Daily Archives: August 15, 2006

Living Publicly on the Internet

Vermont

Rich and I went to this classic Vermont country summer fair last week. Below is a photo of the tractor pull. There were so many garden tractors lined up, this event went on for hours and hours and hours. One event that I wish I had known about (before it happened, rather than hearing about it after the fact!) was a hand-mowing competition (using scythes). I have an old scythe and use it ocassionaly (not for the lawn but for clearing tall weeds) and would have loved to see how it’s really done.

While wandering through the booths, I came around a corner and saw a well-known Vermont actor/comedian/writer named Rusty Dewees. This is a guy you can’t avoid if you live in Vermont. He’s got a column in the local paper (which is very personal like a blog), does radio spots for lots of businesses, gets written about and highlighted on the news all of the time and does shows (which I have never attended) all over the state. Without thinking, I greeted him like an old friend, only to remember in the next moment that I didn’t really know him, and of course, I was a complete stranger t him. Just another fan, I guess. I was pretty embarrassed (how unlike me!).

It made me think a lot about how much I expose my own life on my otherwise “technical” blog. When I meet developers at conferences around the country and the world, and they know personal things about me, it takes me a moment to realize it’s because I write about it all the time. But I love this aspect of meeting people who don’t feel like strangers for long. Somehow, I wasn’t able to project that Dewees might feel the same way even though he was being perfectly nice. Additionally, it’s only a more narrow community of programmers that know me, so I already have lot in common with these people, as opposed to anyone that might accost this poor guy. It would probably have been a little better if I had bought one of his dvds or calendars or something (the guy is pretty talented and also a marketing machine), but though I enjoy reading his column and have been impressed to watch what he has done with his career, I’m not sure if I really want a calendar of him on my wall (though he’s awfully good looking! ;-))


The tractor pull. Click on photo to see full size

Paul goes to the country (and some asp.net 2.0, too!)

dotNET

Paul Litwin, an INETA speaker, came all the way from Seattle to Vermont to speak at Vermont.NET. Rather than fly in the day of the meeting and out the next morning, Paul arrived on Saturday night in order to enjoy being in Vermont for a few days. Unfortunately, shortly before his trip he agreed to do a project that kept him in front of the computer a good part of the time, but we still managed to get him out to a walk around our neighbor’s mountain farm, visit our favorite swimming pond, meet his first brushhog and even go Chanterelle picking (I don’t mind divulging my secret Chanterelle spots to someone who lives 3000 miles away) and visit a local sugarhouse (Purinton’s) to buy some maple syrup.

Last night was our user group meeting and after local developer, Rob Hale (from G.E.Health Care), did a short talk on the Strategy Pattern, Paul shared with us some of the many tricks he had to figure out for his own work when using the ASP.NET 2.0 data controls. I find that the things I struggle with make good fodder for presentations, so I love this kind of talk. Rather than just diving into the tricks with an assumption that everyone was familiar with the ins and outs  of the new controls, he went through them first. I have not played iwth them a lot so even in the beginner part of the sessio, I learned plenty. The tips & tricks will definitely come in handy and I’m glad that someone else has already done the heavy lifting for me on this stuff! Paul will be doing this talk at ASP.NET Connections in the fall, although without the benefit of the extra time we get when presenting at a user group.

After the meeting, we brought Paul to downtown Burlington to sample some more of the local beer (we had already had dinner at brew pubs on Saturday and Sunday night) and then somehow finished up the night at Ben & Jerry’s. The amusing part of this was that the other woman who came along, web developer Gail Guy (who was also the lucky winner of the FarPoint Spread for Web license we raffled off…the Genom-E Express license went to Roger Gillim from the Vermont Dept. of Health) and I started talking about programming and the guys all rolled their eyes and moved to the other end of the table.

Paul found the secret to being the perfect guest at our house – being kind and loving to our old Newfoundland dogs, Tasha & Daisy. Thanks Paul!

Sudden Das Blog 1.8 error – look familiar to anyone??

Blogging

DasBlog is an open source project, so I need to be patient while waiting for a response to my query on the forums. In the meantime, perhaps someone else has experienced this and knows the cause and resolution.

Since Sunday, my blog has been throwing a wierd error that is causing the events log to bloat to 12 or more megs. My datafarm.com sites are in trouble. My webhost had to restart IIS on the web server.

Below is an example of the error. The errors cite different macros, but the rest is always the same. I have gone back to the default Blog Template, but the problem is still there. I recopied the DLL’s, but the problem continues.

So, a plea for help if anyone out there has experienced this. It happened suddenly with no changes to the site. I’ve seen two other unanswered questions about this error in the dasblog forums.

Here is what the error looks like:

l2 time 2006-08-14T15:28:11 code 1 message <span>Error:<br/>Error executing macro: bodytext. Make sure it you’re calling it in your BlogTemplate with paratheses like ‘myMacro()’. Macros with parameter lists and overloads must be called in this way. Exception: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. —> System.Threading.ThreadAbortException: Thread was being aborted.
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 118
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 61
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.SharedBasePage.ProcessDayTemplate(DateTime day, Control ContentPlaceHolder) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\SharedBasePage.cs:line 744
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.Macros.get_Bodytext() in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\Macros.cs:line 1233
— End of inner exception stack trace —
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean isBinderDefault, Assembly caller, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.InternalInvoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean verifyAccess)
at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
at System.Reflection.RuntimePropertyInfo.GetValue(Object obj, Object[] index)
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.InvokeMacro(Object obj, String expression) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 332
at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.TemplateProcessor.ProcessTemplate(SharedBasePage page, Entry entry, String templateString, Control contentPlaceHolder, Macros macros) in C:\Dev\DasBlog CE\source\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\TemplateProcessor.cs:line 105<br/> while processing .</span>

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