Strewth Ruth. Atli Björgvin Oddsson and myself won the Grand Prize in the Larkware Programming Contest.

How did that happen? I hear you gasp. Well, here's the story.

Back in April I had one of those dodgy little ideas that normally falls out of your head and dissappears forever (a DLITNFOOYHADF, or FOOY for short). Fortunately I had a notepad handy, so I jotted it down and soon blogged about it: The Automatic Screenshot Journal.

Some other time, Scott Hanselman blogged about getting a considerable prize ($2500 plus a copy of Visual Studio) in a competition even though his entry took just seventeen minutes to put together.

This was proof that very few people enter programming contests and that unlike the lottery, the odds are stacked in your favour.

When I heard about Mike Gunderloy's Programming Contest (via The Daily Grind, his weblog), I put out a call for someone else to write the Automatic Screenshot Journal.

Two people piped up: one, Charlie, said he'd give it a shot if time permits. Evidently time was short, I never heard from Charlie again. The other respondent, 'ABO' (who I now know as Atli Björgvin Oddsson) said he's already written a version. He sent it to me and it was fantastic. Very responsive, very light on RAM, only a few wrinkles: a good program all round.

I wrote back and told him it was excellent, I also suggested a few changes. But he didn't write back. There was just no word from him at all. I wrote again. I wrote from a different email account. I wrote persistently, but it seemed that ABO had left the world of the internet.

The deadline for the competition drew quite close. I was personally using 'Snapper' for putting my own timesheet together each week -- so i knew it was actually a helpful tool that every office worker in the world should have it on their computer.

So i emailed Atli one more time, this time from my work account. He responded a few minutes later and said he'd never received any of the earlier emails. It seems that gmail and hotmail are blocked by many an overzealous office filter.

Atli was very responsive about making little changes and went well beyond any suggestions I came up with. As he lives in Iceland and I live in Australia, our hours of operation don't tend to overlap very much (much like that movie Ladyhawke, although I confess to being slightly cuter than Michelle Pfeiffer). When I came into work each day I'd find a new version of Snapper waiting for me. I'd run it, check out the new features and tell Atli what I thought.

I started to put together an entry for the competition and I noticed that the program had to target .Net 2.0. (that was the main point of the competition). This was an issue as it currently used (the more common) .Net 1.1. Also, marks were given for documentation, of which we had none. I wrote to Atli asking if he could compile on .net 2.0, and I set about writing a short friendly user manual (link to pdf version of manual), in my best 'Joel Spolsky' style voice. When I heard from Atli the next day he said he'd compiled it against veriosn 2.0, and drawn the code into a single executable (it used to rely on a separate dll). This was extra good as it meant that we didn't need an installer for the package. With only a few days to go we entered the competition.

There were only about eleven entrants in the end, which is about what I'd expected. I would've been thrilled with fifth placing say, but grand prize is marvellous and not to be sneezed at.

Prizes include Code Smith (we use the free version at work) and Graphics Server .Net. Even the very cool book Visual Studio Hacks (cool... if you're a geek like me that is.)

So next time you see a developer competition, I suggest you do something about it.

As Woody Allen might have said, "seventy, eighty, maybe ninety percent of success in life is just showing up. " ;-)

Download Snapper from Larkware.com (requires .Net Framework 2.0)

Snapper User Guide (PDF, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader) from Larkware.com

I've been complaining a lot on this site lately. And it's not just me. Complaining is a common hobby, a near epidemic.

But what are some GOOD DEEDS we can do with our blogs and our abilities? How can we turn our brains around and use them for good instead of evil?

Ten Goods Deeds A Blogger Can Perform

1. Install a Firewall on your mother's computer
2. Put virus scanning software on your cousin's computer
3. Run a spyware remover on your brother-in-law's computer
4. Backup your dad's digital photos to CD ROM and store them somewhere away from his home
5. Teach your grandmother to use email so she can get in touch with old boyfriends
6. Teach your uncle why he shouldn't click on attachments
7. Backup your nephew's website. He doesn't realise that the webserver is about to crash
8. Someone in your family is a genealogical enthusiast. Help them put their research online
9. Pay for some of that shareware you use every day
10. Bite the bullet and publish some of that code you've written in your spare time

That's all i can think of for now. Now I'll go back to kicking injured puppies.

Yeh I know that I "should" reboot once I've received updates. But can you please tell me what has been updated? And give me a few clues as to what will go wrong if I hold off for a few minutes?

Interrupting my work every five minutes is a rude thing to do, so when you do it, please provide details.

(i've complained about this before... and thanks to google i found out where: on mike pope's blog)

I've got a swag of incoming links from this article: Is MS Windows ready for the desktop?.

I like people whose weapon of choice is satire. Better than trolling

[my bad... as Douglas points out in the content... this isn't the password, just a flag]I don't think I've ever seen such a brilliant error message, as one I just found at solucija.com

It not only includes the connection details.... but the PASSWORD TOO!!!

I love the site's slogan:

What's your solution?

uh, my solution involves *not* telling everyone my password.

This is a bit like a situation mike pope wrote about back in August.

Anyway, this all started because i was reading that OWSD (popular home of free website templates) is down, and has been for a while now.

