Entries for Duncan Mackenzie

New larger player and other stuff... [New larger player and other stuff...]

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:18:45 GMT

We'll have a proper 'team' post later today (10/21), but I just pushed out a code update that included a wider silverlight player, a search box across the site, and other assorted changes.

the videos have been wider for awhile now, but scaled down when played on the page.. this new player lets you see them in their native resolution of 512px wide (and somewhere between 288px and 384px high... depending on the aspect ratio).

in reply to New larger player and other stuff...

Testing the Audio issue with XP [Testing the Audio issue with XP]

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:12:00 GMT

Hey folks, as you may have noticed, some people are finding that our videos are playing back with no audio. We don't know yet why this is happening, but we have some theories. Attached to this post is the same Visual Studio Documentary video, but re-encoded with WMA 9 instead of WMA 10 that we normally use.

If you ran into issues with the first version, or with any of our recent videos, please try this one out and let us know if the audio works for you.

in reply to Testing the Audio issue with XP

Tonight's outage [Tonight's outage]

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:27:34 GMT

Hey folks, I suspect many people found C9 unavailable over the past few hours and had problems signing in for a few hours before that. I don't have an explanation for you yet, but I've spent the night trying to figure it out. For some reason, we seemed to be switched from a 64-bit app pool to a 32-bit one, which broke Live ID support on the site. There was regular maintenance and patches done to the server *around* that same time, but it actually seems like the Live ID support broke, then the patches occurred, then the site was down for the count for several hours while I tried everything I could think of to get it back up.

I'll post more information when I have it, but I wanted people to know that we were aware of the outage and had been working on it... it is 5:30 am here now though, and I haven't slept... and I have a kids soccer game in a couple of hours... so I'll have to get back to this later.

My apologies for any inconvenience you might have experienced due to the site being unavailable.

in reply to Tonight's outage

Canonical and ShortUrl on Channel9 [Canonical and ShortUrl on Channel9]

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:11:00 GMT

One of the things we spend time on for Channel 9 is trying to make sure we are following the right standards, adopting new ones as necessary and that we render correctly for both real people and for search engines. As part of that ongoing work, we recently adopted two new concepts.

Canonical URL

The first is the concept of a canonical URL, as described here by Matt Cutts (his blog is a must read for anyone building public facing web sites); a link element that specifies what our definitive single URL should be for any given post.

Why does this matter? Well, on many web sites (including ours) there is more than one URL that will get you to the same piece of content. Consider the latest 'This Week On Channel 9' episode, it is available at:

Assuming Google/Bing/Yahoo only found the post from links on the Channel 9 home page, it would always see the first one... and everything would be great. That isn't how search engines work though, they care about inbound links from many different sources, and it is possible that many different URLs are out there in the wild that really represent the same single piece of content. Each additional URL beyond the first looks like duplicate content and takes away from the search engine love that should be given to the first result. The standard way to avoid this in the past was to redirect every person coming in on anything but the link we want. That works, but forcing your user to go through an extra browser round trip for some obscure technical reason is less than ideal. Enter the idea of the canonical url. Add this to your page and no matter how the search engine finds the page, it knows what URL to associate it with in the system.

If you check any of those links above and view source, you'll find the same thing on each and every one:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-C9-Windows-7-RTMs-7-Sins-of-App-Compat--cool-Silverlight-apps/" />

A fair number of other sites implement this as well, check out Ars Technica for example, and I'm sure more will follow. Should you implement this on your site? Well, first think about how many duplicate URLs will work on your content (if you are running a site that supports both www.sitename.com and sitename.com, that's one ... then if you can optionally have a filename like default.php or index.html... then that is already two duplicates for every URL) and then think about whether or not your position in search engine rankings is important... odds are you should look at adding support for this link tag on your pages.

ShortUrl

A lot has been written about how services like TinyURL, is.gd and other URL shortening services are bad for the internet, and we completely agree. They remove meaning from the link you are about to click (including the source of the content, which is an important issue for trust and security), and they are dependent on the reliability of some unknown third party that might just go away at some point in the future. One solution, that sites like C9, Amazon and others have decided to go with is to implement their own URL shortening. Yes, much of the meaning is lost, but at least they have control over that URL namespace and can make sure it is always available and always points at the intended content. Now that we have such a service though, what's to stop people from just taking our original URLs and using any one of the free URL shortening services? Well, nothing at the moment, but a movement is underway to allow content owners to specify a pre-existing short URL if they have one. The hope is that once this concept catches on, then URL shortening service or client applications (like twitter clients) will try to look up a site's short url before calling out to a 3rd party service to create one. We don't know if this will catch on, but we like the idea so we've gone ahead and added the appropriate link tag and populated it with our special r.ch9.ms short url. Once again, if you view source on that TWOC9 episode from above, you'll find this:

<link rel="shorturl" href="http://ch9.ms/AAPV" />

More to come...
If you went and viewed the source of those pages, you would have seen a ton of other <link> tags, and many different <meta> tags as well. Each of those does serve a purpose, and I'll dig into the rest of them in upcoming posts.

