Ok, I broke my own cardinal rule of weblogging:  I removed content from this site.  Or rather, suppressed it.  But since it is *my* rule, and I had good reason, I can do that. 

Three weeks ago, I was laid off from my job and needed suddenly to find gainful employment.  Fortunately, I was already on the market anyway, but I wanted the FWHagen.com domain to reflect professionalism as much as possible.  The Subversion/VS.NET article I posted was great for that, however, the two entries above it were book reviews.  So I hid them.  DasBlog makes that very easy in the way that it stores content.  I merely moved the days entries and they were gone.

Today, I started my new job and I have moved the entries back.  Ironically, I have one more book to review tonight, and another this weekend, so it gets worse.  BUT, I am excited about my potentials at the new gig, and anticipate much more technical stuff later.  I am actually going to get to write Real Code!

Here we go again.  As mentioned previously, I have finally purchased real hosting.  With my own domain name, I am finally fully managing my blog.  I am going to use DasBlog again, like in the old days of running it on my home server.  It's not as clean (yet) as WordPress, but it is much, much more configurable.

Let's see how long this run lasts.  Ironically, I am able to finally post almost all of my old content again.  The only posts missing are the really old ones from when I was crafting it with JavaScript and DHTML.  Maybe I will get those in one day too.

Well, the new domain is finally up.  FWHagen.com if you want to see it, but there is nothing there yet.  I purchased the hosting account 2 weeks ago and have yet to have the domain name properly transferred to the provider. 

Many years ago, I decided I wanted to have FWHagen.com for myself, for professional development and personal/family use.  I took a chance on the upstart company GoDaddy when they started out because they were pretty cheap.  I was very pleased with their service, having dealt with Network Solutions for years before at work.  That is until this past week, when I tried to transfer it.  After waiting for several days, I discovered that the account was "locked" to prevent any accidental or unauthorized transfers.  If you have ever transferred a domain before, you know that is a bunch of crap.  I had to personally authorize the transfer, so why the lock?  Because of the subsequent failure to transfer, I have to wait 60 days to try again.  The waiting period is ICANN specified, and I really don't have any logical problems with that, except that GoDaddy now gets to hold it for another 2 months. 

I was able to forward the DNS records over, so it works for now.  And I have a long time left to get the domain settled, as well.  It is just very frustrating to deal with underhanded greed like that.  For the sum of $10/year. 

UPDATE [19:50]:  I was wrong about GoDaddy.com.  On my way home this evening, I got a call directly from them expressing concern about my problems.  Now, here's the thing, I only posted my concerns here.  They took the initiative to track me down and fix the problem.  Well, tracking me down in the sense that I posted my domain name and they called my contact info, which only they have.  Long story short:  I am so impressed with their commitment to personal service that I am cancelling the transfer and will simply use DNS forwarding for my new site, as it works perfectly well.  I will continue to use them as my registrar and will definitely use them in the future whenever I can.  BTW, the 60-day wait is ONLY for sucessful transfers.  It does not apply to failed due to locks or privacy safeguards.  And the $10/yr jab?  Only heightens my impression of them.  They surely spent more than that in time and effort on one measely IT guy's satisfaction.

I've had it with Cox Cable.  I tried to put up a photo album (all HTML, because they have never allowed scripting) last night, and was informed that my personal webspace exceeded the size limit.  After some digging, I found that they impose a 10MB limit on personal sites.  Their technical support people really dropped the ball there too, cause I could have been sold an upgrade to allow for my home server to publish, but no, that would be too much to ask.  I swear:  the day FiOS is available in my area, I am switching.

So I finally broke down and selected a paid host.  All of my personal and professional hosting will be done from, well, a highly regarded and recommended vendor. 

I will be moving this site to it as well sometime in the future.  Wordpress is very nice, but they will nickel and dime you to death for any customizable features (which is why this site looks so bad) and domain assignments.  Yes, I own a domain and have for years.  It's time to finally put it to use.

Not that there was any doubt, and of course, answered honestly:

Respect the score.

