April 2008
You are currently browsing the articles from Gyden Blog written in the month of April 2008.
WordCamps are my favorite events to go to because there’s something about the core WordPress community that attracts smart folks with good philosophies that are fun to hang out with. In this post I’ve collated the upcoming WordCamps we know about, including the one in San Francisco. Hopefully there will be one nearby so you can meet other WordPressers in your area.
WordCamp San Francisco will be August 16 at the Mission Bay Conference Center.
WordCamp Paris will be on May 3rd. Here’s their official site.
WordCamp Italy in Milan will be May 10th. (And I believe I’ll be there.)
WordCamp Birmingham UK will be July 19-20.
WordCamp Toronto will be October 4th.
There are people in the planning stages in Australia, Philippines, Beijing, Utah, Hawaii, UK, NYC, and possibly others, so if you live in one of those areas and would like to help set up a WordCamp in your area Google around or connect with bloggers in your area.
You can always find out more at WordCamp Central.
Written by Matt on April 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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How disappointing it is to learn that the Law School of Northwestern University has invited Jerry Springer to give the commencement address. I say this not only as an alumnus of Northwestern (the undergraduate school, not Law) but as a citizen.
Commencement addresses are expected at every university and college and high school every spring, so the demand is high. On the other side of the equation, the supply of speakers with anything interesting, let alone challenging, to say is limited. Hence there is constant downward pressure on the traditional notions of what qualifies a candidate speaker. This is simple economics. The predictable result until recent years has been nothing more worrisome than the blandness that characterizes nearly all of these performances. More could not reasonably be expected.
At my graduation we were addressed by the Hon. Willard Wirtz, a former professor in the Law School in question and at the time the U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Johnson. He was well qualified in point of association and life accomplishment, and so far as anyone knew free of any criminal or moral taint. So he spoke, and we students dozed or chatted quietly. I have no idea what he said, and I very much doubt than any of my classmates remembers, either. Well and good.
Just a few years ago my son graduated from Northwestern, and we were addressed by Tom Brokaw. (Mr. Brokaw was a television news reader and, for what it’s worth, a quite competent one.) Though more recent than Mr. Wirtz’s by nearly forty years, his talk has also left no permanent mark on me, though I do seem to recall that he referred to his book more than once. But again, no harm, no foul.
But Jerry Springer? Yes, he has “inspired” an opera. This only deepens one’s despair of the state of the arts. There really ought to be some sort of countervailing force to keep standards from sinking this low. The one we used to have was called “good sense” or possibly “taste,” if memory serves.
In his defense it is argued that he has served in public office and that he is a highly successful member of the entertainment industry. As to the first, he was, one gathers, obliged to resign his office in a scandal. (I realize that this is less and less a distinction as times goes by.) As to the second, well….
The precipitous decline in standards of public deportment and private behavior that has been so prominent a feature of American culture in recent decades can be laid to a very great degree at the feet of this “industry,” and within that sector of the economy few have taken so leading a role in the process as Springer.
When it comes to what Daniel Patrick Moynihan dubbed “defining deviance down,” Springer has been among the nation’s chief lexicographers. For this he has been amply rewarded in the appropriate coin. How is it a good idea to offer him the trappings of respectability as well?
Yes, yes, I’m a testy old poop. I’m also available for commencements; here’s my speech.
Written by Robert McHenry on April 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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Of the many kinds of pollution that we contend with today, perhaps the most pervasive is noise. Sonic pollution is everywhere, from the idiot kid blasting hip-hop (or, to be fair, Shania Twain) from a superamped car stereo to the grinding of motors, the whir of turbines, and the whine of jet engines. The din of the cities has extended into suburbia and the countryside, so much so that you have to travel deep into wilderness primeval in order to hear—nothing, the rarest sound of all.
Writing in Men’s Health magazine a couple of years ago, Tom McGrath observed that his neighborhood coffee shop clocked in at 82 decibels, a crowded restaurant 86 decibels, a movie theater between 85 and 130 decibels. Given that the fight-or-flight stress response kicks in at 80 decibels, about the level that low-level hearing damage occurs, it is small wonder that one in every ten Americans suffers from some form of hearing loss—and that so many of us suffer from stress-related ailments as well.