Note: For those of you who have the immediate response of 'aghhh... so much wasted bandwidth for meta tags!', I know what you mean... and I also know that some sites choose to only render those tags out when a search crawler hits them. That practice is a bit sneaky though, in general you should avoid alterting the content you serve up to search engines... although it is probably only an issue if you change the actual content of the page in an attempt to deceive the search engine.

in reply to Canonical and ShortUrl on Channel9

Spelling, Code Blocks and Twitter on Channel 9 [Spelling, Code Blocks and Twitter on Channel 9]

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:14:00 GMT

Hey folks, I thought I'd take a moment to update you on what the dev team has been working on recently, including spell checking in the editor, a slick way to insert code snippets and some already deployed features that you may or may not have noticed.

We asked nicely and were given the code behind the 'insert code' button on MSDN's editor (from their forums) and between Nathan and myself we were able to wrestle it into place onto our site. Not a lot of work in truth, but we needed to replace their script and css references with ones that work for us and build a simple service that takes in code and returned styled html (for the preview function). Of course, sending all sorts of code and markup to that service was causing the ASP.NET Request Validation to freak out, so that had to be selectively disabled ... isn't web development fun!

Next up came the addition of spell checking.... which TinyMCE already includes a plug in for, with all the client side code already in place to break up the text into small chunks and send it off to a server side encoded into a block of JSON. The server side code they supply is php though, which is workable on our IIS boxes, but would involve a fair bit of custom work for a relatively small feature and either calls a console app (aspell ?) or calls out to Google. Neither of those options seemed that appealing, so I wrote a service that works with the Live (Bing!) Search APIs and does the same thing.

I'm still doing some testing with this service, but so far it seems to be working out fine... English only at the moment, but the Live API certainly supports more options so I'll add more options in the future.

And last, but not least, I thought I'd talk about a feature that was rolled out a while back; the addition of MSDN/Twitter/DotNetShoutout to the 'Share' drop down on videos.

Ages back, Erik converted our 'share' options to be pulled from a database, with the idea that we'd add new ones from time to time, and now we finally have! In a recent update we added Twitter, DotNetShoutout and support for the MSDN bookmarking service.

We toyed with the idea of a 'send to twitter' option for awhile, but once you put our URL into a tweet, we are either over 140 characters or we've hardly left any room for you to talk about the content! That meant that the deployment of a twitter link was dependent on the use of some form of URL shortening service. We have all sorts of reasons why we'd rather not use any of the existing services (bing problems url shortening canonical for some of these reasons), so now the twitter button had to wait on the creation of our own URL shortening service.

Enter the C9 url shortening service :)

Not really a replacement for Tiny URL or any of those services, as ours only works for our content, but definitely what we needed so that we could (1) create short URLs that we control to prevent future broken links and (2) create them algorithmically so that we didn't have to make an external service call to display the twitter link on our page.

The formula is simple, just turn the Entry ID of our post, which is a long into a short string by Base-36 encoding it and then stick 'http://ch9.ms/' onto the front of it. This produces reasonably short URLs, and can be computed at either end without any need for a database look up. The result, a URL like http://ch9.ms/A49H is then used in creating the twitter link.

You can access the twitter link from the little 'share' drop down below each post, which is another interesting bit of code

This drop down and the 'Formats' drop down for downloadable media files share a common set of code and both support the storing of user preferences. It was our thought that most people have a single way that they usually will want to share a link and a single file format they usually want to download, so when you pick an item from either of these lists, we store your choice in a local cookie. Then, when you visit that page again later or any other page on C9 with the same drop down on it, we'll remember your choice and make that the default choice shown in the drop down. Of course, you can pick something different at anytime, so if you like to use Twitter most of the time and then feel like trying out DotNetShoutout you are not blocked in anyway!

