Its been a long time since I've posted anything in my TiVo category.  The TiVo Series 2 will be getting a software update that will store previously deleted shows in a folder for a period of time before it is deleted permanently.

This doesn't affect me as I've got DirecTiVo but its still a nice feature that I'm sure I could put to good use.

via tech.memorandum

I'm getting through some unread posts in my aggregator today and came across this one on code reviews from Jeff Atwood.  Earlier this month I blogged some random thoughts on code reviews and Jeff's post just adds to their importance, even if its just a one-on-one review.     A guy named Diego left a comment that hit me:

“I've heard of (sometimes) reviews being done in groups. This seems very unproductive to have (maybe) a whole development team doing a code review. Say, for example, the coder presents their code and the dev. team looks through it. These are less common types of reviews?“

We currently do our code reviews this way.  I'll be honest, I think we do it this way just so everyone can get an insight into what people are thinking as a group.  Since we may not work with other team members on any projects we can tap into their knowledge and/or ideas.  I'm not real sure if we are getting anything out of our current setup except for that and maybe seeing other people's code.  Again, we normally do it after a project is complete which isn't the best time to do it either.

He recommended a book on code reviews, Peer Reviews in Software, that has two sample chapters you can download.  I plan on reading them and maybe acquire the book too.

Geocaching can be tuff on its own.  We don't need to bother the police to make it more difficult or dangerous for us (and them).  Plus, bothering them takes the police away from doing their job.  I was shown a CNN article today about a fellow Geocacher who put a cache underneath a bridge to make it an "extreme" cache.  I like the thought and that area of Idaho is probably a nice place to visit however, we've got to think about things in a post 9-11 mind set.  When we do that - caches like this don't work out so well.

“In a game of global positioning called Geocaching, the lowly treasure hunt has gone high-tech -- but it can also be a game of risk when terrorism-sensitive authorities find the goods first.”

On one occasion we've bee en approached by the police because we looked suspicious.  I was open and honest with him and that was that and we were on our way.  We've also had a cache in our area (not one of ours) where it was blown up by the local bomb squad.  This one was an ammo can that was hidden in a public park.  Nothing wrong with that except is was in an area where large crowds would gather.  Put those two things together and you can completely understand the paranoia.

We as cachers need to think before we place.

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

C.S. Lewis

If I have a larger file I want to provide to someone, having my own server, I'll just FTP the file up to the server and then send the link via email but not everyone has that available to them.  YouSendIt.com is cool free service that does basically the same thing.  It allows you to send large files (up to 1GB) to anyone via email.  The file isn't actually sent to their inbox but rather a link to the file that was uploaded the YouSendIt.com server.  Not sure I like that last part about it staying on their server but lets not assume the worst here.  Plus you can “delete it“ whenever you want.

I can really see this being useful for those not real familiar with FTP, those that have a size limit on their inbox, and especially for those not on high-speed connections.

After signing up you will be given a personal file link that you can give out or post on your site so other and send you large files easily.

If you don't have Cropper in your toolkit your missing out when it comes to taking screenshots.  I use TaskSwitchXP and Cropper would become unavailable when alt-tabbing...looks like Brian has fixed that plus added some nice new features.

Ok, developing sites for mobile devices is new to me.  Its just crazy how different they are than regular ASP.NET apps.  So much so that you basically have to write two apps.  This is not new to you mobile guys but for guy like me it is.  How do you do it?  Is there a strategy that you use?

FormsAuthentication piece - I was seeing that my standard login.aspx page was functioning in the emulator but it was hard to navigate and didn't look too good.  So I was hoping I could have one for mobile devices and one for non-mobile.  This seemed like a good idea but you can only define one login page in web.config.  Am I incorrect here or is there a better way implement it?  The path I'm going down now is to make my login page a mobile page.  This way it will work and look fine in both.  Hope this sounds good.  :-)

Stylesheets - Man, who would've thought you had to have a user control just for stylesheets?  Not me that's for sure!

Looks like my stay at WH4L will be short lived.  Sorry Dave but I hope you get to keep the referral.  I'm going to be moving to Christian ASP.NET in the next  couple of days and I'm sure things will be swell over there with David steering the ship.  Did I just say “swell”.  Oh well.  You know what I mean.

I'm thankful that WH4L will refund me the 11 months I haven't used but the fee I paid for the extra domains is theirs to keep.  I've not cancelled yet so I'm hoping they will honor their agreement once I do cancel.  We'll see.

The guys over at WH4L updated the security permissions (I'm assuming) and now it's working again.  I say assuming because they didn't tell me what they did but I will use deductive reasoning here.

Please feel free to feed(back) me whenever you want.  ;-)