Juan Pablo Rizzo's Blog

Rancid BBS Birthday

2006-11-16T21:25:00Z

Ten years ago Rancid BBS was going online. The Bulletin Board System was built on top of Remote Access 2.1 and was running on a 386SX and 8MB RAM with a 14,400bps modem.

The BBS had more than 10 calls every night and about 2000 registered users (it was online only at nigth because it used the phone line of my parent's home).

Sometimes I miss the old days, chatting with others Sysops, the Fidonet point and the UUCP issues, the ANSI arts, the Locolist...and so on.

When I developed Rancid BBS I was 14 years old and it was the beginning of my computer career. I really enjoyed that beginning :)

   __                  _     _     ___    ___  __    
  /__\ __ _ _ __   ___(_) __| |   / __\  / __\/ _\   
 / \/// _` | '_ \ / __| |/ _` |  /__\// /__\//\ \    
/ _  \ (_| | | | | (__| | (_| | / \/  \/ \/  \_\ \   
\/ \_/\__,_|_| |_|\___|_|\__,_| \_____/\_____/\__/

The .NET Framework 3.0 has officially been released!

2006-11-06T17:55:00Z

Today Microsoft announced the release of the .Net Framework 3.0.

There are four new technologies introduced in the .Net Framework 3.0:

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
Windows CardSpace (WCS, formerly “InfoCard”)

Here you have the download links:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package

Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit for Windows Vista™ and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components

There are also Visual Studio 2005 extensions to support the development with .Net Framework 3.0.

Here you have the links to download the extensions:

Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation)

The Visual Studio 2005 extension for Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation are still in beta:

Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP

Enjoy :)

Learn Scrum from a Webcast by Ken Schwaber

2006-10-18T18:21:00Z

Today in the Latin America Agile Software Development forum (laasd) someone post this Google Tech Talk by Ken Schwaber.

The Tech Talk Abstract:
Scrum is an amazingly simple process that causes many, many changes when it is implemented. This seminar presents the basic framework of Scrum and some of the implementation issues associated with it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011

ASP.NET 2.0 Webcasts from Microsoft Team's Members

2006-10-13T14:25:00Z

Simon Muzio has posted a list of upcomming webcast that are live from Redmond.

Take a look at them and register to those that interest you.

19-Oct Live From Redmond: Introducing the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions
26-Oct Live From Redmond: An In-depth Look at UpdatePanel
02-Nov Live From Redmond: Enriching Existing ASP.NET Applications with ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions
09-Nov Live From Redmond: Introducing the Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit
16-Nov Live From Redmond: Building your own Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX control extender
21-Nov Live From Redmond: Using the Microsoft AJAX Library with "other" server technologies
30-Nov Live From Redmond: Microsoft AJAX Patterns - Implementing Predictive Fetch with Microsoft AJAX
12-Dec Live From Redmond: Team development on web applications

Script Snippets to Write HTML Applications (HTA)

2006-10-13T01:42:00Z

These days I've been working doing a user's interface for a couple of scripts.

For that I used a HTML Application (HTA). Developing a HTA is a very easy task, but because I don't like to start something from scratch I searched for some scripts snippets and I found a very nice utilty the HTA Helpomatic.

The utility has a lot of very basic but useful tasks like how to:

Autorun Script
Change cursor
Copy to Clipboard
Create basic HTA
Paste from Clipboard
Prompt the user for input
Save data
Table
Timer
ToolTip

If you are not very familiar with HTML and coding, I'm pretty sure that this will help you .

Certified ScrumMaster in Argentina

2006-10-05T23:57:00Z

Well It's has been a lot of time without posting. I've been really busy these months but I think I will post more often from now :)

Last August I attended to a ScrumMaster certification course from Scrum Alliance.

The course was taught by Tobias Mayer from Agile Thinking.

And Since today I'm listed in the certified ScrumMasters list :)

http://www.controlchaos.com/certification/list.php#r

Microsoft Acquires Winternals Software

2006-07-19T18:57:00Z

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Winternals / Sysinternals.

Microsoft continues with its policy of hiring very smart people :)

Here it is the official press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-18WinternalsPR.mspx

I want a Helio Display

2006-05-22T14:55:00Z

I was thinking about to buy a 19" LCD Display when I found a website with a pretty cool display. It's the Helio Display from IO2 Technology.