When will we see those editor updates?
Soon... I'm still working on them, trying to make sure they are stable and reliable before we deploy them, but I definitely expect them live within a week!

in reply to Spelling, Code Blocks and Twitter on Channel 9

Silverlight support for Chrome and other site updates [Silverlight support for Chrome and other site updates]

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:23:00 GMT

Hey folks, since the last C9 Team post, we've deployed (to C9, C8 and Edge) the TinyMCE editor that I talked about last time, and we've made some other small fixes and changes as well. The editor problem where you couldn't put in a link to another page on C9 has been resolved... check out this page on the TinyMCE Wiki if you'd like to know specify relative or absolute URL behavior on your own site(s). We also fixed the Add/Reply buttons in Safari and Chrome, so those buttons will be styled normally for you WebKit folks now.

We also resolved the weird 'go to a random page when you click Reply and are not signed in' bug... although we have degraded the experience a bit there. When you do a Live ID sign in, you can't include query string parameters or anything after a hash mark, so to keep track of the fact that you wanted to reply to comment x, we used to send you to a special URL (something like /replyto/<commentid>) and that would then construct the appropriate URL to put you on the right page, with the editor open and the focus in the right spot to post your comment. That wasn't working reliably, so when we were trying to fix the 'go to a random page' bug we switched to just sending you back to the post you were on when you clicked reply. Yes, this means you have to click 'Reply' again, and we aren't happy with that, but that is at least consistent so it is the current state.

Finally, and this should be interesting to the approximately 8% of you using one of these browsers, I tweaked the Silverlight detection code to treat Chrome and Safari on Windows as supported. I've only tested in the latest version of both of these (I happen to be writing this post in Chrome 2.0.172.28 right now since I was just testing it), but let me know if you run into any issues.

Fun C9 Fact: According to the Geographic info in WebTrends, when you view our traffic by city, London is #1 at 4.5% of our total traffic, and you don't hit Redmond, WA until #3 (1.4%).

in reply to Silverlight support for Chrome and other site updates

Just testing the editor's ability to make hyperlinks [Just testing the editor's ability to make hyperlinks]

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:53:01 GMT

Charles has filed a bug saying the editor can't do links, so I'm going to use this thread to do some testing. Yay for the feedback forum

Here are some of my most recent bookmarks: http://www.sovavsiti.cz/css/abbr.html (Styling <abbr> in IE), testing with dialog

HTML is not any acroynm...

30 atypical wordpress sites. (the link is untypical, but regardless of what the dictionary says, that doesn't seem like a real word to me!)

in reply to Just testing the editor's ability to make hyperlinks

Update on some new site features coming in the near future [Update on some new site features coming in the near future]

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:28:00 GMT

Hey folks, Duncan from the dev team here. Just wanted to give you a heads up that we'll be rolling out some new features along with a list of bug fixes in the next few days.

The main new feature is a completely new editor. We've moved to TinyMCE for the commenting and creating new threads, and along with that move we've fixed a few of the issues that have been brought up around the editing experience. For one, we'll have a emoticon drop down finally :) and the insert image and insert URL dialogs should be much faster and simpler to use.

At the same time as this update, we'll be rolling out fixes to some bugs that you've reported, including seeing the 'subject' field in some cases when commenting on videos, the fact that the 'all forums' feed is not updating and others.

in reply to Update on some new site features coming in the near future

Just making another new thread [Just making another new thread]

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:32:40 GMT

Testing on the live site is annoying, but when it just doesn't happen in dev...

in reply to Just making another new thread

Creating a new feedback thread as a test [Creating a new feedback thread as a test]

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:45:43 GMT

of the new thread creation code, which appeared to have been broken

in reply to Creating a new feedback thread as a test

Small server speed test... if you don't pay for bandwidth and have a few moments [Small server speed test... if you don't pay for bandwidth and have a few moments]

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:38:13 GMT

Hey folks, I'm trying to compare between two different server clusters where we host our media and I'm thinking that we'll see different results for different folks based on location.

