Yes, it's another blog meme. The previous one on "circle on interest" turned out pretty interesting, and this one is some what similar as it says something about you and your interests. I picked this one up at Lachlan Hardy's Flickr stream, and it started out on Anson Parkers blog:

Meme: Go to your blog/website/whatever. Select-all (ctrl-a) and copy. Then head to Wordle, paste your clipboard into the text area and voila! Your life in a nutshell…

I did that, and this is the results. As you can see this blog have been going Silverlight crazy lately, and as Stephen Price suggests on the OzSilverlight mailing list, I might need some Silverlight rehab.

I also did a Wordle cloud of my 255 (I better make the 256th special) del.icio.us links. This snapshot shows a longer time frame (my first link is from June 2007), and I'm not as Web 2.0 fanatic as the cloud might suggest. I guess I've been a little "sloppy" with my tagging and labeled "everything" Web 2.0.

I'm not going to nominate names for this meme, but would be cool if you drop me a comment/link if you create a cloud your self.

Paul Stovell, a great guy I meet at CodeCampOz in Wagga Wagga, blogged about his circle of interest, and encouraged fellow bloggers to define their own.  Paul defines the three areas like this:

I decided to try to map out the things I care about at the moment, and this is how it turned out:

I would encourage any reader to create their own circle of interest, and in particular the following  bloggers:

• Gøran Hansen: Good friend and long time colleague. Into .NET, switched to Mac as his home computer, flirting with alternative languages like Boo.
  
• Martin Bekkelund: Active and highly visible Norwegian blogger with strong opinions on OOXML/ODF and Open Source. Just started in a new job at the Norwegian centre for free software.
  
• Anders Norås: Dual-minded developer with strong presence both  the Norwegian .NET and Java community. Blogs about agile, software design, DSL and more. Great read!
  
• Sondre Bjellås: Geek of the year, .NET enthusiast, Capgemini and Microsoft RD colleague and good friend. Bought the "love and sex with robots"-book when we where in Seattle for the MVP Summit, so his Circle of Interest should be interesting.
  
• Andrew Browne: Great guy I drove up to Wagga Wagga with a couple weeks back. Just curious about what he's into at the moment.
  
• Håvard Sørbø: Good friend from uni, into open source, C#, VOIP and everything with an Apple.

I'm a frequent user of many so called "Web 2.0" services. Lately I've been spending most of my time in Facebook, a social networking site. Some of you non RSS-subscribers might have noticed my Facebook presence banner in the right column of my site. Facebook is not as music oriented as MySpace, and people can't go crazy and personalize the HTML with animated gifs and magenta backgrounds, so things looks way "cleaner" and more organized in Facebook than in MySpace. On the other hand, Facebook isn't as "serious" as LinkedIn (where I'm also listed), and it has some cool features for organizing events, managing groups and so fourth. But the main reason I'm using Facebook is that it's wildly popular in Norway, and particularly at the Norwegian University of Technology and Science. At the moment the NTNU network on Facebook have 9525 members, and it's spreading faster than any Internet worm I've seen. 

One of the nice things about Facebook is that it can import your blog (or any other RSS feed). How ever, the import feature is limited to only one feed. By using Yahoo Pipes you can avoid this limitation.

Another great "Web 2.0" service I've been using for quite some time is Flickr, which I assume won't need any further introduction. Flickr, as many other of these new and cool online services have some open APIs and cool ways to integrate. One of the things both me and Hege are doing is using Flickr as a mobile photo blog. The way it works is that you sign in to your Flickr profile, and go to their upload tools page, and click on the link "upload pictures by e-mail".

On this page you get a auto generated "obfuscated" e-mail address you can use to send pictures to your Flickr account. You can also configure which tags Flickr should apply to any pictures received on this address. So I've configured Flickr to tag any pictures received by e-mail with "mobile". The subject of the email message becomes the title, and the body of the message becomes the subscription. So the next thing you do is to bring up your tags page and click the "mobile" tag, and then the "feed icon" to bring up an RSS feed with all your pictures tagged with mobile. This is essentially your "mobile blog".

Earlier this year Yahoo released a really cool and innovative Web 2.0 service called Yahoo Pipes. You can look at this as simple "drag and drop mash up tool" that comes with a set of "building blocks" (or pipes if you want) that you can connect together to spit out some kind of functionality. It lets you combine a wide range of services such as RSS, maps, feeds, searches and so fourth to create your own customized mash up. I haven't blogged about Yahoo Pipes before because I haven't found any cool scenarios where I could use it… Until now!