This may all be by design, and certainly some places, particularly eateries, are deliberately noisy, as if to suggest vibrancy and bustle. Emily Thompson, a historian of soundscapes, has suggested that the noise of public spaces such as shops and restaurants irritates us subliminally, and since we can do nothing about the noise, we console ourselves by buying things. It would be interesting to test that out in the face of the current recession, when high gas prices may quiet the streets by a decibel or two and reduce the number of restaurant-goers.
Noise costs us in terms of health. It also costs us in terms of money; studies have shown that noisy workspaces are less efficient than quiet ones, measured in such quantifiable terms as typing speed and absenteeism. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg rightly observes, ”Complaints about noise are not frivolous. Noise disturbs our sleep, prevents people from enjoying their time off work and too often leads to altercations when the police are called in. It can also produce serious hearing impairment, especially for those who work in noisy jobs.”
It has always been so: as historian Peter Coates writes in the journal Environmental History, “The racket generated by iron-rimmed cart and carriage wheels trundling over cobblestones and by horseshoes striking them had been an intermittent source of complaint since colonial days. a strong argument for replacing the horse with the horseless carriage in American and British cities in the late 1890s was the alleviation of noise. Scientific American warmly welcomed trams and automobiles as harbingers of a new age of urban tranquillity: ‘The noise and clatter which makes conversation almost impossible on many streets of New York at the present time will be done away with, for horseless vehicles of all kinds are always noiseless or nearly so.’” The Scientific American writer was referring to the electric car, a far cry from today’s gas-powered (and otherwise superamplified) behemoths.
Bloomberg has made efforts to reduce noise in his city through an active program of incentives and disincentives (the latter including large fines for noise violations). Elsewhere, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has initiated an ambitious noise-mapping project across Great Britain. And in 2003, the European Union established April 30 as International Anti-Noise Day—a commemoration that, beg pardon, would seem to be in need of a slightly noisier program of publicity.
Written by Gregory McNamee on April 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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The Democratic contest goes on, but as I predicted in my post two months ago, it is essentially over (“Is the Democratic Race Over?” February 19, 2008). To win the nomination, Hillary Clinton must win both North Carolina and Indiana on May 6. This is a nearly impossible task given the very favorable demographics for Barack Obama in North Carolina. Indiana remains a toss-up.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, an ongoing nomination fight that may continue until the last contest in June, when the superdelegates will weigh in and settle the matter, should not hurt the Democrats in the fall campaign. Analysts have failed to distinguish between the party that holds the White House and the challenging party. A bitter, lasting battle hurts the incumbent party because it indicates problems with governing. Examples include Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald Ford in 1976, Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Pat Buchanan’s challenge to President George H. W. Bush in 1992.
In contrast, struggles within the challenging party often indicate that the prize of the nomination is worth winning. The three greatest victories posted by challenging party candidates in American history all came after nomination struggles that lasted until the party convention. Warren Harding who won 60 percent of the popular vote in 1920 was nominated on the tenth ballot. Franklin Roosevelt who won 57 percent in 1932 was nominated on the fourth ballot and Dwight Eisenhower who won 55 percent in 1952 was nominated only after the convention seated his Texas delegation as opposed to a competing delegation pledged to his rival Robert Taft.
The fundamentals of election 2008 strongly favor a Democratic victory this fall as I explained in my post on the Keys to the White House (“The 13 Keys to the White House: Why the Democrats Will Win,” October 4th, 2007). However, presuming that Obama become the Democratic nominee it remains an unsettled question as to whether the nation is ready to elect an African-American president. According to exit polls, about a fifth of white voters in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary said that race influenced their choice of candidates; these voters backed Clinton by 3 to 1 over Obama.
Unfortunately, it appears clear that some Republicans will launch a “Swift Boat” style campaign of vilification against Obama with a thinly coded racial animus. This campaign will not come directly from John McCain or Republican leaders. Rather, it will come from “independent groups” like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or the National Security Political Action Committee that made Willie Horton the most familiar face of the 1988 campaign.
Already, the scurrilous attacks on Obama have begun. Floyd Brown, who created the Willie Horton ad, has put together a new ad that openly associates Obama with allegedly murderous gang members in Chicago. It features a roll call of gang victims and extensive footage of bleak and devastated ghetto neighborhoods in Chicago. It asks “can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?”
