Archives for December 2009

December 2009 (8)
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Bye, Dad

Those of you who follow me may have noticed a that I've been somewhat offline for the past week. The reason is that my father had a cardiac arrest overnight on Saturday/Sunday, 12/13 December, just over a week ago. Since then he's been in the Cardiac Care Unit at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough. I flew out from Colorado the next day, arriving the Tuesday, to see him. For the past week, I and my sister have been taking turns at looking after my mother and driving her to and from the hospital (it's over 90 minutes away). There's not been much time for being online, besides which I have to borrow a neighbor's broadband with which to do it. […]

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Converting to the open source GraffitiCMS

Once GraffitiCMS had been posted as open source, I downloaded it with the intent of upgrading this site to it. There wasn't much news on the Graffiti CodePlex page about what had changed since the latest official release (1.2). In particular, no news whether any of the proposed plans from the beginning of the year had been implemented, partially or not. […]

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Wacky text format with Posterous

This has got to be seen to be believed. When you email a multi-paragraph post to Posterous, it formats it, shall we say, differently than anything else I've seen. […]

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Quick blogging via Posterous

Back a couple of months ago I set up a Posterous account as an experiment to see whether I could get anything between micro-blogging (Twitter) and macro-blogging (my main blog, using Windows Live Writer). Posterous was interesting because you compose a blog post as an email sent to a special email address, so it would work from my iPhone as well as from Outlook and Gmail. Worked pretty well, except for one thing: I could not cross-post my Posterous posts to my personal blog. They were arriving, but GraffitiCMS was rejecting them due to no category being present. So I shelved the experiment. […]

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GraffitiCMS has been released as Open Source

It's finally happened. After almost a year of no progress on GraffitiCMS, the blogging engine I use for this site, it's now available as open source on CodePlex, using a Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). Go get it! […]

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Backing up SQL Server database with GoDaddy

Nearly two weeks ago, I converted this site to use SQL Server as the database engine. Without a doubt, having the database on another server separate from the main web server has helped the speed of this site dramatically, so much so that I've added features like the "top five most popular posts" gadget to the first sidebar and "other similar posts" to each blog post (when they're displayed on their own). […]

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Street View through Stonehenge

Something I hadn't realized before (and I certainly don't remember reading about) is that Google have added Street View through the stones at Stonehenge. […]

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An experiment with IM

From a post by James A Robertson on his blog, I learned you can add Google Talk to an ordinary webpage. That is, you can have either an iFramed chat box on the page (which is what he's doing) or a link to Google Talk. […]

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