Scott Hanselman

My sixty-sixth podcast is up, and Carl and I take a moment to discuss Home Networking. We chat about the benefits of Wired vs. Wireless, when you might saturate your network and security. 

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Links from the Show

More on Alternate Linksys Firmware (pkx)
On Losing Data and a Family Backup Strategy (pkz)
Leaving Comcast for Verizon Fios - Upgrading the Home Network to Fiber Optic (pl1)
Configuring PPTP VPN with alternate Linksys Router Firmware (pky)

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.

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I actually appreciate it when folks email me to let me know about a comma fault or incorrect use of an apostrophe. I tend to screw up a lot and Craig Andera always drops me a note. He went to a better college than I. Er, me?

Hopefully folks don't think TOO poorly of me when I misspell words. Of course, I think horribly of YOU when YOU misspell.

The real question is, how concerned should I be when my very expensive Lenovo ThinkPad T60p is about to have it's its ;) BIOS flashed by a Utility that's spelled (spelt?) itself "Utiltiy".

Seriously, I think that the more folks use your product, the more effort you should put into Spell Check. Don't let the programmer check his or her own work. Get an editor. Someone with a B.A. in English.

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.

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Windows Live Writer, Microsoft's Free Offline Blog Editor, is updated to Beta 2. It was getting pretty quiet there and I was thinking it had disappeared but they're back with a pile of good changes. Some of the changes are "it's about time" like inline spell checking and Paste Special support.

They support RSD (Really Simple Discovery, and have since the last build) so if you're running a Daily Build of DasBlog then you've already got this support. Just tell Windows Live Writer about your blog by entering your main URL and WLW handles the rest by interrogating the blog for its capabilities. This will also allow those of you who want to upload images directly via the metaWebLog newMediaObject method (Translation: You can upload images over HTTP directly from WLW) rather than using FTP.

More interestingly is their new Windows Live Writer Provider Customization API, which allows you to not only override the RSD if you like, but also includes a way to more complexly describe your blog's abilities. It also lets us have some control over the Weblog Pane within the editor, including adding buttons and what not.

I just banged together this integration with Alexander Gross' help...you can visit your blog, edit online, or see your statistics without leaving Windows Live Writer. There's lots of potentially cool customizations using their polling notification system. You could be notified of new comments on you blog while you're writing a post within WLW.

One more subtle thing we were able to get working was a "post and continue editing online...

This will do just that, it'll send your current post up to DasBlog, then launch your browser and you can continue editing.

With all these features, make sure you've launched Internet Explorer and logged into DasBlog with the "Remember Me" checkbox checked, otherwise you'll get "you aren't authorized to access this page."

It's easy to hack these things together. Just create an XML file named wlwmanifest.xml and put it in the root of your blog. Here's mine:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
<manifest xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wlw/manifest/weblog">
  <options>
      <supportsEmbeds>Yes</supportsEmbeds>
  </options>
  <weblog>
      <imageUrl>images/dasbloglogo-16x16.png</imageUrl>
      <watermarkImageUrl>images/dasblogwatermark-84x84.png</watermarkImageUrl>
      <homepageLinkText>View your blog</homepageLinkText>
      <adminLinkText>Edit your blog</adminLinkText>  
      <adminUrl><![CDATA[
          {blog-homepage-url}Login.aspx
      ]]></adminUrl>
      <postEditingUrl><![CDATA[
          {blog-homepage-url}EditEntry.aspx?guid={post-id}
      ]]></postEditingUrl>
  </weblog>
  <buttons>
      <button>
      <id>1</id>
      <text>Statistics</text>
      <imageUrl>images/dasblogactivity-24x24.png</imageUrl>
      <clickUrl><![CDATA[ 
         {blog-homepage-url}Referrers.aspx
      ]]></clickUrl>
      <contentUrl><![CDATA[ 
         {blog-homepage-url}Referrers.aspx
      ]]></contentUrl>
      <contentDisplaySize>480,300</contentDisplaySize>
    </button>    
  </buttons>
</manifest>

I'm really interested to see what other cool DasBlog integration ideas (and better-formatted custom mini-pages for inline dropdowns...in the example above, I'm just showing the standard activity page) folks come up with.

