Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I wanted a Bloglines notifier gadget for my Google home page, but I couldn’t find one that was perfect, so I took one and modified it a bit.

The one that I used was close, but I wanted to be able to customize the font color and I changed the background color to white, its much easier on the eyes

If you want to use the gadget you can add it from this url:

http://benreichelt.net/gadgets/BensBloglinesNotifier.xml

You’ll have to install the Google developer gadget in order to add an arbitrary url to your home page gadgets.  This is my first use of any gadgets other than the default ones that Google has, and I gotta say, they’re pretty slick.  I might try to make some from scratch if I find something that I need.

In the ongoing story of Minneapolis providing citywide wifi access:

“Minneapolis officials have chosen an 11-year-old Minnetonka Internet service provider with some Wi-Fi experience to build a citywide wireless network. US Internet would build and operate the roughly $20 million Minneapolis Wi-Fi network and would offer consumers high-speed Internet service for $20 a month.”

…

“Under the proposed deal, the network would blanket the city with signals that could be received in 95 percent of outdoor locations and 90 percent of indoor locations.”

Minneapolis announced yesterday that they have selected US Internet to build out the city’s offering. I think this is going to be a great step forward for offering more Internet based mobile services. If you know that you can get reliable Internet service anywhere in the city, it opens up a whole set of services that you wouldn’t have thought of using before, mainly location based services. I’m most excited for the Skype possibilities.

Although I think this is a great move on the part of the city, I still won’t be signing up anytime soon, for a few reasons:

• I can’t justify paying $20 a month for wifi in a city that I neither live in (St. Paul), nor work in (Golden Valley).
• The bandwidth (1MB/second) doesn’t compare to cable service (although this might not matter for such uses as a Skype phone or other mobile services, but I wouldn’t recommend running a server on this connection )
• I don’t have a Skype wifi phone to take advantage of the service

I’m more excited about this project because I believe there will be a tipping point where many cities will begin to offer wifi, making it ubiquitous, but the other cities will need to see it work for early adopters like Minneapolis before they will take the plunge.

It’s also funny to see Qwest do its best to run the project aground

Apparently, there is some news going around that the startup sound for Windows Vista will NOT be customizable or be able to be shut off.  This really sucks. I absolutely detest the Windows XP startup sound and turning that off is usually one of the first things that I do when I’ve got a new machine.  The primary reason I hate the sound is that it’s too long, the sound plays for, what feels like, about 4 seconds.  If it were about .5 second to 1 second it wouldn’t be so bad.

I really hope they put in some advanced workaround in the registry or whatever to allow you to shut it off, ugh.

So I decided to take the plunge and install IE7, even though I said I never would. I just couldn’t help myself, the most recent screenshots that I had seen looked pretty sexy, and it’s in beta 3, hell thats about as good as it gets!

Some first impressions:

• I like the tabs, I haven’t used the new tabs until now, but I really like the small little space where you can click to expand a new tab, thats a great usability feature
• At first, I really liked not having menubars, it creates so much extra space for the window. I had to put the Links bar back on though, I can’t live without that.
• I don’t know if IE pulls my preferences from Firefox or what, but Google was installed as the default search engine. Huh? Not msn? Weird……..
• The one thing that I really miss from Firefox is being able to type CTRL + L and put the focus on the location bar, with the entire url selected.

I’ve decided to use IE7 as my default browser for awhile, we’ll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Of course, when I tried to write this post in IE7, I got some weird error from wordpress saying that I had to ‘enable referrers’ blah blah blah. So I guess I can’t COMPLETELY move to IE7

UPDATE2: I was a day early apparently, MS has just released RC1 of IE7.

I realized a few days ago that I didn’t have a contact form on my site.  The only way that people could get a hold of me was to comment on a post, there was no general purpose contact feature.

Over the past few days I threw together a rudimentary contact form (see the link on the right side of the page).  I wanted to use ajax to do it, so I went looking for an easy javascript ajax library.  I didn’t want some huge solution with tons of features, all I wanted was a simple, cross browser way to send and receive some ajax requests.

I found this one called “Simple Ajax“, and I figured that would be the perfect one for me, given the name   For some reason though, it was more difficult to get setup than I would have thought.  The javascript code didn’t seem to work, so I had to go in a modify it a bit, but I think it’s all good now.  I like the fact that this library uses JSON to return data from the server rather than parsing xml.

I know the form isn’t too pretty, I’ll probably try to dress it up a bit later, but for now I just wanted to get something out there.

