Saturday, May 29, 2004

Should I continue...

to post notifications of GDI+ FAQ and Windows Forms tips and tricks here or is it sufficient to assume that people who are interested will subscribe to the feeds for those services?

(if you're interested I updated the double buffer article with VB code today)

Peace of mind.. at a price

I just bought the MailWasher spam remover. It works really well but has a slight disadvantage inasmuch as my mailing system that answers all my PayPal purchase notifications now doesn't run automatically.

Mailwasher examines your POP or IMAP mailbox and marks suspect mail for deletion but if the automatic send and receive runs from outlook or whatever client you use, the mail is still downloaded, spam and all. You have to explicitly process mail in MailWasher to get rid of the junk and then run the send-receive manually.

I must say though, I am impressed with it's catch-rate.


Friday, May 28, 2004

Ppl i h8. u?

I h8 ppl who wrt 2 me like ths.

any 1 who wrts 2 me in ths style will b ignored!

It's 2 much trub 2 decipher & it bugs me.

At least people should have the decency to write as though they care!
If it's too much bother to put all the characters in a word I'll start doing that with code I supply and let them figure it out for themselves!!

Strategies

My site bobpowell.net will be changing radically soon. The content will remain similar but I'm going to a more web-based system for Well Formed and other new content.

I just wrote an RSS feed in ASP+ that builds a feed on demand and reads the database of articles to keep content fresh.

Well Formed will be moving to an online format so subscribers can access it and code without having to store it locally and to prevent me from having to e-mail to all the users each month. I get a lot of subscriber mail bounces these days and there are so many people that I can't spend time chasing their cases any more.

All the xray tools will leave that site and be moved to a new commercial site. I have a bunch of other tools but havent finished productization yet so it's another thing i need to do. When the commercial site is up and running It'll inspire me.

I want bobpowell.net to become a repository for knowledge and divorce it from the rest of my business.

As a result of all this, the site might be in a state of flux for a while. I just noticed that a feature I'm preparing has escaped into the wild before it was ready.

Ah well, back to the old grindstone.

Blogs

Rob Scoble is in new-scientist, Scott Wingo is on BBC radio. What is it with bloggers?

Some may say that it's just a way of self publicizing but is there more to blogging than talking about blogging?

Scoble seems to spend a lot of time writing about the process of blogging. He's an RSS nut-case who would have the whole world subscribe to his full-content blog. I say that's ok but only if you can afford to provide the bandwidth necessary for the world to hit your RSS feed once an hour. For people in the real world, it's probably overkill. If everyone demanded full content RSS feeds the internet would grind to a halt. We can afford to do it if we subscribe to very few full-content feeds but it should never be the norm.

Scott Wingo was probably one of the first true bloggers when taken in the current context. His MFC FAQ was a regular release that he worked for long hours on getting right. He used this communications vehicle as a marketing tool that sold Stingray software components to the developer community. Scott's writing skills are excellent and he pens a coherent and readable paragraph (although you'd never think so looking at his recent work in the eBay strategies blog [Sorry Scott]) He was the absolute master of guerilla marketing and someone who I respect enormously. I'd like to see Scott doing more of the real stuff.

Perhaps the process of putting your ideas down for everyone to see clarifies it in your own mind. After all. What use is an idea if it cannot be communicated? Perhaps bloggers are the sort of people who write things in their diaries and then leave the book open in the hope that someone will read it. Maybe they just need to be seen.

Do you blog? Why?

Friday, May 21, 2004

New GDI+ FAQ article

The GDI+ FAQ now contains an article that explains how to create multi-frame TIFF files and includes code in C# and VB that demonstrates the process with a neat drag and drop file creator.

RSS feed changed

This might not reach all of the intended audience :-/

Roy Osherove's SiteFeeder server seems to be offline. The site feed that was on here is gone and updates aren't getting out.

All is not lost however because Blogger now provides syndication via it's own system.

Check out the XML feed from the button in the left-hand column.

Sorry for any inconveinience. The matter was out of my control.

Saturday, May 08, 2004

Support, or lack of it.

My euphoria at getting the site moved to the new servers was short lived because I soon discovered that it was impossible to edit the information that I had transferred there. Frontpage refused to connect either to allow me to open the site for editing or to publish changes I had made using my development system. Of course, the first thing that I did was to read the frequently asked questions lists and knowledge base articles on the providers site but soon have to resort to contacting their support department. As usual, I got the standard support letters with links to all of their helpful frequently asked questions even though I had mentioned in my mile to the support department that I had actually read all of their frequently asked questions and could I please have some real support now.

When dealing with these people I get the vision in my head of spotty faced youths who act as salesman in companies like Dixons (the British equivalent of Best Buy ) who know absolutely nothing about the product they are selling and who quote from a standard set of texts and are incapable of making an independent intelligent judgment on their own.

After having my "support" case passed backwards and forwards between five different personnel, each of them having sent me the same knowledge base articles, I discovered, through my own hard work and investigation, that the problem is indeed at their end and is because the site does not support the authentication scheme required by frontpage to connect through a proxy server.

Hopefully, I can persuade them to adjust this because it seems to me that using a proxy server is not an uncommon thing these days and not to support such a thing is ridiculous. I certainly hope that my continued relationship with Brinksters "support" team does not continue in this way otherwise this won't be the only move I make to a new server.

Spoke too soon.

The site is up but the email isn't.

BobPowell.net back up.

Wow, quick and efficient changeover to Brinkster. The site was only down for 12 hours or so. Business as usual resumes!

Friday, May 07, 2004

BobPowell.net is offline...

I just cancelled the old hosting account. Mail and web will be offline 'till the new stuff propogates.

I feel kinda sad. Don't know why.

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Moving day is set for May 7

The up and coming move of the BobPowell.net servers is set for May 7-9. The domain itself has been moved from Yahoo and the server already set up on Brinkster. Bandwidth is going up to 300Gigs per month and I'll be able to run ASPX applications so the possibilities will be greatly increased.