New blog design (again)

Today I tried the new (to me at lest) Blogger Template Designer, and I must say that I was impressed with the usability of the tool. To be able to preview your blog with a new theme, without actually applying it is a very valuable feature in my mind. And the “Apply to blog” button just works instantly. There’s a lot of help for a beginner in getting a good look for your blog, and at the same time there are options for those that like to customize a lot. There’s also the ability to add your own CSS if you want to, which should satisfy most advanced users. Quite well-balanced if you ask me.

Good job Blogger (Google)! I like it! =)

And I also think my new design is quite nice. ;-)

Changing the registration info for Visual Studio 2010

I just had enough of Visual Studio displaying the wrong username and organization (no I don’t work at Microsoft) in the splash screen and in Help –> About. After a little searching, I came across this blog post by Stuart Thompson, that explains the process in detail.

The only thing I want to add is that you should wait for the “devenv.exe” process to exit before trying to launch VS2010 again. This is in the step where you run “devenv /setup”. I used Task Manager to make sure that the devenv.exe process finished before starting VS2010, and it worked well for me. I can’t say that you will run into problems if you don’t wait though, because I haven’t tried that.

Oh and btw, it might be a good idea to backup your settings (by exporting them) before you start, just in case.

Benjamin Franklin om Datalagringsdirektivet

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
- Benjamin Franklin

Video editing on the web

I read an article in Teknisk Ukeblad (in norwegian) that showcased a couple of websites that offer video-editing for free. Here’s the list:

• Motionbox (Score: 3 out of 6)
• Pixorial (Score: 4 out of 6)
• MIXandMASH.tv (Score: 5 out of 6)
• JayCut (Score: 5 out of 6)

Experimenting with design

Today I have been experimenting with the appearance of my blog. I started by searching google for “free blogger templates”. The first result is Free Blogger Templates, and I spent just a couple of minutes browsing there, before I found a template I liked. It’s called San Francisco Skyline, and I think it looks quite good. I have changed it a little though, as I’m not a fan of pure white backgrounds. I’m not quite finished with my tinkering yet, so some adjustments are still to be made to the white background color, but that’s just minor changes. The overall theme will not be changed.

Now, I’m no web designer, so in your eyes I might not have high enough standards regarding the design of these pages (I’m not even going to talk about the code-behind). But I like it, and I’ll use this new design for a while before evaluating, to let things sink in a bit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not open to suggestions and constructive criticism, it just means that I won’t be using much of my time to address that kind of feedback right now.

I think it’s fun to experiment with the design of my blog, and I want to thank the people who have made it so easy to do so. The fact that it is so easy to change the design of a blog is, to me at least, a sign of good underlying design.

The Jason Scott Sabbatical - update

The fundraiser is now complete, and I’m happy to report that Jason reached his goal of 25,000$. Actually, the total amount ended at 26,658$, and that’s just awesome! =) I’m looking forward to hearing more from Jason, and I wish him the best of luck in his work to save our common history. He has posted a thank you note here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/textfiles/the-jason-scott-sabbatical/posts/3646

How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applications

In this article over at MSDN, Fabrice Marguerie talks about memory and resource leaks in .NET applications, and how to fix these issues. He gives an overview of the different types of leaks you might encounter, and lists a way to fix each one. Worth a read, even if you don’t have problems with memory leaks.

77 Windows 7 Tips

I discovered a TechNet article titled 77 Windows 7 Tips. It gives 77 (yeah Einstein) tips about things you can do with Windows 7 that you might not have known about. Not all the tips are that useful, but there are some gems in there. One of the tips I liked was that you can move a window from one screen to another by using Shift + Win + Left/Right Arrow Key. Combine that with using Win + Up Arrow Key to maximize the window, or Win + Left/Right Arrow Key to pin the window to the left or right half of the screen, and you have a pretty sweet list of keyboard shortcuts for working with windows.

I found the article via The Morning Brew #460. If you are not familiar with The Morning Brew series, it’s a series of blog posts that collects the best posts from a variety of sources and presents them in a nice compact way for you.

The Jason Scott Sabbatical

I just read Jeff Atwoods blog post about
Preserving Our Digital Pre-History and thought that this was actually something I wanted to support.

Therefore I have pledged 50$ to The Jason Scott Sabbatical project at KickStarter, and I urge you to donate to the project as well.

To promote it more, I tweeted about it, and I posted an update to my Facebook account. I have also put up a widget here on my blog to promote his project. Please consider chipping in on this project.

Stopp datalagringsdirektivet

Jeg har skrevet meg opp på listen til http://datalagringsdirektivet.no/. Jeg oppfordrer deg til å gjøre det samme, for å vise din protest mot datalagringsdirektivet. I skrivende stund har allerede over 500 personer skrevet seg på etter bare kort tid.