Thomas Krehbiel

[...]Like many people, I read about Diaspora a while back and thought it was a great idea.  It's one of the few open-source projects I could see myself contributing to.  Unfortunately, it's not "open" in the sense that the technical architecture is open to discussion - it will only become open after they define the architecture, good, bad or indifferent*.  So, as any programmer would, I thought, "Okay, I have some ideas on this, so if they don't want my help, I'll just write my own distributed social network.  How hard could it be?"

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I’ve started working on a major update to my RSS feed aggregator.  With this new 3.0 version, I hope to resolve a lot of outstanding problems and polish things up.

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Recently I upgraded the software running my home page.  I spent a fair amount of time adding a feature I called “nano posting,” which was essentially a way to insert Twitter-style updates into the stream of posts.  In the intervening time I’ve discovered that I don’t much like my implementation of that feature.

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As part of my continuing effort to take over the world, I’ve created my own personal url-shortening service: http://uvurl.net.

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I posted uvBlog 2.0 (the PHP code that runs thomaskrehbiel.com) on Google Code under the GPL3 license.  That basically means you can use it as long as you release the source code, too.

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Just so there’s a record of it, here’s how I’m planning to implement comments in the new blog platform.  It’s geared toward a small community size.

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In case anyone uses it, there's been some minor changes to the Aggravator lately.

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As I've hinted, I decided to rewrite my PHP blog platform again.  I've been working too hard to shoehorn features I want into the old code, so it's time for a re-imagining.  Besides, it's just fun to write new code.

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I've been starting to work a little bit with LINQ to SQL and now the ADO.NET Entity Framework* (to implement ORM** for UvMoney, my home banking system).  There's something that troubles me about both frameworks.  Both require you to build a "model" of your database with a designer, from which strongly-typed classes are generated, which you can then use in your LINQ queries.

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Here's the progress I made on my MMO engine this weekend.

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Before I embark too far on the insane idea of writing my own MMO engine, I thought it would be instructive to peek at some open source engines out there (gathered from the first few pages of a Google search).

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So I decided to write an MMO game engine*.

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I'm calling my latest .NET project UvSignalProcessor. This follows UvMoney and UvNotes, if you're keeping track, and neither one of those is anywhere near finished, so yes, I'm skipping around. But hey, nobody's paying me for this stuff, so (insert Cartman impersonation) I can do what I want.

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I've started migrating to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 for my home projects, for whatever that's worth.  (We aren't allowed to use it at work.) Nothing in my projects actually require .NET 3.5 features, mind you, so it's not that great of an experiment, but hey, it's a start.

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I've been thinking more about concurrency issues in UvMoney. The last time I posted about UvMoney, I was switching over to a database back-end mainly to handle concurrency. Then I decided that was pretty silly, considering that in my current "production" environment, there are only two people that can possibly use the data at the same time. Also, I didn't want to tie myself to a database. So I went back to the easy-to-digest XML files.

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