I just finished upgrading my blog to the new 1.7.2 RC build. I’m excited about some of the new features, such as the major caching improvements, CAPTCHA for avoiding comment spam, and the new permalinks. The permalinks one is pretty silly, esp. because I pushed for a version that used pluses for spaces. So the permalink for this post will be New+DasBlog+Version.aspx instead of NewDasBlogVersion.aspx. But it’s a style thing (I am in marketing now, right?). Speaking of style, I also upgraded the site template and pared down my navigation links. I moved the blogs on that list to a new “friends and family” blogroll. I did add a link to the new Archives page, which lists all the posts I’ve ever made, by category. And I added flair links to add this blog to your desktop newsreader of choice (that supports feed://) as well as to My MSN and NewsGator.

There’s still room for improvement. DasBlog still need story support, IMO. Also, I’d like to have a good offline posting experience. None of the existing blog authoring tools work for me since I use crossposts for my MSDN blog (which is what gets pulled into Architecture Center). I end up writing my posts in FrontPage and then cutting and pasting into the dasBlog web interface. Yuck.

One quick note – because of the new permalink title support, a set of existing URL mappings on my site started causing internal exceptions. This is because any URL ending in aspx that isn’t a file on disk is assumed to be a permalink. Of course, all my existing mappings aren’t files on disk nor are they permalinks to blog entries. I changed these mappings from *.aspx to *.ashx to avoid these exceptions and my template and navigation links to match. The only .aspx mapping I left intact was rss.aspx, since pretty much all of my subscribers use that as my rss feed. When I upgraded from my original blog engine, I had to add the rss.aspx mapping to avoid breaking any existing subscribers. Of course, I certainly don’t want to break those subscribers now. As a quick and very dirty workaround, I created an empty rss.aspx file in my web app directory. Now, the title mapper doesn’t attempt to map to a permalink since there’s an existing file on disk. Oh well, that’s why this is a release candidate version.

Typically, my movie tastes are further down the long tail from the big blockbusters. I mean, I’m looking forward to movies like Batman Begins and War of the Worlds, but usually it’s the small quirky films that get my attention. In fact, one of the reasons I’m excited about Batman Begins is because it’s directed by Chris Nolan, director of the awesome yet quirky independent film Memento.

Along these lines, I saw something about a movie from Sundance called The Aristocrats by Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller). The premise sounds awesome:

Magician, comedian and entertainer extraordinaire Penn Jillette takes us into the secret world of comedians as we’re introduced to a perpetually filthy joke that is never told the same way twice, serving as the comedy equilavent of a jazz solo since the Vaudeville days. All that remains constant is the beginning and the end, and 105 comedians fill in the rest. [From Greg’s Previews on Yahoo Movies]

Aristocrats has been picked up by ThinkFilm. I hope they get into a theater near me, but clicking thru their site, I don’t have a lot of confidence. The only movie currently listed on the site that I recognized was Going Upriver, a documentary about John Kerry that I heard about late last year during the presidential campain. Combined with the fact that it will likely be released “unrated” as it would likely get an NC-17 rating for langugage, I’m thinking that I won’t see it until it gets released on DVD.

With their Super Bowl ad yesterday, I guess Napster to Go is out of the closet. They have some new compatible devices, including the iriver H10 that Jeff likes so much. Alas, my Nomad Zen Xtra is still out in the cold. So far, it looks like only portable media centers and a handful of 5GB players (the H10, Nomad Zen Micro, Dell Pocket DJ, Gateway Photo Jukebox) are supported.

I’m wondering if older devices will ever be supported? I mean, it’s a new protocol and technology, I wouldn’t be super suprised if the older devices just couldn’t be upgraded to support the subscription service. But if that’s the case, I wish they would simply announce it and move on rather than leaving it in limbo. This post on the Creative Europe forum makes it sounds like the firmware will get upgraded, but with no idea of a date. So, in other words, I don’t know when or if I’ll get to use Napster to Go to fill up the other half of my 40GB Zen.

When web servers were first built, there was a one-to-one mapping between virtual files (i.e. addressable via http) and the physical files (the ones in the file system). Over time, two important capabilities were added. First, the contents of a given file became dynamic. So while you the reader always come back to default.aspx (or rss.aspx as the case may be) the content changes everytime I post something new. Secondly, the physical file dependency was removed. It’s not used much in dasBlog, but in .TEXT this is very prevelant. My last post on blogs.msdn.com is located at http://blogs.msdn.com/devhawk/archive/2005/02/01/364380.aspx. Obviously, there is no actual file named 364380.aspx, .TEXT uses the filename as a key into the DB to find the actual entry content. This technique is used extensively in the new MSDN2 (if you haven’t already, check out Tim Ewald’s MSDN Magazine article about URL design for MSDN2).

So now for the funky idea part – why couldn’t we generate dynamic local files the same way? I’m not sure I’ve got a great use for this yet – most of the apps I use are programmable to some extent, so dynamic content can be generated at the app level rather than at the file system level. But I’m thinking there may be some scenarios where it would make sense to do this at the file system. For example, in the new Winter Fun Pack there’s a new version of the WMP blogging plugin that autoupdates the Outlook and Outlook Express signature files whenever the song being played changes (a la Duncan’s Coding4Fun article). But with virtual files in the file system, you could generate these files when they are accessed instead of writing new ones everytime the song changes, even if Outlook open.

Of course, our local file system typically has more writing activity than the web, so I’m thinking this isn’t that great an idea. But I figured I’d share in case someone else could think of some good uses. Or maybe this already exists and I just don’t know about it.

Even though I’m a happy NewsGator customer, I decided to try out the new beta version of RSS Bandit. Wow, I really like the newspaper view. I wish I had this in Outlook.

I recently hopped on the GTD bandwagon and among other changes I deleted all my mail rules and started over. Previously, I was routing my email to different folders based on if I was on the To: line, the CC: line, it came to one of the team aliases or none of the above. I discovered that I pretty much only keep good track of my main inbox with the stuff that came directly to me. Other stuff just languished, unprocessed. Now, I route mail to folders based on the mailing list it comes from. Some mailing lists have lower priority than others. This newspaper view would be perfect for quickly scanning these low priority mail folders, esp. with the feature to mark all as read when leaving the folder.