I'm on iPhonegraphy today!

Just a quick note:  I've really gotten into the iPhone photography thing here lately.  The good folks at iPhoneography were kind enough to show my stuff in one of their reader showcases.  You can find their site here.

I do have lots of software related posts to do, but they take a while to prepare.  I'll get back to the main mission soon.

Learning about Twitter

I was going to write a long post about Twitter and how useful it is. I've spoken to several people who think it's all celebs and teenagers. There's a fair amount of that, but there is so much more. Lots of people are using it for very useful purposes.  Twitter demographic statistics can be found here.

Anyway, like I said, I was going to write a post about Twitter, but the post I wanted to write has already been written by Scott Hanselman.  If you aren't on Twitter or don't know much about it, I highly recommend you read this post.

Interested?  Sign up here.  If you do, then follow me.

Also check out his video about Life with Diabetes and find out how you can make a contribution to help find a cure.

Starting a blog

Starting a blog is easy.  Making sure you always have new (and somewhat interesting) content is hard.  I'll make you a deal, I'll give you some pointers on how to make a blog and leave the content up to you.  I do the easy part and you can do the hard part.  Fair enough?

Actually, there can be lots to just starting a blog.  There are many different ways of doing this and there are multiple companies that provide similar services.  I have no strong feeling one way or the other for most of these.  This just happens to be what i use.  One more thing, you don't need any of this stuff to have fun blogging (other than the first step...creating a blog).  Let's begin.

• Create a blog on Blogger (owned by Google).
• I suggest Blogger but only because I'm  used to it.  WordPress is also one of the better known services.  
• There are lots of settings within blogger that you can mess around with.  I'm not going to go into detail on each of these but Blogger is well documented.  Help pages abound.
• Google Analytics (owned by Google)
• Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google that tracks your blog's visitors.  You can get their location down to the city, what browser they are using, screen size, what pages they visited on your site, how long they stayed there, what operating system they were using...it's all there.  
• Feed Burner (owned by Google)
• Lots of people use RSS readers instead of visiting individual sites.  You should enable the RSS feed for your blog.  The only problem is, RSS readers don't register as site visitors since they are only reading the RSS feed, not the site itself.  Enter FeedBurner.  It's like Google Analytics for RSS feeds.  You don't have to do this to have an RSS feed.  All blogs provide one.  But you can use FeedBurner to track RSS subscribes so you can have a better idea of your true audience.
• TwiterFeed
• I could write an entire post on Twitter alone (and I probably will).  Even if you don't use Twitter, you want to link your blog to a Twitter account.  Why?  Because people who use Twitter share things they find with other people on Twitter.  So if they like your content, it's like free advertising.  So create a Twitter account that sounds something like your blog.  Fill in the blog's web address in the Twitter profile.  Then go over to TwitterFeed and link your blog's RSS feed to the Twitter account.  Once you have done this, each time you create a new blog post, it will automatically show up with in your Twitter feed.  It'll put the title and a bit.ly link back to the full page.  What is bit.ly?  Read on...
• Bit.ly
• There are many different URL shorteners (more info).  Bit.ly just happens to be the one I use.  Bit.ly kind of builds off TwitterFeed and Twitter.  Since Twitter is limited to 140 characters, often times your entire Tweet is taken up by the URL alone.  Bit.ly takes the long URL and gives it a short one.  And...if you create a bit.ly account and then link it to your TwitterFeed account, you'll be able to track who,what, where, when people are clicking your bit.ly links from tweets auto generated by TwitterFeed.  
• Addthis.com
• Addthis provides a handy little snippet of JavaScript (don't be afraid, the directions are easy to follow) that puts group of links at the bottom of your posts that allow people to share the link on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and several other social networking sites.  This is huge.  Why?  Because people who search for content like yours and find it often know other people who are interested in the same thing and if you make it easy for them to share what they found on your site, they will probably get more eyeballs on your content.
• Sharethis.com provides a similar service.
• Facebook Page
• If you're on Facebook, I would consider making a Facebook Page that imports it's wall content directly from your blog's RSS feed (a la Twitterfeed).  This allows people on Face Book to become a fan of it and then their friends see it an potentially join and so on.  You can also add a few other things to the page, like a calendar for events and a link back to the main blog.
• Custom URL
• You can register a URL that links to your blog so that, for example, the address bar says, "http://www.jonwear.com" instead of "http://jonwear.blogspot.com".  It makes you look a little more stable.  This is the only thing in this lists that costs money.  Usually you can get a URL for around $10 a year. This involves a little know how involving things like DNS and A Name records and the like.  There's lots of documentation on the web on how to get this done, but you might want to bring  in a knowledgeable friend to get this setup.  I'm sure you know one.
• Money!
• First off...you probably aren't going to make much (or any) money with your blog.  But you might, who knows...you might make pennies from the masses and retire.  Both of these services  integrate well with Blogger.  I suggest:
• Google's Adsense (You get very small amounts of money when people click ads on your site)
• Amazon Associates (You get a cut of purchases that people make through your site)

