If you don't know what dogfooding is, its to Eat one's own dog food. To say that a company "eats its own dog food" means that it uses the products that it makes.

Well I can't say I made DasBlog, but I sure helped a little with this version!

I really like all the new features, and I am not even sure of some of them, we had so many contributors and new features it will take me forever to get up to speed to help users with this new version and to start writing up the features at http://dasblog.info.

If you have an article on a new feature, or are some kind of expert on a feature, or are said contributor, please send me your articles, or give me permission to pinch what you have elsewhere! 

Version 1.9xxxx coming to a host near you soon!!!!!

Cheers

Tom

Well I've got to just rip off a quick post, I have been so busy supporting the DasBlog community that I just about don't blog anymore <sad>.

Anyway I have fairly recently released a new DasBlog theme which I submitted to be included in the next DasBlog release and it failed the FireFox test. Boy was I embarrassed. I had called myself checking it out but I will admit not very closely at least in FireFox.

At any rate I spent untold hours trying to track down the problem, and along come  Justice Gray one of the better DasBlog developer contributors and volunteered to help me out.

He found 99% of the problems in 10 minutes. Apprantley he has and uses all those fancy FireFox development tools. YEAH!!!!!

I got Scott Hanselman to check the theme in this afternoon and by all appearances, the level of activity at Sourceforge we should see DasBlog 1.9 any day now!

Soon I will be hip deep in trying to support the role out and the user community.

Take Care

Ok just a few rambles here,

#1. I continue to test Newz Crawler, so far it is one of my favorite RSS writer / remote blogger engines! ( I wish it had a built in spell checker, at least a browser based one, but so far I have not found one! This post will be another test of Newz Crawler...

#2. I review a lot of dasblog sites in my admin support duties (self appointed) over at dasblog.us , there are some very interesting blogs out there! I am partial to technical blogs, but I have found one that is artist centric ran by a techie that has caught my fancy. That blog would be @ http://idleminutes.com

#3. Scott has an interesting post over at his blog, "Is OPen Source a Crap Idea?" http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IsOpenSourceACrapIdea.aspx I hope that last leading question doesn't mean he is considering moving away from dasblog and on too newer greener pastures. If that's where he's headed, (I would understand if he did), I just hope he's looking to pass the baton.

/End Musing v0.12345

While this is not one of my standard charity picks, I could not pass up Scott's request!

My father-in-law has diabetes, (not as bad as Scott's situation)! We all have someone dear that needs our help!

See Scott's blog for a very thought provoking monolog about this issue!

While you are there, help out and send The American Diabetes Association some $$$.

I can vouch for Scott's integrity, I even sent my contribution through him via Paypal!

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TeamHanselmanAndDiabetesWalk2006.aspx

Ok a few weeks ago or even longer I blogged about how busy I am!  At that time I didn’t know the “half of it” as they say!

I just can’t find time to keep up with blogging here and supporting dasblog.us & dasblog.info, all are suffering <smile>…

There are a few new changes to this busy schedule, I started using FolderShare. It’s the best new thing in my techie life. http://www.foldershare.com.

I can’t count the times it has saved me time (pun) or from a mini disaster (no pun).

For two weekends in a row I have had personal server problems at home, (Exchange 2003 on PDC/you don’t really want to know the details) and FolderShare has unexpectedly saved the day.

Not only the sharing of designated folders on two or more computers but the feature where you can log into you FolderShare account and access any file on your host computers. That is the feature that was the unplanned lifesaver.

Just today it saved me an 85 mile drive home, yeah I do VPN and remote server etc. etc., and sometime it all lets you down, but not FolderShare.

And you can’t beat that for free!!!!

Why am I blogging here, what do I want to accomplish, what do I stand to gain!

Oh and why am I reassessing this issue now? 

Well earlier today I caught myself thinking that I must blog more, with interesting blogs to get my visitor count up!  You guessed it, I was looking at my web server stats and they are pitiful compared with some of the bloggers I read.   Scott Hanselman, Omar Shahine, Clemens Vasters, Russ Nelson, Rory Blyth, the list goes on!

I guess that old competition thing jumped up a bit me for a while, but I soon woke up. I am not doing this for you reader; I am doing this for me.

I have always been interested in writing, for hobby or profit. My favorite genre is Science Fiction. Well what does that have to do with this blog, you say?

I believe we all have a need and desire for creation, be it art in its many forms, or literature in its many forms or building something, real or conceptual.  I know that the many websites I have built over the years were mainly all about creation. Now do I have a real talent for art, literature, or construction (real or code)?

I would have to say that my skills in all these areas are modest at best.  I work in the Information Technology area, I have gravitated towards technical operations management, (Hey a Vice President of a small company), because I seem to have some wining ways with people, and apparently I just don’t have the conceptual mathematical ability to be a great programmer. 

Oh I have done my fair share of programming, but I have always ended up on the maintenance tasks. I am pretty good, about going in behind somebody else and making order out of chaos, but original coding seems beyond my skill.

