrie was in a rush to catch a plane, so the moderator asked for all of the questions about ASP.NET 2.0 to be asked first so he would have a chance to answer them before taking off mid-session.
Well, I had recently found out that he was now in charge of the IIS team and that a new version was in the works. After a series of questions on ASP.NET with fairly short answers from ScottGu, I asked (paraphrased), “I know you’re about to leave, but in about 1 minute, what is the coolest feature of IIS 7?” Well, I may have made him miss his plane! He seemed very excited to talk about it and listed several (5 or 6?) pretty cool features, and talked about it for probably 5 minutes!
Sorry, ScottGu, if you missed your flight! Needless to say, it excited me about the product to see his excitement.
After the event, the Executive Committee of the WI .NET Users Group, any remaining Platinum sponsors, and any remaining speakers (who didn’t have flights to catch) all went to a nice steak dinner at the hotel restaurant. I actually got to know some of the EC members a little better, and they’re not so bad after all. 😉 I even got to finally meet Doug, Dan and Mark from the Chippewa Valley .NET Users Group.
All in all the whole day was pretty awesome and I can’t wait for next year’s event! We just need to come up with a name for it. The first was Day of .NET, then Deep in .NET, and now Deeper in .NET. Let me know if you have any suggestions for next year.
Now, aside from all of the event stuff happening, I had a little more going on. I am a partner in Oochie Web Hosting, which was a Gold sponsor of the event (as well as being the hosting provider of the WI .NET Users Group). Dennis, one of the other Oochie partners, was there manning the booth, but he wasn’t alone all day.
I need to give a very special thanks to my wife, Kelly, for showing up and helping Dennis get through the day. She kept Dennis company and even answered questions when it was busy, which is pretty impressive given that she’s not really a technical person. Plus, she went and got lunch for me and Dennis at some chicken place nearby (which explains why the box lunch seemed less than wonderful).
All in all, we (Oochie) collected around 100 business cards of people interested enough to leave a card with us. Since we didn’t have any little gimmicky things at our booth to give away like many vendor booths do, we were more than impressed with the turnout. We were, though, giving away a free year of hosting, as well as some other discounted services.
Anyway, yesterday, Kelly took all those cards and entered them into an Excel spreadsheet for us. Plus she did all this for free — that is, free plus a new pair of shoes… 🙂
I’m not really sure what we’re going to do with all those names yet. Maybe we’ll sell them… j/k I imagine we’ll just do a one-or-two-time mailing to find out who is interested, so if you’re name is in there, don’t worry, you won’t get SPAM blasted.
Anyway, I thought the day was great, and so did a few others. Here are a few blog entries I’ve seen about the day after the fact:
I’m really looking forward to next year! (I think I alrady said that though…)
This video is pretty awesome! It’s several minutes long (maybe 10 minutes?), but well worth it. If you’re on a slow connection you should probably download the file instead of streaming it. Do this by right-clicking on the link and choosing “Save Target As…”.
Thanks to Karie (my sister) and Dennis for sending this to me.
So, Robert Scoble recently posted on why he is such an extremist (my own words) when it comes to being pro-RSS. He claims that it builds relationships. Brian Tinkler commented on his blog that, while RSS is a great and important technology, it could never replace the human element when it comes to relationships. In Scoble’s follow-up post he says that he is “getting beaten up” by Brian’s comments.
Here is what I posted as a comment on Scoble’s blog:
I don’t think Brian Tinkler was discrediting the use and importance of blogs or RSS. He was just stating a truth that technology can never replace the human factor when it comes to building relationships. I subscribe to [Scoble’s blog] via RSS, but have no relationship with Scoble, and I doubt that my subscription would ever cause him to do any type of business with me.
However, if I got to know him, and had conversations with him — then I would be building a relationship. I used to work at a newspaper, and I had no more relationship with the authors of the articles that I read than I do with Scoble, or any other blogger, or any other company with an RSS feed.
Reading the articles, blogs or RSS items may help me learn more about the provider (author, company, etc.), but doesn’t go very far in creating a relationship.
On the other hand, if I already had a relationship with Scoble, then me subscribing to him and him subscribing to me very well could help strengthen our relationship.
But until we create artifical intelligence, technology will never “create” relationships — merely transfer information and possibly discover possible relationships.
[Edited and styled for use in this post.]
Like Brian, I, too, am a fan of Scoble overall, and I still plan to read him everyday because I see a lot of things there that I might otherwise miss. However, in my own opinion, Scoble is using the phrase “building relationships” in place of “gathering information”. I can read internal blogs, personal blogs, press releases, newsletters, newspapers, journals, magazines or any other written information 24 hours a day, but have absolutely no relationship with the provider.