A Mirror of the content is now up, and some designers giving out free templates are listed by Andreas Viklund, and some of Andreas's designs are also available. There's a File repository available too, if you're interested.

Not wishing to harp on ajax portals for too long... but here's a comparison of 'google/ig', live.com and the independent (french?) netvibes, in two categories: weather and aggregator.

The Weather

1. three day outlook
2. celsius not available
3. wind given in 'mph'
4. entering city was a clunky experience
5. Sorry but today was NOT sunny

1. five day outlook
2. celsius available :-)
3. nostalgic windows 3.1 style icons... yuck

1. four day outlook
2. celsius available :-)
3. really groovy icons

Sub-Verdict: Netvibes is the weather master

Aggregators

1. set the number of items

1. set the number of items
   ...but it's hard to find and hard to use

1. Refresh on demand
   ...this is a killer feature, particularly for email
2. Set number of items: well positioned

Sub-Verdict: Netvibes has the better aggregator

Verdict: Netvibes rocks

I take back what I was thinking about the French. Netvibes is very cool. Leaves the billionaires in the dust.

_{(And no, netvibes aren't paying me to say this. Who wants their dirty French money anyway??)}

Know any others?

Big news sweeping this net lately: Sony are evil

Sadly, few have stated the argument more elegantly than Pennino:

While I agree with Pennino, I particularly think that artists should be urged to boycott Sony. This is one of the most thoroughly pre-meditated crimes imaginable, and it has been performed in the name of talented and creative people. If they have any concern for their reputation (which we can be fairly certain they do) then they ought to look elsewhere for ways to distribute their work.

You've got a blog?
Here are five ways you can increase^* the chance that your feed will show up properly in Live.com

_{(* update: live.com still reserves the right to fail at any moment)}

1. If possible, keep the number of items in your feed down.
   ...Limit the number of items to, say, fifteen at most (this is the original limit on # items in an rss file). I suspect this is why my feed wouldn't load at Live.com yesterday (I had about thirty items in the xml file).
2. If possible, keep the size of your feed down
   ...Not too many bytes. If you have a very looong feed, you might also provide a summary feed that loads quicker.
3. Specify an icon for your feed.
   ...They display it, so you may as well include it.
4. Have a short, snappy name for your feed.
   ...Otherwise, they'll truncate it, and not even provide an ellipsis. (Notice that 'Tales from the Sharpside' became just 'Tales from the' and you have to mouseover this text to see the full name in a tool tip)
5. Ensure your feed is valid use mark pilgrim's excellent validator

What I've worked out though is that at certain times of day (probably aligned with US 'start of work day') you're unlikely to get a great result from live.com. So be it. I still find it an interesting ajax app (y'know microsoft *invented* ajax). For some reason, writing gadgets is a very tempting thing to geek like me:

Microsoft Gadgets: It's like a cut-down version of the internet... inside a cut-down version of a browser.... hosted on the... um, internet... in a, y'know, browser.

It's Web 2.0, get it?

I've really tried to resist bagging this big announcement from microsoft. but i've also made the mistake of trying to use live.com

Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together.

Pity that the 'out of the box' experience (1) didn't work, (2) wasn't simple (3) wasn't effortless and (4) lacked 'togetherness'.

I clicked all the bits that looked clickable, watched as things changed. One box said: "You can see your Windows Live Mail or Hotmail inbox here if you sign in."

Hmmm. I was already signed in... my name was displayed in the top right, proof positive that my sign-in was successful. But no email showed up. Five minutes of digging showed me that what they meant to say was:
"You can see your Windows Live Mail or Hotmail inbox here if you sign in *AND* you've joined the beta program, for which we send you to a page from which you have to hunt around before going to another page... and even then you'd better have hotmail because we don't accept anyone else."

But of course the real test of an aggregator is: Does it successfully aggregate secretGeek.net/rss.asp??... the answer a resounding NO!

The reason i use swear words (sorry about that., by the way... I went all blythopathic for a moment) is that they imply that my feed is bad. Not true (this time). This time, I'm pretty sure the mistake is on live.com's side. And there's no hint given about what's wrong. Damn them.

Anyway, I might like live.com if:

1. They let me use google as my search. (Instead i feel like they are trying to grab the web in a strangle hold)
2. Their aggregator worked for secretGeek.net/rss.asp and every other page I tried
3. I could plug in to my gmail account. And have it refresh on demand.
4. I could plug into del.icio.us, rather than re-invent it from scratch
5. It had a simple todo list functionality a-la Ta-Da
6. It had something as addictive as LiveMarks or Digg Spy

Anyway... here's some other web portals around the place you might be interested in...

Kudos to the people who worked on this project though. They've definitely got some very talented people, and I hope that criticisms of live.com don't cause too much stress to the developers who've made it happen. I just find it interesting that even a multi-mega-billion dollar company can't get a launch to work seamlessly, even when the whole pitch is about working seamlessly.

'Passfaces' is some kind of proprietary technique for using a series of faces instead of a password.

Apparently it's intuitively easier to remember faces than letters.

It's funny the way memory works.

I'll always remember their website for the typographical errors.

And does it bother them that the name of their product rhymes with "assface" ??

(Okay, i've got the whole passface/assface thing out of my system now)