It would be a tragedy if voters gave a very unpopular Republican Party another four years in the White House because of the skin color of the Democratic nominee. But I have enough faith in the American people to believe that this will not happen, no matter how many Willie Horton type ads the Republican surrogates chose to run in 2008.
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Click here for Britannica’s multimedia spotlight on the American Presidency.
Written by Allan J. Lichtman on April 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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Even die-hard Republicans have to admit that conditions surrounding the 2008 presidential election look very good for the Democrats. A number of these conditions, sometimes referred to as “the fundamentals,” are routinely used in quantitative forecasting models that have proven to be quite accurate over the years. The three fundamentals commonly examined are: public opinion before the fall campaign, the election-year economy, and incumbency.
The President’s Approval Rating: A Key Indicator
While it is too early for most of the forecasting models to produce a prediction from these fundamentals, it is not too early to notice that the commonly used indicators of the fundamentals will undoubtedly cut in favor of the Democrat and against the Republican this year. A very important early indicator of the way that the campaign is likely to go is public opinion reflected in the president’s approval rating. Historically, the approval rating of the sitting president before the fall campaign has been strongly correlated with the two-party vote in November for the in-party’s candidate. The correlation of the July approval rating and the November in-party vote since the 1948 election is .82.
Presidents have had approval ratings in July of over 46 percent in 9 of the 15 elections since 1948. The in-party candidate went on to win a plurality of the popular vote in 8 of these 9 elections. The only in-party candidate to lose when the president enjoyed a 46-plus rating was Nixon who lost a squeaker to Kennedy in 1960. In the other 6 elections since 1948 with presidents with sub-46 ratings, the in-party record is 1 win and 5 losses. The only candidate to survive poor approval ratings was Harry Truman in 1948. Stevenson in 1952, Humphrey in 1968, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, and George H. W. Bush in 1992 ran with sub-46 presidential approval ratings for their parties and each lost his election.
We are a few months away from July, but President Bush’s approval numbers are well south of the mid-40s. This indicator will clearly favor the Democrats this year. The Real Clear Politics average of President Bush’s recent presidential approval numbers are at an anemic 31 percent. He is fully 15 points below what appears to the critical approval level. That is a long and unlikely climb.
The Economy
The economy looks no better for Republicans. The growth rate in the economy is not as closely associated with the vote as approval ratings are, but they have been a pretty good predictor. The correlation of the first half growth rate in the GDP and the vote is .47. When the economy is growing at a three percent (annualized) or stronger clip in the first half of the election year, the in-party’s record is 8 wins and 3 losses since 1948. When the economy was growing at less than three percent, the in-party’s record was only one win (1956) and 3 losses. At this point, no one expects economic growth over the first half of 2008 to be near three percent.
With poor approval ratings for the president, an economy in or near recession, an unpopular war, astronomical gas prices, and without incumbency, it would seem that Democrats should win the 2008 election going away. At least that is the argument from looking at the usual indicators of “the fundamentals.”
Before inaugurating either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton, however, we should consider several other aspects of the fundamentals that augur a close election in 2008. A couple of indicators may even favor the Republicans. While President Bush’s approval ratings and the weak economy are unquestionably a liability for Senator McCain’s candidacy and he would much prefer running to succeed a very popular President Bush in a time of prosperity, these conditions may not be the political death sentence for the Republicans that some Democratic Party analysts think they are.
Why There’s Still Hope for the Republicans
First, there is plenty of evidence that the in-party’s record matters more when the incumbent is running than when there is an open seat race as we have this year. Obviously, President Bush’s approval rating would matter more if President Bush were the Republican candidate than it does for Senator McCain. In political science terminology, elections with incumbents are decided on more retrospective grounds and elections without incumbents are decided on more prospective grounds.
Second, there is another reason that President Bush’s low approval numbers may not be insurmountable by Senator McCain: much of the loss of President Bush’s approval since his 2004 reelection has been among Republicans. When President Bush was reelected in 2004, his overall approval rating was 48 percent, but among Republicans it was 93 percent and among Democrats it was only 11 percent. The overall drop to the low 30 percent range meant a drop of 22 points among Republicans (from 93 to 71 percent approval) and almost no loss of support among Democrats (from 11 to 9 percent).
