Scott Hanselman

Atul (one of this blog's sponsors) over at Sky Software emailed to let me know that through the end of the month he'll be donating 50% of the proceeds of any orders for:

• Shell MegaPack (both .NET and ActiveX )
• EZNamespaceExtensions (both .NET and MFC)

Atul's frameworks plug into Visual Studio with new Project Types for Shell Namespace Extensions, and the Shell MegaPack includes all sorts of interface widgetry for the hard stuff like "toast" that notifies you from the system tray as well as a clean interface to Vista-style Task Dialogs and Wizards.

After you you place an order, then email "sales at ssware.com" with the Order # (also called the ShareIt Reference number) and the name/email used on the order. 50% of the proceeds will then be donated to the ADA!

Thanks Atul for supporting our fundraiser!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Well, I've officially been blogging forever, in Internet Years. Here's my first post, from April 16th, 2002.

"Well, it's up.  After screwing with FTP permissions on and off for a week, my weblog is up.  Sigh, I'm blogging.  We'll see how long it lasts."

What a powerful first post. Moving, really. ;) A harbinger of great things.

I noticed a kind of a pattern in the numbers next to the Months, like September 2007 (21), and graphed it real quick. Looks like I post an average of 32 posts a month over the last 5 years, with outliers clipped (a trimmed mean). I started slow, with just 21 posts in the first six months, then something happened. Somewhere in October of 2002, I found my blog's (first) voice, did 44 posts, and haven't shut up since. The max? An obnoxious 64 posts in June of 2004 - of widely varying quality, but a few classics that get lots of traffic today.

I started on Radio Userland as a blogging platform, then decided a few short months later that it wasn't working for me. I moved to DasBlog in September of 2003, and posted about how to redirect all my old content and comments.

Aside, my original Radio blog is still out there, as Radio won't let you 301/302 your links, but the template included a META redirect and a Javascript timed redirect, and I've imported ALL that content into DasBlog (hence some of the funky generated titles - there was a time when Radio let you post to your blog without titles) and you'll get auto-redirected to the same post.

Now, I've got 1914 posts, counting this one. I may start doing a "greatest hits" or maybe a Popular Posts link so folks can come straight to the 10-15 posts they most likely came looking for. What do you think? LifeHacker does a Retro Roundup each week. Kind of a "this day in history" post. I could probably do one once a month. Just a thought.

 At any rate, the point of this post. I believe that a blog has a heartbeat. Mine, without me thinking about it is about 32 posts per month or 32ppm. I think it's probably good to have a consistent one, while the number isn't that important, the tempo is. There are some blogs I read that are 5ppm or less, but they make each post count. For example, Atwood's blog is consistently about 20ppm (guess) but they are 90% gold. Slashdot's is hundreds of ppm but I've stopped caring.

What is your Blog's Heartbeat? What's your Blog's PPM?

You can click on that ppm image above for a Paint.NET layered file if you want to make your own PPM image.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Hello folks. The Walk Against Diabetes approaches - it's coming up this October 20th, 2007. You can get details and join the Walk with my family and I at the American Diabetes Association. All donations go straight to the ADA for Research, Education and Advocacy.

Last year we (meaning, YOU, the readers of this blog) raised over $12,000, blowing past my goal of $10,000. Turns out we raised more money than any single team in Portland and they made me this year's Walk Ambassador.

So, I set the bar higher for 2007 with a goal of $50,000. As of this writing we are at $25,421.68! We've almost doubled last year, but only 51% of this year's goal.

What's Next

However, don't count us out yet. With only a month left I've got a few ideas up my sleeve. Along with Jason Mauer and Rich Claussen, we've got a fund raising promotion idea that will truly blow your mind. If you're in Portland, SW Washington, or willing to drive from Seattle, mark your calendars for Thursday, October 11th from about 8pm to Midnight and watch the blog for details. If you don't make it, there will be pictures and video galore - of the mind-blowing, face-melting variety. Watch for the announcement coming soon.

Again, do visit the Diabetes Site to DONATE or JOIN THE TEAM AND WALK.

Microsofties

If you're reading this blog and you work for Microsoft, perhaps you've not gotten around to giving yet. Remember that Microsoft will MATCH your donation dollar for dollar. Just visit http://give on the Microsoft Intranet, and select the Portland Chapter of the American Diabetes Association and mention "Team Hanselman" in the notes. Feel free to send me a copy of the PDF or screenshot and I'll make sure things get there they should.

What have we accomplished?

Maybe you've just started reading this blog recently? Here's some of the promotional stuff we've done this year to help raise awareness:

• We woke up at 5am to be on Good Day Oregon for 4 hours. Well, every 20 minutes for 2 minutes over a four hour period. Video highlights here.

