I saw an ad on Coding Horror where the text said “Use CodePlex to find open source software projects built by thousands of developers around the world.”. CodePlex? Never heard of it so I clicked.

Apparently it’s “Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site”. Doh! How did I not know this site? Weird. Ok, I’m a Java dude so I don’t actively look for .NET project hosting sites but still. Happy I “found” it.

Given the date of the site’s first blog post* it looks like it has been under my radar for almost two years. An observation is that, that first blog post don’t have any real comments. As I write this there are five pingbacks, one from an Italian developer in 2006, one from an MSDN blog couple of days ago, and the remaining three pingbacks that are copies of the MSDN one. Those last three are interesting in their own way as they are PingBacks from non-MSDN blogs that mirrors MSDN blogs. Clearly MFA sites(Made For Adsense).

*Ok ok, the first blog post doesn’t mean the site was launched then. A check shows that the first non-test project was added somewhere around Apr 28 2006 at 10:53 PM. Saved you some time now didn’t I?

Believe it or not but one of the more popular posts on this blog is the one with the gingerbread Star Destroyer. No wonder that it’s popular. Who doesn’t like Star Wars? Who doesn’t like gingerbread? It’s a killer combo.

Gingerbread is very Christmas, but hey a Star Destroyer never goes out of season.

As an extra treat to all Star Wars fans, here’s a site tip on that topic.

Feels good to know.

…had almost forgot. I also hadn’t read my usual round of daily reads for a while, so today I did. Paul writes some interesting stuff every now and then but I was surprised to see this post today.

If you don’t have the energy to read through it I’ll round it up for you. He basically found a web site that didn’t conform to his high standards. Hello!? First time? If I go so upset whenever I found a useless website that I had to write about it I would have little time left for other things. Oh well, I guess that’s always something to write about and everyone’s got a right to an opinion. And when I think about it, everyone with an opinion should write a blog post about it, really, why not. That’s one of the reasons that makes it fun to read blogs, personal stuff, the kind of stuff you don’t see here very often(because you don’t see anything here often, or even rarely).

I’m having a hard time lowering my standards. It’s all in my head anyway, so you won’t notice if I do. There’s nothing to compare to. But this post wasn’t very good was it? I certainly don’t hope so, I’m just adding a few more bytes to the interweb, something for Google to chew on. There you go, you’re welcome.

I looked through the domains I have bought the last year and I have too many. The thing is that domain names go quickly so if you find one and don’t buy it there and then it’ll be gone soon after. Can’t say that it’s always like that but I’ve experienced it myself.

So what I’ve done is I’ve had an idea of a project and before even started writing any code I’ve scouted for a nice domain I could use for the application. And then when I’ve found a domain even half good I’ve bought it.

So now I have a long list of domains I don’t use and don’t want. So this year most of them will go back on the market, I will probably just let them expire.

The most recent one expired is pepperish.net that expired 2008-02-18. If you want it, take it.

I still think pepperish is a nice domain name though, that’s why I’m keeping pepperish.com

A friend of mine just sent me a comment to the picture on my about page:

“Seeing your picture I can’t help but thinking of another great personality Jack Black whose magnificent snout is quite like that of your own.”

I’ve been told before that I look like Jack Black sometimes and the picture on the about page is a bit dated. Maybe I should put this one there instead.

It’s like watching a mirror. Thanks for your kind words the picture Perrolf!

I had heard that Virgin will give current 4Mbit/s customers speeds of 10Mbit/s and today on my way to work I saw their ad about it. They will start rolling out the upgrade in the next month, it will be automatic and they will not charge extra. That’s good news! It will definitely give the other ISPs something to worry about. I mean, if you can have Virgin broadband then why wouldn’t you? As far as I know, no one else offers that speed in the UK, yet.

I had 10Mbit/s five years ago in Milan supplied by Fastweb. It was fast.

Yesterday I came back after a few days in my old hometown Milan. Even though I had brought a laptop I didn’t actually use it, much. It’s good to unplug every now and then.

As you probably know CES took place recently. As it is the the world’s largest annual trade show for consumer electronics, all media that reports about technology sends someone over to cover it. That must be really hard work playing with the latest gadgets and toys for several days in a row!

I bought What Mobile today which had a round-up from CES. What? What mobile. Having read a lot about the event online there wasn’t many things in there I hadn’t seen or read about already. But this was new though, the article starts like this:

“It’s that time of the year again when manufacturers show off the hottest new products they’ve been secretly working on for months.”

Months? Like proper months? Noooo, really?!!

I just thought that was hilarious. And if I think it is, it probably isn’t. But there you go. If it had said “years” that would actually have been equally funny too. Crazy.

It’s Saturday morning, the sun i shining and I have time to work on my projects. This is the plan:

• Fix the timezones on Whenda. Now the service is rather useless unless you live in UTC+0
• Investigate why it said “Newer posts” instead of “Older posts” for the link to older posts at the bottom of this page. I must have done something really silly in the early hours. Nicely spotted Perly, thanks! I might also spend some time on the template, I’m not completely happy with it.
• Write something more interesting in this site’s about page.
• Implement some new features, clean up and release a pre-alpha-live-single-user-prototype of FavoRead which is my bookmark engine. The domain is currently parked so I’d like to put something there because it takes time for search engines to pick it up.

Tonight I’m going out for dinner with friends so I think it’ll be a bit tight timewise and tomorrow I have other plans. So for this to work I’ll have to stay focused, which may turn out difficult. I’ve gathered some interesting links this week that I’d like to check out, didn’t have time to read when I found them. Let’s see what happens, I posted this as a little motivator and to let you know what’s going on. Laters.

Iterasi is an online bookmark service soon to be launched. The twist is that instead of only storing a link to the page you bookmark, it stores the whole page as it is. This means is that it’s possible to open up a bookmarked page and see it exactly how it was at the moment it was bookmarked. Not only how it looked like, a screenshot would’ve been sufficient for that, but it saves all the HTML, images, JavaScripts, stylesheets and so on so that it can be used like when it was saved. It’s a bit like a web page time machine. They’ve got a video of their DEMO presentation on the front page of their website so you can see it in action. Since I can’t use the service yet and in case they remove it from their site: the video can also be seen here.

For those who need this “serializing” pages feature it looks like a great tool. When they go live I will do a more in depth review. Until then I’ll continue working on my own bookmark engine but more on that later.