What ideas do you have?

• Last 10 comments, linked directly to the comment.
• Chart of recent activity? Comments, traffic, etc. Perhaps from FeedBurner?
• Link to the DasBlog Configuration Page

Here's a zip with my poor-man's integration:

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.

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What a cool conference I wish I was going to...

"TED started out as an annual conference in Monterey devoted to Technology, Entertainment and Design."

...everything about their site, their style, their recordings, their conference is fantastic. Even their Session Schedule is a work of art and an experiment in User Experience Design. Their TEDGlobal 2007 conference is in Arusha, Tanzania, next week. We spent this last Christmas there...I wish we could be there again for this event.

If you're any kind of nerd I hope you've checked out Photosynth before...if not, check it out now, or watch the Video of Blaise Aguera y Arcas presenting Photosynth along with Seadragon at Ted this last March. There's going to be some really interesting possibilities as innovations like this converge with new form factors like Microsoft Surface.

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.

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Stunning move by Google today in the Rich Internet Application space. While most of us (myself included) are off debating Flash vs. Silverlight vs. Apollo vs. Whatever, Google introduces Google Gears...at technology all of the above (or none of the above) can utilize...

This is a huge move and is quite brilliant. In one seemingly innocuous move (and one tiny 700k (yes, 700K) download) Google is well positioned to get Google Docs, including Writely, Spreadsheet and Presentation, along with who knows what else, enabled for offline use. And the whole thing is Open Sourced via the New BSD License.

Here's a snippet of Javascript that is used to detect if Google Gears in installed. Note the three (currently) different ways, one each for Firefox, IE and Safari.

 var factory = null;

  // Firefox
  if (typeof GearsFactory != 'undefined') {
    factory = new GearsFactory();
  } else {
    // IE
    try {
      factory = new ActiveXObject('Gears.Factory');
    } catch (e) {
      // Safari
      if (navigator.mimeTypes["application/x-googlegears"]) {
        factory = document.createElement("object");
        factory.style.display = "none";
        factory.width = 0;
        factory.height = 0;
        factory.type = "application/x-googlegears";
        document.documentElement.appendChild(factory);
      }
    }
  }

To the right is a dialog box that pops up to let you know that Google Gears is going to store data locally. Gears uses SQLite to store information, and you use SQL from your JavaScript to CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) your data. I wonder how would would store data securely?

If you like, you can explore the databases that are created using SQLite Database Browser. This starts to explain why SQLite was a 2005 Google Open Source Award Winner. ;)

The local storage shows up when running Internet Explorer on Windows under:

C:\Users\Scott\AppData\LocalLow\
Google\Google Gears for Internet Explorer\
www.yourdomain.com\http_80

Within Firefox, the local storage databases go in:

...\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
<profile>\Google Gears for Firefox

So it seems I can't go to a Gears-enabled site in IE and later in Firefox and share data. Each browser gets it's own data storage. That means num of browsers * num of gears enabled uris = num of SQLite databases. For folks who run more than one browser, this makes the whole local storage thing a tricky issue, but I can understand why they'd segment databases by browser. I disagree, but I see their point of view.

Gears also includes a thread pool "tiny process pool" like construct that lets you perform CPU-intensive things without triggering the "Stop unresponsive script" dialog box, but you can't touch the DOM. Again, very cool and very intelligent tradeoffs.

• Google Gears Developer site
• Google Gears Frequently asked questions
• Google Gears Developer Forum

Things are looking up, methinks. It'd be nice if Gears-like (Gearsesque?) functionality could get built into next-gen browsers the way that XmlHttpRequest did. Seems like only yesterday I was deep in the middle of the Great Cookie Scare of 1995, explaining to client what Cookies were...NO, they can't write out a megabyte sized cookie, no cookies aren't programs...glad that's over. If we've going to build some rich stuff, let's stop with the Flash Shared Objects and IsolatedStorage already and get the browser to solve this problem. Kudos for Google and let's pray there's no offline ads...

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.

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