So I have my Flickr Mobile Blog feed, and I have my primary blog feed coming from this site (well, it's actually hosted by Feedburner but that's a different story). What you can do next is to use Yahoo Pipes to create one "master feed" which merges your Flickr mobile feed with your primary blog feed. To do this I used two "Fetch Feed" pipes, one "Union" to combine the two feeds, one "Sort" to sort the new feed on pubDate, and finally everything get's piped to out.

Once you have the pipe up and running all you have to do is sign into your Facebook account, go to the notes section and click "blog import settings", and import the Feed exposed by your Yahoo Pipe.

It literally took me 5 minutes to create a Yahoo Pipe merging my Flickr mobile feed with my main blog feed and import the end result into Facebook. Now that's painless integration!

This might not interest my 33 RSS subscribers (more on that number later), or perhaps it's a reason to peek outside your RSS reader?

Because of bad weather I've spent most of the Easter indoor in front of the computer, which actually have been really nice. Finally I had time to finish off some personal projects I've planned for some time. One of them is upgrading this blog with a new theme.

The new theme is inspired by Alexander Groß great looking theme over at www.therightstuff.de.

As well as making the blog look cooler with a custom theme, the main focus have been on readability.

Some of the readability enhancements include brand new cool looking quotation boxes…

…a way better way to handle code snippets, using "scrolling" windows and CSS styled color highlighting

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MyBlog
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Syntaxt coloring example
    /// </summary>
    public class MyClass
    {
        private string message = "This is my new theme...";

        public void Test()
        {
            Console.WriteLine(message);
        }
        
    }
}

…and a cleaner way to include downloads in the blog posts.

I've also changed the way the blog display comments. If you have a Gravatar it will be displayed next to your post and replies (comments) from me are colored different than comments from readers.
 
I've added a few Gadgets to the sidebar, such as my Facebook profile, my Gamer Card, my Flickr pictures, and a visitor map.

Another update to the blog is that my RSS feed is now handled by FeedBurner. This offers me better statistics on how many people actually subscribe to the blog. Currently I have 33 subscribers, which isn't too impressive… But at least I know someone is reading my posts.

So, what do you think of the new design? Any comments or suggestions are welcome!

Hege, my girlfriend, finally have a new site! Well, the site has actually been online for a couple of weeks now, and have been ready for almost a year! The site is a customized "Personal Web Page Starter Kit", with a blog module, a "chat box", a guestbook, and some cool Flickr! Integration. The site is available up on http://www.hege.rokenes.com/, so be sure to pay it a visit and drop her a note in the guestbook/chat box.

The Flickr! integration we've done is basically a mobile blog. When Hege takes a picture she can send it as an MMS message to her secret Flickr! e-mail address. All message received to this address is posted to her Flickr! site with a custom "mobile" tag. By using an RSS feed with all "mobile" tagged pictures, the XmlDataSource and the DataList control we managed to display mobile photos directly on her blog.

The reason it took so long to get the site online, was partly that we needed to get our virtual "personal project" server up and running on the new GreIT AS (my old company) server. Another "obstacle" was learning how to manage and deploy SQL 2005 databases.

Just before Christmas the SQL Servaer team released the "SQL Server Hosting Toolkit" on Codeplex. This toolkit consists of two major parts, a client side wizard and a server side Web Service. So you as an and user can install the toolkit and get a wizard that integrates nicely with all Visual Studio versions. The Wizard lets you generate both create and insert scripts for a database, and at the end of the wizard you can choose to save the file as a .SQL file and execute it your self, or you can choose to submit the query to a server running the "SQL Server Hosting Toolkit". The server part is a web service that accepts the SQL script and executes it against the server. This way hosting companies can offer their end users an easy way to upload both schema and data with out opening ports in the firewall.

My personal experience with the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit have been great. The script executed perfectly against the server database, and all the data (including binary data) was inserted as expected. If you want to learn more about how you can use the toolkit Scott Guthrie has a good walkthrough.

Another interesting aspect of the toolkit is the licensing. The application is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL), one of Microsofts new licenses that's part of their shared source initiative. Microsoft currently have three licenses under this initiative:

• Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
• Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL)
• Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL)

The Ms-PL is the least restrictive license and let's you create derivatives of the code, change it, distribute it etc. For instance is the client side JavaScript libraries in Microsoft AJAX framework licensed under the Ms-PL license. Mono guru Miquel de Icaza have some comments on this over at his blog. Another important AJAX technology is the AJAX Control Toolkit, which is licensed under the Ms-CL license. This license let's you create derivative works, but if you distribute them in source form you have to distribute them under the Ms-CL license.

