I've just upgraded to dasBlog 1.3. Not much changed, but I like to stay current. The most visible changes:

• The titles of blog entry pages (often shown in the browser caption) now show the title of the blog entry. (I had to change %siteName% to %title% in my custom theme to get it to work.)
• The add entry page (displayed when I add a blog entry) allows me to choose the blog entry category with check boxes (instead of forcing me to type it in).

Call me crazy, but I'm actually getting excited reading about all the new stuff for developers coming from Microsoft. Remember how exciting it was when Windows development was going to 32-bit? I can't wait for Whidbey... Longhorn could be really cool... Oh, to be registered for PDC 2003... (My third child is due that week, so there's never been any hope for me...)

I've always tried to keep close tabs on the files and programs that I've got on my computer (a product of my personality, perhaps), in part because hard drives tend to fill up eventually. I'm not as attentive as I used to be, with hard drive space being so cheap these days, but I've always looked for cool tools that help manage hard drive space, and have occasionally written my own rudimentary "disk usage" tools.

Thanks to Dotnet Boy's list of free utilities (inspired by Scott Henselman's list of Power Tools, which is also great), I found FolderSizes, a great free application that makes it easy to get a good overall picture of your hard drive usage, especially if you're looking for the biggest space-wasters. Also, thanks to Steve Hiner's comment, I've played with SequoiaView (also free), which gives an interesting graphical view of the entire contents of your hard drive. Cool stuff!

Update: FolderSizes is no longer free.

A few days ago, I wondered what svchost.exe was, and why there were so many instances of that process running on my machine. Now I have the answer.

I just finished In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman. I enjoyed the historical nature of the book; I was too young to care about most of the "marketing disasters" mentioned in the book when they occurred, so it was good to read about them and gain a bit more insight into the history of my field. The book uses a very conversational style; in fact, much of it could be converted directly into stand-up comedy for geeks. That style made the book a quick, easy read, though he occasionally crosses the line into unnecessary crudity. He seems to revel overmuch in the disasters he documents; of course, hindsight is 20/20. I'm not sure I gained any lasting insights into how to make a successful company in technology, but if you're looking for a bit of history and a bit of entertainment, this book is a worthy read.

One of the frustrating things about software development is that we cannot measure productivity [Martin Fowler]. This makes things difficult for management, of course, but it even makes it difficult for me as a programmer to know how productive I've been. Each Friday I look back at the week, consider what I accomplished, and it often seems as though I could have been more productive. But it's hard to know for sure; if I'd have worked smarter, or harder, or whatever, could I have "measurably" enhanced my productivity? It also makes motivation difficult at times; my boss knows that productivity is hard to measure accurately, so I could probably get away with a lot of slacking before he'd notice... So, I think I agree with Jon Galloway that a good work ethic is the best that we can hope for; maybe I should stop writing this blog entry and work on mine...

I've always been particular about making sure that I spell words correctly; I even have "automatic spell-checking" for when I send an e-mail, just in case. Unfortunately, bad spelling doesn't appear to make words any harder to read.

A number of my favorite bloggers have taken an online Myers-Briggs personality test. I've always thought Myers-Briggs was at least entertaining and sometimes useful; my wife and I both took the test in college during premarital counseling, and it helped us understand ourselves and our relationship a little bit better.

Anyway, I took the test and got the same result as I did in college: ISTJ.

• moderately expressed introvert (56%)
• slightly expressed sensing personality (11%)
• very expressed thinking personality (100% -- yikes!)
• distinctively expressed judging personality (67%)

Of course, the more often you take the test, the more you wonder if the "right" answer comes too naturally. I may be becoming closer to an INTJ as time goes on; I did get that result once, and my "sensing" is certainly my lowest score...

I'm a lot more fluent in C# than UML, so this C# design patterns site is a great way for me to brush up on my GOF patterns. [via Matt Berther via Jeremy Kercheval]

As you already know, the XP Command Prompt is far more powerful than the command prompts of old. I've recently experienced the small joy of using the ampersand to separate multiple commands on one command line, e.g.

cd ..\project3 & build

Be sure to surf a bit from the link above for any command prompt tricks you may have missed.

Way back in September 1992: http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/09/07/

When I compare the rubbish on TV these days compared to the rubbish on TV ten years ago, it's clear that good taste hasn't bottomed out yet.

Why do I insist on spelling hierarchical with an "ei"? If not for spell-checkers, I'd probably never get it right.

"I think that one of an architect's most important tasks is to remove architecture by finding ways to eliminate irreversibility in software designs." [Martin Fowler] This is something I strive for, but is it too hard to do? How do you make things easy to change? The quote by Ralph Johnson at the end of the linked article seems to point out the difficulty -- making things easier to change tends to increase their complexity, and complexity is what makes things hard to change...

"Indeed, the ability to represent characters in nearly all of the world's languages means that you have more things to worry about, not less." Ain't that the truth. At least displaying Unicode isn't as bad as it used to be, now that so many fonts are Unicode-compatible.

A funny reminder to avoid copy-paste programming.

Does anyone know why the default long date format for Windows includes a leading zero for the day, e.g., September 05, 2003 instead of September 5, 2003? One of the first things I do after I install Windows is head over to Regional and Language Options under Control Panel and change the long date format to "dddd, MMMM d, yyyy". Is the leading zero more correct in some way? I've certainly never written dates that way...

We're married to Microsoft's XML APIs, so most of the Conversation with Elliotte Rusty Harold probably isn't that interesting to me, but Part VII (!) has an interesting premise: "Having one clear vision for an API is better than compromising between many competing visions."

The Conversation with Anders Hejlsberg has been an interesting read, and Part III is no exception. I'm going to have to add "simplexity" to my vocabulary. Interesting tidbit: "So not only can delegates be more efficient than interface dispatch, they can be more efficient than regular method dispatch."

My expectations for my PDA are much lower than those of David Keppler, but it certainly does seem like they could be better. Instead of waiting for them to get better, I'm thinking about getting a PDA that's more convenient, i.e., always on my wrist. I'm not sure I'm ready to shell out $200 or more on a watch that's not water-resistant, though.

I'm not entirely sure where I stand on software patents. I especially don't like patents on things that seem obvious -- but don't most innovations seem obvious once you get used to them? Imagine if a patent made it necessary for Microsoft to remove ActiveX support from Internet Explorer, for example...