Very few Democrats supported President Bush when he was reelected in 2004 and their numbers have not changed much since. His support among Democrats seems to be limited to Joe Lieberman, Zell Miller, and very few others. The approval loss from 2004 to now is almost completely among independents and Republicans. A group (independents) that Senator McCain has done well with in the past and a group (Republicans) who are very unlikely to support either of the Democrats.
Third, open seat presidential elections in times of close party competition, the situation of 2008, have historically been quite close contests. Since the end of the Civil War, there have been seven open-seat presidential elections when the parties were of nearly equal strength. The winning candidate in 5 of these 7 elections (71 percent) received 51.5 percent of the two-party popular vote. Only 4 of the remaining 28 elections (just 14 percent) were this close. Without an incumbent to galvanize opinions and with predispositions about evenly balanced, the vote has usually been close to a 50-50 split.
There are also two reasons why the Republicans may have an advantage in public opinion leading into the fall campaign, but both of these possible advantages have big questions associated with them.
First, despite the initial concerns about divisions within the Republican Party, the protracted and increasingly contentious nomination battle between Senators Obama and Clinton may have reversed the concerns about party unity. Early party unity is as strongly related to the vote (a correlation of early party unity and the vote is .86) as July approval ratings.
At this point, there are signs that the nomination battle may have taken its toll of early Democratic Party unity. More than half of Democratic primary voters since Super Tuesday have said that one of the candidates attacked the other unfairly and that they would not be satisfied with one of the nominees. More than 40 percent of Clinton voters in these exit polls said that they would not necessarily vote for Obama if he won the party’s nomination. Nearly 30 percent of Obama voters in these primaries indicated a similar antipathy or ambivalence in voting for Clinton should she be the nominee. Party polarization will pull many of these disgruntled partisans back into the fold by the time or at the conventions. The big question is will it be enough, and how strongly must they be courted to bring them back?
The Democrats’ second public opinion problem is ideological. While Republicans confront many problems in 2008, it seems quite clear that Senator McCain (to the consternation of many conservatives) is better positioned to appeal to centrist swing voters than either Senators Obama or Clinton.
One of the many interesting aspects of this election is that the three remaining major party candidates have all served in the Senate at the same time. All three have voting records on the same set of legislation and all three have had their voting records examined by the same organizations. The American Conservative Union (conservative), the Americans for Democratic Action (liberal), and the National Journal (non-partisan) have rated Senators McCain, Obama, and Clinton. Averaging these ratings indicates that Obama has an 89.8 percent liberal rating. Clinton is almost as liberal at 85.4 percent. McCain is 24.9 percent and the median Senator in this period was 40.5 percent liberal. In short, McCain is slightly (15 points) more conservative than the median, while Clinton and Obama are both far more liberal than the median, about 45 and 49 points more liberal. As a consequence, many more voters in 2008 should conclude that their values are shared more by McCain than by either Obama or Clinton and, as both the 2000 and 2004 elections demonstrated, this is critical to winning elections.
At this point, many American voters do not perceive just how liberal Senators Clinton and Obama are. A recent Rasmussen Poll indicated that only slightly more than half of respondents could correctly label the extremely liberal Senators Obama and Clinton as liberals. With just over twenty percent of the electorate identifying themselves as liberals, this misperception of Obama and Clinton as moderates is a big advantage to Democrats. Maybe next to Dennis Kucinich and the normal Democratic activist they look moderate, but in the broader political spectrum they are quite far to the left.
The major task of the Republican campaign between now and the parties’ conventions should be to educate voters to the ideological records of the Democrats’ candidates. If the Republicans are able to do so, they may be able to tip public opinion among moderate swing voters away from the liberal options and toward the moderate-conservative McCain. Senator Obama’s close associations with the intemperate Reverend Jeremiah Wright and with radical Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers should make it easier to demonstrate just how far left Senator Obama really is.
Potential Minefields: Race, Gender, and Aggressiveness
There is plenty of evidence available that can be used by Republicans to pull public opinion in McCain’s direction and to convince sensible moderates that the Democrats have not nominated an acceptably mainstream alternative, whether Obama or Clinton ends up as the Democratic Party’s nominee. The big question regarding this Republican advantage is whether Senator McCain is tough enough to make the case against the Democrats.