The Ms-RL is the most restrictive, which basically just lets you read the code for reference, but not compile or alter it in any way.

The second thing that makes the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit interesting is that it shows how Microsoft is becoming more agile in meeting customer and developer demands. Instead of backing this toolkit into the official SQL Server release cycle, and having us wait a long time to get the functionality, they release it as a separate open source project. The same can be said about Microsoft AJAX framework. They released a fully supported 1.0 release now, instead of waiting for Visual Studio Orcas.

My blog have been a little unstable lately. I'm back home in Trondheim after a great, long, Christmas holiday, and have spent the week migrating my web apps from GreIT's old Windows 2000 server to a new virtual Windows 2003 server. While migrating I also upgraded to the current version of dasBlog, but I haven't had time to upgrade my custom theme. I don't know when I'll find time to do that, but I'll try to get the theme upgraded as soon as possible. I'm planning a few "gadgets" I want to add to the site when I'm updating it.

Just a quick shout out to some of my (real life) friends who just started blogging:

My good friend and co-worker Gøran Hansen have finally started blogging. His first two posts are about the Microsoft Gadgets platform and how to run the sidebar on Windows XP. I share his opinion that moving Windows Presentation Foundation out of the Gadgets platform was a big setback. Now you’re basically limited to writing HTML and JavaScript gadgets… The reason for this, according to Gadgets team members on the form, is that Microsoft didn’t have the time and resources to make a solid WPF implementation in time for the first release in the Vista time frame. Another reason why they stuck with HTML and JavaScript is that this model is been used by Gadget/Widget frameworks for a long time. You can check out Gørans blog at http://goeran.greit.no/.

Another good friend from NTNU who also have started blogging is Hans Olav Norheim. His blog will for most time be about technology, focusing on .NET and SQL development. You can check out his blog at http://hansolav.net/blog.

A third blog worth checking out is Espen Fuglems blog. This one will definitely not be technology related! Judging from his first couple of posts this one is going to be hilarious. He’ll be ranting about everything from world politics, philosophy to his brand new (totally pointless) cartoon; “Pyro Pingo”. You can find Espens blog at http://vettugmannen.blogspot.com/. 

I finally found time to finish my new blog theme. I designed it during Christmas holiday, but haven’t had time to convert it to HTML until now. It still needs some work like navigation links and a couple more gadgets to the sidebar.

The design consists of various graphical elements from things that interest me. If you look closely you can find:

• Marv and Nacny from Sin City (one of the best movies ever)
• Master Chief from Halo 2 (greatest online console game ever made)
• Windows Vista logo
• Terje Haakonsen, best snowboarder trough all time
• Visual Studio logo, use it every day
• Tony Hawk
• DC Shoe Company
• Joana Dark from Perfect Dark Zero. Crappy game, cool character
• Jake Gyllenhaal from Donnie Darko
• My girl friend, Hege
• The Donnie Darko poster
• The .NET Framework logo
• An eagle (no idea why I put it in there)
• The Xbox360 logo
• The Burton Snowboard Company logo
• And a snowboarder from Amped 3

I would appreciate any comments on my new design!

I’ve been a long time fan of the show DotNetRocks, hosted by Microsoft Reginoal Director Carl Franklin. He’s considered one of the podcasting pioneers, and the show has been around for quite some time. Well worth checking out. As an addition to the audio version of DotNetRocks Pwop Productions, the company behind DNR, have started up DNR TV. The show works almost like an interactive screen cast. Carl will call up some one to demonstrate or explain some technical concept. The latest episode is an great introduction to multithreading in .NET, so if you want an introduction on how to write multithreaded C# application be sure to check out episode 4.

DNR TV can be found at http://www.dnrtv.com/, while DotNetRocks can be found at http://www.dotnetrocks.com/.

Pwop productions and Scott Hanselman have also started up a new show called Hansel Minuttes. This is typically a shorter show, 20-30 minutes, about .NET development and other cool technology. You can subscribe to Hansel Minutes over at http://www.hanselminutes.com/.

Another podcast I’ve been listening to lately is an Xbox related podcast made by Larry Hyrb aka Major Nelson. He’s Xbox Live Director of Programming, and has been publishing his show for quite some time. I think he’s currently at episode 161 or something. I’ve only been listening to him for a few episodes, after I got my Xbox 360. So, if you’re into Xbox this show is defiantly worth checking out. You’ll find his blog and podcast over at http://www.majornelson.com/.