We went to Busch Gardens today.  It was AWESOME!  We had a fantastic time.  I've got lots of cool pictures of things like gorilla charging, tigers playing, etc.  We walked like 15 miles or something...seriously, we walked alot.  They've got some great roller coasters as well.  A couple were closed though.  They're doing alot of new construction.

Well, I got fed up with the hotel we were staying in.  We got back and wanted to take a shower to cool off, but something was wrong with it.  I got them to give us another room, but the AC in that room didn't work well and made alot of noise.  So, we moved hotels.  Things are great now, and we're waiting for a tasty Dominos Pizza to arrive.

We're going to Busch Gardens again tomorrow to have more fun.  We probably won't stay as long though.

Well, we made it to Florida.  We're here in Tampa for Becky's brother's wedding.  We decided to get here a few days early and go to Busch Gardens and so forth.  So far, it's the smoothest vacation I've ever planned.  Flights, rental car, and hotel have all gone off without a hitch.

I don't know how fast/consistent my internet access will be, so I may not get pictures up till we get back.  But I'll try to keep everyone informed.

There's an Olive Garden about a block down the street, so we'll probably eat there this evening.  I like the Olive Garden pretty good.

Jen recently blogged about her blog's birthday.  Out of curiosity, I wanted to see when I started.  Turns out I missed it.  My first post was on June 5, 2003.

Looks like my old permalinks don't work.  I'll have to check that out.

I've mentioned the thumnail generator, “Thumbo”, several times.  I wrote it about a year ago while I was on vacation wanting to upload pictures to my blog over dial-up.  All you had to do was drag images onto it and it would spit out thumnails sized to your specification.  I had a “duh” moment the other day when I right-clicked on an image in explorer and was surprised to see “Resize Image” in the context menu.

Turns out, I had installed the Image Resizer powertoy for XP, which provides basically the exact same functionality integrated into the shell.

Anyway, I know a few of my readers are using Thumbo to generate thumbnails.  In the interest of not having to support it anymore, I would recommend using the powertoy instead.

After my photography spree over the weekend, I needed a more dedicated outlet than the blog.  I'm running nGallery here.  It automatically manages picture sizes and such, and supports ratings and comments. If you're running an aggregator, it supports RSS!  I just hope I have the bandwidth.  I've put a password on it to keep Googlebot and others from crawling it.  The password is “marklio” (without the quotes).  Enjoy!

I still need to mess with captions and titles, but in the interest of letting people see the pictures, I decided to go ahead and let you look at it.

It has an interesting album structure that I'm still getting used to.  Some albums that may be of interest are:

• The fireworks album from our stay with the Knights.  It's “hidden“ in a sub-album.
• My “Nature on the 4th“ album.

[UPDATE: I'm working on the problem with the above links.  For now, go to the gallery and log in first (password: marklio), then the links will work)

[UPDATE: I'm also working on the password issue.  If you're having trouble, resist the urge to hit enter after putting in the password. Click the submit button instead. That seems to work most of the time. If not, keep trying. Obviously, the password feature was added late in the game.]

Wow, finally another post to put in my “4th of July” category! Man, what a weekend!  We spent some time in Belton with family to hang out, watch the annual 4th of July parade, and shoot some fireworks.  We got VIP-type seats at the parade because we were “in-the-know“.  We shot a great bounty of fireworks.  It was a blast.

It was the first weekend and major event for my new Canon Digital Rebel, so I have TONS of pictures.  I'm working on a gallery.  I'm having to sort through hundreds of pictures.  I may just give up and put them all up there.

We also went to Dave and Jen's parent's place.  Well, more precisely Jen's parents.  There we shot fireworks, camped and played with cameras.  Jen's brother Jerry also has a rebel and was kind enough to let me play with some of his accessories. He has some pictures of the weekend already up.  We couldn't have asked for better weather.

I'll post when I get the pictures up somewhere.  I have some fantastic fireworks photos.

[UPDATE: My new gallery is available]

Here's a non-technical post.

This weekend, I drove a van to Dallas for the Youth Evangelism Conference.  It was really fun.  I hadn't planned on going, but so many kids signed up that they needed some extra drivers.  In short, it was a blast.

Among the highlights were:

• Audio Adrenaline - The last time I saw Audio A in concert, I had much more appropriate, shoulder-length hair to rock with.  It was a fantastic show.
• Kirk Cameron (link to a pretty impressive flash site that I just stumbled across) - He had an incredible amount of insight.  Much more than I expected.  He ended up being a very impressive speaker.
• Red Cloud (link to the only google hit with pictures) - He and his skinny white assistant (who looked an awful lot like Screech from “Saved by the Bell“) did some “freestyle“ rap which was pretty entertaining.  After a few songs, he had the crowd approach the stage and pull things out of their pockets.  He then made up a rap about all the things.  It would have been more impressive if it wasn't so easy to anticipate what was in people's pockets.  He became a favorite of mine just because it was fun to imitate him.
• Grits - I had only heard of them because of a cameo on the first Out Of Eden album I got at the above mentioned previously attended AudioA concert.  It was a fun concert, but that's not really the style of music I'm into much anymore.
• The van ride to and from - We had an absolute blast on the way and back. Lots of Homestar Runner references and impersonations and walkie-talkie fun.  It really took me back.  My parents got on one of the overpasses in Belton and waved as we drove past.  They are crazy.
• Stephen Baldwin (link to a related article) - He was a very sincere goofball.  He definitely has a heart for youth.

There's so much more to write about this, but if I don't stop, I'll never finish this entry. Again, it was fun.