Tiny milestone:  1000 page views at this site!

The number of views to Using since moving to WordPress has exceeded 1000 today.  woot...

I am struggling with issues posting code samples in WordPress.  I am painfully aware that much of my code is cut off visually on the main page, and highlighting is spotty at best.  Suggestions for making it work in WordPress are appreciated.  I'd love to add an external stylesheet, but am loathe to pay for that add on.  An "extra" to handle it would be great, as long as it doesn't violate any EULAs.

Of course, WP layouts are pretty lacking too, without purchasing additional capabilities.  If I wanted to spend money doing this, I'd host this blog myself somewhere else and have Ultimate Freedom. 

I am working on it....

Update [10.08]:  I will be looking at Blogger and Blogsome to evaluate their engines for free coding blogs.  It is possible I may move again.  Also, I will renew my feedburner account so moves are more transparent; or completely so for RSS readers.

I was exploring the statistics on this site the other day and made an interesting discovery.  My rant on The Fall of the Soviet Union, which was done out of annoyance of modern softening of history, is by far the most popular article I have written.  It has received more traffic than all of my other articles.  Which makes me think:  maybe coding is not of interest, but history and military technology.

Then I remember, I post what I know and to help me remember it.  I am not a historian, nor do I play one on TV.

I really haven't posted many code-related posts lately.  There are a few reasons for that:  Primarily, I have been working on SharePoint 2007 branding.  Sheesh!  Once I figure out the guts of that, I will post what I learned.  I have also been maintaining VB.NET code, which I am not at all interested in posting about.  The goal here is to post useful or interesting information for myself and others.  What I have been doing in VB.NET 1.1 is neither.  And I have been taking a business C++ class for my major, and boy it's close to worthless.  So a bit of a code break.

1st issue:  The last post I made stripped out the syntax highlighting from Visual Studio.  Minor, but annoying.  I use the CopySourceAsHtml plugin for VS2005, but what's the point if its going to remove the coloring?

Strike 1.

It's been a slow effort to get this back online.  I had to hand edit my old feed to get it imported to WordPress.  Somebody could stand to get some good press writing a converter, although it'd probably never be more than a one-off.  Anyway, the old posts are in, I just need to go through and clean up every one of them.  So backfill will happen in reverse in order to minimize impact to the actual feed.

Well I finally moved my blog to a public site.  I chose Wordpress for a few reasons, not least of which is its flexibility and category tags.  I just now need to figure out how to import all of my old posts from DasBlog.  Any ideas?

Well, I'm moving this blog to WordPress.  It just doesn't make sense to run it at home using an alternate port.  And I just can't bring myself to paying for hosting or extended service from my ISP.  So this will be my last post here on DasBlog.  Look for my new site at:  http://fwhagen.wordpress.com/

The updated feed is http://fwhagen.wordpress.com/feed/ although I will eventually update feedburner as well.

It really annoys me to not host this myself.  I am, was, a webmaster after all.  I guess I can be content that I did DIY it for awhile.

OK, had a short interruption in service when I setup the new router.  Between Cox reassigning my IP and issues with the port forwarding, I couldn't get everything synced up.  Got it now so everything should resume as normal. 

I optimized my server a bit to get this running a bit faster as well.  Let's see how that works out.  I will plan an upgrade for it later this year, when I have some time to work on it.

I noticed when TC called asking for the address of this blog that I had forgotten to post the primary feed address on this stream.  So here it is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/UsingHagen

of course, you may also use the source feed at:

http://www.hagennet.homeip.net:22/Blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetAtom

But it is not nearly as reliable until I can get my server upgraded.  I don't think ASP.NET 2.0 is designed to run on 384MB of RAM.

This will be the last post on this address.  I have moved my feed to my home server as posted below.  As of February 1, 2007, the feed is also being served from Feedburner at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/UsingHagen

PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ADDRESS!  I hope to see you there!

