Rocket RSS Reader

Maybe this is what I'm looking for? See previous post...

RSS Mix - Mix any number of RSS feeds into one unique new feed!

A tool for combining RSS feeds. I don't think you can choose to omit certain items, which is a bit annoying. I'd like something where I get to moderate, and even direct the output to multiple topic-based feeds.

MailBucket

email to rss gateway. Totally cool.

FeedBurner - About Feed Syndication

A nice background to RSS for newbies.

An Introduction to Microsoft .NET Remoting Framework

If you are trying to get across .NET Remoting, go here first.

Application Domain FAQ

Need to know how to work with AppDomains? Start here.

Borland Developer Network Museum

A simple site which allows you to download "antique" software, for example there are several versions of Turbo Pascal downloadable here. Cool.

I used to use Turbo Pascal at uni, as a "close enough" dev environment for Modula 2; the latter only ran on uni machines that were very difficult to get time on, so I'd code at home in Turbo Pascal, dial in to uni, download the source, and manually port (not too difficult) to Modula 2. The pain of porting was worth it for the gains from having an ide with an integrated debugger. Borland always rocked.

Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent

This is a link to an excellent short paper by the creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen.

It explains the technical detail of the inner workings of Bit Torrent, and the relationship to economic theory. The upshot of this is that although BitTorrent clients can be written by others, the system as a whole is designed from a point of view of not trusting other peers to do the right thing (unlike previous popular file sharing programs like Kazaa). Instead, peers reward other peers that cooperate, and punish those that don't. Thus, it is an extremely robust decentralised system. Brilliant!

The Code Project - XML File Parsing in VB.NET - VB.NET

A very basic introduction to the XML classes in .Net for VB.Net with examples. (pity me, this is what I am reduced to)

How to Create Your Own Podcast - A Step-by-Step Tutorial on Podcasting

Podcasting looks pretty interesting; many people seem to be saying it is the future of radio. Basically, you create an audiofeed for iPod type devices to download automatically from the net, which can be music, speech, whatever. In any case, this article shows you how to do it very simply. Cool.

monoForge - free mono hosting for trying out mono

I will still be following all those steps below, but this puppy will be a nice shortcut to proving the concept. monoForge gives you a free account with 10mb (enough to muck around, not enough for serious hosting) also with mySQL, and nice instructions on how to cope with it. Kicking butt!

GUI Toolkits for Mono

Comparison of GUI toolkits for Mono. There are quite a few!

Gtk# Homepage

I'm currently reading about mono, and am finding out about Novell's involvement (it seems to be sponsoring the project, whatever that means), and about gtk#, which is damned interesting.

One of the reasons mono has seemed a lesser cousin or .net on winodws to date is that winforms is not supported, although it appears that support is coming. A major problem there is that winforms isn't complete in .net yet, requiring a lot of pinvoke calls to win32 which is something not available on linux.

However, mono currently has support for gtk#, which allows you to do fat clients for gnome, and apparently these apps will also run "out of the box" on windows. I think they might actually require a gtk# runtime to be installed on windows, but hey. But this is definitely supposed to be a cross platform fat client option. Interesting!

I've been thinking for a while that Microsoft is open to someone coming up with a decent alternative to winforms which can be used on windows, linux, and other platforms. Is gtk# it? Stay tuned...

Time to check out linux

My website is toast again. I've got to get my machine back off its knees, but the bigger issue is that hosting at home is crap for a couple of reasons; firstly, my outgoing bandwith is 64K, which isn't too bad for web pages but makes downloading crappy for users (I've been hosting files for download on a friend's machine until recently, but that seems to have fallen through so I'm stuck there too), and secondly I don't run a professional 24x7 computer facility in my study, so my machine is down more often than not. Also, the machine my website is (was) on is actually my daughter's machine, running xp pro, so it doesn't allow multiple web sites and just isn't a server.

Anyway, all that leads me to look at web hosting possibilities outside my own home network, and see that the Linux based solutions are *far* cheaper than the windows based ones. I guess those license fees are killers. I'm becoming ever more heavily immersed in .net based software development professionally, and am thinking that I may be able to to my personal sites as asp.net apps running on linux, using either mono or grasshopper as the first two options that I've become aware of.

Looking at hosts, the best looking one I've found so far is these guys at grokthis.net. They seem to have mono available on the advanced plans, and it's only $19.95/month for 768mb of space or $29.95/month for 1.5gb. I'll keep looking and see if I can find better, but that seems absolutely reasonably, it comes with mysql I think (so I've got a database) very cool.

My aim, as is implied above, is to be able to use my existing .net developing skills (which are improving over time as I work more with it) to build my sites on Linux. With the above plan, I've got asp.net with a database, and a pretty good amount of space to host my music, the little utilities I write, etc etc. Mental note: I must check that they allow .mp3, .exe, and .zip files!

Maybe an alternative is to use grasshopper, which converts a project from .net to j2ee, and then look for a linux host that supports j2ee? Sounds a bit funkier, but I wont know until I check it out.

To that end, I'm pursuing the following investigations:

1 - Download and install a linux distro on a VMWare machine, get it working happily. I might look at Debian first, only because the grokthis.net machines run Debian distros.
2 - Get a web server working on the linux box. Apache I guess.
3 - Get mono working on the linux box, in conjunction with the next step...
4 - Write a small asp.net app (under windows) that does some kind of processing, and see if I can get it to work on the linux box. No database access at this stage, that looks to be the bit that's going to be tricky
5 - Now get the app to do database access. I'm probably going to target mysql, but that's going to be tough unless there is a mysql for windows. Maybe there is? Otherwise, I need to find out if mysql can be on another box, and I can talk to it from windows. Hmm.

If I can come out positive on all these steps, I'll be bloody happy! If I hit significant roadblocks, I might try the grasshopper route as an alternative.

So, hopefully I'll get around to blogging all this as I go, to keep a record of my investigations and the results, which might turn out to be useful to someone else one day!