A few months ago, a co-worker and I recieved an email from an overseas counterpart in another language.  We used Babelfish to translate it and also to translate our response.  This was an extremely handy tool.  While exploring it in more detail we found that some translations, especially to and from oriental languages whose sentence constructs are drastically different from English, can produce hilarious results when the results are “round-tripped” from English and then back again several times. For instance, the two round trip translation of this paragraph is:

In regard to the overseas equality of the E-mail of the sky of cooperator several months ago, recieved of another language. That translated that Babelfish is used in addition to the translation of our responses in regard to us. This was the device of convenience very. From the place where you understand the fact that decodement we insert the oriental language to in regard, go away in detail, having gotten together having explored while, the especially result and with this two time English " Empty the next; " of circle; You stumble or, either one; The fact that it differs from time English completely is in order to withstand the possible cheerful result. For example, as for translation of this paragraph as follows there is a thing:

Along those same lines, another co-worker ran across this little beauty today.  The results of a hotel's internet setup instructions English translation gone horribly wrong.

I had a request from Scott Hanselman (who has been vocal on the subject of ViewState on many occasions) to share my approach to file-based ViewState persistence that I mentioned in my previous post.  Feel free to comment on my approach.  I need to get code formatting set up.  Pasting from Visual Studio is a pain.

Here's my overrides of my base class page's LoadPageStateFromPersistenceMedium and SavePageStateToPersistenceMedium:

protected override object LoadPageStateFromPersistenceMedium() {
     return _viewStatePersister.LoadViewState();
}

protected override void SavePageStateToPersistenceMedium(object viewState) {
     _viewStatePersister.SaveViewState(viewState);
}

Doesn't tell you much, except I'm delegating persistence to a ViewStatePersister, which looks like (with some things renamed to protect the innocent):

public override object LoadViewState() {
     object viewState = base.LoadViewState();
     if (viewState != null) {
          Guid guid = (Guid)viewState;
          LosFormatter formatter = new LosFormatter();
          using (FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(CreateOfflineViewStateFilePath(guid), FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.None)) {
               viewState = formatter.Deserialize(fileStream);
          }
     }
     return viewState;
}
public override void SaveViewState(object viewState) {
     //create a guid for this viewstate
     Guid guid = Guid.NewGuid();
     LosFormatter formatter = new LosFormatter();
     using (FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(CreateOfflineViewStateFilePath(guid), FileMode.CreateNew, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None)) {
          formatter.Serialize(fileStream, viewState);
     }
     //trick the regular system into thinking all it needs to save is the guid
     base.SaveViewState(guid);
}

The appropriate persister is created with a call to a virtual CreateViewStatePersister() method, which a page can use to create the persister of its choice.  As I said in my previous post, I was dissapointed that I had to use the LosFormatter rather than the BinaryFormatter.  The downside of this approach is the possibility for creating LOTS of files, as opposed to creating a single file per session.  But I already have a file cleaning mechanism in place that cleans up files created by my graphing library, which creates more files.

On a recent iteration of a project at work, we were analyzing our cache usage for several data analysis pages we have using ASP.net.  The usage of these pages evolved as we updated them with features, and in a pinch we were forced to turn off caching because of the hit to memory we were taking.  As we loaded more and more data into our database, and we had more and more users, more stuff was being cached, but we were not seeing benefits from the caching across users because each user was looking at different data.  Turning off the cache caused individual users to take a big performance hit when reloading the same report twice or making minor adjustments to the options, but we just couldn't justify the memory usage for that small percentage.

I decided the solution was a multi-level cache, where objects expired to lower levels, like from memory to high-speed disk, to slower disk, to db (really, I only want the memory and disk levels, but there's no need to limit it to that).  Unfortunately, there is no mechanism for injecting new behavior into the System.Web.Caching classes to accomplish that, which is a shame because they have already implemented the expiration and dependency code that would be the most complex part.

So, I'm faced with the possibility of creating my own caching framework, or tricking the System.Web.Caching classes to do my bidding using the existing mechanisms like dependencies (which is a possibility).

On another note, I implemented file-based ViewState quite successfully.  It was much more simple and straightforward to address issues like a user with multiple windows than any article led me to believe.  In doing so, I noticed some VERY annoying things about that ViewState persistence mechanism.  The normal behavior uses the LosFormatter to serialize the ViewState to base64 to be put inline with the html.  This is fine for storing ViewState inline, but if I'm serializing to files, I'd rather have the speed and efficiency of the BinaryFormatter.  The problem is that LosFormatter is special and doesn't play by the same rules as the other formatters in the framework (BinaryFormatter, etc).  Most of the built-in controls use Pair and Triplet to store their data in ViewState, but they aren't marked with SerializableAttribute which means that BinaryFormatter can't serialize them!  So I had to continue to use the LosFormatter, which bloats data horrendously.  I hope some of this is cleaned up for ASP.net 2.0.

OK, I suppose it's time to jump on the bandwagon. I've avoided publicly giving out Gmail invitations for a while, but I've given out about 10 of them and they keep giving me more.  I've run out of people I think would be interested in them.  If you would like one, leave a comment with your email address and I'll see about getting you one.  If you're using Hotmail or Yahoo, I'd highly recommend it as a much better alternative (having used them both at one time or another).  I'd also recommend it if you use multiple computers and don't have a way to keep your email synced up.

If you're gonna leave your email in a comment, you probably ought to obfuscate your email address to avoid spam.  I suggest doing things like spelling it out (bob at bob dot com) or something that requires a bit of human intervention to figure it out.  I do get alot of crawler traffic.