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Jon Stewart's Brutal Exchange with CNN Host
Jon Stewart browbeats the Crossfire hosts for their "partisan hackery." Many suspect this now-legendary appearance prompted CNN to remove the show from their line-up.


Courtesy of IFILM

I've just finished migrating my home blog server to CS v1.1.

I spent much of the previous day performing a migration of my blog system from the venerable .Text v0.95 to CommunityServer v1.1.  There were a number of issues that turned what should have been a couple hours of work into a day of work.

You'll notice that I didn't adopt the v1.0 of the product when it came out, but rather waited for v1.1.  The reasons for this are:

1. CommunityServer supports and comes configured for multiple blogs on a single server, whereas .Text was a single blog.  There were difficulties in configuring CS to behave as a single blog server, which was what I needed.
2. There was no support at the time of release for a migration tool to take your .Text content and add it to your newly installed CS server.
3. It's a v1.0.

The first issue, the configuration as a single blog server, was resolved by a web-based configuration tool that provides detailed enough instructions on just how to configure CS v1.1 as a single blog server.

The second issue, the migration of .Text v0.95 to CS1.1 was resolved by this DotText-CS-Converter migration tool.  It's not perfect, there are a number of manual steps that you still need to perform that I think should have been built into the application itself, but you can't have everything.

The third issue...   1.1 > 1.0.  ;)

Related to the first issue, I've set up an alternative DNS entry dedicated for use by the blog.  So you'll now notice that the blog is hosted on http://blog.geeqs.net.  I've redirected requests going to the old blog to the new blog.

The migration and conversion took me 3 or 4 hours.  The setup as a single blog system took another hour.  I wanted to migrate my old .Text skin which was the "cogitation" skin to CS, but there is no skin migrator available.  As a result I had to spend another 4 or 5 hours customizing two of the packaged skins.  What you see in use now is a modification of the "PoisonIvy - air" skin. 

The modifications I made were to the CSS style sheets, which is my first serious use of CSS so far.  I've found it handy for "skinning" capabilities and very useful for maintaining a consistant style throughout a web page, but quite limiting in others.

I am a Defender-ship. I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I'm most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups. What Video Game Character Are You?

Or...

I am a Thrust-ship. I am small and tricky - where you think I am, I probably am not. I can work very fast, but I tend to go about things in a round about way, which often leaves me effectively standing still. I hate rocks. Bloody rocks. What Video Game Character Are You?

• Body Shop Mechanic: “Weeeell, I don’t know what to tell you. This is how Mini’s are. Take a look here…”

Lying to nerds is a bad idea. Do yourself a favor and don't try it. DON'T F*** WITH NERDS!

http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/14683.aspx

I've got a secret crush on the Toyota Prius.

But $30K Canadian is pretty steep.  You shouldn't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to save a lot of cash on fuel savings.  For sure, the Prius gets about 2x or better mileage than my existing Hyundai, but that only amounts to about $480/yr.

I admit that the purchase of this vehicle would still be an emotional purchase.  I think it's a cool car.

Fight the urge... fight it...

> Constantine, with Keanu Reaves, is looking pretty good. 
> It'll be out on February 18th.  See you there!

So we went out and saw this on Saturday.  It was pretty good.  There were some unfortunate storyline and character elements that prevented this from being good.  (Keep in mind, I mark hard!)

The casting of the devil was at best, unfortunate.  The actor, Peter Stormare, is someone you've probably seen before in many movies and some TV shows.  He just wasn't evil enough...  when I see him I think “homeless guy“, not “the Devil“.

Surprisingly, Gavin Rossdale, was in this movie and was playing demon Balthazar (in a nice suit!)  He would have made a better Devil.

I also had a problem with some of the story.  I liked it overall, but at the beginning when they're giving some history on Keanu's character, they described him as having attempted suicide and he died for 2 minutes and went to hell...  then he came back (somehow, it's unclear).  Because he killed himself, and he's a catholic, he's now condemned to hell after death...  So now he fights to get some spiritual cred. and get into heaven...

Right... okay, gotcha.  I understand the concept.  But .. .uh, excuse me... one question?  He didn't die, right? 

So, either...
1)  He didn't succeed in committing the sin, and shouldn't be condemned to hell.  Or...
2)  He's still alive now and can go repent, as a Catholic, and get past those pearly gates.

Was I the only one who caught this?

Related to my earlier post on buying your special someone that diamond ring...

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"Why buy her a diamond? She wont live forever!"

I'm a big fan of, "if it doesn't do something useful, don't buy it", and also the corollary "if the only difference between 2 things is the brand name, buy the cheaper thing".

How many discussions have I had about the /actual/ value of a diamond?  Comparing a diamond ring to a cubic zirconia...  if I'm trying to cut my way out of a glass prison, I might choose the diamond... but otherwise, go with the glass!

However, if I can just persuade my gal to go for a "hunk-o-nuke".  See this post over at BoingBoing.

Yesterday I spent a couple hours fiddling around with a pet project of mine.

