Tobi + C# = T#

… Ego Surfing does not work!

That’s all. No need to add anything further – I predict it to fail, because it does not return any meaningful results when I enter my name.

What about your name?

I heard only the best things about the Windows 7 beta – so, with the RC being released I did set aside a bit of time to do my backups (which is breeze when using TrueImage), get the necessary drivers for my system, …

Now a little more infos about my system: I have one main drive for the operating system and two additional drives that are 100% TrueCrypt volumes, one for my personal data and one for my backups.

Well, alright, we are already kinda used to Windows overwriting the MBR on a disk that was booting to linux before, we all know that – but did you know that the installer now initializes ALL drives in the system? Imagine my surprise when both my TrueCrypt partitions were SHOT! Apparently the Windows Installer found it appropriate to write a boot sector and a boot manager on all disks in my system. And a encrypted disk without its headers is … just a blob of random data.

To be fair, of course I used an unsupported software on a beta operating system. Who’s to blame but me?

BUT ANYWAY: W.T.F.!

Conclusion: USB Disk FTW. Remove ALL TrueCrypt Disks. Not Developers, Developers, Developers – but Backups, Backups, Backups.

Boring update: I finally got to twitter. Almost a week ago. I did not post this earlier here on the blog, because I wanted to see if it sticks. And I have to say it is a nice way of passing the time while code is compiling. But I hope to keep it purely “professional” in the sense that I don’t want to start talking about anything else than programming problems or at least programming related topics.

So, if you want to join me – and maybe yell at me for not posting anything of value to my blog in way too long – go to http://twitter.com/dun3 and look me up. Looking forward to your tweets.

Hmm, the world is a funny place – but unfortunately on Sunday it got a little less funny. George Carlin died.

I don’t remember who introduced me to George Carlin, but it sure was funny and dirty and great. And I knew right away that my parents aren’t going to like it. Which made it even more fun to listen to. But the thing is – looking back, my favorite bits aren’t the one that are filthy. Sure they are fun and mostly thought provoking. But I always loved the ones best where he imitates people or just fools around. Especially the beginning of Class Clown is just great. Which he recorded before I even was born. It’s just amazing how long he was on top of the business of being funny.

Well, enough about that and to lighten the mood I’ll use one of his quotes: “I have as much authority as the Pope; I just don’t have as many people who believe it.” So in the spirit of G – f*** you for not believing in him and how do you like that? Now stop listening to him on youtube and go back to work!

I have to do some automated exchange maintenance using C#. And I am totally new to that particular problem set. So I was rooting around the internet and stumbled across this blog post by “PoSH Fan”:
Why PowerShell? Why not C#?

There are some very valid arguments there in favour of PowerShell – but why is case insensitivity a good thing? To quote:

C# is case sensitive complex language with hundreds of assembly and thousands of classes (whereas PoSH is case insensitive with only 128 cmdlets). Now don’t tell me that I can write code in Notepad and compile using CSC.

Why did the case sensitivity thing sneak in there? Is that really something that makes writing scripts harder? Any thoughts?

Hey there, just a quick personal note: Alexander Brütt joined us here at this blog. He is our absolute go-to guy when it comes to SharePoint development – even though that’s not really developing, right Alex? Check out his first post: Visual Studio 2005 Project Template for SharePoint 2007 Timer Jobs. Cool stuff. Good to have you here, Alex!

I am serious, it might be the only way to stop global warming. In the spirit of the statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature I present you the proof that we need to get more German citizens on the internet since that actually decreases the carbon dioxide emission per capita. See for yourself:

I am not kidding! I found that out while I watched the video over at Gapminder and toying with their statistics. Awesome stuff! Very cool way to present statistics.

Hi folk,

I just wanted to introduce to you my colleague Lars Hildebrandt. He just wrote his first post on my blog and I am very excited to have him on board with me here. We both work at the same company here in Hamburg. So let’s all hope he enjoyed writing his first post, because I certainly want to read more about addins, vsPackages, etc. – because, if used right, they simply improve coding speed and code quality. Great stuff.

So, please give him a warm welcome.
Lars: hf & gl

Tobi

Of course I had to test my mean value calculator. So I did some minor modifications and made it parse last month’s apache logfiles. And for the first time I had more than 1GB of data served solely by this blog. This blog served 92000 requests (all kinds of http requests) to 9500 individual IPs (sadly only about 2500 show no sign of being a spammer). There were about 12800 requests for the feed of the blog from 750 individual IPs.

So trying to filter out spammers this boils down to 3000 real blog pages served to 2200 unique (human) visitors from 93 different countries in May. With about 20 real subscribers to the feeds. Most visitors are from the US (30%), then Great Britain (7%), Germany (6%) and India (6%). There even was a visitor from exotic places like Vatican City and Ghana.

The largest amount of hits come from Google with the keyword combination “google toolbar iceweasel” followed by queries related to hbm2net and nhibernate. By far the weirdest search was “what is meant by website in asp.net”, I’m not even kidding. Pretty vague was “codes to look at stuff” and the ones that made me literally laugh out loud was “scifi operating system” and “tobi march”, the first one for obvious reasons, the second one, because the context of the search was probably sooo different from what the surfer found on my blog. The sadest one was “tobi smells”. No I don’t. Because I am (or at least my site is) “way too hot”. The one search that got me a little scared was “pro and con of using fear, uncertainty and doubt”. Who is searching for pros on that topic?

Other than that:
The largest traffic magnets on this server are by the way SiKoRe a German site about improving your skills in mental arithmetic and latex2html the main repository of the LaTeX to HTML converter. Great jobs guys, but watch out. With the kind of increase my blog is showing over the last couple of months, I’ll get you soon.

I have to thank you, my dear reader, for that. I am surprised that you like my blog (google analytics even reveals that some of you do even come back! ). I hope you keep enjoying it in the future as well.

I just came across this little video interview over at on10.net. And I thought, sure it sounds geeky enough, let’s watch it. And I found out about this amazing Life Browser Eric Horvitz is working on. Way too cool to be true. This tool has so much potential! Cool stuff. Watch the interview!