So how does this equate to blogging on a site called Robosapient.com.  Will just writing about ones self, is just self aggrandizing, and while satisfying for a while, it ends up that only your mother is reading what you have to say.  Hi Mom.

So I looked around for good open source blogging software, that was Microsoft centric (MS Bigot here), and decided that I would blog, and support that blogging software. You need a useful purpose for creation, and I am a Technologist first and foremost. Well things did not really work out as I intended.

I have let this blog become a family web site, while I went off in my usual modes operandi and created http://dasblog.us and http://dasblog.info to support DasBlog.

DasBlog my chosen blogging engine and focus of my creative energy! I need to work on my creative writing skills, but I keep letting myself fall back into IT support roles. You would not believe the hours I have put into the dasBlog community. I am going to continue, but I must refocus to make sense out of this hobby, more writing less site building!

(Yea I guess you could call it a hobby!)

So the final assessment result:   Hobby + Technology + Literature + Helping Others = dasBlog

Cheers
Tom

Don't ask me why but I find economics interesting and the philosophy of Russ Nelson.

I read Russ regularly and I don't always agree with him, but I appreciate his reasoned thought on all the subjects he tackles. For example I believe that the good of a monopoly usually outweighs the bad, i.e. Microsoft!  Standardization and the lower cost of effort will always win me over.

Boy am I lazy!

I am jealous that I appear not to be so capable of this kind of reasoned thought! Maybe I will some day get the courage to try my hand at expressing intelligent thought! Until then try reading Russ.

Everyone is lazy

http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/everyone-is-lazy.html

I noticed Omar Shaine is telling the world how busy he is, that’s cool; always busy is so much more fun than the dull life.

One of my favorite observations, is if you want something done, ask a busy person, they get it done. The procrastinators of the world don’t ever get anything done!

I guess I am something of a work-aholic I usually take my employees work home with me most weekends, if I am not working on the wife’s “Honey Do’s”, I am working on an employer work project. I work for DOD contractor, so I can’t really go into any detail on that!

Will recently I have changed my modes operandi, I am still the same old work-aholic, but I have decided to spend some of that free time on personal projects instead of giving my free time back to my employer.

Hence all my recent work on the dasBlog support environment. I really like this product but the more I really use it, (and I have become a power user in a very short time), the more I discover how it should not be used!

I created the dasblog.info documentation site. For the first 50% of the effort I had the site hosted on my personal web server, and it went fairly fast. Later I moved the site to our hosting provider BoundGrid.Net. Then things really slowed down. Not BoundGrids’ fault just the inevitable result of a hosting environment. Making the remaining 50% of current changes took several days.

dasBlog is a great blog engine but it’s really not the best document management system I ever used. Having said that I think it is way cool that dasBlog is being used to document itself! (Even if I do say so myself!)

So to sum up this little diatribe: Crap I am busy!

• Working on creating two new commercial web sites for my employer as a subcontractor. (This is to mostly keep my “hands on” in the tech stuff and to pay for my IT hobby expenses) Yeah I think its fun, most of the time. When you are the only developer on a web site, you get to touch it all bad or good!

• Working for a foreign government (part of my employers contract), actually doing some hands on coding for an “international database web application”, (almost over my head here), but they swear they are happy with beta 1, so who am I to complain. Again just trying to stay up with the technology. No I don’t really consider myself to be a programmer! I have been trying to stay at the DOD business analyst level, but it’s hard.

• Building a new studio recording “computer system” for my son “the musician” this weekend. I bought a really nice four channel I/O sound system (M-Audio delta 44) and a 200GB drive etc. etc. Learning about music recording PC’s as I go! A little slow here, since I am not a musician myself! I think he will be thrilled, he is not expecting the super duper system I am building!

• I am also working on updating a charity www site I support, Day-of-caring.org  It's way out of date!

• Oh did I mention, I am far from finished updating dasblog.info documentation, it’s still pretty chaotic, and I would love to have a single “user manual” document for new users to peruse or download! FAQ’s could stand a lot of help also! And I continue to husband dasblog.us as much as I can, I really appriciate the users who contribute here!

• I have not figured out what I am doing for Christmas for the remainder of the family, and I only have this weekend to figure that out! Oh my!

So are we having fun yet (smile)

Tom

While I know most people don't care about this, these site are new and these visitor stats are interesting to me so here they are!

http://Dasblog.us

http://Dasblog.info

These sites have been up the total days documented above and their off to a good start! On 12/13/2005 http://dasblog.net was redirected to http://dasblog.info, that changes everything!

Link: Officials fear base jobs at risk

I have been talking to a lot of DOD management teams at Wright Patterson AFB over the last few months and I have been saying for months to whom ever would listen that there is a stealth effort to continue to move jobs from Dayton (specifically DSFG) to Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and to OSSG in Montgomery AL.

There is a lot of smoke in this story, major contracting changes in the DSFG, and acquisition philosophy changes... this story is still unfolding. Glad to see Dave Hobson is looking into it!

This article just proves my intelligence work was on the money!

For reasons outside the scope of this blog entry I decided to a host a forum in support of the dasBlog software project. After tacit approval by the real powers that be in the dasBlog world, I went looking for appropriate forum software and hosting companies.

