Tag: Community Page 7 of 8

Q#

On August 21, 2005

Yesterday was a good day. The weather was really nice.

We had a few friends over for a cookout. Actually, there were about 25 people (including kids). I decided a few months ago to have a party sometime this summer and invite some of my geek friends.

So yesterday was Q# 1.0 (formerly known as BBQ.NET). I grilled 18 burgers and a dozen brats. (Actually, as Russ can attest, the grill was basically a bonfire there for a while — lots of grease in the burgers.) Lots of people brought other things as well. All in all, I thought it was a pretty fun evening. The last ones to leave were here until right around 11, and we were all sitting outside around the citronella candle talking about string theory, the meaning of life, and Office 12 amongst other things.

About halfway through the party, I looked around and realized that I had some of the smartest people in Wisconsin in my backyard. Gerry and his family were there, as well as Brian and the rest of Tinklers (including Brock), Travis and his wife and son, casey and his girlfriend, OS, Russ Ambrose (no site), John Mitchell and his wife, and Kate and Clint Houchens and their kids. My friend Jeff also made a brief appearance.

I wasn’t sure if Brian would actually be there since he HADN’T CALLED ME IN TWO WEEKS!!! 😉 Apparently, he’s been “really busy” at his new job (at Microsoft), but he did show. 🙂

Also, I just found out yesterday that casey won the Code’n my way to the PDC Contest with his labyrinth TabletPC app. Congratulations!!! That’s awesome!

So anyway, thanks to those who came by and enjoyed the afternoon with me and Kelly. We had a blast!

Ditching Google AdSense

By Scott

On August 15, 2005

In Uncategorized

So the Google AdSense thing wasn’t working for me, and I’m not referring to the fact that I only made 60 cents. OK, so maybe it has a little to do with that, but the real reason is that the ads were totally out of context. 99% of the ads that were displayed were about “blog”. The other 1% was about tsunami relief.

Both, I’m sure, are fine topics, but are not relevant to my content like they “were supposed to be”. I e-mailed Google about this a few times to find out what could be done. My third e-mail got no response at all. The two responses before that were (paraphrased):

I need to wait for indexing by the AdSense crawler.
I need to use full sentences and paragraphs about specific topics.

OK, the first one I could understand. I didn’t realize at first that AdSense uses a different index than the regular Google index.

The second suggestion, though, was a little frustrating, for a couple reasons. First, I know I’m not a hardcore tech writer, where all I write about is code, but the majority of my posts were, in some way, about technology and development. Second, I’m not writing term papers or essays, and in most cases, long paragraphs don’t “make sense”. Also, as far as I can tell, I nearly always use compelte sentences.

In addition to describing my above reasoning, in each of my three e-mails, I asked (or suggested) if there was a way to “tag” my content. For example, I could surround my content with something like this:

<div rel=”adsensecontent”>…</div>

Well, my third e-mail has been unanswered for 10 days now, so today I decided to ditch Google AdSense. It’s not that I expect them to change their technology based on my suggestion, but I suggested/asked about something like that in each of the three e-mails, and that part was ignored each time. It wasn’t working for me, maybe it will for you. I’m not the only one, though. Julie Lerman blogged about a similar issue.

Anyway, in place of AdSense, I’ve decided to post jobs from karmaONE, a service for referring people to open positions. You can read all about it here on their site. The service is currently in BETA, and, as you can see, most of the jobs are currently located in the San Francisco area. If you are a recruiter in the Wisconsin area, check out karmaONE — you can help to make this list more relevant. I might end up getting some money, but you’ll end up with a good candidate.

In the end, though, as much as I’d like extra money for doing pratcially nothing, I decided that I’d rather my “practically nothing” at least possibly help someone find a job.

For those that care, I’m actually using OpenGUI’s Feed2JS service to display these links. What can I say — I’m too lazy to write my own RSS display module for CommunityServer.

Casey’s /CameraFlow App

By Scott

On August 15, 2005

In Uncategorized

Have you seen the new app that casey (or “the lower cased one”, as OS likes to call him) wrote? Remember the old wooden labyrinth game? The one where you had to twist the knobs to tilt the deck so the little silver ball would roll through the maze without falling in the holes?

