Xagronaut

Cool tagline: “A single-threaded guy in a multithreaded world.”  I totally understand.

Rockford Lhotka’s site mentions some shifting in publisher ownership.  Much to my surprise Wrox Press has gone belly-up.  APress and Wiley have moved in to cast lots for the scraps.

APress has purchased the bulk of the Peer Information (including Wrox Press) titles. Wiley purchased the Wrox Press brand name and 36 titles, and now the liquidation of the assets is complete with APress buying all remaining assets.

Rocky’s book, Visual Basic.NET Business Objects is sold out on the major online retailers.

3500 copies of the book were printed by Wrox Press before they went bankrupt. From what I am hearing, these are sold out so Amazon and bn.com no longer have them. It is possible that you may find a copy in a physical book store, but otherwise I am afraid we’ll have to wait until the first Apress printing of the book.

dirdiff 1.6 [freshmeat.net]

Bob at Wise Solutions emailed to remind me that the Wise Installation System has patching built in, and costs less than InstallShield plus vBuild.

He also pointed out that Wise for Windows Installer now has a ton of features for server setups: user account creation, IIS administration, and SQL Server administration… basically they implemented my entire wish list from working on the FogBUGZ 3.0 installer. Good work!
…
Using patching technology saves a lot of bandwidth, even for the first-time installer, because a lot of the bytes you’re distributing may be system files and runtimes that users already have.
…
For now, Michael convinced me to stick with the tried-and-true Inno Setup for the next release of CityDesk. The bandwidth savings don’t quite justify the effort of switching installers.

[Joel on Software]

Movable Type templates tutorials. It has been a few weeks since I’ve visited Mark Pilgrim’s blog, but it is always like Christmas when I do. Today’s gift was actually posted last week entitled Movable Type templates tutorial. As we begin to discuss using… [Heal Your Church Web Site]

To steal Dean’s metaphor, I have my Christmas presents delivered to my news aggregator several times a day.  I was thrilled at the relevance of this post to my current lines of thought.  Then I realized that I had reached a new milestone in blogging.  The blogs I read are about as close to a Vulcan mind meld as I will get.  I have finally tapped into the right blogs so that they are one or two steps ahead of what I need to know.

That’s the beauty of blogging.  You can connect with *someone* whose online musings echo what you are thinking.

OK, I did it.  I changed computers with Radio Userland.  I knew it was going to be a chore, but I got through it.  This article pointed me to some useful scripts, including one called myFixFilePathsAndAddresses that helped with adjust the internal file paths stored in Radio.root because the installation path on my new computer was on a different drive letter (C: –> D:).

Here’s the dirt on myFixFilePathsAndAddresses:

This script is an improvement to the one UserLand provides in the workspace.userlandSamples table. If you move your Radio UserLand folder to another location on your hard disk or to another computer then your copy of Radio UserLand will not work. That is because there are many internal references to absolute file paths within the Radio.root. To correct these references download this script and open it from the Radio File > Open menu. Then run the script. It will ask for your prior file path, the default choice should be correct. When the script finishes everything should work again.

I copied my entire www folder from the old installation, the Data Files folder, and Radio.root.  That seemed to do the trick for most things, but I had to tweak the preferences a little to restore my old settings.  At some point, everything popped back into place, but I’m not exactly sure what order I did things in, so I can’t give an explicit tutorial here.  The articles mentioned above should help though.

I’m finding though, that since I moved my Radio installation from an always-on static IP address to a frequently-moving laptop computer, that there are certain disadvantages to not being able to remotely post from anywhere.  Having a server handle upstreaming in the background while I go about my daily life can be a plus sometimes.  Hmmm… We’ll see how it goes.

URLs are what matter.

You know, I’ve realized that the only thing that’s really important to me is meticulous control over my url-space. That’s the only thing that really matters. As long as your URLs stay constant, you can rip out your backend as many times as you want and it doesn’t matter. So, I might just say screw it all, move over to Drupal, and set up a simple gateway that’ll translate named URLs into Drupal nodes. Hmmmm…

[Keith's Weblog]

Drupal seems to be built PHP, XML, and perhaps other technologies.  Need to read more here.

GvR: Strong vs. Weak Typing.

Guido van Rossum: Strong versus Weak Typing:

Strong typing is one reason that languages like C++ and Java require more finger typing. You have to declare all your variables and you have to do a lot of work just to make the compiler happy.

[Keith's Weblog]

I’m sorry, but I can’t sympathise with someone who is too lazy to declare variables. Period.

The disgust with excess typing I can understand. I feel your pain. I don’t want to worry about the type of a variable on every statement but omitting variable declarations is without excuse.

HTTrack website copier.

The HTTrack website copier looks like a useful piece of software.

[Keith's Weblog]

I need to read this later.