Get Educated about Diabetes

Here's some potentially interesting Diabetes Links for you to read:

• Scott's Diabetes Explanation - The Airplane Analogy - If you read one link from this post, read this one.
• Twitting my Diabetes - I was on NBC11 in the Bay Area when I blogged my Diabetes every few minutes for an entire day.
• Diabetic Books - My personally cherry picked selection of the best Diabetes Books from Amazon.com.
• Team Hanselman and Diabetes Walk 2007 - My Personal Story about Diabetes and information on how to join us on October 20th for the Walk to Fight Diabetes. There are also banners and badges you can add to your blog or MySpace page.
• A Call for Good Design - One Guy, an Insulin Pump, 8 PDAs and an iPod - A post about the sad state of design around Diabetes Equipment.
• Arusha Tanzania 2006 Day 14 - Travelling as a Diabetic - Here's how I travel to a different country in Africa each year or so and all the things a diabetic has to deal with when out and about.
• The First 12 Hours - The Medtronic Minimed Paradigm REAL-time Continuous Glucose Monitor - This is some information about the Continuous Sensor I use as well a brief history of Diabetes.
• Diabetes Walk 2006 - The Day of the Walk - We raised $12000 last year. Here's some pictures of Team Hanselman at least year's walk.
• Type 1 Diabetes will likely be cured in my lifetime - and just in time - Will Diabetes be cured in my lifetime? I hope so, as Diabetics die of Diabetes.
• Symlin plus Insulin equals new Diabetes Therapy - I am not only on an insulin pump, but I still take shots. (A lot of folks don't know that.) Here's why.
• What is the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes- - Here's my definition. Be sure to read the comments.
• Technology and the first insulin pump - Here's a picture of an early insulin pump.
• Garrick Neal's Ten Commandments of Diabetes - My good friend's tips for good control.

Thanks

Thanks VERY much to everyone who has given so far. This has been an amazing here.

Special thanks to our MicroISV partners:

• Scott Cate and his EasySearchASP.NET gift! He donated all the proceeds to EasySearchASP.NET to the ADA from August 23rd through September 7th! Very generous and a great MicroISV idea. Thanks to the folks that purchased his product and indirectly supported the fight against Diabetes
• Leon Bambrick for donating 50% of the proceeds for TimeSnapper. If you have to keep a timecard or keep track of exactly what it is you do all day? Get TimeSnapper - It's Tivo for your Mind.
• The very awesome Martin Plante, lead at slimCODE Solutions, for starting us off by giving all the earnings from his slimKEYS product during the May 6th to May 11th to help fight diabetes. An amazing idea and a very nice gesture. Thanks Martin! Check out SlimKEYS in my post on Replacing Start Run.

Kitsch and Merchandise for the Cause

Phil Deveau emailed me and said:

"I'm going to be riding in a 50K bike ride in November of this year for diabetes (www.diabeteschallenge.com).  I'm training with a couple other guys, every day, if you have a store or something where I could purchase a team Hanselman hat, I'd be proud to wear it while I'm training and on the race day"

What a fantastically nice thing to offer! Of course, I have no merchandise, BUT I do have Jon Galloway on Skype Speeddial. Jon created a 2000x2000 Transparent PNG of the Team Hanselman Logo (also a Galloway creation), and fired it off to me, and 20 minutes later I present to you, Dear Reader, The Team Hanselman Fight Against Diabetes Store.

Just when you though you couldn't get away from my giant disembodied head, I show up on a T-Shirt. When will it end? It will never end, thanks to the Team Hanselman Diabetes Store. Madness.

 Here's your hat, Phil, along with T-Shirts, Sweats, Hoodies, Buttons, and, of course, the Team Hanselman Baby Onesie. Rock the Onesie on Oct. 20th to help in the Fight Against Diabetes.

Thanks again to you, the community. I'm proud to call you all my peeps. I appreciate you, your comments, your support, your emails. Even the anonymous cowards in the comments. Especially you. ;)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

This might be old news but it was a treat for me. In debugging some multithreaded code recently got to use the improved debugger support for threads in Visual Studio 2008 (I'm running Beta 2) that John Robbins blogged about last month and Soma blogged last week.

Take a look at the IDE screenshot below (click to Zoom).

There's a few cool and subtle things going on here. Take a look at the current instruction location in yellow. It's right at the end of the CheckDependancyCallback method - but see the gray highlight with the squiggly "thread" in the margin? That's the current location of another thread of execution.

You can name your threads now just by entering their name in the Threads toolbox window, and some threads without names will get an automatic name. You can also flag threads you're interested in watching so you don't have to remember the Thread ID.Take a look at the Debug toolbar as well. You can see the Debug Location including Process and Thread (what thread I'm currently debugging).

What a treat.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

My eighty-second podcast is up. Every copy of Windows Vista Home Premium and above has Media Center on it. Have you run your copy? Turns out that you can develop your own '10 foot apps' (that can be run with a remote from your couch) with Visual Studio Express or even Notepad. Scott talks to Charlie Owen to find out how.

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show
• ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley! Digg us at Digg Podcasts!

If you have trouble downloading, or your download is slow, do try the torrent with µtorrent or another BitTorrent Downloader.

Links from the Show

• Charlie Owen's Blog (sgt)
• Media Center Sandbox Blog (sgv)
• Media Center Community (sgw)
• Media Center 5.2 SDK (sgu)

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By