He wrote that for the TabletPC (in C# with managed Direct3D). But it’s not just a game controlled by mouse or keyboard (although you can use the mouse). The meat of the story is that the “board” is controlled by camera tracking, so if you have a camera connected to your Tablet, you can play the game by actually, physically tilting your Tablet. Just like the real game…

I saw the app while it was in development, but haven’t seen the finished product yet. Maybe sometime this week? Or this weekend?

I think it’s pretty cool — he even got Scobleized. If I had a TabletPC and a camera, I’d probably be playing it all the time. I haven’t seen my “real” labyrinth game in several years, so I’ve had withdrawls, you know.

Maybe for version 2.0 he’ll add the ability to control it with some sort of knobs?

casey also presented on Tablet and speech technologies at our June WI .NET Users Group meeting. He’s posted slides and code for those who are interested. The code for the Labyrinth game will be available soon.

My Other News

By Scott

On August 10, 2005

In Uncategorized

Last week, I mentioned some news and said that I would have more this week. As promised…

It’s no secret that Brian Tinkler has joined Microsoft. He started on Monday (the same day I started my new job). He also has taken on a new role as the VP of Marketing for INETA. Because of all of his extra responsibilities, he has decided to step down from his role as president of the WI .NET Users Group. As of last week, I am now the president of the UG. It was announced last night at our monthly UG meeting.

This is new territory for me. Fortunately, we have a solid Executive Committee, so I’m not worried. 🙂 I’m actually pretty excited!

So anyway, look for good things in the future. We have a lot of exciting meetings coming up!

Comments Have Been Restored

By Scott

On July 11, 2005

In Uncategorized

Well, after being down for about a week, comments are now re-enabled on my blog.

I posted to the CS Forums about this issue to try to get some help, but no one ever responded. So I decided to ask someone I know that works for Telligent — Dan Bartels. I sent Dan a short e-mail, pointing to my forum question, and he responded right away (within ~30 minutes).

He made a simple suggestion to temporarily switch to the default blog skin and see if comments would work. The comments did work! My problem stemmed from the fact that I was using a customized version of a skin that came in the 1.0x CS distribution. Based on his suggestion, when I got home I poked around for about 10 minutes and got it working. In case anyone else has a similar problem, here is my simple solution.

In the /Themes/Blogs/_Your_Theme_/Skin-EntryPostCommentContainer.ascx, add this line:

<Blog:EntryComments runat = “Server” ID =”comments” />

For example, my file now looks like this:

<%@ Control Language=”C#” %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix=”Blog” Namespace=”CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls” Assembly=”CommunityServer.Blogs” %>
<%@ Import Namespace=”CommunityServer.Components” %>
<Blog:EntryView runat = “Server” ID = “Entry” />
<Blog:EntryComments runat = “Server” ID =”comments” />
<Blog:CommentForm runat = “Server” ID =”form” />

You could also just copy this file from /Themes/Blogs/default/, but you would lose any other changes you may have done to the file.

Thanks for the tip, Dan!!

That’s My Name — Don’t Wear It Out

By Scott

On June 30, 2005

In Uncategorized

So Gerry posted about Sean’s posts about commercials, etc. Lot’s of interesting stuff there — you should read it (after you’re done reading my post, of course).

For me, the real interesting part was near the end where he’s talking about Cropper, which is a simple tool to help you take screen shots. (A very cool, simple tool I might add.) Gerry’s last line was:

The name at the top of the Cropper site is Brian Scott… Is this funny to anyone else in the industry???

As it turns out, the author of Cropper responded to a question of Gerry’s, and was also wondering what was so funny about his name. Gerry meant no offense to Brian Scott. That comment directed at me. For those that don’t know, my real name is Bryan Scott Isaacs.

I spoke with Gerry for about 5 minutes this morning and he mentioned this and we started thinking of all of the people in the industry that we either knew or knew of that were named Bryan/Brian, Scott or Isaacs. Gerry challenged me to come up with a list of all that I could think of, so here goes, with their number of Bryan/Brian Scott Isaacs (BSI) points.

