Essence Theme

The current theme on this site was created by Jelle Druyts.  I just emailed him looking for an idea to solve the problem of the left column dropping to the bottom of the page if you narrow the window.

I was kinda suprised to see his site when I clicked on the link for the theme creator because I have been to his blog a few times before, obviously for some .net programming stuff.

I am going to take a look at his categories b/c I long ago gave up on using categories in BlogX b/c you could only search in 1 category.  So if I knew I had saved some URL in my blog I would have to search in every category in order to find it.

Now that I am using dasBlog, I should be reorganizing my categories.

Morning Commute

I tried wearing a new pair of shoes yesterday (big mistake) and on my walk to the train I got a giant blister on my left foot.

Damn it hurts!

So today I decided to drive to avoid the walk to/from the train station, and something terrible happened.  I actually ended up looking for “the mix” on my car radio.  I am ashamed.

Kathleen has been putting it on every morning, and my usual stations were not doing anything intersting.  The Score had Mike North saying something racist, 720 and 780 were on commerical, 850 was some terrible show I have never heard before, and ESPN was talking about golf.

Lucky for me the mix quickly went to commerical, so I was able to come to my senses.

Testing Trackback / Image / File / Google filters.

With this post I am testing out some features of dasBlog.

I am linking to a Trackback faq page by Shai Coggins seen below thanks to the upload image feature (not bad eh?).

It looks like dasBlog just throws these uploaded images into a single folder, which I guess means I could overwrite a file if 2 were uploaded with the same name.  Lemme try…

Yep, it overwrote it.  I guess I will have to be careful about that possible occurance.

On to the file upload option:

Sequencediagram_1.png (1.84 KB)

Interesting, thats pretty cool.

The last thing to test is the content filter ability.

This seems a bit much, you type in a bunch of code and it will output some standard string.  For example, this should produce a google search: $g(chrismay) and this should produce an IMDB search: $imdb(The Matrix).

Here goes…

Update
Well it seems that everything worked pretty well except maybe the trackback isn’t working.  The URL for the trackback appears to not be saved when I save this article, but maybe that is by design.  I will have to look into it.  I posted a comment on the article I was trying to trackback… maybe that output is cached and it will show up later (?), doupt it.  Here is the article I am dealing with.

dasBlog and httpfilters

Apparently there is a cool blogging app called dasBlog, which means “That Blog” in German :), that provides a lot of better features when compared with my old blogX, and even better it provides a direct upgrade from blogX, so I don’t have to write my own scripts to do the conversion to what I was going to use (newblog on DNN).

The downside is that I had already written the necessary code to parse and replace … well… “code”… in my blog posts into pretty formatted HTML.

It worked like this… I would type something like

Dim s as New System.Text.StringBuilder 

and it comes out looking like:

.csharpcode
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: Courier New , Courier, Monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}

.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }

.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }

.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }

.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }

.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }

.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }

.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }

.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }

.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }

.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}

.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

Dim s as New System.Text.StringBuilder 

So that is pretty cool… but I think I can get the same result, and maybe make it even cleaner, by using an httpfilter.

HttpFilters are registered at application startup and are sent the html just before it gets passed to the browser, so you can use the filters as like a last change modification mechanism. Hopefully I can write some regexps to parse out what I want and replace it with the new stuff.

Death of Dime (and WS-Attachments)

DIME and WS-Attachments are basically dead.

MTOM (SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) has shown up on MSDN (xml messaging page), and DIME, SwA, and PASwA are marked as superseded.

I have seen some places describing MTOM as basically the same thing as XOP (XML-binary Optimized Packaging), not sure if that is true or whatever, but it seems the message is clear: DIME is yesterdays news.