Therapeutic refactoring, or “Care and Feeding“, of your pet project

I think that every developer needs a long term pet project of some kind.  It should provide a developer with a test application that they can try out new technologies, designs, and generally fart around with.  Here are some general guidelines to picking an appropriate project:

• The project should be something that the developer works on outside of their regular work.
  (Trying to get this done on regular work time usually ends up causing a conflict in priorities between customer work and personal work, so I'd advise against allocating time within the existing work day.)
• It should use technologies that the developer is not already proficient in.
• The solution should be useful to the developer.  It needs to solve a problem, or otherwise do something useful.  If it doesn't, the project will just gather dust.
• The solution should be simple enough to be relatively easy to rearchitect as neccessary, but not so simple as to make the project not useful.

A little about my pet project...

The project is something that I started to learn more about Microsoft SQL Full Text Search capabilities.  To really play with something like this you need something pretty big to search and check out the results on.  I didn't really have piles of text just lying around I could import into a database, so I was on a search for a way to get something useful, that's text based, into SQL...

I do some surfing looking for the latest in tech news all the time, and the process of visiting each of 20 or more favourite sites and scanning the headlines for anything new, just seemed inefficient.  I thought, what if I could scan all the sites automatically, retrieve their content, and store it in a database, categorize it using the content, and then I could query the database to present a summary of the findings?  That'd save me from having to manually visit each of the 20 or so sites!  Better yet, if I was looking for something in particular, I could use the full text search capability to find articles matching my search criteria...   By golly, I thought I was on to something.

At the time, RSS feeds were only just beginning to be used by a few mainstream sites, but there were other websites such as Moreover.com that were providing RSS feeds by scraping mainstream sites that didn't already have RSS feeds, and summarizing them.

RSS feeds are a standardized way to present lists of textual content with a title, link, and an optional summary.  For sites providing RSS services for their content, I could build an application that would periodically grab the list of published articles, and gather them for searching.

This project was useful to me in that it gave me a real-life problem to solve, and I had the tools to solve it.  It made it possible to experiment with solutions involving:

• SQL
• SQL Full Text Search
• SQL Stored Procedures, Views, UDFs
• SQL Query Optimization
• ASP.Net (as the web front-end to the database) and Database apps.
• .Net Windows Forms (the gathering application is a forms based app)
• Asynchronous calls using web System.Net
• Let's not forget good old XML (RSS feeds are in XML format)
• Multi-threading (the gathering application runs multiple gathering threads)
• Multi-threading with a custom thread-pool and UI controls indicating a threads status.
• ... anyway, lots of good stuff.

What I've built is a web page that displays the latest available web articles.  You can choose a particular topic, how recent you want to limit your listed items, and how many items to retrieve.  Since the page also automatically refreshes after 3min (by default) you can also opt to not show already displayed items.  You can also use an RSS reader and hit the data behind the page using this url:  http://www.geeqs.net/newslinks.net/rss/rss.aspx.  Have a look at the XML comments in the returned document for instructions on how to customize what's returned by the RSS query.  You now have a one-stop-shop for almost 200 major web sites, organized by topic and refreshed.

What I did during my most recent refactor...

Originally I had a thread class that is a gathererprocess that was responsible for opening a connection to the database, and retreivinga list of news channels (sites) and their respective news items.  Within this gathererprocess was included code to handle parsing of RDF, RSS, and KlipFood feeds.  I had classes before that defined a NewsChannel and a NewsItem, but no logic was n these classes, only data.  I've now moved the RSS parsing into the channel class, and a channel now has a collection of NewsItems that will be populated when the RSS document is parsed.

In addition to this cleanup of code, I've included support for Atom feeds in the NewsChannel class.  After the refactor of code, this was made much simpler.  It will also make future additions of different types of feeds (or quirky feeds that don't strictly follow RSS, RDF, or Atom like KlipFood) much easier.

I like Cruise. I like Speilberg. I like aliens. So I must like this...

It's coming June 29th.

Constantine, with Keanu Reaves, is looking good.

It's out February 18th.

I'm a big fan of, "if it doesn't do something useful, don't buy it", and also the corollary "if the only difference between 2 things is the brand name, buy the cheaper thing".

How many discussions have I had about the /actual/ value of a diamond?  Comparing a diamond ring to a cubic zirconia...  if I'm trying to cut my way out of a glass prison, I might choose the diamond... but otherwise, go with the glass!

However, if I can just persuade my gal to go for a "hunk-o-nuke".  See this post over at BoingBoing.

Have you seen this?  No? 
What are you waiting for?

I was turned on to this by a friend, and while I liked the show as a kid growing up...  I wouldn't have thought that it could survive as an adult sci-fi drama. 

I'll be big about it.  I admit that I was wrong.

This is a great show.  It's the best sci-fi show currently out there.  The stories are great, the characters are interesting, and the effects are superb.

It's been playing in the UK for the last year or so on the sci-fi channel.  I've downloaded the shows using Bittorrent and watched the first season.  I'm now watching it on the Space channel in Canada.  Here's hoping it gets picked up for season 2!