Name	About	BSI points
Brian Scott	Cropper developer.	2
Brian Tinkler	Our fearless leader at the WI .NET Users Group.	1
Scott Hanselman	Funny-man. Geek. .NET Architect. Famous for his “Ultimate Developer and Power Tools” list.	1
Scott Guthrie	His nickname is ScottGu, but should be ScottGuru. He is in charge of ASP.NET and IIS7 at Microsoft.	1
Brian Nantz	Local (MKE) Indigo and .NET expert. Working on an Indigo book with *Scott* Seely, so 0.5 bonus points for that.	1.5
Scott Seely	Microsoft’s Indigo Team. Working on an Indigo book with *Brian* Nantz, so 0.5 bonus points for that.	1.5
Cory Isakson	.NET blogger. Although his name is close, it isn’t an exact match, so he only gets 0.75 points. 🙂 Hey, they’re my points. I can do whatever I want with them!	0.75
Scott Mitchell	4 Guys from Rolla founder/editor, author, blogger.	1
Scott Galloway	UK .NET blogger.	1
Scott Watermasysk	AKA, Scott Water. Creator of .Text blogging system. Now works for Telligent, working on Community Server (the software I use for my blog).	1
Scott McCulloch	DotNetNuke Core Team and module developer.	1
“The Other” Scott Isaacs	An author that works for MSN. I’ve posted about him before. I don’t know him personally, but we’ve traded e-mails and he mentioned me in his blog once.	2
Bryan Scott Isaacs	Yours truly…	3

I know there are undoubtedly hundreds, or even thousands, more geeks named Bryan, Scott or Isaacs (or some variation/combination). We have at least 6 or 8 Scotts in our WI .NET Users Group alone. If I’ve missed you, don’t take it personally. It’s not like I’m the “Keeper of the Scotts” or anything. I just thought it’d be interesting to list as many as I could come up with in a few minutes.

MSN’s Scott Isaacs and the Secret TechEd

By Scott

On June 7, 2005

In Uncategorized

Wow. So a lot of stuff has happened since last night.

For starters, when I was checking my blogs this morning, I saw that Scott Isaacs from Microsoft (a different Scott Isaacs) has mentioned me in his blog. I’m honored. (I wonder what the odds of him being at Tech·Ed are?) Apparently he does some of the same geeky things that I do: Googling yourself. I would say “MSNing yourself” but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. It’s funny that, while he outranks me in the Google results, I rank higher than him in the MSN results — and he works for MSN! 🙂

Anyway, thanks, Scott. I appreciate the link!

So, back to Tech·Ed…

I was told that Gerry and I needed to find the “developer party” and make sure we went to it. Ummm, OK. We had a couple leads of who to ask, but no one seemed to know what we were talking about. I ran into Jason Beres yesterday and was asking him about it and other things. He didn’t have any idea either (so he said). So, we had pretty much given up on that.

Later in the day, someone mentioned to us that there was some midwest region “something or other” happening that night and we should go. We just needed to find the organizer to let him know. Well, we couldn’t really find him either. As it turns out, though, we happened to bump into him right before the bus left to take the group over there, and he told us to come along.

We ended up going to some Nascar thing at Universal City Walk. They had a buffet, drinks and all of the arcade games were open and unlimited. It was pretty sweet.

So anyway, as we’re in the bus on the way over there, I happened to notice that Rob Howard was on the bus. So was James Avery. As it turns out the event was actually a Central region event, not just the Midwest.

I thought that was pretty cool. When we got to the Nascar place, we grabbed some food and ended up sitting at the same table as Rob Howard. I know he’s just a person, but I thought it was nice to be able to hang out with him and the others. I didn’t know until last night that Rob drives a Porsche and it costs him a few hundred bucks everytime he wants to change the oil. Poor guy.

Well, after the food I started walking around and meeting some of the other people and I started to notice some of the other people that were there. I saw Betsy Akoi, Angela Baxley (who works with Scott Guthrie at MS), Doug Seven (of dotnetjunkies), Jeff Julian, and others. By this time I was realizing that this wasn’t just a midwest, or even a central region party. This was a little bigger than that.

I also saw Jason Beres there.

Actually he saw me first. He came up to me and, with a big smile on his face, said, “I see you made it.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t realize I was making it until I got here.”

Then he smiled again and said, “Oh, yeah, you made it.”

