Dylan Greene dot com

I'm doing a bit of re-coding today on the photo album part of this site and you won't be able to browse the photos for the next few hours.

I started this combination photo album and blogging system about four years ago and I've been upgrading it constantly ever since. Constant upgrades mean messy code, and it's time for me to go through and remove as much junk as possible. I'm also getting the code ready to move to .NET.

UPDATE: Already done. Took only a few minutes for the biggest changes. There's still some pages that might not work yet, such as the PhotoBlog, but I'll get to them soon. Bonus: The entire site should be a bit faster.

The day after Thanksgiving is often called Black Friday. This is the day when many stores have ridiculous sales - like a RCA 52" HDTV for only $1000 from Best Buy or a DVD player from Target for only $13 - from 9am till noon to get you in their store to do as much holiday shopping as possible from them. Some sales last all day, and some stores open even before 9am.

Usually stores have a limited quantities of the items on sale, so people line up before stores open, like at 7am. Using this list, you could in theory buy the items now, and ask for the difference on Friday. Of course maybe these really aren't the sale items, so take it as it may be. These lists also don't always say the exact product number, so you won't know which Samsung 17" monitor is going to be on sale (Samsung has a high end and low end line of LCD monitors).

Here's the list:
- Best Buy
- Circuit City
- Staples
- Office Depot
- Ace Hardware
- Radio Shack
- Toys R Us
- Sears
- Kohl's
- Target
- K-mart
- WalMart

Check your coupons too, I noticed the Best Buy coupons I have expire tomorrow - before the Black Friday sales begin.

Count the number of people in the picture.

Wait for it to change.

Count the number of people in the picture again.

This past weekend in my off time in Minnesota I added what I think is a pretty cool feature to this site: Asynchronous partial web page loading. Yeah, it needs a sexier name.

Before: Certain parts of my web site were kinda slow to load. For example, the Random Photo Caption and the page counter. This meant that while getting that random caption, the web page couldn't show anything after it because that part of the page wasn't created yet.

Now: Now I get the whole page, and I load the random quote in a separate thread. This means that you can see the whole web page much sooner, even though the Random Quote might not have finished loading yet. Once the random quote finishes loading, it automatically displays.

How: I make a simple web service call (using the XMLHTTP object) via JavaScript back to the server as the page is loading. This works in both IE and Mozilla, and does not use any special plug-ins. As a bonus, I can make this web service call repeatedly to show live data. I plan on adding a web page that shows what page everybody currently on this web site is viewing in real time using this technology.

The inspiration and much of the XMLHTTP code for this feature comes from WebFX's xLoadTree, which is a DHTML tree that loads nodes from your web site as you expand them rather than download the whole tree at once. If you would like to know more about how I did this, leave me a comment here and I'll go into more technical detail.

Microsoft showed a professionally-done Matrix parody at the 2003 Comdex as part of Bill Gates' keynote. The video features Bill as Neo and Steve as Morpheus.

Here are some stills from it:

Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: The Decision
Part 3: The Fight

(These photos came from TabletPCtalk.com)

I don't have the full video yet. If you have a link to it, let me know.

Messageboard Alumni: There is a backup site here: http://forums.TeacherReviews.com. This will stay up until December.

Microsoft has begun beta testing a Windows Update CD - meaning all your updates on one CD. This will be great for those without high-speed connections and businesses that want to conserve bandwidth. I can't comment more on this project because I'm a Windows Update beta tester.

Windows Update via CD was one of my requests in my "Windows Update is like going to the Dentist" post.

No word on fixing the 0x800A138F error. I posted how to fix this problem back in August and it still gets about 1000 visitors every day.

RSS explained for normal folk:

An RSS feed is an XML file that has the latest news, photos, comments, or whatever from any web site that supports it.

Here is a sample example RSS feed from this site: http://www.DylanGreene.com/rss.xml

If you look on the left side of this web page, you'll see an orange XML button. That is the link to my RSS feed. I also have feeds for the latest comments and photo captions.

The XML file is too confusing to read without a tool. The tool you use (the Web Browser of the RSS world) is called a RSS Reader or RSS Aggrigator. These tools download the RSS files that you have "subscribed" to and show you the items that are new or have changed. This is better than web browsing because the tool brings what is new to you, rather than you having to go to each of your bookmarks to see if something is updated. RSS also typically cuts out a lot of the fat from the web site, like ads, menus, and unnecessary graphics, only showing you the content.

