Scott Hanselman

I get a lot of email sourced from this blog. It's really getting crazy. I used to get a few a day, but now it's at least 15 a day. Seems lots are from students who want all my interview questions answered. Sorry, it'd take a while to type them, and if I had them, I'd have them posted. :)

Since the Ultimate Tools List I've got a lot of these:

Dear Scott,

Yada yada, love the list, yada yada, keep it up. I'm the President|CTO|Owner of yada yada and we have this innovative product called Yada that is amazing. Here's a free copy|key|download|developeredition, and I hope you add it to the list!

By the way, I turned off referrers so the whole blog should load faster now. I log only trackbacks. The Ultimate Tools List had 6746 unique referrers (referrers are not people who visit, but unique places folks came from) and it was loading so slowly it was starting to hang FireFox.

You may notice that most of the software on the Utils List is free. That's by design. Truth be told, I'll pay happily for software that will change my life, no hesitation. Especially when I notice that I'm on my fourth or fifth "30-day trial" I know I need to buy that software. But, I'm a cheap bastard at heart, it's part of my Scottish heritage; we are bred cheap.

"You'll never catch a cold from a Scot, because a Scot never gives anything away."

If you send me a free copy of your software, of course I will install it and use it. I will try anything free for a week (or until it sucks or blue screens me) and if I love it, I'm happy to post about it. I love MaxiVista, I love CodeRush, I love PeterBlum's VAM, amongst many others. But I loved them from afar, like a software stalker, before they knew me, not for any other reason. I'm not into the whole paid sponsorship thing. I'm a shill for good software and cool products because I love good software and I'm enthusiastic.

If I dig your stuff, I'll totally review it and spread the word. If I thank you and you never hear from me, your software didn't fill a vacuum in my life. It wasn't an ideavirus.

All that said, I get a lot of random email and I appreciate it all. Today's interesting email comes from a dude at Dell. He didn't send me free stuff. Instead he came with an interesting question and the answer was a cool product.

He knew I liked multiple monitors so he wanted to know how to get output from FOUR separate machines on to ONE monitor in a split screen.

My friend, you buy a quad splitter combo KVM dealie (PDF datasheet). This isn't just a splitter/duplicator or signal amplifier, it is actually a "VGA Aggregator." That's cool. That'd be a nice way to monitor four machines rendering in a farm, or a Web server farm or be a freaky multitasker. I don't know this company, but I think their stuff is shiny.

I like getting interesting questions. Now, if only I could get more free stuff...

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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Yay! Wesner has updated the Notepad2 source with Ruby Syntax Highlighting and released both the source and the EXE. I've just happily overwritten my old copy with his new one.

He is looking for mirrors. I wonder if Flo will step up and take the update?

Update: I've mirrored them to take pressure off Wesner.

• File Attachment: notepad2.zip (261 KB)
• File Attachment: np2src.zip (232 KB)

Now playing: Will Smith - Switch

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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If you're a designer, we'd like a few new blog designs for DasBlog. We'd love to include your themes in the distribution. Email me if you'd like design a new theme for us.

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

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Working on the dasBlog bug list this evening/morning. I'm running the latest source that's checked in now.

We're getting close to a 1.8 release. However, you're always welcome to download the source and follow the "head" of CVS, compiling it yourself.

One (small) milestone - well, less of a milestone and more of a ToDo, our RSS validates against Feed Validator as does our ATOM.

In the conformance department, a few small things, like a language element for the RSS Feed and xml:lang for the ATOM. Working on things like umlauts and high latin in blog post titles, hyphens in weblog vdirs, an easier setup with a VBS.

Also, I'm putting together a smoke test using Ruby and Watir that should make regression testing way easier.

There's also a number of small security fixes to plug holes in referrer logs and some cookie efficiencies.

Omar has also checked in some code that should take care of this trackback spam issue by including total conformance with the trackback spec (most blogs are NOT comformant and that causes most of their trackback spam problems) as well as blacklist support using our existing referral blacklist and MTBlackList nightly download job. Also, the obfuscated javascript/mailto: links work in all browsers now.

Omar also added a great new feature called "theme manifests." This means you don't have to edit the web.config to introduce a new theme to dasBlog. You'll include a theme.manifest file that includes all the themes info and assets and dasBlog will find it automatically. This is intended to promote easier theme sharing and removes a whole section in the web.config.

Finally, there's been a lot of talk around DasBlog's (some say formerly) excellent MailToWeblog support. Things seemed to break between 1.6 and 1.7, but it seems that it was likely the introduction of Thunderbird and it's use of multipart/related and multipart/alternative that was the culprit. Needless to say, I've added a number of new code paths in MailToWeblog that have pass all the tests so far. We also added SMTP Authentication support from Ryan Gregg.

MailToWeblog in DasBlog takes new posts via email with the email subject in this format:

• SECRETWORD Blog Post Title [category1;category2;category3]

SECRETWORD is the prepended keyword that will cause dasBlog to post your post. This is configurable. The list of categories is separated by semicolons ";" and appears within brackets [].

If you send email and HTML'ed inline images, those emails are automatically stored and the whole email is posted as is. If you send plain text email with attached images, those images are optionally thumbnailed and linked to, and of course extracted and stored on the server. Much of this is functionality from previous versions that was a bit fragile and is now less so. Thanks to Clemens and Luke for their early work.

Coming soon!

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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There's a new kind of developer community event out there, and we're bringing one to Portland this July 23rd and 24th. It's called Code Camp and it's been a lot of fun and a great success all over the East Coast this past year.

The original Code Camp Manifesto was by Thom Robbins starting in Boston. Portland's will be the first Code Camp west of the Mississippi!

This event is TOTALLY FREE. It's not meant to be a "come listen to pundits talk" - it's meant for you. If you have always wanted to present, then come present. The list of Tracks is up and you can just email the Track Chair and tell them what you'd like to present. We're still taking talks for many tracks so this is a great opportunity for you to share the useful things you've been exploring.

That said, we do have a pretty amazing list of presenters already, 23 to be exact as of the time of this writing, including Chris Kinsman, Ed Kaim, Andy Dunn (a fellow Coding4Fun author), and Ted Neward as well as locals like Chris Sells, Rich Claussen, Chris Goldfarb, Jason Olson, Jason Mauer (our DE) and Rory (only one name, like "Cher"). Helping organize this all along with Jason and Rich is Stuart Celarier, INETA Iluminatus who is also a world class juggler.

This isn't a .NET event, it's Code Camp. That means we'll have talks on Ruby, Rails, Squeak, Boo, whatever. We'll talk about XML, we'll talk about ASP.NET, and we'll talk about Ajax.

I'm chairing the "Hobbyist" track, so I'll personally give at least one talk with content from my Coding4Fun column and probably a talk on Ultimate Tools. I'm currently looking for talks, so if you have a talk that would be interesting to the Hobbyist programmer, email me and cc: stuart.celarier@ineta.org. Some ideas are: Automating your house with X10 and .NET, Using Java to talk to your Tivo, Making Coffee with JavaScript...you get the idea. You'll speak for 60 minutes and have Q&A for 15, so be prepared, but be prepared to have fun.

For new speakers, we'll have an orientation and presentation tips talk the Friday evening before the event.

Join us at Code Camp Portland, this July 23rd and 24th at Reed College, in Portland, OR [Map]. Perhaps if you're in Salem, Eugene, Seattle or Olympia you'd like to get a bus and head down to hang out?

Register at our Yahoo Group.

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

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