I wasn’t sure to be pissed that he didn’t just tell me when I asked him earlier, or if I should feel honored that I ended up there in the first place.

I decided to go with the honored feeling.

So after lots of food, soda, water, video games, talking with Betsy Akoi about GDN Workspaces, talking with Angela Baxley about Visual Web Developer and about the low number of females in technology, Rob Howard about his Porsche and the time the fire alarms went off at his apartment (he ran out of the building with a computers under each arm — a true geek), and a host of other user group leaders, we finally caught the last bus back. We ended up getting to bed about 1 or 1:30.

But it was definitely worth it.

VMWare, Virtual PC and TechEd

By Scott

On June 3, 2005

In Uncategorized

So, I wanted to install VS 2005 Beta 2 so that I can play with it before (and at) Tech·Ed. Well rather than install it rught my laptop (in case of any potential conflict or crash or whatever) I decided to install it in a virtual machine. On my work laptop I installed VMWare Workstation and on my own laptop I installed Microsoft Virtual PC.

Both were incredibly slow. I mean painful. Granted each machine has only 512MB of RAM, but I can’t believe how slow it was. S. L. O. W.

Fortunately (in a sick sense), I had a problem with my work laptop and it will need to be re-imaged. So I removed VMWare and installed Beta 2 right on the base OS.

I got it all (VS, SQL, MSDN, Visio, VSS, etc.) installed just before I left the office today. I’m hoping to get in a couple hours of “play time” before the sessions start. If anyone else is using Beta 2 already, I’d appreciate any tips or warnings you might have.

Also, if you’re going to Tech·Ed, let me know. I’m staying at Westgate Lakes Resort & Spa.

IIS Util for XP Pro

By Scott

On May 25, 2005

In Uncategorized

Sometimes when developing web applications it is useful to have them live at the root of the web space instead of a virtual directory (which is the default for Visual Studio). This is not always the case these days, but when I was still doing a lot of classic ASP development, I would often need this. Since XP Pro only allows one web site (as opposed to Windows 2000/2003 Server, which allows multiples), I spent a lot of time loading IIS, going to the properties page, and changing the “Home Directory” for the web site.

Maybe it’s because my computer was crappy, or maybe there was too much other stuff in memory, or maybe it’s always this way, but IIS was slow to load, plus that seemed like a lot of clicks for something so simple. So, a long time ago I wrote a simple utility in VB6 (to help me deal with this. Then as I was learning .NET, I re-wrote it as a WinForms app (including the designer generated code, it’s all of 157 lines of VB.NET). In a nutshell, it lets you choose a new folder to be the webroot on your local machine. Additionally, it keeps a history of directories used (in a text file) so that you can easily switch back to another in the future.

For me, the main benefits were that it loads much quicker than the IIS console, and that there are not as many clicks needed, especially if you’re just switching back to a previously used web root. But it’s far from perfect, so here are a couple ideas for possible future improvement (if I ever work on it again):

Also copy virtual driectory and IIS application settings when changing web roots. Currently, only the web root itself is changed with this utility. All virtual directories are left unchanged. This may be good, or it may be bad, but there should be an option.
Build a more complete console, similar to IIS, based on something like Cassini. This could allow multiple web applications to be running at the same time, each at the root of their own web site. Of course, this will take away the simplicity that currently exists, so I don’t know how much I like this idea.
Possibly some integration with the HOSTS file. I’m not sure what I would want here, but it might make sense.

So anyway, take it for what it’s worth. Use it if you want. As always, use it at your own risk. Here is the ZIP download. Aside from this post, there are no docs of any kind — you’re on your own. If anyone is interested in source, I can supply that as well, or you can just use Reflector. It’s pretty basic, but if you want to make any improvements (my ideas or your own), I’d like to see the result.

I rarely use this anymore, but it came to mind again recently, so I thought I’d post it in case it might be of use to someone else.

Congratulations Dan Bartels

By Scott

On May 20, 2005

In Uncategorized

So I found out yesterday that someone I know is going to work for Telligent Systems, the company that makes Community Server, which is teh software that I use for this blog.

Congratulations to Dan Bartels, a fellow Milwaukee-area developer, on this new position.

Now that I know someone on the CS team, I’ll have to start sending in lots of feature suggestions and bugs…