this movie was quite appealing to me, and I began to think about how cool it would be to work for an employee owned software collective.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

How hard can it be?

Oh, right, it can be an arduous part time struggle to get the thing going while woikin’ for the man every night and day. But I never lost a minute of sleepin’, worrying ’bout the way things might have been.

Oh, sorry, that’s a different song, isn’t it?

Further Reading

Anyway, here are a couple of resources if this idea appeals to you as it does to me:

The guys actually have an employee owned software collective in the liberal Ben and Jerry’s Gay Marriage state of Vermont. A collective, no less. Let’s hope Papa Joe Stalin doesn’t come by and wipe them out.

Isn’t socialism exciting?

I enjoy it.

The more detail oriented among you may enjoy this (PDF Alert) article about What Is an Employee Cooperative?

There’s even a bit of a club we can join.  Kind of a Star Trek Economics Chamber of Commerce.

Let’s just hope I’m not the ensign in the red shirt.

Kaplah, comrades!

• Stop being so boring.
• Stop assuming folks will appreciate introspective jokes.
• Separate ParticleWave and ASPWorkbench further – all the ASP and certification stuff on ASPWorkbench, and all the company related Employee Owned Software stuff on ParticleWave.
• ASPWorkbench will also need a reasonable home page.  Readers, don’t go there until  I do.  Trust me.  It’s not even sophomoric. 
• Rework the ParticleWave navigation to reflect the new division of labor.
• Publish the draft ParticleWave Employee Owned Software Company charter.
• Be not afraid of losing your day job.  You need to say what you need to say.  This is your outside blog.  Be of good cheer.
• Write your open source-ialism article.
• .htaccess Forward ParticleWave’s ASP content to ASPWorkbench.
• Get permission from your client to write about him, then do, putting the Portfolio page back up.
• Stop being so boring.
• Don’t repeat yourself.

Your first word of caution:  fiction writers say that if you want to make a character interesting, present him with adversity.  Unfortunately, presenting characters with adversity in real life doesn’t make us any more interesting – it only makes us write tutorials.  Expect delays.

Your second word of caution:  If you’re not writing about ASP.NET or adding a blog to an ASP.NET web site, or if you don’t need to be on an ASP.NET platform for some other good reason, what the hell are you thinking?  BlogEngine.net has some cool features, but for the most part Wordpress works significantly better.  There, I came out and said it.

Godaddy’s Support for BlogEngine.NET

I wasn’t able to do what I tried in the first go around, which was to just download the BlogEngine.net 1.5 release candidate and push it up to the site.  Perhaps I was tired after a long day of work, and your mileage may vary, but what I ended up doing was installing BlogEngine.Net it from Godaddy’s application control panel.  From the Hosting management page, click on the “Your Applications Link” (shown at left), then select “Blog” from the left hand navbar and then BlogEngine.Net.  In my case I got a compatibility warning because I was running IIS 7.0 in Integrated Mode rather than Classic Mode (who knew), so I had to click on “Purchase Compatible” then “Select compatible hosted domain” to work through what was going wrong, then return to “Content / IIS Configuration” to get it squared away.  Once I did that it was pretty much smooth sailing, but at one point I either messed up the application, so I needed to make sure my blog directory (where blogengine.net was installed) was configured as an application:

Clicking the edit pencil button brings up this window, and you want to make sure Set Application Root is checked:

Importing Wordpress Posts to BlogEngine.Net

You’re first step for this part of your journey is to get the  BlogML export tool from the Codeplex BlogML downloads page.  You want the download that says “Wordpress BlogML Export”.  When you unzip this file, you’ll get a single export.php that works as a replacement for the default Wordpress export page.  Backup up export.php in your <wordpress folder>/wp-admin directory, install this file, and run the Wordpress export from the admin panel to create a BlogML export.

Now at this point you might want to give some thought to manually reviewing this file and removing duplicate posts, which could be a very tedious process.  The export file created by this tool is likely to have any number of versions of some of your posts, and when you import into BlogEngine.net, your blog is going to stutter like a Porky Pig cartoon.  When you run the BlogEngine.net import tool, there’s a handy checkbox “Remove Duplicate Posts” you can check.  It doesn’t do anything, but you can check it.

Maybe if you’re running BlogEngine.Net 1.5 this has been fixed and it does something.  That would be nice.

Another quirky aspect of this tool is that it doesn’t give you any sort of progress indicator letting you know what’s going on, so while it’s doing the import it pretty much looks like it’s gone to lunch.  I recommend pushing the two validate buttons before you start the import, that way you know everything’s set up correctly, then be prepared to wait several minutes while it does its thing.

When it finishes, your posts will be there, complete with Porky Pig stutters, but you’ll find your categories and tags weren’t imported.  Oh well, what did I tell you at the beginning?  Adversity won’t make you interesting, it will only make you write a tutorial.

Converting Your Wordpress Theme

Next your ready to convert your Wordpress theme.  You’re probably not going to like this part, but here’s how I did it.  Open up your favorite text editor and file difference tool, pick a target third party BlogEngine.net theme such as “Standard”, and code yourself a theme, there, fella.  Here’s how mine turned out, combining the ASPWorkbench / ParticleWave theme with the Standard theme.

So there you have it!  Delete your duplicate posts, re-enter your categories, and rock and roll.

Oh alright, it’s not that bad, but if you can’t be inaccurate using a metaphor, then what good are metaphors, anyway?

The next phase of our little certification pony show is likely to be a good deal more labor intensive than the first phase.  The nice thing about studying for 70-536 is that it lends itself readily to sort of brain dead little “Hello World” example that I used to write twenty years ago when I was first learning to code in C.  This is good for blogging in the evening after a somewhat tiring day in the procedural salt mines.  The study for 70-562, in contrast, is likely to require bigger bits of code, especially if I want to get to something I can not only learn from in a quick and dirty way, but also publish.

I have a few ideas for how that will go, and now I have a new domain to host it on, but there’s nothing there yet. 

I’m not all that discontent – just weary, and I thought it was a cool title, what with old Sigmund having anticipated it and all.

I wouldn’t know about that.  I’m old, but I’m not THAT old.

These days, doing such a thing would be pretty much unthinkable, which is why it’s nice to be able to report that having sacrificed the Windows partition of my desktop machine to the dubious goal of getting faster Ruby on Rails unit tests working, I’m not content to envision my Microsoft Certification on Ubuntu, but have treated myself to a new Dell laptop.  It’s a Studio 17”, model s1737-020B, and it’s quite the spiffy little workhorse so far.  It’s fairly light for the size and price, has plenty of USB holes so the USB can get in, but also sports an HDMI hole so the digital video can go somewhere – though I must say that even though setting up an extended desktop was the first thing I did, so far I’ve spent most of my time looking at the built-in display for most tasks.  It found my wireless network with no fuss at all.

Battery life is supposed to be quite good though I’ve yet to test that.  4 gig of RAM, half a terabyte hard drive, $749 at Best Buy.  The front side bus speed is 800 MHz, the two processors runs at 2.1 GHz, so those numbers are a tad lower than some of seen out there, but I don’t think I’ll be doing huge builds just yet so that’s probably all I need, and all things considered I’m very happy with it.  Hat tip to the Best Buy folks in Folsom, a very congenial and generally fairly knowledgeable bunch.

About every six months or so, I completely change platforms and direction in my software career. That may be because I’m a head case, but if you read “How the Mind Works”, you’ll stumble upon the more charitable explanation that as the last born in my family my personality developed with a view to embracing change.

Charity begins at home.

I probably need to get certified, on some level. I don’t mean I need it or I won’t have a job, per se, although it’s the kind of thing that may open up opportunities around here. As you might expect, the Sacramento programmer market has a lot of government work going on, and government hiring tends to be driven by the check box. And of course, being the kind of late born head case that I am, I need to have more opportunities than if I were a conservative first born drudge.

I usually start thinking about certification in response to reaching a trough in fretting about my status. (The wave itself runs perpetually.) I have this relentless need to make some pathetic mark on the world, as if that could be done with a keyboard and a Microsoft Certification. Perhaps fortunately, I’m generally able to suppress my ambition in order to grab whatever tarnished brass ring of a maintenance job happens to fly by my little software hobby horse of life. It’s a late born head case thing: we know how to make do with hand-me-downs, all the while secretly plotting to someday have our own pair of jeans for once. As with pants, so with code.

Well, that was maudlin. Both my older siblings were sisters, so the truth is I got my own clothes. My parents were wonderful people, and like most folks they weren’t about to go raising any de facto transvestites.

Hey look, if you’re a transvestite, nothing personal, OK? Jeesh.

Anyway, if I make good on my threat, then I’ll have something to write about. No longer will I be working on a double secret probation Rails project where I can’t share my code. Instead, I’ll be working on code so trivial in all but a pedagogical sense that only a Cheney-level paranoid would keep it in a man-sized office safe.

Meet the new blog. Same as the old blog.