Ok, maybe I can't run my blog on my home server.  ASP.NET 2.0 across the wire may be too much for it.  It runs my other 2.0 apps OK.  I just don't want to spend money for this!

This is the new home of using.  It is hosted on my own server at home that I have ultimate control over.  However, it is getting old and may be a touch slow.  Also, Cox is kind enough to block port 80 so I have to run in on port 22.  Of course, this will block all of my friends at AGP, sorry guys, but is just fine at SFI.  The URL is:

http://www.hagennet.homeip.net:22/Blog/

 

I am terribly behind on book reviews.  I finished Forever Peace a couple days before Christmas and am almost done with Inside Delta Force.  I also will post Forever War, the not-a-series forerunner of Peace that I read before Red Mars.  Mars took so long to read that I got out of the habit.  For reference, Mars took 5 months, where Peace took 3 weeks and IDF will only be 5 weeks.

I don't usually like to post about other peoples' posts, but Coding Horror frequently causes exception.  If you're not reading it yet, but are me, then there must be something wrong with you!  Today Jeff posted another great article on two books I've never heard of:  The Secret Guide to Compters and CODE, both about the glorious life of the computer.  The first compares the computer experience to drugs and sex:

Computers are like drugs: you begin by spending just a little on them but soon get so excited by the experience - and so hooked - that you wind up spending more and more to feed your habit.

And

The computer will fascinate you. It'll seduce you to spend more time with it. You'll fall in love with it. You'll start buying it presents:  exotic foods (expensive programs to munch on), new clothes (a pretty little cloth cover to keep dust off), and expensive jewels (a printer and extra disks).

Sex or marriage, you decide.  Anyway Jeff Atwood does a much better write-up than I, so read his article.  I may have to get these books...

And his previous article on PC Clocks was geek chic for me too.

In the spirit of Me-Too:

Here are my results of the Super-Hero and -Villian likeness quizes.  What do you think?  And who are you?

---

My results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% Green Lantern 60% Robin 57% Hulk 55% Superman 50% The Flash 45% Iron Man 45% Batman 40% Supergirl 40% Catwoman 20% Wonder Woman 15%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

---

My results:
You are Magneto

Magneto 69% Dr. Doom 65% Lex Luthor 63% Apocalypse 63% The Joker 55% Green Goblin 54% Mr. Freeze 43% Kingpin 40% Riddler 37% Dark Phoenix 29% Catwoman 27% Juggernaut 26% Mystique 26% Poison Ivy 23% Two-Face 22% Venom 20%

You fear the persecution of those that are different or underprivileged so much that you are willing to fight and hurt others for your cause.

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

It took nearly two months, but I finally posted the review of the Foundation Series today.  The post date, however, is set to the date I originally started it, and ATOM sets the update date to the date finished or last edited.  Enjoy.

You may have noticed two things on my blog of late.  First is a Comment link that is simply a mailto: tag.  I have decided to use TC's method of comments for the time being until I can get a real system up.  Anybody have a problem with a port22 address?  Yeah, thought so.

Second is a hit counter.  I don't really like them myself, but I wanted to get some idea of the (really low) traffic coming here.  I know a couple people occasion, but I am a bit curious.  Honestly, I miss the traffic logs from my last job enough to want to do some of my own.  Kind of crazy, I know.  Anyway, it's just a little image that loads from a remote site in order for me to get an idea of views regardless of viewing from an aggregator or direct page views.

If you don't like either one, drop a comment!!

When I restarted this blog using DasBlog, I wanted a configuration that I could install on my USB key and run from anywhere with IIS.  I was able to leverage DasBlog to do that with some custom scripting to automatically install the VirtDir.  Everything was great.  Then I moved to another company and got a new workstation.  The script still works great, but since my machine defaults to ASP.NET 1.1, I have to manually modify the IIS Config after running the script to allow the 2.0 runtime I have DasBlog configured for.  It's a minor annoyance and one I will solve by finding a solution to the script, or getting everyone defaulted to 2.0 (which is happening!).  The script is below:

Now that everything is working OK, I am going to start retrofitting old posts.  So you may see some older posts showing up previous to the first one here now.  Don't be alarmed, it's OK. 