Now, if you have a bit of time to run this test in the background, I'd appreciate it... just download these files one at a time and note the data rate you are getting (once it seems to settle into a consistent value)

Server #1: http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/1/4/3/5/6/4/HistoryofMicrosoft1985_2MB_ch9.wmv
Server #2: http://mschannel9.vo.msecnd.net/o9/mix/HistoryofMicrosoft1985_2MB_ch9.wmv

And if you could reply with the rate you saw, your location (at a country level would be great) and your internet connection speed ... that would be very helpful. If you think any of that information is something you don't want to tell me... that's cool too, please don't download or post if you'd rather not :)

in reply to Small server speed test... if you don't pay for bandwidth and have a few moments

MIX09: Time Lapse camera, setup and tear down [MIX09: Time Lapse camera, setup and tear down]

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:50:00 GMT

This time lapse video shows how the MIX09 crew sets up and tears down the general session hall from empty room to setup, to rehearsals, to the live event, to tear down.

in reply to MIX09: Time Lapse camera, setup and tear down

Anyone working on a C9 themepack for Windows 7? [Anyone working on a C9 themepack for Windows 7?]

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:47:20 GMT

I've been thinking of doing this myself, but I have no graphic/artistic talent... so I've been bugging Adam Kinney with absolutely no luck. I'm not sure how many folks are running Win7, but you don't really need to be to contribute to a C9 themepack... creating a desktop image is really all that is needed to start with, then that image (or a set of them) could be combined with a window color into a themepack by someone who does have Win7.

Details on 10 about how to make one for yourself, including a pointer to a set of them done by Mike Swanson (who you've seen on various PDC/MIX videos here on C9): http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/How-to-Make-Your-Own-Theme-Pack-for-Windows-7/

in reply to Anyone working on a C9 themepack for Windows 7?

Completely off topic, but I just watched the pilot for "The Flash" [Completely off topic, but I just watched the pilot for "The Flash"]

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:56:30 GMT

Xbox marketplace has DC Comics as a network now, and it showed this series "The Flash" as a 2008 show... figuring it was some new show that I hadn't caught, maybe a spin off from Smallville (and I don't really see that as a positive affiliation), I downloaded and starting watching the 93 minute long pilot episode.

Turns out it was this series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flash_%28TV_series%29) from 1990. I enjoyed the show anyways, but I was a bit disappointed. As much as I would like to say it is all about the writing and the story, when it comes to sci-fi style shows, the special effects matter and in a show like the Flash... I just don't know if I can watch the 1990 version of super speed :)

Of course a new version would probably just abuse the "bullet time" concept to death, but at least it would look slick

Can't really complain though, I watched the whole pilot while I worked on the title wrapping issue.... and now I'm half way through the first episode of 'Batman Beyond' ... which seems fun so far.

in reply to Completely off topic, but I just watched the pilot for "The Flash"

anyone feel like doing some gadget development? [anyone feel like doing some gadget development?]

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:46:12 GMT

Looking at the html for a zune card I saw this feed...

http://zcards.zune.net/zcard/usercardservice.ashx?lcid=1033&src=external&zunetag=Festive+Turkey

Seems like a great source for some fun development

in reply to anyone feel like doing some gadget development?

some new features, including one with questionable usefulness [some new features, including one with questionable usefulness]

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:46:15 GMT

Along with one relatively major change, the use of a Silverlight 2 video player, and various bug fixes (wiki editing works again, for those of you that noticed it was broken and ordered lists should render just fine now ... to pick two examples that I worked on today), we also have a new 'fun' feature: User specific CSS.

Go to your profile and click Edit, then put whatever CSS you want into this box and we'll put it on the page for you after our CSS, allowing you to override whatever settings you feel like. What if you put bad CSS or broken CSS? Well, it will only affect you... so we aren't terribly worried about policing what you put into this box. Of course, considering the audience, I expect to be shown reasons why we shouldn't give you this option within a few hours... but until then I'll stay blissfully optimistic.

My current settings are:

.user_minh
{
display:none;
}

body {
font-family:Calibri, 'Segoe UI',Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif;
font-size:84%;
}

.posted, .status, .tags, .resources, .date, .downloads, .sharethis, .showlink, .details, .userInfo
{
font-size:79%;
}

.box .header .inner {
font-size:100%;
text-transform:none;
}

(yep, that's right... you can style the comments of a specific user using .user_<username> feel free to just copy my settings completely)

Hey, what about sharing our settings... can I just say I want my C9 to look how jamie sets his up? Nope. As cool as that would be, it would essentially be giving another user the ability to spit malicious code out onto the page when you visit... which is just too crazy for me to feel comfortable with. Go ahead and post your CSS changes to the site though, and people can pick and choose the changes they'd like to use.

Come up with an awesome change, or even just a good one, that you think should be the default? Post it up, and we'll look at just making those changes directly in the site's main CSS.

