Moving

I'm finally taking the plunge and switching to Movable Type. I'm not going to bother importing this weblog, at least not initially. Too much work for too little benefit. My archives can stay here indefinitely.

My new home page and weblog. Feeds are available in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 flavors. I'm not going to set up RSS redirects. I don't like Userland's solution because any aggregator that doesn't understand the format will barf on it. HTTP 301 redirects are better supported, but I don't feel like reconfiguring Apache to allow .htaccess files.

For the couple of people that subscribe to my category feeds, I'll get around to re-creating those eventually. Stay subscribed to the current feeds and wait for an update.

4:15:07 PM | Comments: | Topics: movable_type radio 

MySQL vs. Cardfile

I wasn't going to bash MySQL for offering fewer RDBMS features than say, Microsoft Access, but...

Slashdot comment in response to Novell to ship MySQL with Netware 6:

In related news, Microsoft announced that Cardfile would be bundled in their next version of Windows.

4:14:05 PM | Comments: | Topics: humor 

ASP.NET vs. LAMP

Ken Rawlings is lamenting the cost of deploying ASP.NET database applications compared to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python).

I say it's all about the TCO. Licensing is a minor cost compared to development, maintenance, and on-going support. For an unfunded project, look to re-use licenses until funding can be justified. Also, don't ignore the fact that many free software packages will run on Windows. PostgreSQL is almost plug-n-play under Cygwin, can be run as a service, and has an ODBC driver.

3:31:22 PM | Comments: | Topics: dotnet_asp linux microsoft 

Diving into ASP.NET

I am finally getting around to looking at ASP.NET. Not sure what has taken me so long... if there is any label that can be accurately applied to me, it's ASP/VBScript Geek. My highest joy in life used to be figuring out how to do things in pure VBScript when everyone else was resorting to COM objects in VB or C.

Getting everything installed on my beater box wasn't too difficult, just had to fix some long-standing permissions problems that prevented Visual Studio from communicating with it. 'Hello World' was easy enough...

Now I need to come up with a useful learning project.

4:42:31 PM | Comments: | Topics: dotnet_asp 

FTP from .NET

Getting ready to work on my desktop Blogger API router for Zaurus Blogwalking... Here are some pure .NET FTP samples that I found:

• FTP Client in .NET "is a simple FTP protocol client component class written in C# using .NET sockets. It implements core functionality of the FTP protocol, so you can connect, change working directory, download and upload files. Masks will be added later."
• FTP Pluggable Protocol "demonstrates a pluggable protocol handler for the ftp:// protocol."

12:28:53 AM | Comments: | Topics: blogwalking dotnet 

Porting to .NET Compact Framework Beta 2

The porting of Pocket Blog to the .NET CF is back underway. The "bugs" in my XML-RPC routines and test wrapper have magically disappeared under Beta 2, now they just need to be cleaned up so that I can move on to the next piece.

I had been debating VB vs C#, but I've decided to stick with what I know for now. The advantage to C# is that it should give me a head start in porting to the Zaurus once Mono is ready, but realistically that's probably a year away. No point in wasting effort on that now.

When Pocket Blog is finished, or stalled again, I've got another project in mind to kick off my C# learning experience. I'll write about that in another post...

5:06:06 PM | Comments: | Topics: dotnet_compact_framework pda_programming pocketblog