Monthly Archives: October 2004

Anyone want to dogfood Blink?

Blink

I keep forgetting that this application is pretty much usable now but I have to fine tune some things (and deal with the bullshit of the icons…uggh). I’d be happy to have some people play with it and give me some feedback. Basically it lets you create posts off line and then upload them, but more importantly, it lets you use ink. It leverages the built in TIP to ink and recognize text and then has a way to create and embed (and upload) drawings. I don’t have a “category“ ability built in and you cannot edit posts that are online.

If you want to save posts to upload later (or keep forever) they are persisted in xml.

The settings allow for BloggerAPI and MetaWeblog API. There is an issue with post titles with BloggerAPI so I just use MetaWeblog. It has all of the downsides of these two apis such as your logins being sent in clear text (uggh). The app settings that are used to post to your blog and ftp images are encrypted and persisted locally.

There are a few things that bug me about it still, but maybe I’m just being way too picky which is why I have sat on it. I’m embarrassed for anyone to see it unless it’s perfect, but at this point it seems a huge waste to have it just laying around on my tablet which I don’t use all that much on a daily basis.

Contact me offline. I will not put this into too many hands until I am more confident about it. I have to rebuild the MSI etc and just be warned I’m really over-committed right now so I might not get to fixes quickly.

I have no plans to share the code because I hacked it together and would be completely ashamed for anyone to see it. It was all just experimental to work out some ideas.

Google Desktop and WinFS

Just Rambling

Note: This post has been misinterpreted twice in other blogs. I hope it is pretty clear that I am saying WinFS is MUCH more than google for your desktop.

So everyone is blogging about Google Desktop and many are joking that they won’t need WinFS now anyway. Where are the Longhorn people to remind us that, although that was the easiest part of WinFS to grasp, that there is a lot more to it. I know I saw a post about this in the past…just can’t find it. But I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a new one since everyone started blogging about this yesterday.

Health Care costs for indies

Purely Personal

Uggh . Just got my annual letter from MVP telling me my next year’s rates.

We have the absolute budget HMO and I get some break since I’m getting it through my corporation. But for 2 adults (no kids), $25 co-pay, [I think] $500 deductible, NO prescription help here is what we have paid here in Vermont.

2001: $425/mo
2002: $527/mo (yes a $100 month — $1200 year increase!)
2003: $568/mo
2004: $597/mo
2005: $617/mo

Sad part is we hardly ever get sick and don’t go to the dr. much. Last year Rich had a wierd dizzy spell that freaked out our doctor (thought it was a precursor to a heart attack) and ended up in the hospital for 3 days getting every test known to mankind and got a clean bill of health. A $7000 physical! We joked that at least we got something out of our insurance money.

My poor hubby has also had a lot of dental problems and that is 100% cash out of pocket so add about another $4000 on top of our health insurance costs. I’m more sad for Rich though than for our wallet.

Each year we spend many hours reviewing our options and determine (when thinking about maximum out of pocket what-if situations) that this is still our best bet. This is a big problem in Vermont (this is the health care that Howard Dean wanted to share with the whole country) because we have run most of the competition out of the state.

I’m thinking about the problems Shelley Powers had when talking about her finances on her blog – somehow the tax department read them and used that info against her. I think I’m okay with this here, though.

Corel acquires Jasc

Tools

I am sure that many of us use PaintShop Pro. I have since version 4,though I stopped upgrading after version 7 as it has about 4 gazillion times more things in it than I need.

I found it interesting news that Corel acquired Jasc Software (announced today – all users received an email).

The Vermont air has clearly helped Rocky’s brain

Just Rambling

Rocky seems to have had a major aha! moment today with SOA and is kind enough to share it with us. It definitely was enlightening to me. But coming from Rocky it is pretty deep because one thing I learned about him on Monday night at our user group meeting is that he has been focused on distributed architecture before since the he first started playing with computers and seems to have been on a quest through all of the work he has done in all of these years.

But his brain was already full steam this morning when he wrote a “rambling rant” about languages which includes a lot of history and also stream of conscious ideas.

(Just kidding about the Vermont air thing – I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this guy’s brain…)

Applicating Updater Block

Tools

After 2 years of just giving up on updating my .net apps through the web server, I finally went to patterns and practices guru, Chris Kinsman who helped me figure out how to combine a feature from the AppUpdater component (that is unavailable in the Application Block) with a feature from the Application Block (that is unavailable in the component).

Basically I wanted to be able to update on demand, before my application loads and then not do any updating after that while the application is running. In addition, I wanted my updater to be able to discover dll’s that it would not be able to identify through reflection within the execution path. These dll’s are randomly added to the application and are loaded dynamically.

So – Chris worked out that part of it, whipped up some code for me, and I have been working out the problem of incorporating this into my application so that I can go through this process:

1) user starts up the app by way of the stub application (the appupdater program)

2) user logs in using WSE2 for authentication and authorizaton 🙂

3) upon being properly authorized, the app updater component does it’s job, checking for updates and downloading them. If the user is unrecognized, it just fails. If the authorization returns some “interesting“ information about the user, something “interesting“ will happen to the application on the client machine.

4) the app udater then fires up the latest version of the program I want to run

Sounds simple – and in hindsight it will be, but it has been a bear! At some point, I will dig in to Chris’ code to see what magic he worked to make the app block deal with my needs, but for now I am just happy that I have the update working!

Most of my difficulties with implementing the solution he sent revolved around the fact that the basic setup for the application block is dependent on local host. So I had some setup and configuration problems and then had to understand how to use the manifest utility to create and ecrtypted manifest that actually uses digital signing to verify the downloads to the client.

It is completely senseless to remain stuck on a problem and be so bull-headed to think that additional instances of whacking your skull on a brick wall is going to somehow solve the problem. There are some incredible resources available in our community to sub-contract even for little pieces of expertise. Chris has proven to be one of those people I know I can turn to help me solve some problems that I just don’t have the skill or knowlege for.