Any true geek had/has a Commodore 64 or Vic 20 stuffed somewhere in a closet.  I began writing code on my trusty Vic-20 in 1983.  Wow, that was a long time ago.

I found a great site dedicated to all things Commodore.  It's a blast to look around this site and remember the good old days when Load "*",8,1 meant something.

Click here to check out the site.

And more...

I've been using .Text  at work for about 2 days, and my first impressions are not great.  A few things that I'd like to see improved.

• Attaching files to a post is difficult, or impossible.  I haven't figured out how to do this yet.
• Adding pictures to a post is also very cumbersome.  You have to add the picture to a gallery, view the gallery, copy the image, open your post, and then paste the image in the post.  I must be doing something wrong, but all the .Text forum instructs you to do it this way. Ugh.
• Using BlogJet with .Text is buggy, sometimes it just doesn't work.  But I found a patch that we're going to apply to see if things improve.

Other than those two major issues, I like .Text.  I like the look and feel a bit better than dasBlog, I love the skins.  A few people I've talked to believe that .Text performs better than dasBlog, but I don't have as much content on my blog, so I can really compare.  I asked these people about their decision to use .Text instead of dasBlog, here's some of what they said:

Brendan Eich recently wrote: “The best way to help the Web is to incrementally improve the existing web standards, with compatibility shims provided for IE, so that web content authors can actually deploy new formats interoperably.”

Dave Shea nicely summarizes the conversation about web applications. “The recession is over, the slump is ended. Web development is in demand, and the demand is only going to increase.”

Patrick Breitenbach pointed me to General Interface, a company that has built a commercial windowing/UI system on top of DHTML allowing almost-rich-client-apps inside the browser. They lean a bit too heavily on IE-only features for now and the overall look is more like a rich client app than a web app (very much like Oddpost), but hey, it's one way to do it.

Ben Nolan has a dusty library called phplive. “It's event driven programming for the web - but the whole page isn't refreshed - whenever you click a button, focus an element, or fire any event that has a handler on the server - an RPC call is dispatched to the server...”

Ian Hickson of Opera: “Our own position was that any successful framework would have to be backwards compatible with the existing Web content, and would have to be largely implementable in Windows IE6 without using binary plug-ins (for example using scripted HTCs). We were the only ones to even remotely suggest that the solution should be based on HTML.”

Espen Antonsen shares his wishlist: “As a web developer I find many tasks more time consuming and difficult to accomplish when building a web application - we develop a web-based ERP system.”

SysAdmin Week

I just wanted to announce that SysAdmin Week will hence be known as "SysAdmin Fortnight."

I recently purchased two tools that I use all the time.  The first is a blog reader, it takes RSS feeds and combines them for easy viewing.  It's awesome.  It's called FeedDemon.  It's just under $30 and well worth it if you read a lot of blogs.

The second tool is BlogJet.  In fact I'm using BlogJet to create this entry.  It just makes adding entries to your blog much faster and easier.  Take a look at my previous BlogJet post for more information.

I recently purchased BlogJet and absolutely love it.  I'm also a big fan of FeedDemon.  I just discovered that I can configure FeedDemon to automatically launch BlogJet so I can quickly blog about entries in my FeedDemon Channels.  The setup is absolutely simple.

• Launch FeedDemon
• Click "Tools" -> "Blog This News Item" -> "Configure Blog Blog Publishing Tools"
• Click "Add"
• In the "Name" field add a descriptive name, I just entered "BlogJet"
• In the "Command Line" field enter the location of BlogJet.  You can browse to the .exe or just enter the default location: "C:\Program Files\BlogJet\BlogJet.exe"

I'm sure there are ways to customize this even further.  If you figure it out please add a comment to this entry so everyone can take advantage.

Some suggested reading from Brandon Bohling... 

• Breaking changes to System.Xml in .NET 2.0
  For those that rely heavily on XML (which is probably most of us), you'll definitely want to take a look at this.
• Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space
  Anyone working in the reuse space or is an Architect will be interested in this excellent read.
• WSE 2.0: Finally Web Services without HTTP
  Probably not useful quite yet, but as we move towards SOA and Indigo becomes available I see this being powerful.
• Web Services and Datasets
  This is a common question and a difficult one to answer. For quite some time I have been at Level 2 (hate datasets), but have recently been moving towards Level 3 (enlightenment...now think they may be all right in most cases). We will definitely be addressing this more in our Primer white paper.
• EIF vs. Log4Net
  According to this particular opinion, we have chosen wisely with ILAAB (extended version of Log4Net.
• Blogs.MSDN.com
  Keep up-to-date with many MSFT bloggers.
• SecureString in .NET v1.1
  For those using encryption and wanting to start utilizing the Whidbey recommended solution for encryption with today's .NET FW, you definitely will want to take a look at this article.

Feedster has taken an anonymous look at the the users of myFeedster, their web based aggregator, and calculated the "Feedster Top 100", the most popular RSS feeds based on the number of subscribers.  This is a very interesting list, and well worth a look.

Click here to see the list.

If you need a good primer for Agile Methodology this is a great one.

Copied from: The New Methodology

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge today gave preliminary approval to a settlement that would require Microsoft give voucher "refunds" to all consumers and businesses that purchased its application and operating system products between 1996 and 2002.

Copied from: Arizonans to get 'refunds' on Microsoft purchases

Finally, a "get money from Microsoft" rumor that is true!