The crazy-hott company I work for is getting ready to move into new, swanky, techno-stuffed digs. Yesterday was packing day for the delivery center - where my group of super-consultants live - and in honor of the event my grand-boss, Brian Prince, started a little meme: How does an XXX guy pack? Brian tagged several of his minions with variations of the meme and surprise, surprise... I'm Open Source Guy. In OSS, this is how we roll... Similar to how a tools nerd packs, an Open Source guy would first take a look at the lay of...

I recently attended CodeMash, the biggest-little-conference around, and had a great time. While the sessions and content at the conference are first class, they aren’t what bring people back. Its the conference attendees, the hallway conversations, and the vibe that bring folks back and make the conference what it is. As a matter of fact, I only made it to a hand full of the sessions this year. Why? Because the rest of the time I was caught up in Open Spaces talks and adhoc conversations with wicked-smart guys like Dustin Campbell, Keith Elder, Bill Wagner,...

It seems one of the biggest voids in Windows Live Writer has finally been filled - Search & Replace has arrived! Waldek Mastykarz recently left me a comment to let me know that he was tired of waiting for the WLW team to add Search & Replace, so he took it upon himself to build a Search & Replace plugin, complete with... Regular Expressions! Sometimes I just miss the Replace functionality which in my opinion is a must-have of each content editor - even the Notepad proves it. If I’m not wrong the Live Writer...

Despite my hope for a quick turnaround on the Parley release things just didn’t go that way... they rarely do. I’ve got all kinds of excuses as to why it’s taken so long. Phil, Simone, and I each taking new jobs at Microsoft, Avande, and Quick, respectively, would be one. Carli and I buying a house and getting totally wrapped up in Buckeye Football would be a couple more. But in the end, who care because no one like excuses. Isn’t there even some old cliché about how. excuses are like... something... and they...

Phil officially broke the news early this morning... but for those few of you that don’t read his blog - MySpace China is using a modified version of Subtext for it’s blogging engine. Flippin' Sweet! Does this mean we’ve finally made it and we can start making insanely frivolous purchases like our own data center, ping-pong tables, and a yacht? Nope, not even close. That’s the beauty of the OSI license under which Subtext is released - others are free to do pretty much whatever the heck they want with Subtext. And that’s cool by us......

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read James' response to Phil’s Tweet regarding the recently announced open sourcing of parts of the .net code base. It went like this: Phil : Remember, "Open Source" is a trademark owned by the OSI. .NET is not open sourced, it’s being shared. James : I think shared might not be right either, more like shown. I am not sharing my ice cream with you if I just let you look at it. :) Open Source explained for the...

After a very hectic month or so things are starting to slow down around here. They are slowly getting back to normal, or at least as normal as things ever were. And since Phil is utterly overwhelmed with Cody "O.G." Haack he’s been hounding me to give up my day job and spend more time Subtexting. Unfortunatly we’ve not found a rich benefactor to pay our salaries while we do what we love - build Subtext and evangelize the goodness of open source software. But I digress... The point of this rant? The point is - we were not planning...

As several of my comrades have already announced, Subtext has been nominated for two, count 'em two Community Choice Awards! Apparently my pleading worked! Nominations Best Project for Communications: The best project for talking to your friends or sharing information. Other nominees include - Miranda, Pidgin, and FileZilla. Most Collaborative Project: The project most likely to accept your patches and value your input. Other nominees include - Azureus, XOOPS, and Zimbra. This is a really big achievement for the project and we're proud to be one of only two .NET projects to be nominated. The other project is VMukti, a corporate...

Recently several Subtext users have asked how to integrate Lightbox JS into Subtext's photo galleries. My standard answer has been Right now it's not possible because the control that renders the galleries emits links with relative URLs rather than fully qualified URLs. We'll look into making a change to the data binding mechanism for a future release - so hold tight! I finally had a few spare cycles so I looked into the existing data binding logic and realized that it is possible to get the control to emit fully qualified URLs right now! Notice, I said it's...

The SourceForge.net team is proud to present our second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members like you, and it's that time again! Cast a ballot for your favorite projects now and make your voice heard. That short blurb pretty much says it all. The Community Choice Awards are a chance for you, the community of open source software users, to nominate and then vote on the projects that you find most useful, best designed, most collaborative, etc... Actually, there are eleven different categories that a project can be nominated for - though...

A recent post by security analyst David Kierznowske reports that 49 out of 50 WordPress blogs that he checked out were running an exploitable version of the WordPress blogging engine. According to the post, David looked at blogs running on versions as far back as WordPress v1.2 (with v2.2 being the most recent release, as of this writing). So does this mean that WordPress is buggy software that is to be avoided? No, not at all. It just means that those users need to do a better job of dealing with the bugs. The sky is blue and software has bugs...

Phil recently went public with his pending career shift - he's leaving VelocIT to make waves at Koders. Naturally I wish my friend only the best... but I've got to get something off my chest. My gut reaction When Phil first called me to break the news I thought I took it rather well. I mean, I certainly understand where he's coming from when he talks about his love for OSS and the communities that are built around great projects like Subtext - boy do I understand! I also tend to agree with his there are only two kinds of...

I don't know how I missed this for so long... but I just realized that the CSS Adapters are now a community product. As best I can tell, Microsoft decided to hand control of the Adapters project over to the OSS community and it is now being hosted at CodePlex. Actually... I do know how and why I didn't catch onto this until now - Microsoft's asp.net site make no mention of the fact that the product has now been handed off to the open source community. (Or, at least it didn't as of the time of this writing.)...

Like most netizens, IM is one of my primary methods of communication... and has been for many years. And like a good number of you I also have multiple IM accounts, AOL AIM, Google Talk, MSN Windows Live Messenger, etc... and one of the biggest pains of using multiple IM accounts/protocols is having to use multiple IM clients. Those in the know (like myself) have been using a great free (as in speech and beer) IM client to consolidate all of their accounts into a single IM client. That magical client's name? Gaim - well at least it used to...

OK, so it's not like I made it on HeadlineNews or something... but it still feels good to see your name in the headline for a news item. And it feels even better when the news is coming from your employer - VelocIT Hires Steve Harman. Admittedly, this is somewhat old news, but I just noticed the announcement yesterday so it's exciting (to me)! Besides, I've been meaning to blog about this transition for a while now and this gives me an excuse. The story As the news items says, I was introduced to VelocIT (pronounced: vuh-los-i-tee) by company co-founder Phil...

As I usually do prior to a new release, I am going to eat my own dog food - but don't worry, it's not that tainted pet food that's all the rage right now. I just finished upgrading this blog to Subtext v1.9.5 (pre-release). So please click around and look for any odd behavior. A few changes In the comments section of each post you'll notice that I now have Identicons enabled. This release also brings the ability to distinguish between an regular commenter and the blog author. So any comments that I've left should look a little different than the typical comment....

In his Working for The Man piece Jeremy Allison lays out six lessons he's learned over the course of his career in software; six lessons he'd like to go back and tell himself at the beginning of his career. Whether you're a code-slinger just starting out or a seasoned veteran with wisdom and design patterns coming out your ears, this is a great read. So go read it now... I'll wait. This is me, waiting... See I told it was good, didn't I? Even though I've only been in the software business for half a decade I've already learned many of...