I was reading Alec Saunders' blog the other day and he mentioned testing out the Windows Live Writer beta. So here I am doing the same. Pebble supports the MetaWeblog API, which is also supported by Live Writer, so it seems to be working. The only thing I really had to figure out when setting it up was the address for metaweblog calls, which happens to be http://hostname/pebble/xmlrpc.

So far, I like it. Rich text editing. All the little hotkey shortcuts I expect are there - Ctrl+K inserts or edits a link, Ctrl+I makes things italic. Pretty sweet. There is a claim that it will insert pictures, which has always been a pain with pebble, so I'll try that now.

Darn. Turns out MetaWeblog doesn't support image publishing.

Live Writer also supports inserting maps for some reason, so I tried to insert a map of my office. It was pretty easy to insert too - just type in the address and it goes there. Zoom in, zoom out, pan, add a pushpin. No way to have it do directions yet. It will be interesting to see what it looks like when it is published.

Darn. It has an image, and that doesn't work (as noted above).

I'll have to get Julie set up with this. The basic functionality is cool.

Update - while the MetaWeblog API doesn't support image uploading, it does support FTP uploading. So (hopefully) as soon as I get an FTP server set up and configured correctly it will be able to publish pictures more easily.

Start flying at my office: Goggle flight sim After clicking the link, just press start. The curvy building is my office.

Scary - this shows an easy way to open just about any lock in seconds, with little to no expertise needed. YouTube - Bump keying

Jeffrey Frederick, who is organizing the CITCON conference in London, sent out a message today asking if folks had seen or used any of the newer CI servers that are becoming available. It is pretty amazing that over the past few years so much has been done in this area. Check out this huge feature comparison matrix.

Personally, I have only used CruiseControl, CC.Net, and at one point I did a trial install of AntHill. Of those, I have been the most impressed with CC.Net. I found it easy to install and configure, powerful, and flexible. It's been a long time since I looked at AntHill, so I bet that has gotten better too. It would be fun to look at some of these new ones. I'm especially intrigued by the new Java tools that can work with Maven. The dependency conglomeration they do seems like it might be a lot more flexible and robust than the system I described in my post on enterprise continuous integration. That system has been working extremely well on my current set of projects, but I think I might have more difficulties if we scaled up to a larger more distributed team. Some of the tools that Jeffrey mentioned specifically include

• Bamboo from Atlassian (the folks who make Jira)
• TeamCity from JetBrains, the IntelliJ people
• AntHill3 from UrbanCode

Interesting graph, from Brian Marick's blog. He overlaid democratic/republican presidencies over a graph of the national debt. So much for the theory of tax-and-spend Democrats, although it is true that the Democrats controlled congress for most of the time shown.

Paul Julius and Jeffrey Fredrick are hosting another version of the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, this time in London, October 6th and 7th. The first one in Chicago was impossible for me to go to, this one is just rubbing salt in the wound for me!

The last one sounded like a great success. They ran it using the 'open spaces' conference style that I am seeing more and more. Here's hoping that this one gathers lots of folks and leads to lots of good information sharing. If you are interested, register (it's free once you get there!) at the citcon website. Even if you are not going, check out the wiki from the last conference.