ISethWebster

I've been meaning to post this for a few months now -- I got a call from Johnny Guitar in May to plat this New Orleans benefit at Club Congress.  We had a great time and so did the crowd -- here are some pictures...

Scientists at MIT, specifically Dr. Daniel G. Nocera, have announced a major breakthrough, not in energy production per se, but in energy storage. They describe the process as having "captured the essence" of plants' energy storage system. This advancement may very well prove to be the bridge between current solar technology and a technology that will in fact be affordable and scalable enough to make a real difference. Today's solar systems are just not quite "consumable" enough to provide energy for everyone; primarily because they only work when the sun shines and the battery systems leave much to be desired.

The basic idea is that sunlight would still excite photovoltaic cells and produce energy. This energy would be used to power the home (or other building) but instead of losing excess energy, or storing it in complicated, inefficient battery storage systems, the energy would be used to separate oxygen and hydrogen atoms from water molecules. The oxygen and hydrogen are later combined in a fuel cell and viola!

Read more here: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html

Jeff Prosise's Blog Post, and the comments explain how to read an image (after it is selected by the user) from the disk.  This post proved to be incredibly useful in the application we are currently developing for desktop publishing.  Thanks Jeff & Friends!

For the subscribers, I apologize if you have a slew of new and re-used posts in your reader.  I have been in the process of migrating from Community Server to SubText and then to BlogEngine.NET.  It seems as though BlogEngine.NET has a more active community than SubText which is run by the very busy Phil Haack of Microsoft fame.  I am happy to report that the migration is, for now, complete.

I decided to write a migration tool that would move the data over - I did so using the BlogML, MetaWeblog & Blogger apis, C#, WPF, and the Cook Computing XmlRpc library.  There are tools (one even comes with BlogEngine.NET) but they don't move over the linked images and since some of the posts that survived my last migration have pictures, I didn't want to move them manually... 

There was some effort involved and the code needs refactoring but all in all the utility works well.  Once I have the time to clean it up and if anyone is interested, I will post the utility and code here.

Yesterday I received a low disk space notification from one of our production boxes which gave me a chance to flex my SQL management muscles before the finally atrophy completely.  If course, it took me a bit to remember how to really shrink the log file as the SQL Server Management studio doesn't seem to actually do anything.

This seemed to ultimately be the combination that got the log file down to size: