Obama Axes Pentagon Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In Shape Of Dragon
Jul0
Obama Axes Pentagon Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In Shape Of Dragon
Shooting the 1756 British Sea Service pistol
Jun0
I spent the day Saturday at my friend Jerry’s “home shooting range”. He has a really nice setup for a pistol range with 3 sides made of earth berm. He fabricated a target frame that could hold up to 3 man-sized silhouette targets.
We spent roughly 4 hours shooting 2 blackpowder pistols: Jerry’s 1851 Navy Colt (repro) and my 1756 British Sea Service pistol (repro). Here’s a video of mee shooting left-handed (after I cut my right index finger on the the flint… haha).
PS - No pirates were harmed during the making of this film.
Bing has SEO community theorizing ad nauseam
May1
If you haven’t seen or heard of Microsoft’s new search/decision engine dubbed Bing, go check it out here. Bing is supposed to be the next generation search tool that will allow a user to not only search for information on the internet, but also categorize the information into taxonomic navigation treatments in the UI like faceted navigation, side-by-side comparisons (i.e. products) for the user to make their search experience more rewarding. It also claims to have some strength when dealing with localized data, i.e. restaurant reviews, hotels, etc.
So what does this mean for sites that rely heavily on SEO/SEM? Well, according to this and other posts, not a lot. Lots of people are claiming that Bing will fade away like Ask3D and are advising SEO professionals not to worry too much about Bing right now. I am not sure that I entirely agree.
You see… I’m a developer. Not an SEO/SEM professional, so I have a problem with search engines right out of the gate. They tend to be, as in the case of Google, too black box for most developers’ tastes. If you are a developer on a website that relies heavily on search engine ranking for its business, you are very aware that a small change to Google’s search algorithm can wreak havoc on your design and spin you into a hell of hotfixes without warning. Nothing sucks worse than having a strong dependency on a system (Google) with what amounts to a poorly documented (or completely un-documented) API. Now throw all of the other search players into the mix and you find yourself on the least desirable end of the stick altogether.
I get the feeling that SEO professionals think that Google is the end-all be-all of search engines and that anything else that comes along is just a knock-off, but be careful. This is Microsoft we’re talking about here. As a .Net developer, I can’t help but speculate that Microsoft would go the extra mile and do what Google hasn’t done so far and provide a documented API for Bing integration. I imagine that we would see a Bing SDK and tools in Visual Studio designed to Bing-enable your website. This would be consistent with Microsoft’s modus operandi in the past and would make Bing pretty sexy to geeks like me.
So I will be watching Bing closely. And a word to the wise: if you want people to come to your site, give them something of value to come for. Don’t rely on tweaking keywords and re-arranging your website to make it more appealing to search engines. Focus on the customer.
I know. Easier said than done. But something like Bing offers hope that one day quality will once again reign supreme.
Scott Hunter on the Future of Web Forms
May0
This is a podcast with Scott Hunter commenting on the future of ASP.Net Web Forms in .Net 4.0 and beyond. Lots of folks seem to be be questioning the need for Web Forms in light of Microsofts introduction of the MVC framework for ASP.Net. This episode highlights the fact that these are not competing technologies and are intended to give developers more options. Microsoft is not dropping Web Forms or completely changing direction. They are just providing us with more weapons. Enjoy.
Are there any sailing charter businesses in Costa Rica?
May0
Costa Rica is a pretty cool place and I would love to sail the Pacific side, but I can’t seem to find a single charter company that does bareboat charters. I am really interested in catamarans, but monohulls will do. Recommendations anyone?
Do you TATFT?
May0
You might test first and test often, but do you test all the f*****g time?
BryanL on TATFT from Bryan Liles on Vimeo.
C.S. Forester vs. Patrick O’Brian
May0
So I’ve read the entire Horatio Hornblower series by Forester and the entire Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian and here’s my take. I read the O’Brian novels first and I wish I hadn’t because they probably ruined Forester for me. If I’d have read Hornblower before the Aubrey/Maturin novels I might have enjoyed them a lot more. The Hornblower novels are not without merit, but they don’t compare to the richness of POB’s books.
Hornblower comes across as a boring character when compared to Jack Aubrey. I read the Forester books in chronological order according to the time period that the story was in, and not in the order the books were written in. For this reason, I kept thinking that maybe I was missing something. Forester goes to great lengths to really explain the inner workings of Hornblower’s mind. And when I say great lengths, I mean that Forester is still trying to convince the reader that Hornblower is a complex, but flawed character until the very end of the series.
On the other hand, O’Brian achieves so much more by not being as specific, and leaving it up to the story and the reader’s interpretation to form the characters of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Forester attempts to eliminate any doubt about who Horatio Hornblower is by contstantly delving into the man’s mind, and it left me thinking that C.S. Forester himself didn’t believe that Hornblower was all that interesting. I didn’t have this feeling with Aubrey or Maturin. They felt very much alive.
These issues with the main character of Forester’s novels made them hard to digest after reading the 21 O’Brian books. It was alot like eating fresh King crab then going to Long John Silver’s. I don’t even have to go into the difference in the writing styles between the two authors (O’Brian wins here too).
I guess my advice would be: read Forester first!
HTTP 400 Bad Request error problem
May0
So I ran into an issue on my site running ASP.Net MVC 1.0 on IIS6. Some of my “friendly” URLs contain ampersands in places that IIS doesn’t really like. For example:
http://www.customnewhomes.com/Detail/Builder/IN/Indianapolis/Hansen_&_Horn
IIS would choke on this URL and spit out an HTTP 400 - Bad Request error. I found a simple article on how to fix this problem so I want to pass it along.
Basically the fix involves changing a couple of registry keys on our webserver (both IIS and IIS7).
1. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters create a key called “AllowRestrictedChars” and set its value to 1
2. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET create a key called “VerificationCompatibility” and set its value to 1
That’s all I had to do!
File|New -> Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC)
May0
Scott Hanselman at Mix09 demonstrating how to build a real-world ASP.Net MVC app in about an hour (more or less):