Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.3.9074.18820
Disclaimer The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
E-mail
Well I plan on spending the next few days getting together a beta of dasBlog 1.7. I've been slowly doing some work on dasBlog the past few months (emphasis on slowly). To be honest I was pretty close to closing up shop on dasBlog and eventually writing something new from scratch, mostly because I felt there was to much to fix and a bunch of things were broken that I didn't feel like dealing with. However, thanks to some inspiration from Scott Hansselman and Clemens, I'm much more excited about continuing to work on the code. In the coming weeks I will get around to moving dasBlog from GotDotNet to SourceForge or some other place. GDN is just way to frustrating to use, and I'm the only person left contributing because of the hassles and issues with using Source Control over there. Dare did the same thing with RSS Bandit and a year later he seems happier for it.
Having said that, version 1.7 has some unbelievable performance improvements. Scott Hansselman did some amazing work under the hood and increased Runtime and RSS performance a great deal. Furthermore he added a Referral Spam Blacklist, a CAPTCHA solution for comments, and an IP address Blocker. I just installed the bits on my site and it's amazing how much faster things are. My ISP should be much happier.
There is another important change in 1.7. Due to a very unfortunate bug that has existed since 1.3 or so, the dayentry.xml and dayextra.xml files were created based on UTC for dayentry and local server time for dayextra. This meant that when dasBlog went to go write a referral or trackback to the dayextra file for a lot of folks that file was the wrong file. In my case since my server is in GMT -5, any attempted writes to this file between midnight GMT and 5 am were lost. I came up with a fairly clever way of fixing it, but this does mean that for users who first install 1.7 there is a one time hit where dasBlog goes and loads all the old files, creates new ones with UTC file names, and then backs up all the old ones. This can take a while if you have a lot of entries and dayextra files.
Anyway, I plan on finishing up some final things and posting a beta to GDN before the new year. If you want something sooner to play with leave me a comment and I'll send you mail when it's ready.