To date there is real reason to be concerned that the Republican nominee possesses the toughness necessary to correct the falsely moderate images that Clinton and Obama have been able to cultivate. McCain seems to have elevated the lack of toughness to a principle. He seems more inclined to apologize for the toughness of his own supporters and those in his party than to aggressively take on his Democrat opponents. As Al Gore demonstrated in 2000, it is often not enough to have the fundamentals in your favor; their impact on the vote depends at least in part on the candidates making good use of their advantages in their campaigns.
This election may hinge on whether Senator McCain makes good use of his advantages. We know that the senator was heroic and honorable as a prisoner during war; the question now is whether he will be aggressive and smart on the political battlefield this year.
Beyond the problem of McCain’s temperament of trying to be above politics is either the race or gender of his opponent. An aggressive campaign fought against either a woman or a black opponent is filled with minefields. It is a virtual certainty that the race or gender cards will be played as a defense against any part of the campaign that uncomfortably challenges Obama or Clinton. While Republicans must be careful to avoid any suggestion that their appeals are remotely about race or gender, they must be even more careful not to be cowed into backing off of an aggressive campaign.
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Click here for Britannica’s multimedia spotlight on the American presidency.
Written by James E. Campbell on April 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past.
ASP.NET
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Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site: Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET's membership, roles, and profile support. In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET's Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site.
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ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update: The ASP.NET team last week released an update of the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature. This update adds several new features including cleaner URL support using the same URL routing feature that ASP.NET MVC uses, as well as better confirmation, foreign-key, and template support.
ASP.NET AJAX
ASP.NET MVC
Silverlight
Hope this helps,
Scott
Written by ScottGu on April 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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When the Associated Press posted an article on April 16 about Tricia Walsh-Smith and her public tirade on YouTube, the world had the chance to see the angry side of a crumbling marriage straight from their PCs. In a tearful and furious YouTube video, actress and playwright Tricia (”Bonkers”) Walsh-Smith publicly lashed out against her husband, Broadway theatre executive Philip Smith, in a steady spate of negative and personal details about their failed sex life and marital woes. With the growing use of Internet sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and personal blogs, (it is estimated that one in every ten Americans have Internet blogs), many scorned spouses are using the Web to tell their side of the marital saga in a compulsive stream of rageful and embarrassing posts.
In her New York Times article on April 18, “When The Ex Writes a Blog, The Dirtiest Laundry Is Aired,” Leslie Kaufman states that, for the blogger, writing can be therapeutic. And she suggests that, for the reader, blogging can be infectious. Kaufman writes that bloggers who share their personal gripes about marital indiscretions sometimes have between 10,000 and 55,000 regular readers; and the percentage of users with personal blogs has quadrupled in five years.
All of this poses the question: Has the Internet facilitated a new type of confession where ill-advised or uncontrolled statements and emotions can be aired, if not supported and even validated?
In the professional world of psychotherapy, private emotions are explored and expressed in a “controlled environment” where the listener is a trained and willing participant in the patient’s journey of self discovery. Whether it be through behavioral techniques, interpesonal feedback or psychodynamic questioning, the therapist hears the patient’s confessions and offers appropriate dialogue to promote healthy decisions and optimal functioning. But when the listener is an audience of 55,000 anonymous eaves droppers (many with their own personal gripes and emotional wounds), cyber-rage may lead to ineffectual choices and misguided validation.
And what becomes of the children who read about, or listen to, their parents’ personal traumas on line? The public maligning of marriage, most often one sided, is not a healthy way to co-parent children who are already enduring their parents’ relationship struggles. (And children who harbor guilt or personal responsibility for their parent’s fights are particularly at risk.) In this new public arena, boundaries become blurred and unfair allegiances are borne out of a need for a parent’s emotional validation in “the heat of the moment.” And once written, or spoken, they can not be taken back. Instead, cyber-confessions can be book-marked, printed, and saved for personal posterity: perhaps to be used as fodder for the next generation of psychotherapy patients.
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For video discussions by me on assorted related topics, click here.
Written by Norman Fried on April 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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This is the most amusing sentence I’ve read all week:
“Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don’t feel like they need an organization,” says Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists for the past thirteen years.
I’ve excerpted it from an interesting article (”If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?”) in NewYork magazine. It seems that atheism, not merely the militant sort but the everyday sinner-in-the-street kind as well, still makes for good copy. It’s a topic that comes and goes, though whether the cycle is related to the stock market or the length of women’s skirts or sunspots is as yet undetermined. (One of these days someone will do the study, announce some correlation, and the press will report that some x-factor “causes” or alternatively “is caused by” atheism, but that’s another topic.)
