Article on Ward

From John Alexander’s Blog, I found a link to an article in the Seattle PI about Ward Cunningham joining Microsoft. The article focuses primarily on descibing wikis, but it does mention he now works for PAG doing pattern work. I liked this quote:

“I write the seed of the idea and I come back in a week and see how the idea has grown.”

It’s also interesting to see that it took a month and a half for the news to go from blogs to a “mainstream” news source.

Cool DasBlog Feature is Google Friendly

I was reading Steve’s blog with my browser earlier today when I noticed his odd permalink url’s. Instead of a url like “http://devhawk.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=9abbd5ea-3a10-44d8-8872-877033b7349c”, his look like “http://hyperthink.net/blog/PermaLink,guid,fc99ce5e-b748-44f0-853d-0a261632b885.aspx”. Turns out it’s a standard feature of dasBlog! Just check “Enable URL rewriting” in the config page and you’re set. Now my permalink url’s look like Steve’s.

Since Google doesn’t index pages based on query string, this feature should make my site more easily crawled and googled.

Update: This feature breaks sub category specific feeds, like “Blogging | dasBlog“, so I’m turning it back off until someone can fix the bug.

New MSFT Architect Blogger

Michael Platt, Field Architect in the UK, has started a blog. I know Mike and so I’m looking forward to reading his thoughts on the topics he lists in his first post. Subscribed.

Bloggers Dinner Last Week

I haven’t had time to blog last weeks blogger dinner in Seattle. I had a great time. Scoble and I drove over with Deepak from the MSN TV group. I spent quite a while talking to Steve about syndicating reference data, which builds on his recent SOA posts (more on that later). The coolest new thing this time was meeting Eric Promislow, a senior developer with ActiveState. Eric is responsible for Visual Perl, Visual Python and Visual XSLT (and apparently the Baconizer). One of the Visual XSLT developers was also there, but I missed his name (sorry). The three of us had a very interesting discussion on dynamic languages (something I know little about) and language design (something I know a moderate amount about). I know Ward is a perl guy, so maybe I should give Visual Perl a whirl.

I also got to rant about explain my view of SOA to Scoble on the way home. Lucky him.

Shaking Off The Ice

I got a couple of emails yesterday at my work address that my blog was down. Turns out there’s this big winter storm battering the east coast. My blog is hosted on the east coast and they lost power for a while. No power == no blog. But if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already figured out that the power is back on and my blog is back up.