Now all we need is a code formatting option for CSS!

in reply to some new features, including one with questionable usefulness

Seeking feedback, not providing it ... Silverlight 2 player on beta.channel9.msdn.com [Seeking feedback, not providing it ... Silverlight 2 player on beta.channel9.msdn.com]

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:49:40 GMT

Hey folks, we've uploaded a new version of our player to the beta site, using Silverlight 2 this time. That means you'll be able to embed using an OBJECT tag soon, instead of through the iFrame method that we've had available before now.

Check it out, let us know what you think. For the curious, this player is a slightly modified version of the one available here: http://www.codeplex.com/sl2videoplayer

in reply to Seeking feedback, not providing it ... Silverlight 2 player on beta.channel9.msdn.com

Modeling Through the Ages [Modeling Through the Ages]

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:37:00 GMT

Watch a short video that depicts the humble origins of modeling and humorously traces modeling’s evolution from the beginning of history to present day, with Microsoft new modeling platform, “Oslo.”

in reply to Modeling Through the Ages

Creating a new thread from Firefox 3.0 in Linux [Creating a new thread from Firefox 3.0 in Linux]

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:36:39 GMT

yay, this is me creating a thread

in reply to Creating a new thread from Firefox 3.0 in Linux

Channel 9 has a web slice [Channel 9 has a web slice]

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:53:50 GMT

For those of you using IE8 (or 'Web Chunk' on Firefox, although I haven't tested that method of consuming web slices), there is a new way you can keep track of updates to Channel 9; a web slice!

The slice is advertised on the home page through the page slice / rss menu:

and through a hover area on the page

clicking on either of these will prompt you to add the slice

and you'll up with this slice showing the most recent videos posted on C9 ... bolding on your IE menu bar to indicate new content, etc...

in reply to Channel 9 has a web slice

testing C++ formatting [testing C++ formatting]

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:34:24 GMT

[code language="cpp"]
// This is the main DLL file.

#include "stdafx.h"

#include "Microsoft.WMVImport.h"

using namespace System::Runtime::InteropServices;

MicrosoftWMVImport::Importer::Importer()
{

}

MicrosoftWMVImport::Importer::~Importer()
{

}

System::IntPtr MicrosoftWMVImport::Importer::ReadFrame(System::String ^filename, System::Int64 frameTime)
{
    System::IntPtr ^piName = Marshal::StringToBSTR(filename);

    PWSTR pName = (PWSTR)piName->ToPointer();

    IntPtr image;

    LONG width = -1, height = -1, bpp = -1;

    DWORD length;

    this->ReadFile(pName, frameTime, &image, &width, &height, &bpp, &length);

    this->_width = width;
    this->_height = height;
    this->_BPP = bpp;

    /*array<System::Byte> ^image = gcnew array<System::Byte>(length);

    IntPtr Bits(_image);

    Marshal::Copy(Bits, image, 0, image->Length);*/

    Marshal::FreeBSTR(*piName);

    return image;
}

HRESULT MicrosoftWMVImport::Importer::ReadFile(const WCHAR * filename, QWORD frameTime, IntPtr *image, LONG *width, LONG *height, LONG *bpp, DWORD *length)
{
    IWMSyncReader* pSyncReader = NULL;
    INSSBuffer*    pMyBuffer   = NULL;

    DWORD videoOutputNum = 0;
    QWORD cnsSampleTime = 0;
    QWORD cnsSampleDuration = 0;
    DWORD dwFlags = 0;
    DWORD dwOutputNumber;
    HRESULT hr = S_OK;

    // Initialize COM.
    hr = CoInitialize(NULL);

    // Create a synchronous reader.
    hr = WMCreateSyncReader(NULL, WMT_RIGHT_PLAYBACK, &pSyncReader);

    // Open an ASF file.
    hr = pSyncReader->Open(filename);

    // TODO: Identify the properties for each output. This works
    // exactly as it does with the asynchronous reader.
    DWORD pcOutputs;
    hr = pSyncReader->GetOutputCount(&pcOutputs);


    for(DWORD i = 0; i < pcOutputs; i++)
    {
        IWMOutputMediaProps *props = NULL;

        hr = pSyncReader->GetOutputProps(i, &props);

        DWORD type;

        hr = props->GetMediaType(NULL, &type);

        BYTE *puType = new BYTE[type];

        hr = props->GetMediaType((WM_MEDIA_TYPE*)puType, &type);