A relationship is a two-way connection or association. I have a relationship with my wife, Kelly. I have a relationship with my boss. I have a relationship with my bank. I have a relationship with my mortgage company.
I don’t have a relationship with Scoble, or any other supplier of some RSS that I comsume. Likewise, just because you are reading my blog, doesn’t imply that you have a relationship with me.
Maybe it’s just semantics, but as ardent as Scoble has been on the topic lately, I’m tending to think that he is under the impression that he is actually building relationships by consuming RSS. I have no doubt of the importance of RSS, and that it can play a critical role in supplying information in a timely, standardized manner, but let’s not lose scope of things. It’s just XML — angle brackets, letters, numbers and a few equals signs and quotation marks. I’m a software developer and have written a number of CRM systems, and even those, with the word “Relationship” (Customer/Contact Relationship Management) in their name, don’t really build relationships — they are just a tool to track them.
The relationship comes from communication. Anyone agree or disagree? Leave a comment or e-mail me and let’s begin building our own relationships.
(P.S. Just to be clear, I personally know Brian Tinkler through my involvement in the WI .NET Users Group.)
As you may or may not know , I am pretty heavily involved in the local .NET community and serve as the Vice President of the WI .NET Users Group. Well this weekend, March 5, is our third annual day long extravaganza – Deeper in .NET 2005.
Well, I don’t know if extravaganza is the right word. Let me check.
(Searching the web…)
OK, Dictionary.com defines extravaganza as “an elaborate, spectacular entertainment or display”. I guess extravaganza is the right word after all.
I am SO excited about this. I’m such a geek. Our group is one of the 10 largest .NET user groups in the world! And get this: This is going to be the largest .NET user group event ever!! Right now we already have over 400 registrants. If you’re going to be anywhere near Milwaukee this Saturday, you need to be there. But register now so you can be sure to get in and get fed — mentally and literally (there’s lunch).
We’ve got an awesome lineup of speakers:
Topics look great too! Distributed objects, ASP.NET 2.0, Smart Client…
To top it off, Jacob Cynamon is hosting a lunch Q&A session featuring Scott Guthrie, Chris Mayo, Rob Howard, and Jason Beres who will answer questions regarding .NET architecture and design considerations not covered in their presentations. Watch for the e-mail to come out to all registered WI .NET UG members soon. If you want to know more about this, then you need to register on the WI .NET UG site.
It’s this Saturday, March 5, 2005 at the Radisson by Mayfair Mall. Late registration and check-in starts at 7:00 AM and things get kicked off at 7:45.
Seriously, you should check it out! I’ll be there all day — come see me and say hi!
OK, so there’s already an updated version that fixes the problem. But there is (was?) a problem!
It seems that Firefox was invincible because no one was attacking it. Now there are 25 million Firefox users. Now there are exploits.
For the record, I occasionally use Firefox myself. It is a fine browser, although I’m not a fan of tabbed browsing. I’m primarily a Microsoft fan, but have a few open source items that I use and appreciate.
Well, I have officially joined the “INETA Academic Committee Student Committee” (quite a mouthful). I participated in my first conference call tonight, and it looks like I might be assisting in the development of a new site for the Student Committee. I’m still learning about the role of these committees. I even had to have a cheat sheet of various acronyms and definitions e-mailed to me in order to make sense of what was happening in the meeting.
I’m actually kind of excited about this. When Brian Tinkler first asked me about getting involved with INETA a year or two ago, I was hesitant. Since I am already involved in the local .NET community as the vice president of the WI .NET Users Group, I didn’t think I would have enough time. Plus I didn’t think I could bring anything substantial to the table.
Well, the time availability hasn’t changed much (actually, I’m busier now than ever), but I’m excited to be involved anyway!
OK. So last week I mentioned that I had been working on a code generator for myself. For what it’s worth, I am actually posting the EXE here.
Use this at your own risk! Here is the ZIP download.
In the ZIP there are five files:
Contact me if you have any questions. I’m sure it’s still buggy. It also has a number of limitations, such as:
In short, this was for me. It is written around my own “practices”. It hasn’t been tested nearly enough to be considered solid, so don’t count on that. I only use it as a starting point, and I can’t recommend that it be anything other than that for you.
That said, please try it if you want, and let me know what you think. If anyone feels like writing some more thorough documentation, especially as it relates to the generated code, I’ll give you a copy of this app for free. 😉 Also, if you find that my generated code could use certain improvements, please send contact me to let me know.
For what it’s worth, it also runs from your USB drive, but then if you’re into .NET code, you probably expected that it would.
Update (2/28/2005): I have uploaded a new ZIP because I found a bug in the first version.
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