Kevin Dente's Blog

The Blip in the Noise

May 2003 - Posts

Move to weblogs.asp.net

As one might have expected, the move to the new weblogs.asp.net domain wreaked havoc with NewsGator. I had to play yet another round of "clean up the duplicates" - a game which is growing quite tiresome. The whole problem of duplicate posts is really my only big issue with the blog experience. NewsGator does it's best to deal with the problem, but it can only do so much (in this case even the GUIDs changed). Hopefully incremental feeds will help alleviate this problem.

On the plus side, NewsGator seems to have recognized the redirect and automatically updated my subscriptions to use the new URL. How sweet is that?

 

Posted Friday, May 30, 2003 1:46 PM by kevindente | 2 comment(s)

Setec Astronomy

And as long as I'm ranting, let me mention how tedious it is to see "I know something I can't tell" posts from Microsofties. If you can't tell, than be quiet.

    - Mike Gunderloy, The Daily Grind

Amen, brother. Glad to see I'm not the only one getting tired of this trend.

 

Posted Wednesday, May 28, 2003 11:43 AM by kevindente | 1 comment(s)

ZIP in the .NET framework

The fact that this article needs to exist is just wrong. ZIP compression support should be a part of the core framework. Hell, it's been in Java since 1.0.

Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2003 3:21 PM by kevindente | 4 comment(s)

Caught up

Whew. Just finished catching up with my unread blog entries. Though not by reading all 966 posts, of course.

The end result? A half-dozen new blogs added to my blogroll. *sigh*

Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2003 3:05 PM by kevindente | with no comments

The stagnation of IE

E&A post about the comatose state of IE's evolution at Microsoft. I've been thinking about posting on the very same topic - I see I'm not the only one feeling this way. This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the problem with monopolies. Microsoft now dominates the browser market, and have little reason to innovate. I'm looking for an excuse to switch off of IE, but I haven't found it yet. I continue to evaluate Mozilla from time to time, but I still find it too piggy. And I still like IE's ability to run multiple instances of the browser process (maybe there's a way to do this in Moz but I haven't found it). Firebird has potential, as it seems design address the bloat factor of Mozilla. I'll be keeping an eye on it.

A completely revamped Favorites system (the file system/shortcut-based model SUCKS - Netscape had a better system in 1.0, for God's sake), popup killing, full support for the DOM APIs (including events), better developer tools in the browser (ala Mozilla) - these are the things I would kill for.

Oh yeah, and fixing that stupid bug that causes new browser windows to take an eternity to launch if you have multiple IE windows open. Geez, that bugs me.

Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2003 12:21 PM by kevindente | 5 comment(s)

RSS - the bad

Hi, my name is Kevin, and I'm a blogaholic.

I just got back from a conference that kept me out of the office for a week and a half. I had 966 new blog postings to read.

Clearly my blogroll is out of control. Drastic action may be required.

Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2003 9:05 AM by kevindente | 2 comment(s)

Trick for command-line junkies

I'm still very much a command-line kind of guy. I get around the Windows UI just fine, but frequently I find it quicker to just drop to a command prompt to accomplish certain tasks (especially since Explorer generally sucks at launching apps with command line params). I like the "My Documents" feature of Windows, as it keeps documents easily accessible in from the Windows Explorer. However, when I want to perform a command line operation in My Documents, it's a pain to navigate there, even with path completion. Plus, C:\Documents and Settings\Kevind\My Documents is a long string, so my cursor starts 2/3 of the way over in the window before I've typed a single character.

I recently hit upon the idea to create an NTFS junction point off the root directory (I called in mydocs) that points to the "My Documents" directory. I used the Junction tool from the wizards at Sysinternals. It worked like a charm, and made "My Documents" much more accessible from the command line. Of course, this solution wouldn't work too well on a machine that is shared amongst multiple people. But for me it works peachy.

 

 

Posted Wednesday, May 14, 2003 2:38 PM by kevindente | 7 comment(s)

Virtual PC at Microsoft
Several of the Microsofties have been singing the praises of Virtual PC for development work recently. As a long time VMWare user, I share their enthusiasm for this type of technology. For me, it falls into the "how did we ever live without it" category. My biggest hope is that Microsoft comes up with a sensible licensing policy around the thing. The "each VM requires an OS license" model imposed for VMWare users is exceedingly onerous.
 
Unfortunately, there's a chance Microsoft will now be able to license-and-support-policy VMWare right out of existence. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Those VMWare guys do incredible things with software, and I have massive respect for them.

Posted Thursday, May 08, 2003 12:21 PM by kevindente | 1 comment(s)

What's going on here?
First InfoWorld and eWeek, then Microsoft's MSDN site, and now PC Magazine. It seems like everybody is going through a major site redesign these days. Is it the first hint of spring in the air (at least in the Bay Area, where winter is just ending finally)? A case of "the other guy is doing it"? Or is everybody just feeling stale at the same time? Wackiness.
 
One disturbing trend is that the sites seem to be moving toward smaller fonts and packing more text on the screen.  Personally, I find the new multi-column eWeek layout to be difficult to read. They also don't seem to adjust their text size based on the browser font preference (although maybe they never did). Also, PCMag's site is a fixed width, it doesn't grow with the width of the browser window. Tre lame.
 
 

Posted Wednesday, May 07, 2003 6:58 PM by kevindente | with no comments

WINIPCFG for XP
 
 
Nice. I've often wondered why Microsoft never ported WINIPCFG from Win9x to the NT-based operating systems. Finally someone else got around to it.

Posted Wednesday, May 07, 2003 11:58 AM by kevindente | 10 comment(s)

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