Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

The Windows Presentation Foundation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0 gives you a lot of bang for the buck—for instance, it includes a free spell checker. Unfortunately, you sometimes get what you pay for. There is no ability to add a custom dictionary in the current version of the spellchecker. There also appears to be no [...]

(Warning: technical post ahead.) Ever since leaving the PowerBuilder/Sybase/ERWin world behind, something I’ve missed is the ability to easily generate portable SQL scripts for populating a table with test data. There are plenty of solutions in SQL Server for migrating data—DTS/Integration Services, BCP, and others. But DTS and Integration Services have to be maintained in [...]

Mike Lee, toughest programmer alive, came up with an insanely competent idea for a comments system: Lemur CATTA, which uses reading comprehension to quiz you on the contents of a blog post before you are allowed to comment on it. Yeah, I know. Seems like some gradeschool teacher—or Kaplan temp—would have come up with this [...]

Well, Simon Cowell wasn’t kidding when he told Paul Potts that he was going to make an album. It was June 17th when the former mobile phone salesman won Britain’s Got Talent by singing opera, melting just about everyone who saw him on TV or YouTube in the process (including myself). His album came out [...]

Coming on the heels of the shuttering of Michael Robertson’s CD Anywhere and the collapse of Richard Branson’s Virgin Digital, now would not seem an auspicious time to launch an online music download store. But that’s what Amazon is doing today. The big difference is that they aren’t trying a subscription play, and they aren’t [...]

The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, better known to myself and other alumni of the center as Etext, has gone the way of all flesh, kind of. The center’s page announces that its online contents are being migrated to the Digital Collections center of the Library, and that its functions will [...]

Finally I have a few moments to sit down and transcribe the liner notes from the 1947 edition of the Virginia Glee Club’s album Songs of the University of Virginia. From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill, from Cabell Hall to Scott Stadium or Lambeth Field, and back again to the Gymnasium (Fayerweather or Memorial, depending [...]

Regular Guy Rob Crawford is running for President of Red Sox Nation. Once you get past some of the aggressive populism of his candidacy, he reveals himself as a candidate with some seriously good ideas for making the Red Sox accessible to all: Have you ever had a conversation with someone that revealed to you [...]

In their haste to try to break Apple’s well-earned stronghold on the content download market, NBC is starting its own download service. Rather than charge for the downloads, the downloads will contain unskippable commercials, and according to the Times the downloads will “degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable.” Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC [...]

I keep meaning to write this post about the vile branding job that the Mars Company did with Flavia, their single serving coffee offering, and deciding that the names of the product suite really kind of tell the whole terrible story. First of all, there’s “Flavia, the Café of Choice,” which is the oddest tagline [...]

I had the opportunity to try exactly one non-convention-center meal while I was in Charlotte this week. A few of us went to Ratcliffe on the Green, which is a very cool restaurant in a former Beaux Arts florist building (the Ratcliffe Florist neon sign is still out front). The wine list was OK—I’ve been [...]

Following up on my earlier post about XSLT: I am drawing near the end of the first stage of my project and wanted to update my notes. One thing I learned is that XSLT is far from dead. There was a 2.0 version of the standard released a while back that fleshed out some of [...]

I have been at the itSMF Fusion conference in Charlotte, NC for the past two days; today is the last day for the vendor exhibits, so I’ll be packing up tomorrow morning to head back to Boston. It’s been fairly eventful. We announced a new version of our flagship ITSM product yesterday; completed a rigorous [...]

I jolted out of bed at 4:20 am today, not because of something I heard but because of something I realized I hadn’t: my alarm. I had a 6 am flight to get to. So I quietly stumbled downstairs, shaved and showered about as sloppily as I know how, stepped into my suit, and hightailed [...]

Today’s quick random surf turned up some really horrifying things and some really funny ones, so here’s the best of each: Horrifying: The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time at the Museum of Hoaxes (via). While it starts out whimsically enough with elephants on acid, the whimsy is cut short when you find [...]