I hope you have a great Thanksgiving holiday. Please be safe…

With Christmas right around the corner, I’ve started my amazon.com wish list.

Using Adam Kalsey’s MTAmazon plugin for MovableType, I’m now able to place this on my sidebar.

If you’re having a tough time deciding what to get me for Christmas, one of these items would really be appreciated. I will be updating it throughout the next few days.

Thank you in advance… :=)

So, I’ve been spending most of my evenings for the last little while working through the almost 200 posts on this site and verifying that everything validates against the XHTML 1.0 Transitional schema.

The tool that I’ve used to do this is located at: http://validator.w3c.org. If you’ve never used this tool, it is an absolute blessing. I just wish I wouldve thought about this about 199 posts ago.

Now, after every post that I generate, I’m going to make it a habit to verify that the site is still compliant.

It’s also interesting to see how, once everything conforms to the schema, things just seem to work a little nicer across browsers. If you’re having problems with display of your content, make sure to visit the above link. It may contain the answer to your problems.

Lastly, coupled with all of this, I have updated my site layout. Some of the things that I addressed:

• Updated CSS to use proportional font sizes (ie: font-size: small instead of font-size: 10px. This should make the site much easier to read, as now the font sizes update when you update the text.
• I’ve removed links on the main page for RSS 1.0 feeds. The links will continue to stay active, and RSS will continue to be generated. However, since most aggregators now support 2.0, these will probably go away at some point in the future.
• The google ad bar has been moved to the top of the screen, giving more screen real estate to the actual blog entries. I still like the non-intrusive nature of these ads, and would appreciate it if you clicked through every once in a while, if you see something interesting.
• The side bar is now back on the right. After thinking about this a little more, I just seem to like it better there.
• Blog entries are now shown as distinct units, rather than one giant unit, separated by dates. I stole this idea from Luke Hutteman, and just *love* the way this looks.
• Made the contact me link much more obvious. No more hunting around the page for a way to drop me a line.
• Last, but not least, I added the W3C XHTML 1.0 graphic to the homepage.

Why dont you drop by and let me know what you think?

Blogomania.com has done a great job of restoring permissions to my form emailer, and the contact form is once again back online.

Thanks for your patience…

Well, I finally got Longhorn networking up and running.

After some digging, I noticed that the default gateway from my DHCP server was not being added to the route.

This was fixed easily enough by the following command:

route change 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 metric 1 if

In the above example, interface-number is obtained via route print. Towards the top of the list, you will see a list of NIC cards, with numbers just to the left of it. This number is what you put there.

For example:

My statement was: route change 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 metric 1 if 2.

The next chapter of Brent Rector’s book is now online.

Chapter 2: Building a “Longhorn” Application
Chapter 1: The “Longhorn” Application Model

There’s some very good information here, and I’m really looking forward to next month’s chapter, which will be covering XAML.

With a great amount of excitement, I downloaded Virtual PC 2004 and the client preview release of Longhorn from the MSDN subscriber downloads.

I created a new virtual machine, with all of the default settings, except for RAM, which I bumped to 512MB. The first part of the process, specifying the location and everything, albeit slow, went fairly smooth. Now, for the last 2.5 hours, Ive been sitting on this screen that says “Please wait while Setup detects your computer’s hardware. This can take up to 10 minutes.”

I’m wondering if they meant 10 hours, or 10 days. After seeing other comments on this, I realized that I’m not the only one going through this, so, I’m still letting it run.

I really hope that this isnt indicative of how the performance will be after setup is complete.

*Update:* I did decide to restart the installation process, and the second time around the entire process ended up taking approximately 2.5 hours. First glance at it is interesting.

• I installed the VM Additions and now I have high color display, which is nice. I’ve seen people having trouble getting more than 16 colors.
• I am one of those afflicted with a substantial delay from login to the start menu coming up. :(
• I’m quite a few problems getting network connections working. I’ll post an update to what I had to do to get the network running, if I ever do.

I went through and followed some of the great tips here and performance seems to be ok.

Next up: The Longhorn SDK. I can’t wait to start playing around with Avalon.

This is the first look into programming with Yukon that I have seen, and I gotta say that this is not quite what I was expecting.

I guess I kind of expected the stored procedures to be written in a CLR language, not just links to external assemblies.

The way that Im seeing this work is something similar to this:

Database  .NET assembly containing stored procedure code
    |
Middleware component for data access
    |
Presentation layer

I don’t see the advantage of this, as to me, it just seems as if it makes things a little more convoluted than it should be. Why isnt the presentation layer just using the code for the .NET assembly containing the stored procedures? It appears as if an extra layer is introduced for now apparent reason.

Am I totally missing the boat here?

… is now available on the MSDN Subscriber downloads website.

One of my next book purchases, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, looks like it will be a very interesting read.

Open up the table of contents and look inside.

• The most important factor in software work is the quality of the programmers.
• The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers.
• Adding people to a late project makes it later.
• New tools and techniques cause an initial loss of productivity/quality.
• Rigorous inspections can remove up to 90 percent of errors before the first test case is run.
• Efficiency stems more from good design than good coding
• Fallacy: You teach people how to program by showing them how to write programs.

Things that Im sure everyone has heard before, however, this book appears to put hard data behind those facts and fallacies, so that you can use this when presenting your ideas.