Back in December I moved my blog to Hugo running AWS S3 , and of course I blogged about in Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes. After that move, I lost some of the visibility into my blogs operations that Azure provided. Worse, I did not have enough visbility into my blogs costs. Not that it is running that expensive, but even after tagging my resources, customizing my reports, I really didn't have the transparency I wanted. So, as most modern people with problems do - I turned to the Great Google to ask for help. Fast forward a few dozen blog posts, product reviews, horribly annoying videos that just started playing on the pages I visit, and I decided S3Stat was my new log analyzer for my blog. I could go into all types of methodically selected criteria, with objective scores weighted with meticulous care, but in reality, it came down to a few key reasons: ...

My blog has changed again, in two different ways. First, I have moved from Jekyll to Hugo. Second, I have moved my blog from Azure to AWS. So why the changes? Azure to AWS Let me start with why I am changing cloud providers. A couple of simple reasons. In fact, they are the most basic of reasons: cost and convenience. I have had a very hard time getting an accurate cost for Azure. I have had months at $5.00, and others almost as high as $13. The price itself isn’t issue. It is the inability to predict the price from month to month with some levels of accuracy. I can always get to the details, but it takes digging. It is just not intuitive. ...

I am saying goodbye to Walmart. After years of being a customer, our time together has finally reached the end of the road. Not over some major issue, but over the very basics of customer relations. The Goal Earlier, I decided to get a Google Chromecast to use for a repeating presentation in a lobby. I am not a 100% sure it will work, but it was at the right price point to give it a try. I did all the normal pre-purchase rituals, specifically compared Amazon, BestBuy, Target, and Walmart. The three big box stores are only a few miles from home, and I didn’t want to wait the whole two days for the Amazon Prime delivery elves to work their magic. Besides, the prices were all within a dollar of each other, so I decided to go to Walmart. Besides, I had to be next door for something else. Once more, laziness is the ultimate motivating force. ...

Ten years ago, May 14 2005 specifically, I started this blog on the WordPress platform. I chose WordPress for a number of reasons, but the primary reasons were that it was simple - really simple - for me to get up an going and that the hosting providers I was considering supported it. I wanted to use the web, but not actually develop for the web. WordPress seemed like the right choice. I did consider other options, and every few years, I would look around at what else was available. I have played with Drupal, Joomla, DasBlog, and others I can’t remember. In the end, I always ended up back on WordPress. Why - simplicity. It did what I wanted. ...

I am going to diverge from my normal blog post topic of programming to talk about another passion of mine – fiction. I enjoy writing it, and more importantly – greatly enjoy reading it. One of the authors I have started to read recently is John Scalzi . His Redshirts book was the first of his I read (ok – I listened to it using Audible , but I am still calling it reading), and I was hooked. So I started following his blog , and he recently posted about a Kickstarter project for the Uncanny Magazine . ...

Just a quick note that with the release of Caliburn.Micro 2.0.0, I have updated the logging libraries to use the latest and pushed to NuGet. ...

Nope. It’s not mine. Though I wish it was. It is an older post (from the distant past of 2012) on the Highly Scalable Blog entitled NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques . This past weekend I found myself looking for methods of storing hierarchical data in a key-value store (a subject for another blog), and in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel – I broke out my trusty Google search window. A few search refinements later, I discover this gem of a post. Ilya starts with a pretty simple explanation of the differing NoSQL models. But the real value in this post is when he describes the conceptual techniques, some of pros and cons, and the applicability to specific NoSQL engine types. ...

It has been a long time since I upgraded this library, and the .NET development world has shifted a bit in that time. One of the key changes is the move to Portable Class Libraries, and Caliburn.Micro is one the libraries making that change. I have decided to follow suit and make the core Caliburn.Micro.Logging library portable. This, of course, has creating some significant breaking changes, so please look over the changes list below. ...

Sometimes time flies way too fast. It has been seven months since I last updated my Caliburn.Micro logging frameworks and nearly a month since Caliburn.Micro has been upgraded. Well, I have finally caught up and upgraded the logging libraries. Caliburn.Micro.Logging, Caliburn.Micro.Logging.NLog, and Caliburn.Micro.Logging.log4net are now version 1.5 and available on NuGet. Version Changes Upgraded Caliburn.Micro to 1.4 Upgraded solution / project files to VS2012 Added support for Windows Phone 8 Split Caliburn.Micro.Logging, Caliburn.Micro.Logging.NLog, & Caliburn.Micro.Logging.log4net into their own solutions Changed NuGet packaging to be a project in the solutions Minor changes to the physical directory structure Please see the following posts for usage: ...