Well, I'm back.  I'm now running plain ol' XP Pro.  Everything went down hill after I installed Apache.  Then, to make matters worse, I accidently quickformatted my data drive during the XP install, which I don't recommend.  Back from a restore now, I managed not to lose anything.

Recently, I started having problems browsing in 64-bit XP.  All command line utilities work fine, as well as serving things with IIS, but anything network-related in the UI seems to go stupid.  Accessing the network connections folder, or the connections tab of internet settings just hangs.  If I boot in safe-mode everything works fine, which leads me to believe that the firewall has something to do with it.  Of course, I can't seem to turn it off because it isn't enabled in safe mode, and won't respond in regular mode.

I thought I'd get this out here to see if anyone googling had a similar problem, and perhaps had a suggestion if they'd fixed it.

I'm glad I got dasBlog fixed in time to blog about Google Desktop.  Trust me, if you ever have looked for something on your hard drive or in your email, you want it.  It is freaking awesome!  I saw a video demo of the new MSN search which is identical in purpose, but it appears they've been beaten to the punch.

Scott Hanselman has some good observations on how it works.

Since the 64-bit windows versions can only run the 2.0 framework, everything is having to run on 2.0.  This is a good test for the framework.  DasBlog does not run as smoothly on the 2.0 beta framework as I hoped.  So far, it's been problems with client-side interaction with server-generated html (javascript).  For example, the sign-in code had some nifty javascript that was formed in a fairly short-sighted way. I had to change the way that controls were being referenced.

I'm also having trouble getting apache installed to run Subversion.  I may have to make due with svnserve until I figure that out.

I just came across the Subversion Book. From the site:

a free book about Subversion, a new version control system designed to supplant CVS. As you may have guessed from the layout of this page. this book is published by O'Reilly Media.

At work we adopted Subversion and I really love it.  We made (in my opinion) a mistake early on by separating our projects into multiple repositories.  This makes it very difficult to handle the versioning synchronization when those projects collide.  It looks like the svn:externals property may keep us from  having to migrate to a single repository before we're ready to take on that problem.

As you can see, I've already taken away some useful tidbits.  A must read for anyone using Subversion.

This past week, Becky's PC finally had enough problems with it to warrant a new one.  I think the final problem was with the interupt controller.  Anyway, I always enjoy an excuse to put together a new one, and I felt this was as good an excuse as any to start experimenting with my Home Theater PC project.  It also will take over the role of serving this page, at least for a while.  The old server will become Becky's PC, and will be a welcome upgrade.

I decided to go 64-bit so I could get a head start looking at the migration path for .NET apps (which is extremely low friction (not even a need for recompiling in most cases)).  I ended up getting an AMD64 combo from Fry's with an MSI motherboard.  I've been more and more frustrated with Fry's recently.  The motherboard is pretty good, but mine seems to have a problem with the on-board ethernet.  You can wiggle the connection around and the link light will turn on and off, and the drivers seem to have trouble (the latest 64-bit nForce3 drivers) recognizing it and such.  So, I've got to exchange it this evening.  Seems like I have to go through that at least once for almost everything I get there.

Other than that, I'm very pleased with the performance.  Seriously fast.  When the POST screen is the bottleneck in the boot process, you know you've made a significant performance jump.  Hopefully, we'll be up on the new system soon.  I'm torn on whether to run XP or Server on it.  I'm going to be using it as a media center, so XP seems to be the route to take.  On the other hand, I'll be hosting some stuff on it as well, which makes Server the more appropriate route.  Any feedback?  I initially installed server and thought the network problems were driver issues with the platform.  So it's got XP on it now.

Today is my dad's birthday!  Happy Birthday, Daddio!

I got the news this morning that an old fraternity buddy of mine passed away over the weekend.  Brandon McFarland (or McFarley as I like to called him) was a mere young one when I was there, so we only shared a few semesters together.  I only knew him for a short time, but I find myself at a loss just the same.  Judging by the kind words of those who knew him best, he grew into his own nicely and touched the lives of many.

We always enjoyed making him act out the scene from Tommy Boy, where Chris Farley's character meets his new brother (Rob Lowe).

“Brothers don't shake hands, brothers gotta hug!”  We'll miss you buddy.

This has been the first Presidential debate in the age of weblogging (for me at least, I'm sure some will claim they have been blogging since before there was such a thing).

It is interesting that we no longer need the media to break things down for us.  I keep an eye on Instapundit, which I can only describe as the Robert Scoble of the political world.  In almost real-time, people from both sides were fact-checking, clarifying, and interpreting the debate.  I found it to be very interesting.

I hope more people than me were frustrated by Kerry's pattern:

Lehrer: Can you tell us blank?

Kerry: I'll tell you exactly blank, but first ... (long session of not telling us exactly anything until time was up)

I thought his story about the KGB was a little weird.  I also didn't understand why Kerry didn't want the world involved in the Korea talks, when that seemed to be his whole solution to all our problems.

Overall, I was pleased with Bush's performance.

This entry originally was a response to Heath's comment on my last entry on my ChickenScratch project, but it started to get long, so I figured I'd make it an entry.

He asked about my ideas for relational algorithms between topics.  The first phase of "auto-linking" is based on matching phrases in content with available topic names and meta-data like categories/properties with the content of entries.  Later, I might do things like Google-type analysis of content and present these “related“ topics in a way similar way to the “ads“ you get in Gmail.  We use FlexWiki at work to manage all our projects and their bugs, feature requests, and infrastructure projects, and more than once we've had “happy accidents“ in auto-linking within that data that have led to better design, and FlexWiki uses a very simple topic matching algorithm.

He also mentioned hierarchy.  Hierarchy is a key reason for me to create something new rather than retrofit one of the Wiki implementations available like the excellent FlexWiki. I love the "magic" linking and organizational ability of Wikis, but I don't like giving up the ability to direct organization through hierarchy.

Security and permissions is also core to the goals of ChickenScratch.  It's always frustrating to me when I have to separate my public information from my private information from the information I only want to share with friends just because a program doesn't let me.  My security model is working pretty well, and was pretty easy to implement thanks to the new Role and Membership providers in Whidbey

I'm definitely open to collaboration.  I'd like to solidify my ideas a bit more.  I've changed my parsing model about 4 times now.  What I've got going on now appears to be working out pretty well.

Yeah, an overview of the .NET API Design guidelines!  Now I can point people at a more consumable resource rather than trying to keep my own overview document in sync.