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I just purchased the Atech Pro-9 9-in-1 flash card reader.  This thing is extremely cool- it has a number of different ports on the front to plug various storage items into.  A bit pricey (CDN$100), but cool nonetheless!

Getting it to work under linux is trivial.  If your kernel has CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN set, it will work out-of-the-box.  If not (RedHat kernels don’t set this flag by default), just add the following line to your modprobe.conf file for 2.6.x:

options scsi_mod max_luns=512

Or, if you are running 2.4.x, add the following line to modules.conf:

I’ve just checked in some code that will allow profiling of ASP.NET. Anyone interested in trying this out before the 0.8 release should send a note to the nprof-developers mailing list.

I had made a mistake in packaging 0.6 and forgot to include NProf.Hook.dll. This has been corrected in the 0.7 package.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The nprof 0.6 alpha release is now available. Changes in this version are:

• Fixes for recursive function calls
• Some minor GUI updates (double-click profiler runs to open)
• VS.NET add-in work - moved enable item to menu
• Fixed major slowdown in large profiler runs introduced last version

Those people who use the VS.NET add-in should be very happy to know that it’s been worked on a fair bit. It should perform as expected now (at least it did in my testing).

Bugzilla.NET version 0.1 has been released!

Bugzilla.NET is my Visual Studio.NET <-> Bugzilla integration project. So far it has the ability to query Bugzilla from within Visual Studio and synchronize a set of tasks with a given set of server-side queries.

Requirements:

• Bugzilla 2.16.1 or later
• Visual Studio.NET 2003 (2002 may work, but is untested)

The nprof 0.5 alpha release is now available. Changes in this version are:

• Improved UI (about box, new project icon)
• Fixed sorting - faster, doesn’t crash
• Removed GUILibrary dependency
• New NAnt build scripts
• Fixed callee timing percentages (now display as % instead of useless total ticks)
• Added suspended time in callee description
• Added command-line interface for SharpDevelop integration

The big change for me is the NAnt integration. This should allow me to release nprof more often (by removing the previously tedious and error-prone release steps). It should also help anyone interested in enhancing nprof to get a packaged release for testing.

Since Scoble has been pushing Morton Thiokol stories over the last few days, I thought I would counter with a Linux success story from this article (first page here). 

“Sabre Holdings Corp., based in Southlake, Texas, is a $2.1 billion holding company with four technology-based travel business units: the Travelocity online travel site; the Sabre Travel Network, which operates the Sabre reservations system for travel agents, suppliers and travelers; GetThere, a Web-based corporate travel service; and Sabre Airline Solutions, which provides software and consulting services to airlines.”

The latest Google Zeitgeist is out.  Using the approximate readings from this forum post, it looks like the new (very approximate) browser shares for Google are:

• MSIE 6.0: 68.5%
• MSIE 5.5: 10%
• MSIE 5.0: 11.5%
• Netscape 6+ (Mozilla): 5%
• Other: 5%

The total is 100%, but that luck more than anything.  I didn’t fudge any numbers, but I eyeballed most of them.  Each of those Google major ticks are 15%, from what I can tell. 

Good news: Mozilla is now 5% of the web (according to Google). 

UPDATE: Perhaps I don’t know my procmail as well as I thought. There was something wrong with this setup and I don’t know what it was. I ended up with major mail loops as sendmail tried to redeliver messages to my local address over and over, which were then forwarded to the unpublished account (which refused it because it was an invalid address!). Any ideas?  For now, I’ve updated this setup to deliver locally–something that’s fairly straightforward to do for most people.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled entry:

It’s been a while since I last put any news on this page, so I thought I’d do a quick update:

I’ve started a project to integrate the Bugzilla bug tracking system with Visual Studio .NET.  So far, I’ve managed to get a “quick query” window in Visual Studio, as well as synchronization for server-side saved searches with the Task List window.  This should help make bug lists more available for anyone using both VS.NET and Bugzilla.  My plan is to put it up on Sourceforge, but I haven’t had a chance yet. 

I wonder if I can get Dave Winer to start pushing more user-friendly RSS with XSL.  I would like to see someone collect a library of XSL transformations for RSS/RSS2.0 and Atom that can handle pretty much any valid feed.  Would this be a better way to softly introduce visitors to RSS?

I’ve added permalinks for all of my articles, as well as commenting for most of the pages within this site (the news pages themselves being one exception).  This means that you can now comment on the various coding projects I’ve worked on.

It seems as if x0rfbserver is no longer around.  I’m not sure the program was really supported by its author, so it’s no surprise.  Fortunately, a number of replacements have popped up!

So, for a fantastic replacement application, try x11vnc by Karl Runge.  I managed to get this installed and running with virtually no effort.  It uses the fantastic libvncserver library to do its magic.  Just make sure that you have the requirement libraries, headers and source (libjpeg-devel, zlib-devel and XFree86-devel) available.

Starting it is just a matter of running the x11vnc executable.  For anyone looking for VNC for an existing X11 session, I highly recommend this program.

For those of you writing Visual Studio.NET 2003 add-ins in C# (or any other .NET-enabled language), you might have noticed that CreateToolWindow doesn’t really work with real .NET controls.  Fortunately, this piece of code fixes this problem.  It’s a bit of hack, but it works for me so far and was created by using Reflector to figure out exactly what was going on.

I’ve managed to replace the built-in IE control in SharpReader with a nice, fast Mozilla ActiveX control.  There’s a few easy steps to follow to get this working:

1. Stop SharpReader.
2. Download and install the Mozilla ActiveX control: MozillaControl.exe (5 MB).
3. Rename the file AxInterop.SHDocVw.dll to AxInterop.SHDocVw.dll.old.
4. Extract the new AxInterop.SHDocVw.dll file from here: (download no longer available) (11 KB).

That’s it- when you start SharpReader, you’ll see a nice Mozilla window instead of IE.  To test if it works, right-click the page and select “Properties”.  You’ll see a Mozilla-style window like this if everything worked:

In his latest post about RSS, Robert Scoble says:

“Now, imagine a new syndication format that brought up a page that showed what a news aggregator was, and explained how the system worked and why it’s more productive.”

My challenge: create a plug-in XSL file that works with RSS to explain to the user what RSS is and point him at a application to read RSS.

This is actually a fairly easy task.  XSL can be plugged into any arbitrary XML file via something called a processing instruction.  In the XML file, these appear as tags of the form: