Another great day on Sunday. Tires felt great, car felt great, driver felt great – leading to another pole (by 0.2 seconds over 2nd, and about a second over 3rd). During the race, there was some heavy pressure – another car was within 2 seconds of me for the first 15 laps or so, but finally he went off and lost 15 seconds or so…so I ended up leading flag to flag again. Woo-hoo!

Unfortunately, despite this win, my hopes for winning the division are pretty slim. You’re only allowed to keep your best 6 races, so I have to start dropping points. The bottom line is, I’d have to go out-of-division twice. Of those two races, I’d have to win one, and at least finish on the podium in the other one. Not impossible, but not extremely likely either! I haven’t made a final decision, but I think I’ll “cool the tires” so to speak until heading for Mid-Ohio to prepare for the runoffs.

Since the last time I wrote here about racing, there has been one more national, where I finished 4th again. Not good…

This weekend is another regional/national at Pueblo Motorsports park. This is the last national of the year in our division. I was out testing on Friday, and had nothing but problems – it was over 100 degrees, and my car was having serious vapor-lock problems. My crew got those ironed out by the end of the day, we think – cross your fingers!

Today was the regional. It was a bit cooler, probably in the 90’s, and 17 cars in the field. Practice this morning was a little rough – I was 4th fastest, but about 1.5 seconds off the fastest time (yikes). This was on some crappy tires that I should probably have just thrown away. Anyway, I changed tires and made a small setup change for qualifying, and qualified on the pole by 0.2 seconds – a nice change, the way the weekend had started! The race went well – I led flag to flag, winning by probably 5 or 10 seconds.

So tomorrow is the national. I haven’t finished better than 4th the last two national races, which has all but killed my chances to win the Rocky Mountain division. It’s not over, though – if I do well tomorrow, I’m still in the running if I head out of division to pick up a few more points. I put on stickers (new tires, that is) for tomorrow, which are usually very fast at this track. John and Kim (the two drivers ahead of me in the national points for our division) also put on new sets…so we’ll see how it goes!

Ted posted a few days ago about how he met Dave Winer last week:

As I mentioned in my blog last week, I briefly met Dave Winer at OSCON last week. I have to admit being a little nervous about it, because I offended Dave earlier in a thoughtless way. But Dave paid me about the best compliment that he could have: “Oh, yeah, I read your blog all the time”. [Ted Leung on the air]

I almost met Dave last week at the Applied XML Conference (which was excellent by the way – I might post more comments later). On the Friday of the conference, I figure I’ll introduce myself to him, since we’ve talked via email a couple of times but never met in person. So during a break between sessions, I wander over to him, and this is how it went:

Greg: “Hi, Dave, I’m Greg Rei…”

Dave: “Not now.” (doesn’t look up, but sticks hand up toward me, in “talk to the hand” style). “I’m writing.”

Greg: (thinking that’s strange, but ok…) “Ok, no pr…”

Dave: (hand up again) “I can’t, not now. Sorry. Sorry.”

Uh, yeah – whatever. I’m not sure, but I think this is what he was writing at the time. At least it was something important – heh.

I have mixed feelings about this post:

Here’s some of the crap that’s caught my attention in the blogosphere and in the news using NewsGator in Outlook. Love this app.

So far so good.

If anyone has a cracked version, let me know.

Yikes! Now of course I’m very happy he likes NewsGator. But it seems pretty ballsy to ask for a crack on his weblog. Especially when we could email him (email on his site), IM him (also on his site), or look up his mailing address, phone number, and alternate email from his domain registration. Come on, it’s only $29. :-)

Mr. SageOne, if you remove that sentence from your post, I will remove this post if you ask. :-)

Well, after some more research (thanks again to everyone who responded!), it seems that the following registry key is occasionally not getting created:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\Uninstall\{B888BA11-6DF7-499D-8D98-F6B87AFA2359}

The key is supposed to be created by the windows installer engine, and if this key is missing, the remove button will be disabled/missing (depending on the OS).

This seems to happen on approximately 1-2% of installations, and there doesn’t seem to be any other obvious things in common. And, on an affected machine, removing NewsGator and then reinstalling it will bring things back to normal.

InstallShield support has been less than helpful, although I kind of understand since I can’t reproduce this problem on any of our test systems here, with a huge number of different configurations. And getting a log file is problematic – by the time I know a machine has a problem, re-running the installer won’t have the problem again…so we can’t get a log of it happening.

Any installer experts out there have any ideas?

So who else is going to the Applied XML Conference this week?

Hot out of the RAI lab…RSS feeds generated from Visual SourceSafe. Many development shops use some kind of email notification for source changes – and this is a perfect application of RSS. Here’s a screen shot in NewsGator with Outlook 2003:

This currently runs as a Windows service, and periodically generates the RSS file(s). To get it running, do the following:

1. Download (msi or zip) and install the service. When you install, make sure you enter in a user account that has permission to access the directories where your VSS data lives.

2. Edit the config.xml file in the installation directory. It should be pretty self-explanatory.

3. Start the service from the service control manager.

Post comments here – I’d love to hear your thoughts. Also, I’m not sure what the final disposition of this code will be (free, part of another product, etc.)…so this build will expire on August 1.

Sam Ruby’s wiki is documenting an effort to define a syndication format, designed to overcome some of the existing issues with RSS (which I won’t get into here!). There is quite a bit of popular support so far for this effort, which is nice to see. If you’re at all interested in RSS and syndication, I encourage you to go over and take a look! There’s also more on Sam’s blog.

If a new syndication format grows out of this, NewsGator will support it (in addition to RSS) in the first release thereafter.

I haven’t followed this whole thing all that closely, but I thought this was interesting:

…open-source folks aren’t tackling the one key question in the SCO Group-IBM hoo-ha over Unix: What if the company’s right?
[CNET News.com]

It has come to my attention that a few folks I haven’t heard from are having stability problems with NewsGator. If you are seeing any problems like this at all, please contact me.