I’ve discussed this business before, but – like the peace march I walked in back in ’67 – it failed of its intended effect. I’m beginning to wonder if anyone listens to me. You’d all surely be better off if you did.
Now, wasn’t that an offensive thing to say! Yes, it was. And that’s the point, and, as a corollary, why I would never describe myself as an atheist. The self-identified atheist is saying to the rest of us “There is no god.” Now, the various sorts of theists – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Shintoists, you name them – agree at least on one thing: there is a god, or maybe several. The atheist asks, sneeringly, “And you know this how, exactly?”
Which is an altogether appropriate retort to the atheist who says there isn’t one. Just where does this supra-cosmic knowledge come from, anyway? The very fact that there are sets of people confidently pronouncing the exact opposite “knowledge” about what lies outside or above the universe is, shall we say, a suspicious circumstance.
My own suspicion is that the avowing of such dicta is evidence of what I have thought of as the “need to know.” By “need” I mean, not that such knowledge is required in the conduct of some business (“I’m sorry, Carrothers, but that information is strictly need-to-know”), but that there is in humans a psychic need to feel oneself to be in possession of certain knowledge. This need varies in degree from person to person; to put it another way, people differ in their ability to tolerate uncertainty.
That’s not the whole story, however. For some of us, at least in the train of that satisfying certainty comes the drive to proselytize for what one knows. This, too, varies by degree, from the person who will suggest gently that you might find his church a welcoming place to the one who explains that you will convert or die.
And when you think about it a bit more you begin to notice that the need for certainty and the drive to convert are not limited in their scope of operation to questions of religion. Politics, or more broadly political economy, provides a rich field for them as well. Hence the crusaders of all persuasions, along with their passive-aggressive quasi-intellectual brethren, who squat on some ideological park bench and commence to provide rote analyses of and, more often than not, sneers at, the evils and errors of us unenlightened ones.
Those of us with less than utter confidence in our genius, or intuition, or whatever it is that serves to produce that empowering sense of certainty, are for the most part content to walk the Earth hoping to learn something useful from time to time to make the journey a bit less wearing. “Content” may not be the word; “in no position to do otherwise than” may hit closer to the mark. Is it that we are more prudent, or are we merely incapable of conviction? Is one of those characteristics better or worse than the other? I wouldn’t venture to pronounce, though I’m willing to suggest that, by and large, we make better neighbors.
Signs to watch for while out in the human wild: fervor and condescension. Soon you’ll be able to spot them several blocks off. Not that I’m suggesting you go out of your way to avoid them, for aren’t they all just a barrel o’ laughs?
P.S. Religion: Good for You or Not? An interesting
exchange of views (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan).
Written by Robert McHenry on April 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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Last week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando. I gave a general session talk on Monday, and then two breakout talks later that day. You can download my slides+samples below:
General Session
The slides for my keynote can be downloaded here.
In the talk I demonstrated how to debug the .NET Framework source code. You can learn how to set this up with VS 2008 here.
I also demonstrated building a site using the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support - which you can learn more about here. I also demonstrated using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework - which you can learn more about here.
I also showed off the new Hard Rock Memorabilia site built with Silverlight 2. You can try out the Hard Rock application yourself here. You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here.
Building .NET Applications with Silverlight
The slides + demos for Silverlight breakout talk can be downloaded here.
You can learn more about Silverlight from my links page here. In particular, I recommend reading my tutorial posts here and here.
ASP.NET MVC
The slides + demos for my ASP.NET MVC talk can be downloaded here.
You can learn more about the latest ASP.NET MVC source refresh here. Stephen Walther also just posted a really good set of slides + demos from his post conference tutorial on ASP.NET MVC here.
Hope this helps,
Scott
Written by ScottGu on April 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.
In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes. If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.
If you download the entire 2.5.1 release, you will be getting over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:
- Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
- Better performance for those who have many categories
- Media Uploader fixes
- An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
- Widget Administration fixes
- Various usability improvements
- Layout fixes for IE
Secret lives of blogs
Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.
Many thanks to Steven Murdoch for responsibly reporting the security issue (CVE-2008-1930) and Alex Concha for reporting an XSS issue.
Written by Ryan on April 25th, 2008 with no comments.
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