Yesterday newly installed Firefox 3 crashed on me at least 10 times, which, I believe, is a new world record (ha-ha). It could be because I am visiting a lot of Microsoft-centric sites that often run Silverlight. It looks like Silverlight 1.0 does not work in FF3 at all and Silverlight 2.0 kills it. Or vice-versa. Lovely... At the end, I had to drop to IE 6 (tough without tabs, but works fine). So, where does it put Silverlight and who is to blame? Specially considering the fact that problem with compatibility was known long ago and existed since early betas?

It doesn’t matter, everybody is a looser. Firefox – because it is crashes. Microsoft – because it’s cross platform/cross browser technology did not cross anything yet (very limited on Linux, still not working in Opera despite promises etc.). Average Jo – because “internet is broken”.

Small little tiny but mostly good things. More...

I use thumb flash drives quite a lot moving between computers. It is still much faster to load a gig or two from the flash drive than to use Skydrive or other "cloud" alternative. For the most part it is painless - stick it in and OS will find and mount it, no setup requires. But one day perfectly good USB drive stopped working all of the sudden on one specific computer. It works fine on the others and other USBs work fine on that computer too. What's going on? More...

Running public web site from your basement is unprofessional. I know that. For a couple years I'm running my own internet facing toy server at home as a sandbox project. Let me tell you - I'm still working on that 99.99999% uptime. 5-6 times a year my house loosing power, sometimes it comes back right away but it doesn't matter - server is going down and patiently awaiting me coming back from work. This alone means realistically 40-50 hours downtime a year. Sometimes it looks like my ISP goes down, too (may be he also running from the basement?) and I have to reset router to be able to connect again. Yet dependency on external DNS (I use DYNDns). And don't forget that you'll need to maintain it, patch, upgrade software, install new stuff with many-many reboots when you counting it year long. All that put together, and you got totally unreliable site that is constantly, chronically down. More...

Developers don't like to write documentation. There is nothing one can do about it. Yet, no matter how many great features you add to the project, no one will use them if they not well documented and easily discoverable. There is no special department for document writers on the open source projects (alas), so man has to do what the man has to do...

It is work in progress, but I promise to put extra effort and catch up on all features I've been doing for BlogEngine before 1.4 will be released some time late spring. I'll maintain documents both on Wiki and this site, in the future Wiki will have documentation on current release and this site will have latest on new features that will be rolled out to the Wiki when new release will become available.

Do you use design patterns in your daily development? You probably should, and if you don't you might start with reading some books on the subject. I would suggest one from Head First series, although not everybody is a big fan of this book. But I found it fun and easy reading that can trigger your curiosity and encourage you to dig dipper. It is written for Java developers, but language samples presented in the book are minimal and, if you don't understand Java, you can refer to this project for C# translation. More...

When I first tried Paint.net a year or so back, I wasn’t that much impressed. It looked a bit heavy for small feature set and fallen lightning years behind Photoshop. I tried to use it, but soon it ended up in the dusty corner of my toolbox. Right next to the Santa costume and DOS 5.0 set. I was using Photoshop now and then for all my graphics needs and was mostly satisfied with experience, or may be just got used to it. More...

BlogEngine 1.3 has been released this weekend, so now I can take a deep breath and relax a little. Last couple of weeks I've been torn between two deadlines, one on Extension Manager rushing into 1.3 and another on my day job. One down, one to go... Last night I upgraded my blog to 1.3, so now it runs on latest and greatest code base. Not sure if I followed best practises, but it did work so for those curious these are the steps I followed: More...

Don’t be jealous – I haven’t had real vacation for more than three years now, since my kids were born. These few days in Vegas are well deserved! I’m leaving early Saturday and will be back Wednesday, hopefully in one piece and not much poorer. And I’ve done everything I’ve promised: Dark Blog is up and running and Mp3 Player got face lift and don’t choke in IE any more. What more do you want? No, seriously…

In case you didn’t notice, I “enhanced” this site with SnapShots. If it annoys you too much, you can easily turn it off by opting “disable” in the upper right corner any pop-up that jumps when you hover over some of the links (you’ll have to delete cookies to re-enable it again if you’ll get bored afterwards). I can turn it off all together if you’ll start complaining, but so far I’m more like having fun with these little guys. It took about five minutes total to register and set it up, so if you are into this kind of things go ahead and add it to your own blog, it is really that simple. More...