Archives
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Aggregator Updates
You can download the latest aggregator build from here. You will need MSDE installed and you will need to run the included SQL script to create some tables. This version adds persistence support for feeds and posts for those of you who emailed me and told me you wanted to start using it as your default aggregator already. As you can tell from the screenshot below, there are some minor UI tweaks in addition to the DB support. Some of the more noticeable UI changes are that posts that have already been read are now dimmed so that you can tell them apart from unread posts and post counts are added to the junk and unread messages folders.
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Rory + M$ = Love
Rory has been assymilated...
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Bloggregator Sneak Peak Download Available
Ok. All you guys that are drooling and foaming at the mouth for a little preview of the Bloggregator, you can download it here. This download is only for fanatics, it doesn't do much of anything except load RSS 2.0 / RDF / RSS 1.0 feeds, look cool, and let you preview the p2p search stuff. The search should work fine behind NAT/Firewall assuming there are some “supernodes” online to do a bit of message routing for you (aka. people who aren't behind firewalls). Still a lot of code before the release of course, but the basics are up and running.
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Uber Bloggregator
A long while back, I posted about some a client side blogging experimental app that I had begun work on. Well, I am actually bringing that experimental stuff out into the open and am slinging out code for the coolest blog tool you can imagine. I've attached a screen shot of the progress so far below, but just to name a few highlites (other than the cool UI), I have built-in support for bayesian filters which allow you to mark posts as “Junk“ posts and enable the aggregator to automatically filter out unwanted posts. This is very useful if you subscribe to some of the massive aggregate feeds out there and have a hard time keeping up with what you are interested in because of the plethora of lame posts. There is also some other things I'll be building with the filters that are equally cool, but that is the one that is up and running right now. Additionally, the application contains a bit of P2P functionality that can enable all sorts of cool scenarios. For example, lets say that you are on vacation for a week and end up missing out on a bunch of content from your favorite feed. With a normal aggregator, you would be lost without any hope. However, this baby lets you search for other users who have subscribed to the same feed and download missing posts or even download posts from before you had subscribed to the blog. In any case... just a sneak peak. I'll try to make a preview available some time soon so that you can play around with it a bit.
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WSE 2.0: Setting a Bad Example
Today, while working on a uber cool blog tool that I will be talking more about shortly, I needed to utilize WSE 2.0 for authentication. WSE 2.0 authentication is fairly straightforward (though not a walk in the park if you haven't done it before). However, unlike WSE 1.0, WSE 2.0 goes ahead and automatically authenticates your users using Windows auth unless you specify otherwise. Changing this behavior is just a matter of implementing your own UsernameTokenManager class and updating your web.config files. This, of course, is all very brain dead stuff if you have an example or some good docs to walk you through the process. However, the official MSDN examples and all the other guys writing WSE code seem to have been working with another version of WSE, because their examples don't do jack as they are written. It took me a while to figure out why the hell their code was malfunctioning, but finally, with the help of the WSE 2.0 tracing utility, I determined the root of the problem: the wsse namespace used by the UsernameToken class has been changed to match the OASIS specs and is not the one listed in all the damn examples! So, if you are thinking about using WSE 2.0 with some custom authentication, keep in mind that you will need to use this namespace if you are passing UsernameToken credentials:
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FlashPaper 2 Available as Standalone
Great news, Macromedia's slick PDF alternative FlashPaper is now available for pre-order: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashpaper/
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Tablet PC
My laptop has been acting up, so I bit the bullet and purchased a Toshiba Portage tablet PC (M200) this week. If you are in the market for a Tablet, I highly recommend the Tablet from Toshiba. First off, Toshiba's tablet is the only Tablet with SXGA res that I know of 1024x768 just doesn't cut it for me. Second, it is one of the few that supports 2GB of Ram (Most top out at 1 GB). And third, it is the only one that comes with a nice nVidia GeForce FX card. On the downside, it doesn't come with a cd/dvd, so you will have to drop a few hundred bucks on a USB powered one.
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Bobby Fisher Found
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Microsoft Abandons Wi-Fi
According to this article in Business 2.0, Microsoft is shuting down it's Wi-Fi hardware operations. I'm sad to hear this. I have a Microsoft wireless router and a Microsoft hub and both are excellent pieces of hardware that I'd recommend over anything else I've used. The configuration utility on the router is a fine piece of work and the hub has some cool features like the ability to automatically detect when you plug in the wrong type of cable and reconfigure itself (for instance, if you plug a computer to computer cable from your hub to your laptop instead of a computer to hub cable, it detects this and everything works fine). In any case, all the MS hardware I have used rocks, so I hope they can get their foot in the door somewhere else and stay there for a while.