Heliodisplay images are not holographic although they are free-space, employing a rear projection system in which images are captured onto a nearly invisible plane of transformed air. The projected images are two-dimensional but appear 3D since there is no physical depth reference.

Here it is a Heliodisplay's picture

I think I will have to save a bit more to buy one of this :).

Data Mining and .NET?

2006-04-27T15:21:00Z

These two last months I've been working with some classic data mining algorithms like Apriori, D-ARM, K-means, Fuzzy C-means, Birch and so on. I found implementations of most of them in Java and other languages like c++ or c. There is also a nice open source application called WEKA from the University of Waikato that has a lot of machine learning algorithms implemented but also coded in Java.

I've found just one site with some algorithms implemented in C#, but just a few and just one site.

Why there is not .NET implementations of these algortithms?

If anybody knows a good source code resource for data mining algorithms for C# developers just leave a comment :) also if you would be interested in C# implementations of these algorithms, please leave a comment. I'm thinking about implement some of them if people is interested.

Under Maintenance with ASP.NET 2.0

2006-03-17T15:40:00Z

If you are used to put your website under maintenance while you are updating it you will love this nice ASP.NET 2.0 feature.

You just need to create a file called app_offline.htm (with the static content that you want) in the root directory of you website and ASP.NET will unload the application domain and redirect all new incoming requests to that file.

Just rename or delete the app_offline.htm file and the website will be online again. Pretty simple, pretty cool :).

Oasis in Buenos Aires

2006-03-11T13:11:00Z

Yesterday I was at Campo Argentino de Polo in Buenos Aires, Argentina to hear Oasis live.

The concert was nice, they rock very well but I have to say that it was a little short, the sound was really bad and at the field there was too much people.

They opened with Turn Up the Sun and then played a lot of classic songs like Morning Glory, Rock'n'Roll Star,Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova and Don't Look Back in Anger.

Then a song was dedicated to Diego Maradona, Cigarettes And Alcohol :).

After all they closed with My Generation (a cover from The Who).

How to manage the assembly name of an ASP.NET 2.0 Web site

2006-02-28T17:44:00Z

As you may know there is no way to manage the assembly file name of a web site application in Visual Studio 2005 neither its version and build number.

I like to have control over those properties, and so does theVS 2005 team, because they released an add-in that extends a number of features for Web Deployment in Visual Studio 2005.

With this add-in you can manage the assembly name and version, merge the output assemblies as only one (like VS2003), customize web application’s web.config file at deployment, and a lot a things more.

You can download the Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Project support and try it.

Also you can download a tutorial of how to create and manage Web Deployment Projects.

The Disc Stakka has arrived

2006-02-21T17:34:00Z

Last year I went to the Ready Launch Tour 2005 and as Ezequiel tells in his post I won a Imation Disc Stakka. But it didn't arrive until yesterday (three months later!).

The CD Stakka is pretty cool (but a little big for my desktop). The management software that it uses is OpdiTracker that is a very complete program. You can define:

disc name
disc type (e.g. data CD or video DVD)
disc content (e.g. file names and directory structures for data CDs, or track names, lengths, and artists for audio CDs)
disc description (e.g. keywords and other details to help you identify and locate the disc)
disc location (e.g. the physical location of the disc, or the name of the person who currently has the disc and when it is due to be returned)

But I wonder why it does not come with a web based interface so everybody in the LAN could query the discs database and get the disc that is looking for.

If someone is interested in build a new stuff, I think that here is an opportunity. As far as I know there is not web front end for de Disk Stakka. If you are interested, here it is the SDK.

Building a standard and valid RSS feed

2006-02-21T16:09:00Z

These days I've been working on RSS feeds. For the standard I used this RSS 2.0 Specification and to be sure that I did the things right I used this feed validator.

How to enable RSS discovery in your website

2006-02-16T18:07:00Z

The latest version of the most used web browsers like Mozila FireFox 1.5, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Safari have a nice feature to discover RSS feeds. This feature is implemented as a little icon on the address bar that indicates if the visited website offers a RSS feed. Allowing you to read and bookmark the feed with one click.

This is also available in older browsers thru a plugin like Active Web Reader or NewzCrawler.

So if you are a webmaster and have a RSS feed in your site and you want to enable the RSS discovery icon in most browsers you have to add this tag inside your html <head>:

Of course you have to change the title and href values to the corresponding website.

You are allowed to have as many link tags as RSS feeds you have.