I'll be a lot less busy in March, they tell me. Meanwhile, here are some things I want to read:
I will get to them...soon...
I have a new post up at my employer's developers blog.
Hard-core Daily Parker enthusiasts may have seen it already. Still, click through to XM. We like blog visitors!
I had meant to make a note of my 3,000th blog posting, but I completely forgot it was coming. So, after 2,353 days (and 24 minutes), three house moves, a few significant personal events, and Parker's entire life, The Daily Parker is still going strong.
At the historical posting rate for the blog (1.28 per day), I'll hit 6,000 entries in September 2018 and 10,000 entries by April 2027. (For the last two years, though, I've posted about 1.5 per day, so you could see 10,000 as early as April 2025.) Stick around.
And thanks for reading.
Swamped with client work, getting ready for Xmas, traveling hither and yon—tomorrow, at least, will be quieter.
If you don't know Hyperbole and a Half, set aside an hour and read every one of Allie Brosh's posts. Since it's December, though, start with this one:
By the time I was done reinventing her, Mary carried a cane, walked with an exaggerated limp and was completely covered in BandAids.
She was also blind.
I started reading the blog last night when I got home for dinner and finally stopped 90 minutes later because my face hurt from laughing.
Just now, going into hour 32 of the (technically) longest day of my life, I noticed that the blog's comment view feature isn't working. This is Case #2869 in FogBugz, and will be fixed as soon as possible.
Not tonight, though. Just like Saturday, my goal is only to make it to 9pm. If I can do that, I will defeat jet lag in one stroke. I must not fail. Sleep deprivation leads to pointless blog entries, and we can't have that, can we?
The new feature I mentioned this morning is done. Now, in addition to the "where was this posted" button on the footer, you will notice the entry's time zone. Each entry can have its own time zone—in addition to the site-wide default.
I still have to fix a couple of things related to this change, like the fact that the date headers ("Thursday 24 November 2011," just above this entry) are on UTC rather than local time. But going forward (and going backward if I ever get supremely bored), you can now see the local time wherever I was when I posted.
Incidentally, if you want to bring the tzinfo database to your .NET application, I have licensing terms.
I'm rushing to get a major change to the resurrected dasBlog code done before I leave tomorrow (because I don't want to push code from anywhere I can't recover). Meanwhile, here's a timely NSFW comic for your holiday.
A week ago Sunday I mentioned that I'd forked this blog engine so I could add features. I've added the first one, and everything seems to be working just fine.
The Daily Parker has used GeoRSS for a long time. All of the entries since March 2010 are geo-coded, which you would only know by looking at the RSS feed. Well, now you can see the geographic information on the blog entries themselves.
See the little globe icon next to the time and date at the bottom of the entry? Go ahead, click on it.
For more fun, check out some other entries, too.
The blog engine running The Daily Parker, dasBlog, last got updated in March 2009. It appears moribund; no one's updating it anymore. This happens in software development all the time. As a user of the software, however, I'd like some new features and some defect corrections. For example, I complained last month that I couldn't switch from GUID permalinks to more user-friendly ones. I also found a bug in the module that lists the months, off to the side. And I want to show the posting time in the local time zone where I made the post.
All of these things require changes to the code. It's an open-source project, so getting the code is easy, and I've had it for years. Only, the dasBlog project appears moribund.
So I've decided to start my own private code branch. Not only will this allow me to make the changes I want, but also it will allow me to integrate with Inner Drive libraries, which I'll need for the time-zone update.
I don't know when I'll have time to work on it, but at least now I feel like I've got some control over the blog engine. There are lots of blog engines out there, including some open-source .NET-based engines. But this is post #2758; I really don't want to convert all those entries to a new format.