iPhone Images

I'm experimenting with the iPhone camera and some of the little photo apps that you can get for it.  I'm not sure if I'm taking good photographs or not, but I'm having a fun time with it.  Hard to believe that it has all these imaging capabilities...and it's a phone too.

As is my usual MO, I setup a whole other blog devoted to just my iPhone masterpieces.  Common sense finally took over and I decided to do just a post about it instead.  I may do others and if I'm still into this several months from now then maybe I'll spin off another blog then.

I've enjoyed working with the limitations of the iPhone.  I have to look for places with good lighting or else trick them up some way with the editing software.  The constraints are quite liberating so far.  Anyway...here they are.  I'll keep uploading new images to this Flickr album (RSS):

Time to learn

Several years ago I worked with a developer that did all of his development with classic ASP pages. It didn't matter what the task was, a classic ASP page was the answer. Instead of writing a console app or writing a .bat file to run an automated file manipulation task, he would reference COM objects from within the ASP page and run it under an account that had access to the file system and then schedule IE to run with that page as a command line argument. And it ran...most of the time. This guy was very comfortable with his classic ASP. During the time I knew him I never saw him write a windows application or a .net application of any kind. Classic ASP uber alles!

I am not like that.  I certainly have my comfort zones.  I stayed with classic ASP during the initial days of ASP.Net.  I didn't fully leave my spaghetti code ways behind until version 2.0 of the framework came out.  Then I left it behind for good.  But VB6?  I dropped it as soon as I tried my first .Net WinForms application.  I cannot quite explain why.  It was different enough that I found myself spending a lot of time relearning old tasks (like adding items to a drop down box and actually seeing the text).  But I could see the potential.  You'd think I would have seen it in ASP.Net from the get go but I've always been a console/backend/windows developer first and a web developer by necessity.

Anyway, version 2.0 of the framework came along and that got me excited about web development.  It seemed like there were a dozen new technologies to learn.  Right about the time I got up to speed on the relevant (to me) parts of framework 2.0, version 3.0 came out.  Then version 3.5...the version 3.5 sp1...and SQL Server 2008.  I threw up my hands and gave up trying to learn it all.  I picked a few things here and there and learned what I could.  When I found something really useful, like Linq-to-SQL, I would talk it up with the other developers in my department and try to get them using the new better ways.  Some took to the new ways, some kept on slogging the .Net 1.1 way.  You can bring a developer to water but you can't make him Linq.

For me, I usualkly learn so much about new technologies while working on a project that by the time it's finished, I want to rewrite the entire thing in the stuff I was learning while coding with the old stuff.

What is this post about?

