Jelle Druyts

Happy Birthday, David. You would've turned 33 today.

Let's all stand still and think about that for a minute.

While catching up on my unread blog posts, I finally followed Scott Hanselman's link to Carl Franklin performing Steely Dan's Home At Last - and I'm blown away.

Sure, it's cool that it's using Silverlight in Hi-Def 720p video (whatever that means, but indeed, for a streaming video, it looks really good and it sounds excellent with my good headphones on), but I'm just amazed by Carl's performance(s). He does all the instruments (and does them well), and has a really great singing voice to tip it off.

Very, very impressive! Meaning: I'm very jealous If I'd have such a studio with all those instruments, I'd stop sleeping as well

I just released an update of Flickr Schedulr, making it v1.1.

Flickr Schedulr is a Windows desktop application that automatically uploads pictures to Flickr based on a schedule (e.g. to post a new picture every day at a certain time). It allows you to create a queue of pictures to be uploaded, along with their titles, descriptions, tags, and the photoset into which they should end up. This effectively takes the hassle of uploading pictures at regular intervals away, and allows you to go out and have fun shooting pictures (or drinking beer) while your photoblog is maintained for you.

What's new in this version?

• You can now move pictures directly to the top or bottom of the upload queue.
• You can now shuffle the upload queue to make a randomized list of pictures to upload.
• You can now upload all selected pictures in the upload queue with the "Upload Now" button.
• You can now get inline previews of the pictures inside the Queued Pictures list.
• You can now import and export the current configuration (containing queued and uploaded pictures).
• You can now see how many items are in the queue and which one you are editing.
• You can now easily navigate up and down in the queue from anywhere with the ALT+UP and ALT+DOWN keys.

As always, you can find all information, screenshots and downloads on the dedicated site at http://jelle.druyts.net/schedulr.

Happy Flickring!

Well finally: my good buddy Steven has at last done something useful since arriving at Microsoft Corp. a little over a year ago Although Popfly itself has been getting a lot of good vibe and is certainly a cool playground for mash-ups and showcase for Silverlight, the recently announced Popfly Explorer is something that "clicks" with me a lot more. In other words: something I'll actually use

Basically, Popfly Explorer is a tool window in Visual Studio (all editions, even Express!) that allows you to connect to a Microsoft server to upload your projects, create web sites and even host them directly on their servers, and build a community of friends where you can share code and comment on each other's stuff. So for me, the fun part is where you can directly upload your current solution to Popfly, switch to another machine, download it again and continue working. It's sort of like a Shelveset in Team Foundation Server, but then without the Team Foundation Server. And for free.

When he first described this to me, I was like "hey, cool, it's like CodePlex Light^TM(R)(C) or something". And then Steven was all "yeah dude that's right". And I was like "yo wicked bro". And he was all like "yeah, it's so totally sweet". And then I tried it, and it actually worked, and everything went smooth, and I was all "w000000t"!

Anyway. Soma announced it a few days ago on TechEd EMEA, Steven posted a quick overview on Popfly Explorer (by the way, check out the cool picture of Steven as a kid on the logon screen!) and Dan Fernandez followed up with a bigger post describing how to build and publish web sites with Popfly Explorer. I encourage you to check it out, yo! Download Popfly Explorer Beta and get to the party!