A new version of the site was posted - click through for the details on what changed.

Another computer brought back from the dead! Click through to see pictures of the process.

  My little girl is three today!

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
- Brian Kernighan

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
- Bill Gates

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.
- Jon Ribbens

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
- Charles Babbage

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
- Albert Einstein

Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
- Keith Bostic

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
- Douglas Adams

Saying that Java is good because it works on all platforms is like saying anal sex is good because it works on all genders
- Unknown

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
- Rick Osborne

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil
- C. A. R. Hoare

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen
- Edward V Berard

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems
- Jamie Zawinski

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
- Rich Cook

I don’t care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!
- Ovidiu Platon

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
- Bjarne Stroustrup

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
- Mitch Ratcliffe

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
- E. W. Dijkstra

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
- E. W. Dijkstra

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re not.
- Yoggi Berra

XML is like violence – if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.
- Unknown

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
- Fred Brooks

Heisenberg gets pulled over by the police. The officer asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?” Heisenberg answers, “No, but I know exactly where I am!”

A programmer is walking along a beach and finds a lamp. He rubs the lamp, and a genie appears. “I am the most powerful genie in the world. I can grant you any wish, but only one wish.”

The programmer pulls out a map, points to it and says, “I’d want peace in the Middle East.”

The genie responds, “Gee, I don’t know. Those people have been fighting for millennia. I can do just about anything, but this is likely beyond my limits.”

The programmer then says, “Well, I am a programmer, and my programs have lots of users. Please make all my users satisfied with my software and let them ask for sensible changes.”

At which point the genie responds, “Um, let me see that map again.”

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.

The first orders a beer, the second orders half a beer, the third orders a quarter of a beer, the fourth an eighth, and so on.

The bartender looks at the line going out the door,turns to the line and says "you guys suck!".

Then he pours two beers and walks away.

These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"

The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"

"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.

The physicist said "We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed".

The engineer said "I think I've got a few spanners in the back. I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's wrong".

The programmer said "Why don't we get going again and see if it's reproducible?"

A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and asks, "Can I join you?"

Build 31 of the site and related services has been pushed out. Click through to see the gory details.

• Marked all assemblies as needing .net 3.5
• Implemented Windows Live Writer integration.
• Now using Microsoft CDN to get jQuery 1.4.1 included on site
  http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx
  http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.1.min.js
• Fixed delete image bug
• Added new UI to edit image title/description; allow image/site owner to delete image more easily

After putting into place the basic blogging functions on my personal site using FCKEditor for rich text editing I started looking for a more feature rich way of editing my posts.

I first contemplating using this as an opportunity to practice writing a WPF application, then I read about Windows Live Writer. 

Live Writer is a desktop application that lets you create your blog entries offline.  It has decent editing/preview capabilities, lets you add files/images/etc.   It also supports plug-ins, so you can add in capabilities for inserting music, movies, etc.

Microsoft provides an SDK for this application, which tells you about it’s internal API, how to write plug-ins, and what interested me: ability to plug in your own blog engine via it’s provider API.

The SDK is a good reference, but did not help me get started quickly.  A few Google searches brought me to PlugBlog.

From the http://plugblog.codeplex.com/ page:

“PlugBlog is an open source project focused on Windows Live Writer. First goal of the project is to help developers and companies that run blogging services to integrate with Live Writer by providing them documentation, samples, screencasts and Visual Studio templates. Second goal of the project is to develop a set of Live Writer plugins and also document it so that the developers can develop plugins more easily. The project is done by students from Croatia but is open to entire community and we invite you to participate.”

The documentation they provide gives a decent background on the basics of XML-RPC, the metaWeblog API, and the basic requirements for integration with Live Writer.

Examining their documentation and the Visual Studio template they had put together gave me a very good idea what I needed to implement on my services endpoints.

Using the CookComputing.XmlRpc dll, the MetaWebLog API RFC, Microsoft’s MetaWeblog API Reference, Google searches and some trial and error I was able to implement the needed API methods.

Now I can create my blog entries offline in Live Writer – a much nice interface than any web based rich text editor!

I know that there are other desktop based blog editors out there, perhaps another day I’ll explore those to see if they offer a richer experience.

-- Erik Hoffmann

(** In the course of writing this, I also discovered that Microsoft has an C# code sample of implementing the MetaWeblog API here.  I don’t know if I just missed that link earlier or if it’s newer content)