Let me know if you notice anything wrong with it.  I suppose you’ll have to leave a comment to get a hold of me

I was already impressed with FeedBurner before yesterday. I publish my rss feed through FeedBurner and I use some of their other tools for my feed, and I like their website a lot. They have good information and they present it in a fun, lighthearted way, but it’s got good, raw stats.

I also read Brad Feld’s blog, Brad is an investor in FeedBurner. And, not only is he an investor, he’s also a user.

Yesterday, I noticed that I could see Brad’s favicon in his feed inside of Bloglines, and I wanted mine to do the same. I thought it was some service that FeedBurner offered, so I emailed Brad and asked him about it. About 30 seconds after I emailed him, I realized it was actually a service that Bloglines offered, which I promptly setup.

The next morning I saw a response from Brad that he cc’ed to Dick (the CEO) at FeedBurner. Dick wasn’t sure of the answer, so he forwarded the message to Matt (the CDO). A few hours later, I had my answer after including two of the top executives of the company and one of the investors. Thats awesome. And not only did I get an answer, but it wasn’t some PR bullshit, the tone of the emails was the same that you would get from an acquaintance, not a CEO. I love how the attitude of their website clearly resonates through the entire organization, it’s not just a facade they’ve put up on the web. Thanks guys!

Recently I wanted to get the build version number from a compiled assembly.  I wanted to package some files together into an .msi installer and then copy the .msi file into a folder with the version number of the application.

It turns out theres not a real easy way to do this from a shell script, so I had to write a small console app that would take in an assembly file path and write out the version number (download it here).  Next, I wanted to take the output from this app and store it in a variable in my batch file, something like this:

assver.exe myAssemblyPath > myVariableName

Now, I realize that the ‘>’ redirects the output to a file, but I wish there was a way to redirect the output to a variable instead.  I had to redirect the output to a text file, then read the contents of that file into a variable, ugh.  Heres the full code for that:

Tools\assver “myAssemblyPath” > version.txt
for /F %%a in (’type version.txt’) do set ver=%%a
del version.txt

So I write the version number to a file, read the file into my variable, then delete the file, quick and dirty.

As an aside, I’m using Wix to create the .msi and MSBuild to build the code.   I like using Wix better than having a setup project in VS, it has more options and it doesn’t clutter up VS with an extra project.  My installer is very basic at this point, but Wix is clearly a very powerful install tool, with many options, I’m just getting up to speed.  I’ve found this Wix tutorial that has a TON of useful information.

At my previous job we got paid on a monthly schedule, I think it was the last week of the month, or the first week of the month, I can’t recall exactly.  At first I didn’t know if I would like this payment schedule as I had been used to getting paid every two weeks for all my other previous jobs in high school and college.  As it turns out, getting paid monthly is more convenient that getting paid every two weeks.

Nothing else in my life is on a bi-weekly schedule.  None of my bills, grocery store visits, mortgage, etc.  They’re all either monthly (bills, mortgage) or random (grocery store).  Getting paid once a month allowed me to more easily budget my cash flow because it lined up well with my fixed expenses.

I get paid twice a month currently, so I’m back to the “old” style of getting paid; the one nice thing about this is that I get paid on the same day as Erin, so it’s as if we’re getting one paycheck, rather than direct deposits happening on random days, there are just two days a month.

I would think that employers would see the benefits of paying their employees once a month because they are only running payroll half as many times a year.  In fact, that was the reason that I got paid monthly at my previous job, we were a startup and running payroll cost ‘x’ dollars, we could save that much money per month by just running payroll once instead of twice.

I wanted to enable auto incrementing build numbers on an app last night at home in VS 2005, but this feature is doesn’t exist in VS, unfortunately.

A quick google search later I found this solution on the Code Project that will modify your AssemblyInfo file with updated build numbers each time you build in VS.  I was skeptical about using this after looking at the code because it seems to be a hack, also, I didn’t want to add another assembly reference to my projects, and I’ve had issues in the past with using code from Code Project (typos, won’t compile, etc).

But, I decided to give it a whirl. I downloaded the project and built the assembly (it worked!), then followed the directions detailed for using the resulting assembly.

It worked perfectly.

Now my build numbers are auto incremented, and even better, if I don’t like the numbering scheme, it’s easy enough to change it myself cause I have the source code.  Also, there is no need to reference the assembly in your project, you just need to point the project file to the location of the assembly.