        WM_MEDIA_TYPE *pType = (WM_MEDIA_TYPE*)puType;

        if(pType->formattype == WMFORMAT_VideoInfo)
        {
            videoOutputNum = i;

            WMVIDEOINFOHEADER *info = (WMVIDEOINFOHEADER*)pType->pbFormat;

            *height = info->bmiHeader.biHeight;
            *width = info->bmiHeader.biWidth;
            *bpp = info->bmiHeader.biBitCount;

        }

        props->Release();
    }

    // Specify a playback range from frame number 100 of the video
    // stream to the end of the file. Assume that the video stream
    // is stream number 2.
    WORD videoStreamNum;

    pSyncReader->GetStreamNumberForOutput(videoOutputNum, &videoStreamNum);

    hr = pSyncReader->SetRange(frameTime, 0);

    // Get the next sample, regardless of its stream number.
    hr = pSyncReader->GetNextSample(videoStreamNum,
                                   &pMyBuffer,
                                   &cnsSampleTime,
                                   &cnsSampleDuration,
                                   &dwFlags,
                                   &dwOutputNumber,
                                   NULL);

    if(SUCCEEDED(hr))
    {
        // TODO: Process the sample in whatever way is appropriate
        pMyBuffer->GetLength(length);

        BYTE * _frame;// = new BYTE[*length];
        BYTE * newImageBuffer;

        pMyBuffer->GetBuffer(&_frame);

        newImageBuffer = new BYTE[*length];

        memcpy_s(newImageBuffer, *length, _frame, *length);

        *image = IntPtr(newImageBuffer);

        // to your application. When finished, clean up.
        pMyBuffer->Release();
        pMyBuffer = NULL;
        cnsSampleTime     = 0;
        cnsSampleDuration = 0;
        dwFlags           = 0;
        dwOutputNumber    = 0;
    }

    hr = pSyncReader->Close();
    pSyncReader->Release();
    pSyncReader = NULL;

    CoUninitialize();

    return hr;
}
[/code]

in reply to testing C++ formatting

Sorry for the momentary sluggish-ness [Sorry for the momentary sluggish-ness]

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:34:37 GMT

I pushed out an update, hopefully fixing our 'threads move on edit' issue... also adding back the [ quote ] markup. We'll figure out some UI for this in the future (editor button/dialog perhaps), but for now if you'd like to do a nice quote you can do this:

[ quote user="Duncanma"]Wow, quoting is awesome[ /quote] (without spaces after the [ characters)

Duncanma said:
Wow, quoting is awesome

in reply to Sorry for the momentary sluggish-ness

Should I get a new text editor? [Should I get a new text editor?]

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:37:26 GMT

This discussion about Japanese Localization, and my suggestion to try notepad, made me think about how much I use that little app... at any given moment I probably have 3 - 5 instances of it open. 5 right now in fact; a couple web.configs, the source of a couple of web pages and a 'scratch' one that I've just been collecting notes about some EventLog errors on the C9 production web server. Whenever I need to construct any text (a to do list, a sql query to email to someone, a list of errors from an event log), I hit Windows Key + R and type notepad ... and work there.

I wonder if, since I use it so much, I would be happier with another program? Anyone have any suggestions?

in reply to Should I get a new text editor?

Smilies [Smilies]

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:10:45 GMT

As you may have noticed, we have smilies back :)

We'll add a menu or toolbar of them to the editor soon, but I had this other thought today that you folks might find interesting. I was thinking of creating some additional emoticons like ( 8 ) to make the channel 8 logo (8 with wings) or (9) to show a little 9 guy, (10) ... you get the idea. Just thought it might add some nice visual touches when folks want to reference other sites. Any other ideas for emoticons that would fit well onto C9? (vs) for the Visual Studio one? (vista) for the vista icon? I'm just throwing out ideas here :D

in reply to Smilies

Viewing our changesets [Viewing our changesets]

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:38:41 GMT

Erik had this great idea today (well probably not today, but that is when we were discussing it... he probably had this great idea a while ago and has just been too busy to muse) about making our dev process more transparent. Mostly we are focused on publishing the code, as Erik was chatting about here, but tonight he asked us all if we knew of a good/quick way to ship our list of changesets out live, either in conjunction with a site update or just all the time....

I don't know the answer off hand, and we'll look into it (if you know, give me a shout!), but I was curious what it would look like and what the reaction would be so I grabbed a screenshot of my Outlook folder where all the check-in emails get stored.