If you use Outlook, tools like intraVnews and NewsGator are excellent choices for your RSS needs.

If you have any questions, post them here. I'll see when your comments are added because I've subscribed to my site's Comments RSS Feed - I don't need to come back to this page to find out if people have added new comments. RSS makes us more efficent.

I found a great new RSS Reader for Outlook called intraVnews. It's got better features than NewsGator, it's free for personal use, and it downloads the full page that the RSS items link to meaning you get the full content from sites that normally only give you the headline. It also sets a custom view for folders with RSS feeds, which is great because the default email isn't needed for RSS (you probably don't care about the From field, for example).

It's multithreaded, meaning it won't slow down Outlook while updating the news feeds, and it's written in .NET, which is cool.

Thanks to the Lockergnomes RSS Resource for finding this gem.

Today, Tomorrow, and Friday I'm taking off from work (where Java reigns supreme) to attend .NET training in Reston, VA. I'm not a programmer at work (I'm in charge of Usability and Design), but I do a bit of development on my own (like the site you are looking at now).

I finished the first session for today. Some notes:

• It's free (thanks Microsoft and Rackspace!)
• It includes lunch (there is such thing as a free lunch!)
• .Net rocks (Seeing features like partial-page caching, which is as simple as changing an attribute to true, and learning how to use Visual Studio .NET 2003, which is a beast at first, makes me anxious to finally port this site over to ASP.NET.)
• Tomorrow we're getting a tour of the Rackspace hosting facility (Cool for geeks like me)
• Daily door prizes just for being there (I'm hoping for the PocketPC)

Wow, it looks like Avalon (the new Windows user interface system to debut in the next major new version of Windows currently codenamed Longhorn) will include live spell check (like Word) in every text form. This means you'll get spell checking when using forms on web pages, when writing email, in your IM program, in non-Microsoft applications, and anywhere else you've ever wondered if what you are writing is spelled correctly but not cared enough to open Word to check. As a terrible speller, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time.

Okay, now that you've seen third and final of the Matrix series, time to discuss your thoughts.

Note: This is only for those who have already seen Matrix Revolutions. There will be spoilers.

Silicon.com: "Red Hat's chief executive has said that Linux needs to mature further before home users will get a positive experience from the operating system, saying they should choose Windows instead."

Red Hat simultaneously pulled the plug on the Red Hat Linux product line, including dropping support and maintenance for all current and previous releases.

Red Hat Linux was a popular, if not the most popular, Linux distribution. SuSE, another popular Linux distrubution company, sold itself it Novell this week.

No word if this has anything to do with Microsoft's impressive Longhorn technology showing at the PDC last week. :)

Scott Guthrie, head of ASP.NET, gives a great list of pointers based on his preperation for his part in the PDC keynote demos to over 8,000 people. There's some cool photos to go along, such as the 30-person control room directly behind the front stage. A great read for anybody that ever has to give demonstrations to large groups of people.

53 redesigns for Jakob Neilson's web site and none of them really look that great...

I've been looking for somebody to help me redesign TeacherReviews.com, and somebody for a project I'm working on at work.
Current site: TeacherReviews.com
New (incomplete) site: TR.betterblog.org

... but you have to know where to find them. If you know where they should be, go ahead, check them out, and start adding captions.

I'll put a direct link to the photos here later today.

I have my tickets to Matrix Revolutions, how about you?

I'm going to Loews Georgetown 14, an awesome new theater in Georgetown where I also saw Matrix Reloaded. In addition to large comfy seats, stadium seating, and digital sound on every screen, they don't seem to mind when you bring in your own, uh, beverage of choice.

We'll be seeing in on Wednesday at 10:10pm, click here to join us [Fandango.com].

You should also check out some great discussions on what people think is going to happen in this next Matrix. Is Neo a machine? Is there a Matrix within a Matrix? Is Neo actually evil? Read the full text with the architect and over 40 comments and theories: http://www.dylangreene.com/blog.asp?blogID=208

A great 50 Cent parody video staring newcomer PIMP as 50 Cent and his son, Lil' Homie, as 25 Cent: http://www.tconl.com/~tonyabrian/PIMPVID5mb.wmv

Photos will be online Monday. Thanks, everybody, for a kick-ass party.