Binary Fortress Software

After taking the most amazing trip I’ve ever had, and taking piles of photos, I think I’ve caught a slight fever… known as the photography bug. I loved taking photos while I was there, thinking about the lighting, the background… all that jazz. I’m a huge noob though, so I really have no idea what I’m actually doing, I just take photos of things that strike me in some way. Today I stumbled across a site called Crestock who is currently running a photography contest. The theme for this section of the contest is “The Meaning of Life”. I could think of many photos that I took on trip that fit the bill, but in the end I decided on this photo of my mate Andy.

He is perched above a 2000+ foot drop on a mountain named “Stac Pollaidh”, in the far north of Scotland. What else brings you closer to the meaning of life, then being at rest in a place where certain death is just a mis-step away.

If you would like to enter the competition, or would like to vote for my photo (once voting opens) check out the Crestock website.

Update (May 7, 2007): It appears the fine folks over at the Crestock website have decided to cut a bunch of entries, mine included, as they apparently weren’t good enough to be judged by the public.

I have compiled and released a 64 bit version of the WordPress URL Rewrite ISAPI filter. The only catch is that I don’t have any 64 bit hardware or versions of Windows to test it on. If you are running IIS on a 64 bit version of Windows and would like to help me test this it would be greatly appreciated. You can find the new version here.

Thanks!

As the title says, I’m back! What a fantastic trip. We spent most of the trip either traveling or hiking and climbing. Our main goal was to climb the east and west summit of Suilven, and we accomplished that sometime during the second week. As a primer before heading up to Scotland we headed to the Lake District in england to do some easier climbing. Here is a photo of me nearing the top of Yewbarrow.

All the mountains we climbed were in the range of 2500-3000 feet, so they weren’t huge mountains, but they were challenging enough to a rookie like myself. After we spent a couple days in the lake district we headed back home to pack for Scotland. Upon arriving in Scotland we were presented with this view of Suilven from a long, long ways away.

After some grocery shopping we set out on our long hike to the foot of Suilven. We setup camp right at the foot of Suilven, and headed to bed early. At first light we set off. Here is Steve working the ropes while Andy climbs to the East summit.

After the first summit we stopped for a lunch break, then headed to the highest summit. This was the view from the top of Suilven.

Our goal was to make it back before sunset, and this was taken just as we were close to arriving back.

As you can see, we just make it back in time, after an exhausting day. We spent a few nights at a the Inchnadamph Lodge, and I can’t recommend it enough. It was an amazing place to stay, and was central to many of the hikes/climbs we did.

Thanks to Christine for letting Steve and I stay at her place, for cooking us some absolutely amazing meals, and for putting up with us. I can’t thank Andy enough for giving me a crash course on climbing, and doing all of the driving up to Scotland (2x 9 hour days in the car). Thanks to Steve for coming up with the initial trip idea and inviting me along, this is something that I will never forget, and probably never duplicate.

An experience of a lifetime.

Well, the time is near. I leave in around 24 hours from now, and I’ll gone for about 2 weeks. That means I will be unavailable to respond to forum posts and emails. If you need help with something, I’m not ignoring you, I’m just going to be “detached” from this hi-tech world we live in for a couple weeks. And on this happy, hi-tech note, I’m pleased to announce that the latest version of the ASP.NET ViewState Helper passed 2000 downloads this morning. A big thanks to everyone!

My buddy that I’m going to the UK with, Steve, sent me this picture of one of the mountains we’ll be visiting. I’ve been hoping that the weather will start to get warmer, now that it’s March, but I guess things are different around the mountains. This picture was taken on February 26th, about 2 weeks ago.

Yikes! What have I got myself into.

In an attempt to reduce bandwidth usage, and to speed up page loading, I have switched to a “lighter” theme. It has far less images on the main page (20ish compared with 40ish) than the old theme used to. The overall main page size has dropped from around 400 KB to about 225 KB. Quite a big difference. I also disabled a couple of plugins that were real speed killers. The screen shots sections for SS:Zero and ConceptRS are currently unavailable, until I find a new plugin for doing an image gallery… one that doesn’t destroy server performance. But other than that, the site should be fully operational. If you experience any issues please drop me a line and let me know.

Thanks to spam, I have decided to disable anonymous forum posting. Deleting all the spam every few hours was getting to be a real pain, so this was my only option. I really like the idea of anonymous posting as it encourages people to post on the forums who wouldn’t normally, because they don’t want the hassle of having another account on this big ol’ internet. I don’t force email verification for new accounts on the forums though, so feel free to give me all your fake information. The forum is supposed to be a place where I can help people easily, not make people jump through hoops setting up accounts just to ask a simple question. Thanks spam, I hate you!

Andy and I have been hard at work over the last couple weeks migrating TownRenowned from MS SQL 2005 to MySQL v5.0. Let me tell you, this was a painful experience. It wasn’t necessarily difficult, just very time consuming. There are enough differences between the 2 SQL servers to generate subtle bugs, and the MySQL admin tools can be challenging to use at first, if you use the Microsoft SQL tools all day long (which I do).

For those of you unfamiliar with the TownRenowned project, it is a website that provides restaurant reviews and allows people to vote for their favourite establishments. It is a very exciting project, and I am very happy to have been invited to join the team. It is currently running only for select Canadian cities, but we seem to be adding new ones very frequently.

If you’re Canadian, or planning on visiting Canada anytime soon, I invite you to visit TownRenowned to find a great place to eat.