Category Archives: Blogging

Writer’s block

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When people haven’t written a while they usually start off with some kind of apology like “sorry I haven’t written in so long, but I’ve been doing xyz.” My feeling is: blogs (with some exceptions) are strictly amateur hour, so no apologies are necessary for life intervening. That’s just the way it is, and people should come to expect that from blogs – you get what you pay for.

That said, I’d really like to say that I haven’t been writing in a while because I’ve been busy, but that’s not really it. The holidays took up a lot of time and I spent a good chunk of the last month or so trying to get the VB Language Specification updated to reflect all the good stuff that we’re doing in VB 2005. Even though, in theory, updating the spec is just a matter of merging individual specifications into the master specification, I tend to do a lot of rewriting to fit things into the general flow and because of the fact that I’m a latent control freak. (Rewriting the spec also helped turn up an interesting number of bugs in our beta compiler. It’s amazing what just trying out what the spec says is supposed to work will produce.) Hopefully the spec will be available generally in the near future (I’m gunning for when Beta2 RTMs, whenever that is), but it’s not like that kept me from writing.

No, I think it’s just plain old writer’s block. There’s always stuff you can write about, but if you’re not interested in or are not inspired, then the writing (and the writing process) is stiff and boring. Until the magic inspiration comes back, I figured the best thing I can do is work on other things and not foist off a bunch of uninteresting junk on everyone. Whatever the reason, it feels kind of like the mojo is coming back, so I’m hopeful that the words will start flowing again. If not, well, I guess this was just a blip…

Die spammer scum!

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You may have noticed the comments coming on and off today… I’m getting innundated by an extremely agressive comment spammer (I believe other .Text sites are also getting hit hard), and I’m trying to block them out. Hopefully it’ll work, but please bear with me.

Hello, world?

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This is a test blog post to see what’s going on with the .Text tracking system. I’m not sure if my method of using BlogJet is causing problems with people getting posts or whether .Text’s tracking system is broken. Anyway, please ignore.

Technical difficulties

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It appears that my blog has been stricken with the .Text threading bug, so while the front page seems to be working, everything else is giving .Text errors. For some reason I can’t seem to log in to my hosting provider to fix this from work, so it’ll have to wait until tonight when I get home. So please bear with us…

Movin’ out

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You may notice that comments are temporarily turned off on this blog for a day or so. This is because I’m moving the blog out of my basement and onto a hosted ASP.NET service, easerve.com. As much fun as it’s been to run everything myself, the reality that I’m not cut out to be a full-time system administrator has slowly sunk into my consciousness over the past year. That, and my wife really wants a webmail solution for her domain and I really don’t want to spend the time tracking one down, setting it up and maintaining it. So off we go. Once the DNS updates have propagated, you’ll be able to post comments again. Here’s hoping the move is smooth!

We are experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by…

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As I’ve said before, I host my own website which means that I’m responsible for my own DNS resolution. For a long time, I used the free service provided by Granite Canyon as a secondary DNS server, however that service started becoming more and more unreliable this year and appears to be largely dead. Searching for another source of secondary DNS hosting, I hit upon secondary.org, which seemed like a good place to get some free backup DNS hosting. Big mistake.

Sometime over the weekend, it appears that secondary.org has been taken over by someone who’s started redirecting all DNS requests to some random website. Depending on which DNS server your machine chooses when resolving panopticoncentral.net, you’ll either get my website or not. Last night I moved all my DNS hosting over to Network Solutions which at some point started offering free DNS hosting to people who register with them (all the better to sell their web and mail hosting). As that change propagates itself throughout the DNS system of the Internet, the connection to this server should become reliable again. I apologize to everyone who’s been redirected against their will…