There are still a few things left to do:

• Create a "bridge" for individual posts.  Each post needs its own page for compatibility reasons.
• Create a categories list.
• Publish the blogrole.
• Continue to adjust the CSS.
• Create a real front page to utilize all of these features.

That's all work.  I'll do it later...

Well I finally have a full solution I can live with for the blog.  Using DasBlog to create the entries and do all the managment necessary on them and a few custom scripts to post from it, I am now able to do nearly everything I need.

I figured out that the easiest way to filter private items is to do exactly that:  the script to post the public blog searches for the Atom tags for private category and removes that entry.  I will probably leverage this concept to create a even more filtered professional blog too.  So now I have 2 blogs from the same source:  a public, censored blog that I am not afraid to let out, and a private one to capture my thoughts and feelings about everything.

I am pleased!  As always, the scripts are available upon request.

I love SharpReader.  I have tried dozens of other readers and aggregators and always come back to it.  I just hate the way it treats ATOM feeds.  Or more specifically, MINE.

See, when I posted a entry, it gets a date.  If I ever go back and update it, it gets another date.  This is built into the spec.  One tag is labeled "published" and the other "updated".  Pretty obvious what each is for, yes?  When I tagged my own entries, I just ignored the <updated> tag.  But I have moved to DasBlog to ease my administration and now it (properly) updates said tag.  But SharpReader uses <updated>, not <published>, for its display and sorting algorithms.  So all of my entries show up out of order if I, say, go back and apply categories to stories.

Frustrating...

I have tried to get ATOM to format nice with XSL with nearly no success.  So I switched to CSS.  It works!  Almost.  IE6 doesn't render it properly, which is annoying, as I have been a defender of IE for years.  IE7 should do fine.

If you'd like my CSS file, note the xml-stylesheet tag in the XML and grab it.  If you don't know how, then you don't really need it, do you.

Here we go again!

I am going to try this one more time.  This time I am trying to leverage DasBlog (love the name!) on my keydrive to "host" my blog.  It will take care of all of the admin work, I just need to push the RSS ATOM to my Cox Webspace.

Let's see how it rolls!

Ok, it's build number 3. This time using ATOM, specifically ATOM 1.0. I am going to stick with this format for a few reasons:

1. I can embed XHTML directly in the feed for nice formattingeffects.
2. It's proper XML, which RSS is also but only superficially.
3. It feels better. Or more extensible. Definitely more mature.

I am building everything right now with a combination of cmdline scripts and UltraEdit-32. I am looking for a small, free winapp that will do much of this for me, and will probably write one myself. if I ever get around to it, I will share the source here.

So buckle up, we're trying this again...

It's been almost a year since I have done this, thanks to the great state of <Insert Crap Company Name Here&> and their site-blocking fun. Recently the blocking came down; I guess some Exec wanted to see pictures of someone's ugly kids. (Yeah, just a little bitter...) Anyway, I miss my book reviews (yeah, be scriptin' that too!), especially now that I've found the Amazon Image Abuse format.

This go round, I want to expand on the technical side of thing more too. I will be constructing a tool to help built this site just fot the fun and experience of it. All in C# 2.0, of course. I will post snips of code I find useful. Also will be building this whole thing data driven despite the lack of any language support from my ISP servers. Everything has to be on the cheap, i.e. FREE. I will post lessons-learned there too.

So sit back and enjoy! This may be a fun ride. Or not. It's really for my own benefit and that of friends. I can be reached by emailing fwhagen.blog at the great free "G". (Figure it out, I'm not publishing my email address.)

Well, I'm back. This time with an RSS feed that I encode manually at this point. Well, it's not entirely manual; I built some vbs scripts to generate each post and built the feed.

I still need to build out the XSL pages for purdy-ness, but the feed can be used in nearly any aggregator. Well should anyway; I have conformed to strict RSS2 specs.