I spent far too much time on Friday trying to make log4net work in a COM+ ap­pli­ca­tion.

Someone else had done part of the work necessary, by creating an ap­pli­ca­tion.config for the COM+ ap­pli­ca­tion and setting a custom Ap­pli­ca­tion Root Directory. This was enough to ensure that most of the managed code in the ap­pli­ca­tion got their con­fig­u­ra­tion settings; log4net being the exception.

It took some additional work to realize that we needed to add two assembly attributes:

[assembly: log4net.Config.Repository("unique-name")]
[assembly: log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(ConfigFile="application.config")]

The repository name just needs to be a unique string. We used the name of the assembly.

From Scott Hanselman, I learned about Microsoft’s new blog posting client, Windows Live Writer. I’ve played around with it and it’s definitely the nicest free blogging client that I’ve used.

Here are in­struc­tions on con­fig­ur­ing it to post to dasBlog. I’m showing how to set it up for Emma’s blog, since she’s running dasBlog 1.8. I’m running a recent build of the as-yet unreleased dasBlog 1.9, which supports Really Simple Discovery, which makes the first part of this exercise simpler, as WLW can infer that it’s dealing with Metaweblog API, just by pointing it at the root of the blog.

Launch WLW and Add a Weblog Account. Choose Another weblog service.

Next, enter the URL …continue.

This year is the 20th an­niver­sary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was considered a gay man’s disease and a death sentence. The U.S. government was just beginning to ac­knowl­edge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized by health au­thor­i­ties, and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the de­vel­op­ment of an­ti­retro­vi­ral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year in the U.S., and most new infections …continue.

Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who was fired for speaking out about Karimov’s use of torture, writes about the UK terror plot:

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of pro­fes­sion­al in­tel­li­gence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine….

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many …continue.

I came across a very long interview with Saul Alinsky (24,000 words), conducted by Playboy in 1972, in a Fire­DogLake thread about the book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Fight the Right.

Saul Alinsky was a longtime radical activist, starting in the Great Depression. He moved from labor organizing to social organizing in the late 1930s, working in the Back of the Yards neigh­bor­hood of Chicago that was made famous by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. He is generally considered the father of community organizing.

Shortly before he died, he published his most famous book, Rules for Radicals

As a graduate student in crim­i­nol­o­gy, he spent a couple of years hobnobbing with Al …continue.

My brother David sent me this photo earlier today, of me, him, and Michelle. I’m guessing that Michelle is less than a year old, so it was taken sometime in 1971, which would make David four and me six. (Our youngest brother, Mark, wasn’t born until 1973.)

Emma thinks we’re adorable and has already made this picture her desktop background on her work computer.

Mark has another photo of the four of us, taken in 1978 on his website, alien­res­i­dent.net:

Via Peter, a site full of "in­spi­ra­tional" posters drawn from Star Trek in the vein of the satirical ones at Despair.com.

This poster of course plays on the trope of Kirk/Spock fan fiction, where Kirk and Spock are portrayed as lovers. Emma has long been a fan of slash, par­tic­u­lar­ly pairings such as Solo/Kuryakin (Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and Jack O’Neill/Daniel Jackson (Stargate SG-1).

I found this opinion piece on bi­sex­u­al­i­ty by Matthew Parris in The Times of London:

In my Notebook column in The Times I have been recording, in an occasional way, candidates for inclusion in a spec­u­la­tive list of truths or nonsenses staring us in the face that we somehow cannot see: things future ages may dismiss with a snort — just as we look with in­creduli­ty at our forebears’ faith in the theory of the four bodily humours or possession by demons. Here is another modern candidate: the idea that there is a set of males called ho­mo­sex­u­als, and another called het­ero­sex­u­als, plus a handful in the middle called bisexuals …continue.

Joe Lieberman, the 2000 vice-pres­i­den­tial nominee, lost the Democratic primary for his Senate seat tonight. He has said that he will run as an in­de­pen­dent. In effect, he will not accept the will of the people.

Lieberman lost, in part, because of his continuing refusal to admit that the Iraq war is a disaster, and in part because he has been a leading enabler of the Republican agenda. Good riddance!

Amer­i­ca­Blog suggests contacting your senators and demand that they come out in support of Lamont and that they strip Lieberman of his Senate committees.

I sent the following email to Senators Murray, Cantwell, and Reid:

Ned Lamont won the Democratic primary in Con­necti­cut. I …continue.

Raven is now Doctor Raven. She suc­cess­ful­ly defended her doctoral dis­ser­ta­tion in biomedical in­for­ma­tions this morning. Six long years in the making.

Dr. Raven and Mr. Raven came over this evening for Games Night, a twice-monthly get-together we have for our friends to play board games. Emma and I had been given a bottle of Dom Perignon ‘92 for our wedding that we had never quite found a suitable occasion for until now, so we chilled that in an­tic­i­pa­tion of tonight’s cel­e­bra­tion. I generally don’t care for champagne, but that went down nicely.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Raven!