I was reading Scott Guthrie’s blog post about a free CMS (content management system) written with ASP.NET 2.0. I went to look at the site, and clicked on the link for a demo. First sentence:
You can test and get to know the new AxCMS.net for 4 weeks completely free and without oblivion. (Emphasis added.)
Oblivion. Funny.
Update: I checked last night (2/13/2006) and the word was corrected.
Today is my wife Kelly’s 24th birthday. Happy birthday, Kelly. I love you!
A couple weeks ago, I posted a “slightly useful piece of software” which could be used to convert a bunch of BMP files to JPG. We’ll I just updated it to allow you to select the source and destination file types.
I’ve replaced the old download with the modified one, and you can get it here. Use at your own risk.
It’s pretty simple to use, but see the original post for more info. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. I probably won’t put too much work into it, but if it’s a good suggestion, I may.
I just saw this today: MS Paint
(via Clemens Vasters)
I have a few invitations to use the new MSN Live Messenger Beta. If I know you, and only if I know you, and you want one, let me know. First come, first served.
I disabled comments and trackbacks on this post because I’ve seen other posts where someone announces invitations, and that’s too much. 🙂 Besides, if you know me, you’ll probably know how to contact me anyway.
In honor of me starting to use the new MSN Messenger 8.0 (Windows Live Messenger), I made myself a new display picture. Let me know what you think.
Old pic:
New pic:
Downloaded it this morning and have been using it all day. So far, I don’t really notice much different, other than the skin. I know it has shared folders and offline messages, but haven’t got to play with that yet.
Sorry, no invitations yet, though.
OK, so this one may only be useful to one other person on the planet, but here it is. (If you’re a .NET developer, then this is a trivial application.)
Anyway, my wife had a need to convert a bunch of BMP files into JPGs, and she doesn’t have Photoshop, or anything like that installed. She could have done the conversion with MS Paint, one at a time, but that was cumbersome for a lot of images. So I “whipped this together” for her. In a nutshell, you specify a folder, and it creates JPG versions of all BMP files in that folder. It doesn’t do any resizing, resampling, cropping, or anything else. It just saves a copy in the new format — pretty basic.
For the .NET geek that might read this, I got 95% of the way (which was approximately equal to a whopping 20 lines of code) through this in VB 2005, then remembered that she doesn’t have the new framework installed. So rather than spend the time installing that for her, I just copied the code into VB 2003 and finished there. What can I say. I’m lazy… 🙂
Anyway, here is the download. Use at your own risk. I zipped the entire solution, but if you’re not a developer and just want to use it, then look for the EXE in the “bin” folder. You must have version 1.1 of the .NET framework installed for this to run, but if you’ve run Windows Update anytime in the last couple years, you probably do.
Since I’m approaching my one-year anniversary of my return to blogging, I thought I’d compile a few stats about my blogging habits. These numbers do not include this current post, and dates and times have been adjusted to Central time (the server is in the Pacific time zone).
Since I started blogging on this site on February 7, 2005, it has been 332 days, and I have written 110 posts. For those posts, I have calculated totals based on month, day of week, and hour of day.
Posts per Month
| Posts per Day of Week
| Posts per Hour of Day
|
I’m sure this information is completely riveting to absolutely all of my readers, right? 🙂
I don’t know your stance on environment preservation. Overall, I’m not a big environmentalist. I believe that we need to take care of what we have, be smart, do what we can, etc., but I have never really been of the mindset that I need to worry and take seriously life-changing action.
Until now, that is.
No, I’m not going to tell you that we need to save the trees, the rain forest, the whales, the rivers, the oceans, the air, or even the Argali. No, I’m talking about something much more serious. Something has recently been brought to my attention, and after a little research I’ve come to the alarming conclusion that we all, as a society, need to take immediate action: write your congressman, put a sign in your yard, picket offending companies, and organize other peaceful demostrations that will be broadcast on local and national news media.
“What is it that has got Scott so concerned?”, you ask. (Go ahead, I’ll wait while you ask…)
It’s the GUIDs. Globally Unique IDentifiers. You know, those 128 bit, hexadecimal strings that are, well, globally unique. They typically look something like this:
270E3782-AA0B-4FAE-B605-2CB99F0F1F9D
There are only (approximately) 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. In ordinary English, that is just over 340 trillion trillion trillion – roughly 10^38 GUIDs total.
Sure, that sounds like a lot, but think about it. There are already over 6 billion people on earth. At current population growth rates (2.15% in 2004), the earth’s population will double in about 30 years and will square itself in just over 2^10 years, and we will have over 40 million trillion people. Given that there are only approximately 10^80 particles in the known universe, and that each person is made up of a bunch of those (10^7 red corpuscles alone, not counting the other color corpuscles, or things like intestines and hair follicles), and that in such a short time, the earth’s population will square itself, I think we have serious cause to worry.
When you think about it, we already don’t have enough GUIDs to truly globally uniquely identify every particle. As it is, if we tried to identify every particle, each GUID would be “responsible” for ~10^40 particles. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10,000 trillion trillion trillion.
That’s GUID abuse, if you ask me!! We HAVE to stop the madness!
“What do we do?”, you ask. I’m not sure, to be honest. I’ll have to leave that up to people much more intelligent than myself. I do have a few ideas, though. Please excuse my naivety if you are a GUID expert. I’m just trying to do what I can to save the poor little guys things. (I have been informed that GUIDs are asexual entities.) My ideas:
At the end of the day, I can only hope that this post generates some interest, some concern, some thought, some discussion, and some action. Please, people, let’s save the GUIDs from abuse and extinction. Together, we can find a way!!
Note: All GUIDs presented in this post are recycled, reclaimed, or reconditioned GUIDs. No GUIDs were harmed in the writing of this post.
😉 
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