“Having a family member who is in politics, I’ve learned that whenever you see what seems like a religious fundamentalism there usually is a quest for money and/or power behind it.”
-Dare Obasanjo, What is Rob Weir (and IBM’s) Agenda with the OOXML Bashing?

Dare posts about two charity search sites hosted by Live Search. Use teamseattle.live.com to search and you help sponsor Children’s Hospital. Use click4thecause.live.com to search and you help sponsor Ninemillion.org, which is working to help the 9 million refugee children worldwide.

GIven that I’m already using Live Search, changing my default search page from Live.com to one of these two seems was a no brainer. I use the IE7 Search Box more often than not, so I also set up a custom search provider. However, that’s a bit of a PITA, so I took the OpenSearch Description XML files and hosted them here @ DevHawk. Click the links below to add them to IE7 search box.

• Add Click4TheCause Charity Search to your IE7 Search Box
• Add TeamSeattle Charity Search to your IE7 Search Box

I’m sure there’s a way to do this for Firefox’s search bar, but I have no idea how. If you – dear reader – know how to add search providers, please send me email and I’ll update this post accordingly.

• Forgot to say this yesterday, but I’m happy the Colts are in the Super Bowl. Well, I guess I’m more happy that New England isn’t in it. They’ve won it enough lately. I wish the Saints has made it, but at least this way I have no question who to root for on Super Bowl Sunday.
• My Gamerscore cracked 1000 over the weekend. I got 60 points in Dead Rising and 100 points in NHL 07k0%01%02). I have played ten games + three arcade games for a maximum possible Gamerscore of 10,600 and a Gamerscore “conversion rate” of 10.28%. I wonder how good that is? All the leader boards I’ve seen rate purely on Gamerscore.
• Speaking of games, Obsidian (of Neverwind Nights fame) is working on an Aliens RPG! Check out this post by Chris Avellone of Obsidian on Game Design Research (via Game Tycoon).
• Richard Grimes’.NET Instrumentation Workshop rocks. Richard also has extensive workshops on .NET Security and .NET Fusion (aka runtime binding). If they’re as good as the instrumentation workshop, they’re worth a read.
• In my SSB/WF prototypes, I’ve simply been writing to the console. The lo-tech brute force works okay for a console app, but not at all when I move my code into a shared library. So I decided to bite the bullet now and translate the Console.WriteLine calls into TraceSource calls. My prototype isn’t that big (yet), but it went pretty smooth nonetheless. I currently have three TraceSources in my solution – one for the host, one for my SSB activities & workflow service and one for the persistence engine (I just inherited from SqlWorkflowPersistenceService and added the trace calls). I’m sure in time, I’ll wish I had set up my TraceSources differently, but for now it works.
• The one feature I lost moving from Console.WriteLine to TraceSources was color support. Since I am creating voluminous tracing data, I used color coding to indicate which part of the application the trace information was coming from. Of course, the OOB ConsoleTraceListener doesn’t have any mechanism to color code the output. I hacked up a ColorConsoleTraceListener in a couple of minutes that worked great. I say “hacked” because my color choosing code is currently hard coded, rather than being stored the config file. If I get the time to change that, I’ll post the code here.
• While researching ASP.NET’s Membership system, I found this Scott Guthrie post with links to ASP.NET providers for MySql, Oracle and SQLite. I’ve wondered about the lack of a simple file-based ASP.NET role/membership provider and even started hacking together an XML based one. But the availability of a .NET SQLite data provider makes that an interesting option. XML would be human readable, but porting the existing SQL providers to SQLite would probably be easier.
• Politics 2.0 in action: Talking Points Memo is enouraging you (aka Time Magazine’s Person of the Year) to record your own response to tonight’s State of the Union. Basically record your response via camcorder, webcam or cellphone. Then upload it to YouTube and add it to the TPM SOTU group. With President Bush’s approval rating at all time lows, I’m guessing these videos will be venting some of the pent up hostility towards this administration.