Again for reasons outside the scope of this blog entry, we decided to try a PHP forum. I was very impressed with phpbb and that is what I setup to support. I spent some hours doing the prep work, and even decided to create some custom graphics and mods for a theme for phpbb in support of dasBlog. (Those hours are not of the lost 12, unless we finally do drop phpbb)

Next, a brain storm hit me; I saw that Godaddy.com was offering both ASP.NET and PHP on the same Windows Server box. I then decided that it would be nice to have a sample dasBlog forum for a potential user to see, it could be linked from all the different dasBlog web locations, SourceForge.Net and the Wiki system etc. More bang for the buck on one hosting site. I opted for the professional hosting with lots of bandwidth etc.

So my Godaddy saga begins. I called tech/pre-sales support twice on Friday evening to confirm that they truly indeed had PHP and ASP.NET on one box and I could setup the site I envisioned at http://dasblog.us. They even had a reasonable price for a full years’ support, so I bought it. Around midnight after all my phpbb prep support efforts were finished I tried to install.

Well to shorten this Rant a bit, after talking to 7 techs and the effort lasting into Saturday afternoon. I found I had wasted 12 hours. The install crashed, the techs didn’t know why, and said they did not support phpbb. I finally determined that Godaddy runs PHP in safe mode with no database support of any kind, MySql or Sql2000.

Did I mention I spent several hours trying to get the install to work with Sql2000 after MySql crashed and support didn’t know why it would not work, or that the SQL2000 generation took hours? The final resolution was that if I was going to use phpbb, it would have to be on a Linux box, I have yet to find a host that will support the full dual environment on a windows box.

So right now, I have canceled my Godaddy hosting account, got a refund!

I might mention the Godaddy.com support guys and gals were extremely nice and professional, but they really don’t know what they support and what they don’t, and if your requirements are a bit technical, then their systems and polices are not up to the task.

Having said the above, I may use their Linux hosting, if we go that way! Now my weekend is shot, my wife has other plans for what’s left of it, and I probably won’t get back to this effort till next weekend!

(UPDATE TO THIS RANT)

I tried to go with Godaddy once again, via the linux route, got the entire forum running and Godaddy killed the database, after working with them for 7 days, I gave up on them forever and moved everything to BoundGrid.Net. I hope to never have a reason to rant about hosting again!

Very interesting article:  "The reason is very simple: Capacity. There’s a limit to how much information an individual can process and I think that by now, Microsoft managed to push the feature depth to the point where I can’t fit Visual Studio and related technologies into my head all at once any longer....."

Visual Studio Overload And The Specialization Gamble

Of course Clemens calls himself a generalist, when in actuality it's all relative. For me as an IT operations manager type, Clemens looks like a real specialist.

While I am no programmer, I do dabble, but I try to keep up (a little), in all the camps, .NET and J2EE (MS vs Linux). It's bad when you have to support customers in either camp or some who have projects in both. I work with/for the Department of Defense who has .NET and J2EE systems not to mention a ton of other technology old and new.

I have to keep conversationally aware of issues around DB2 and SQL2005, not to mention some who use MySqL or Oracle. And issues like Oracle's recent raid (purchase) of MySql contract teaming partner. It's enough to make your head spin. I would love to focus just on MS products.

OK here is the most exhaustive list of geek tools I have ever seen, it's true that if your not a Windows centric developer some will be of little value. I had no idea some of these even existed! 

Love this list: RoboSapient approved!

Thanks Scott!

Scott Hanselman's 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List

The other day I was talking to my mother via cell phone (she lives a 1,000 miles away in FL and I call her two or three times a week), and we got to talking about quotes.

She professed to have never heard the phrase “Quotable Quotes”, now you have to know my mother, there is not much that she either doesn’t know or hasn’t learned in life, but that phrase was new to her, or at least she had forgotten she had heard it.

I told her that “quote” tag lines were all the rage on forums and blogs, it was a computer geek thing, I least that’s what I said. Yes, I know Quotable Quotes has been in the Reader’s Digest for a million years, but I didn’t think of that then.

Now my mother is pretty computer literate, she has an e-mail account, and pays her bills on line etc. but bloging or “forum use” much less something like chat is not something she’s into. I went on to tell her that my use of forums and blogs over the years had sort of crystallized what I considered to me to be some of my favorite quotes, and that I used a number of them, something she was a little amused and maybe surprised at.

So here are some of my favorites as told to my mother, and a little of why they are special to me!

•     "Everything is relative"

While this is not only a truism, it fits my whole personality and sums up how I feel about just about everything. This is concrete in its own inscrutable way, I can deal with this.

•     "Carpe Diem" – Seize the Day

Enough said!

•     "All who wander are not lost" (JRR Tolkien)

Have you ever just Googled a random word to see where it would take you? Try it!

• "Contentment is not the fulfillment of what you want, but the realization of how much you already have. "

I am still working on this one…..

I could go on but having more than three or four favorite quotes is “Quote” Bad form…so says I.