We use FlexWiki at work. It’s an ASP.NET-based wiki, a low-overhead, organic way of sharing knowledge.

The only built-in means of editing a page in FlexWiki is to type into an HTML textbox, which is a horrendous user experience. There’s no WYSIWYG feedback showing you whether you’ve got the wiki markup right.

Back in December, Emma and I went to the Oregon coast for a week. We had no Internet access and long dark evenings, so I spent quite a bit of time on my laptop, working on a couple of projects. One was a new theme (skin) for DasBlog, which I didn’t finish to my sat­is­fac­tion. I really ought to get …continue.

Doing the rounds. John Cleese at the Institute for Backup Trauma.

On Saturday night, at the White House Cor­re­spon­dents Dinner, Stephen Colbert did something brave and unparalled. Standing 10 feet from George Bush and in front of an audience of hundreds of members of the Washington press corpse, Colbert, acting in his persona of a Bill O’Reil­lyesque pundit, flayed them with irony and sarcasm.

The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man’s beliefs never will. As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal …continue.

I’ve just spent an hour working through the tutorials for Google SketchUp. It’s a free 3D-modeling tool. Pretty slick and easy to use.

I worked on 3D graphics and user in­ter­ac­tion when I was a Master’s student at Brown in the early 90s. What we had then wasn’t bad, but the SketchUp UI is easier to use and more functional, and it runs on a regular PC instead of a high-end Unix work­sta­tion.

I can see myself using SketchUp to model wood­work­ing projects.

I’m writing some C++ code at the moment, after months of C#. I’m trying to be very Test First, writing Red tests, then making them turn Green.

I’m also using CppUnit for the first time. It’s not as easy as NUnit. You can’t just declare your test method with an attribute, you have to declare the test method in a header file, place it inside a macro, and then have the test im­ple­men­ta­tion in a .cpp-file. And there’s no nunit-gui. I’m using a post-build step to run the tests, which makes it fairly pain free.

There was one internal method that I didn’t have an explicit test for, although I had tests for methods …continue.

Vim and DasBlog, two open source projects that I’m associated with, have both switched over to using the Subversion source code control system in the last week. In both cases, the prolonged problems with anonymous CVS access at Source­Forge proved the final straw. And I provided the impetus, by bringing up the need for a change on the vim-dev and dasblogce-developers mailing lists. I take no credit for doing the work, however, as that was done by others.

(Vim’s primary repository continues to be CVS, with Subversion acting as a mirror for anonymous access. Bram didn’t want to change over until after Vim-7 ships.)

Earlier this year, we switched over to Subversion at work, after years of using Visual SourceSafe. It …continue.

I’ve ported Vim to Win64. Native binaries for AMD64 can be found on my Vim page.

In the end, it wasn’t all that hard. Last weekend, I fixed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400 warnings that were thrown up by the x86_amd64 cross compiler. Most of them were due to the widening of size_t (especially the value returned from strlen()) and ptrdiff_t to 64-bits. Several years ago, I went through a similar exercise in fixing these warnings for Vim6, but I never finished the port.

This week, I scrounged access to an AMD64 box at work. Today, I turned on the /Wp64 flag, which found several new, subtler problems, where pointers where being truncated to __int32s …continue.

One of my favorite shows is back on the TiVo. Barbecue University is Steven Raichlen’s show about all kinds of grilling and barbecue techniques and recipes.

I love this recipe for Afghan Game Hens, although I always substitute chicken(s) for the game hens. This recipe convinced me to buy a rotisserie. It’s been a huge hit whenever I’ve served it up. It’s not the easiest meal to prepare, so I don’t do it often. Note: I cook the marinaded onions in a pan and serve them with the chicken. Yum!

Beer Can Chicken, on the other hand, is very easy. It also works well in the oven. Last year, I found …continue.

Over at Fire­DogLake, they’ve put together an impressive (and depressing) series on the "racist freak show" that con­sti­tutes so many right-wing blogs.

En­light­en­ing, if dis­taste­ful.

I’m a lot happier in my U.S. con­gress­man, Jim McDermott, than I am in my senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. (Especially Cantwell.)

Jim has been a strong pro­gres­sive voice in Congress for years. His early opposition to the Iraq War led to him being dubbed ‘Baghdad Jim’ by infuriated Re­pub­li­cans. He was one of the first national politi­cians to support Howard Dean’s bid for the presidency. He had a big role in Fahrenheit 9/11. And he reads the role of Leopold Bloom for the Wild Geese Players of Seattle’s readings of *Ulysses*.

For a decade, Jim has been fighting a legal battle for …continue.