Mike-Ward.Net

Pipes: Rewire the web Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. Yahoo has introduced new free service that allows you to build...

Despite a trip to Slovakia this month I managed to squeak out the next alpha of Bloget. Alpha 5 introduces two new features, timezone support and BlogML. Timezones are well, timezones. You can set the...

Universal Data Type Checker Here’s a neat little C# function for checking if one can convert a string value to a specific type. Here are some examples: CanConvert("12", typeof(int)); // true CanConvert("f637a876-9d58-4229-9559-a5e42a95fdac ", typeof(Guid)); //...

My real job takes me to places all over Europe as of late. I’m currently blogging from my hotel room in Bratislava. If you haven’t heard of Bratislava you’re not alone, neither had I. This...

The Vista Ready to Launch tour came to Detroit this week. These “kick-off” events are a lot of fun and the break out sessions can be very informative. Mostly I go to reenergize my interest...

There are times when keywords and identifiers collide when coding. This is particularly true in code generators but sometimes the keyword really describes the purpose of the identifier (like default or ref for instance). You...

I don’t particularly care for the track changes markup that displays on the right edge of documents in Microsoft Word. While it may be useful for collaborating on documents, most of what I write is...

NIST’s Plan for New Cryptographic Hash Functions Due to recent attacks on the SHA-1 hash function specified in FIPS 180-2 , Secure Hash Standard, NIST is initiating an effort to develop one or more additional...

Every time I discover a new off-line blog editor I of course have to test it with Bloget™. Post2Blog - a desktop blogging client for Windows. This is an example of quick snippet that inserts...

Microformats - rest/ahah AHAH is intended to be a much simpler way to do web development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_development) than AJAX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29): “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.” Strictly speaking, AHAH can be considered a subset of AJAX, since...