I’ve read alot of posts on how to interpret and evaluate your blogs statistics, most lately Scott Hanselmans post entitled 7 Blogging Statistics Rules – There is a life after page views so I realise and agree that how many people has visited your blog isn’t everything. I’ve had ClustrMaps from the start and that’s what I’m using as measurement in this case. ClustrMaps definition of visits are hits from unique ip adresses during a 24 hour period. I think it’s a good definition as oppsed to hits or something else. The landmark I’ve passed is probably small and insignificant to all of you veteran bloggers out there. Still, I can’t help but to feel a little happy that I’ve passed 1000 visitors. And I’m just getting started… To celebrate the event I put the feeburner subscriber count up on the blog, although I feel a bit silly doing it since some of the blogs I myself read have 27000, and I have 27. I don’t have a wide enough subject to get a really wide reach, and that isn’t the goal. I don’t need alot of subscribers, I just need the right ones. And hopefully my posts can help or amuse someone out there. Have a nice weekend all.
Category: General
Vote for TechDays in Sweden
If you’re from Sweden, and I guess mainly if you live and/or work in Stockholm (although I’m unsure at this point), and you don’t have the possibility to go to TechEd or PDC and would like to get the chance to get some of that technical content delivered closer to home, take your chance to let Microsoft know. Visit the swedish msdn website and make your vote heard. I’d probably go, and I’d be willing to present.
How do you track the latest Microsoft Downloads
Do you ever wonder how alot of bloggers seems to know when downloads become available on the Microsoft Downloads site? And blog about it almost instantly. I am not a download chaser myself, mostly because I don’t have the stamina to check up on the latest news often enough. And to be clear, I think a simple blogpost about an available download that might interest the audience of the blog is a perfect way to make people aware of the download becoming available. In fact, an RSS feed over latest downloads is exactly what I’m missing at the Microsoft Downloads site. Unfourtunatly, even in the new Silverlight version, Microsoft doesn’t provide it. For now the only thing you can do at the site is to use the advanced search features to look for recent additions. For example:
You could sign up for the weekly download notifications newsletter, but it’s not nearly as useful and doesn’t allow you to receive truly targeted conent.
Luckily, I’m not the first to miss an RSS feed over latest downloads, this feed will keep you up to date with the latest downloads. It won’t let you define keywords like BizTalk, but you can live without that… As far as I know, it’s not an official feed, and not connected to the actual download site, and as such it can at times be a bit (hours to days) behind on the very latest downloads just released.
I’ve got 4GB, or do I?
When installing Windows Vista SP1 for your 32-bit operating system you may be fooled into believing that you do in fact have more than 3GB of memory and that the operating system is taking advantage of that. In pre SP1 installs only 3GB will be detected and reported. After installing SP1, since I have a compatible BIOS, Vista recognizes the fact that I have 4GB of memory installed on my motherboard. However, as far as I understand, it won’t actually use it. Here’s a quote from the Notable Changes in Vista SP1 document:
With SP1, Windows Vista will report the amount of system memory installed rather than report the amount of system memory available to the OS. Therefore 32-bit systems equipped with 4GB of RAM will report all 4GB in many places throughout the OS, such as the System Control Panel. However, this behavior is dependent on having a compatible BIOS, so not all users may notice this change.
And here is a more detailed explanation as to why there is a 3GB limit in 32-bit operating systems, regardless of it being Vista SP1 or anything else.
Although my computer is what passes for a high performance model it came pre-installed with a 32-bit operating system. Since the processor it features is an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, that’s 64-bit capable, I’m considering re-installing. I just have to read up on the impact of having a 64-bit operating system, how it impacts my applications, battery lifetime etc. Anyone want to share their experiences running 64-bit compared to 32-bit or have a link to some good up to date resource that talks about it?
Snow and LINQ
For those of you wondering where I’ve been – I’ve been on vacation for the last 10 days, skiing and snowboarding. Although slightly of topic for this blog I just have to share one of the pictures we took with you, to give you an idea of the wonderful snow and weather we had. And yes, that’s me in the midst of that snow. And no, I’m not about to fall, we just had alot of snow.
For those who know me, you know I like to bring some litterature along on my vacations to catch up on some topic of interest. This time that topic was LINQ and the reading was the free ebook from Microsoft press: Introducing Microsoft LINQ. Go here for details about the book and the free ebook offer. I’ve listened in on presentation about LINQ before, but not lately, and they have never gone deeper than to show the grace of the syntax, and talk about why LINQ was developed and what you can do with it. The ebook also talks about the language syntax and background, but goes into more detail about the .NET language features that enables LINQ, and their history and evolution. Good stuff.
Of the different aspects I’ve learned about LINQ I most like the idea of LINQ as a SOA enabler, rather than a simple data access language. Being able to do join, where, etc. on data returned from different Services being called in parallell, all wrapped up in a simple functional statement. That’s where LINQ really becomes useful.
Be Logical - Notes from Johan Hedberg 