Yep, I admit it. I’ve gotten sucked into the whole poker craze. I think it was Brad Wilson’s fault, originally.

Only two small problems:

1. I tend to prefer tournaments more than cash games, even though cash games are generally much more profitable.

2. When I get into a new hobby, I really get into it. Not in a gamblaholic sense, but in a “I need to keep doing this so I can get as good as I can possibly be at this thing” sense.

So I of course flew to Vegas last weekend to play in a few tournaments.  Not the WSOP events (although I’m thinking about going back to play in one of the preliminary NLHE tournaments), but just some of the regular tournaments. Here’s a quick story from one of them:

At least I can count on Chris Pirillo to not hold back. :-)

He’s right – we did have an IM exchange a couple of weeks ago, and I did tell him development is moving forward on NewsGator Outlook edition. In fact, it’s in beta right now, but the beta is pretty small at the moment while we iron out some problems. As I’ve said in the past, there are MAJOR changes in the way we retrieve and synchronize content in this version – and we’re moving slowly to make sure that when we ship, it not only rocks, but it’s rock solid.

An older version of Chris’s subscription list is actually one of the test cases we use for testing. And it works fine…but performance isn’t quite up to the level we want with that many feeds (Chris’s list is about 800 or so feeds, and we test with others with about 1500 feeds).

So Chris, I know you want to be on the beta, and you will be…just give us a chance to get it to a point where it’s ready for you.

As to his point about wasting bandwidth, NewsGator Outlook edition works similarly to nearly every other desktop aggregator – it retrieves content directly from the publisher – so I’m not sure how that’s acting irresponsibly. That said, some of the changes we’ve made in the upcoming version have to do with the way we retrieve content…so stay tuned, and I’ll post more details as we get closer.

As many of you noticed, NewsGator Online was down for maintenance last weekend for about 8 hours.

We use Microsoft SQL Server on the back end for much of our storage needs. What we found was the SCSI disk arrays we were using for storage were being maxed out in terms of I/O throughput during peak times on the site. Lots of changes have been going on in the database structure and the code accessing it, but at the end of the day, we just needed more I/O capacity than was possible with the storage system we had.

Another problem in parallel was the massive growth we’ve been experiencing.  The SCSI arrays we were using had physical limits as to how much storage space we could add, and we were bumping up against those limits on a regular basis. We needed something more expandable.

So over the weekend last weekend, we installed an EMC fibre-channel SAN, and moved our I/O-intensive SQL databases over to that. We got a HUGE boost in I/O performance, and we can now expand storage capacity very quickly and seamlessly without downtime.

We went live again around 6:00pm.  Amusingly enough (in hindsight), at 6:31pm, we had our first drive failure…we’re all sitting there with the EMC guys, and our phones start beeping with the email notifications.  Probably better that it happened while they were still there!  Luckily one of the hot spares just took over, and we had a new drive at the data center a few hours later.

In the end, we’re very happy with the current system.  We can now scale out where appropriate with local storage, and scale up where necessary with the SAN.

I didn’t post about it…but one of my new years resolutions for this year was to clean out my email inbox.  I believe at the beginning of the year, I had about 500 unread messages, and about 1500 total in that folder…I was using it as an every-growing to-do list.  It hit critical mass a couple of weeks ago, with over 1000 unread.

Some friends told me to just archive the whole thing and start from scratch…but I just knew there were things in there I should respond to. So over the last week or so, I’ve been cutting it down to size.  And today, on a holiday, I spent about half the day and got it all the way down to empty.  Could I be more excited?

So if you’ve gotten a flurry of email today, regarding things you’ve long since forgotten about, now you know why!  And here’s to hoping I can keep this better under control now. :-)

You know RSS is getting much more mainstream when it’s covered on TV.  There was a two-and-a-half minute segment on CNBC about a week ago, including interviews from myself (from NewsGator) and also Scott Gatz from Yahoo. Watch it here!

Wow, it’s been a while. So much has been going on, and I’m going to try to catch you all up here in the coming week or so.

One thing I’d like to mention here…we at NewsGator have decided to donate 3% of our Q1 revenue to the American Red Cross for the Tsunami relief efforts. Our hearts go out to all involved during these difficult times, and I hope we can make a difference.

Yep, we’re still looking for great Windows and .NET developers.  Turns out it’s pretty hard to find folks with the depth of knowledge we’re looking for.  Most recently, Gordon has joined us (welcome!), but we still need more help.

So I thought I might list a few questions that our ideal candidate wouldn’t have too many problems with. Does this describe you?

• You know the difference between _beginthreadex and CreateThread.
• You know all of the ways to share memory between Win32 processes.  (hint – it’s a short list.) (another hint – it’s a really short list.)
• You know what an AppDomain is, and you can think of a reason you might want to create one yourself.
• You know what a HttpModule is, and you can think of at least two examples of why you might use one.
• You know what Mutexes and Semaphores are used for. (hint – they don’t magically enable sharing stuff between threads.)
• You know you can override member functions in C++ without them being declared virtual; and you know when and why you should declare them virtual.
• You can explain the difference between:
   
     A::A() {m_x = 5;}
   
  and
   
     A::A() : m_x(5) { }
   
• When someone asks you to write code on a whiteboard to reverse a string in place, you’re disappointed that they didn’t ask a more interesting question.
• You know that IL isn’t interpreted.
• You can explain transaction isolation levels as they relate to SQL Server.
• You know what the Running Object Table is, and can think of situations when you might want to use it.
• You want to work with an amazing team of folks who thought I shouldn’t have put such easy questions on my blog.
• If you’re not already here, you’re interested in relocating to Colorado.

I while back, I wrote an application to generate RSS feeds from Visual SourceSafe databases. The code was set to expire a few months later, as we were considering building this capability into a product. A couple more times after that, I posted updated versions with a later and later expiration.

Well, I’m happy to announce that we’ve decided to release the source code for this application. It requires .NET 1.1, and build files are included for Visual Studio .NET 2003.

This really is a cool app…it runs as a Windows service, and generates RSS feeds based on the change logs in VSS. And now it’s free, unlimited, and ready for you to play with. :-) The copyright and license are included in the readme.rtf in the package below – basically, it’s an unrestricted modification and redistribution license.

download source: VssRssSvc.zip

Well this is a little odd:

I’m twisted. Not as bad as Rory Blyth, but who else has a geek dream with Greg Reinacker (author/owner of NewsGator) playing the part of the future Erik Estrada (from CHiPs)? See for yourself:

[…]

Apparently I’ve parked here for years, but his new wife is none too happy about it. She tells him to get rid of me.

I’m speechless.