This post is about all the new stuff that's come out recently(and somewhat recently) from Microsoft.  I was making a list of books I need to buy to get current on things and realized I was going to be spending a fortune.  Here are the technologies that I want to learn about:

• MVC 2.0
• WPF
• Silverlight 4.0
• .Net Framework 4.0
• Powershell (So hard to leave my cmd ways behind, but I need to)
• JQuery (I'm way behind on this)
• IIS 7.0
• SQL Server 2008 (somewhat advanced)
• Windows 7 (It's cool, I like it, but I'm still stumbling around some)

That's a full year's worth of reading right there.  I'm going to have to go back to doing it like I did in the old days when I ways trying as hard as I could to get out of the technical support department and into development.  I'll buy a book (or two) about each technology and read them from start to finish.  I won't remember all of what I read, but general concepts and terms will stick.  Later, I'll be thinking about a problem and think, "Wait a second....I read something about this..." and I'll flip through a book or Google a certain term and find my solution.  The fun parts of reading these 800+ page behemoths is when I come across a better way to do something I do all the time.  I know that sounds strange but, yes, those are the fun parts.  If it wasn't fun I wouldn't be able to do this for a living.

Anyway, time to get reading. 

Twitter Feeds For Websites That Don't Have Twitter Feeds

How many times have you come across a website and thought, "Hey!  I'd like to follow this on Twitter!" but when you looked around for a "Follow Me" button on the website, you can't find one.  Not very often right?  I mean, most places have a Twitter feed now.  But not everyone.  So what do you do?

Well, almost every single website that publishes content on at least a semi-regular basis has an RSS feed.  That's your ticket.  You can use the RSS feed to create a Twitter feed.  Here's how:

• Open a new Twitter account and give it a name and a unique email address.
• Gmail makes this easy by allowing you to add "+somename" to the account part of your email address.  So if your gmail address is "myname@gmail.com" you can use the email address "myname+something@gmail.com" and it will still go to your regular Gmail account but you can register it as a unique email address elsewhere.
• Open an account at www.twitterfeed.com.
• Click Create A New Feed
• Paste in the URL of the RSS feed.
• Click Advanced if you want to look through the other options.
• Click Next and link the feed to your newly created Twitter account.
• Now go back to your REAL twitter account.
• Follow the Twitter account you just created.

For instance, I'm interested in player trades and roster changes in the NBA.  There is an RSS feed for this but no Twitter feed.  At least there was no Twitter feed.  Now there is and you can follow it at:

http://www.twitter.com/nbaxact

Numlock Morse Code

In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, Randy Waterhouse finds himself in a prison in the Philippines.  Randy has a laptop with some very valuable information on it that some bad guys want, but since the information is encrypted, they can't get to it.  So they allow Randy to keep his laptop in his jail cell but the only place he can put it is on top of a short, locked, file cabinet that has been chained to the floor.  The battery has been removed so the only way to get power is to leave it plugged in on top of the filing cabinet.  The thing is, Randy doesn't even know what the information is yet, because it's encrypted too. He needs to decrypt the information, but not let the bad guys know he is decrypting it, or rather, he wants them to think he's doing it but give them the wrong information.

He can't show the real decrypted info on the laptop display because he is afraid that the bad guys are trying to use a Van Eck Phreaking antenna that is inside the filing cabinet so they can eavesdrop on his laptop screen (he's already made sure there are no hidden cameras).   So he comes up with some fake decryption that he shows on the screen, but the real info has to be displayed another way.  He writes a program that takes text and translates it into Morse Code.  The program turns the the scroll lock light on and off to simulate dots and dashes.  Now he knows the real info from the blinking light, and the bad guys get the fake info he showed on the screen.

I thought that was kind of cool so I wrote a program that does just that.  The only difference is my program blinks the num lock key instead of the scroll lock key (my keyboard doesn't have a scroll lock key).

If you were to load this application on your windows PC and run the following from the command line:

c:\waterhouse\waterhouse.exe /T:"sos"

You would get this:




Notice the /T:"sos" that comes after the name of the application.  The /T: switch says, "turn this text into Morse code."

You could also type this:

c:\waterhouse\waterhouse.exe /F:c:\morse.txt

/F: says to load a file and turn that into Morse code.  It can be a file on your computer, a UNC path or a file on the web (just prepend it with http://).  The contents of the file c:\morse.txt on my computer happens to be my name.  So when you hit enter, you see this:




Help is available by typing the /? or /help switches.

You can download the compiled application here. (Windows only)

You can download the source code here.

You can download Microsoft's free Visual Basic 2008 Express development environment here.

Wikipedia: Morse code