April 27th, 2007 Rusty
If you haven’t heard of it, don’t fret, its a pretty well guarded secret. However, I am ready to spill the beans… Matty Cakes has been our yearly birthday cake artist since our son was one. We’ve expanded to use him for just about any excuse we can have for a party and, frankly, one of his cakes is reason enough to celebrate.
His first cake, the “Elephant Cake“, secured Matty’s place in our family for the long haul. Last Halloween we got a “witch cake” that was about the size of a small pony but one of the most delicious things to ever pass the lips of each of our guests.
We frequently stop by for chocolate devil’s food cupcakes with buttercream icing. Sometimes my car just drives itself right into the parking lot at the corner of Rock Springs and Piedmont Rd in Atlanta.
While no one can touch Matty’s kids cakes, his other specialty cakes, including wedding cakes, are amazing. They taste even better then they look.
Today I brought a small chocolate cream torte from the counter at Matty cakes. They always have something available for last minute needs. It was a chocolate cream cake with chocolate cookie crust topped off with whipped cream. Sounds simple and almost common but everyone oo’d and ah’d when they tasted it. The office ladies made redneck teeth with the crust and the whole environment turned to cheer and child-like celebration. Its amazing what these cakes can do to a person!
We’re picking up our son’s 4 year old birthday cake on Sunday. I’ll let you know how that turns out. The bar is set high but I’ll bet there won’t be anything but wows.
Posted in Atlanta | No Comments »
April 26th, 2007 Rusty
Several times I have wanted to check the extension of a System.Uri. There is surprisingly little documentation about System.Uri. I am disappointed with that because it is a wonderful little data structure that guarantees correct formatting of your urls. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend blanket use of the class as it does not have a parameterless constructor and is not inherently serializable using xml serialization. That said, its still a nifty little class and I love using it.
Forgive me if this code doesn’t compile, it should be very close. I am remoted into my XP work computer from Dell laptop running Vista (I hate what Dell has done to themselves) and my clipboard is not copying. I copied carefully just for you!
Here’s a simple method that tries to return the extension of the url. You could enhance this by checking that the length of the extension is less then five char but this suits my purposes. If you know of a better way, shooooooot!
public string GetResourceExtension( System.Uri uri )
{
// get the last url segment
string lastSegment = uri.Segments[ uri.Segments.Length - 1];
if( lastSegment.Contains( "." ) ) return lastSegment.Substring( lastSegment.LastIndexOf( "." ) + 1 );
return null;
}
Posted in Asp.Net | No Comments »
April 24th, 2007 Rusty
I’ve been using a blogging platform for years but recently couldn’t deny the absolute fever that WordPress has spread in the blogging community. While I am very grateful to all the folks who contributed to DasBlog over the years, it was time to step up to something different. My biggest complaint with my old blog is that it doesn’t format well and extending it is outside of reasonable scope. While it is relatively painless to log on and post, I wanted something more. It does a great job for what it is and its still probably the best blogging engine for Asp.Net finatics but I am starting to turn to the dark side of whatever gets the job done best.
I recently had the task of providing a blog for a non-programmer. There was no way I’d have considered my old geek enginefor her, it is far too complex and the geek factor was too much. I needed something intuitive, well supported and really, really easy. When I discovered that WordPress is written in PHP, I shuttered. You could have said it was built using dead kittens and I’ve had been less turned off. That aversion was unfounded as I not only was able to configure the whole thing, including MySQL and PHP for IIS, in less then an hour, I was ableto extend the default template to do what I wanted it to. Sweet!
So, after setting up a blog for this professional friend of mine, I decided to create one for me (this one). I expected WebHost4Life to have an automatic install and yessir they did! It took a minute, tops. Done. WOW!
I am up and blogging that fast. A minute…
The plug in community for WordPress is remarkable. There are literally thousands of gorgeous, standards compliant themes. The experience is Macintosh like.
Along with my blog moving to a php engine, you may find me occassionally blogging about technologies other then .Net. This does not mean I am not a DotNet finatic! I am merely branching out and allowing myself to embrace diversity in code.
I plan to import my old blog into WordPress using the RSS import plugin. If I do, the old url will merely redirect to this directory. I doubt the urls will match entirely but I may go ahead and hand code a redirect mapping for popular pages. Then again, I may just call this a fresh start and see what comes naturally.
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »