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Distro Issue 75 arrives with a look at the history of human-powered flight

Six Revisions Freebies

How to Play DVDs on Windows 8 (Even on your tablet that doesn’t have a DVD Player)

Yet Another Podcast- Intelligent Technical Conversation with Jesse Liberty

MVC: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site

Announcing the release of the .NET Framework for Windows Phone 8

Clean Word HTML using Regular Expressions

Ok let’s face; I did not walk from Manhattan to Connecticut, I took the train and drove my car.  But normally I take the subway from 17th Union Square to Grand Central.  Tonight I walked instead.  I forgot how much I enjoy walking and taking pictures in Madison Square Park.

Entering the park:

An electrifying sculpture:

The Shake Shack:

A favorite building:

Grand Central Station:

Stamford, a storm drain in an interesting light:

Review of Microsoft’s Surface RT:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/microsofts-first-stab-at-a-pc-surface-reviewed/

Filling in PDF Forms with ASP.NET and iTextSharp
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/030211-1.aspx

Privacy Policy – Terms of Service Generator
http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-generator.htm

Chirpy
Mashes, minifies, and validates your javascript, stylesheet, and dotless files. Chirpy can also auto-update T4MVC and other T4 templates.
http://chirpy.codeplex.com/

WiX Toolset
The most powerful set of tools available to create your Windows installation experience.
http://wixtoolset.org/
WiX is short for “Windows Installer XML”. WiX Version 3.6 has one of the more interesting installers I have ever seen. The big button in the middle of the setup screen begins the installation process. The cog on the middle button is smoothly animated (rotating) during installation, and the button doubles as a progress indicator.  I think the WiX team is using the installer to show off what you can do with WiX.

TypeScript tutorial: http://www.typescriptlang.org/tutorial/

GitHub for Windows: http://windows.github.com/

EPPlus: Create advanced Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheets on the server: http://epplus.codeplex.com/

Creating Reports in Excel 2007 using EPPlus (Header, Footer, Comments, Image, Formatting, Shape and Formula): http://zeeshanumardotnet.blogspot.com/2011/06/creating-reports-in-excel-2007-using.html

EPPlus has some minor bugs but is very useful. If you need to work with Excel workbooks and don’t mind being restricted to working to only XLSX files then I highly recommend it.

The quotation widget has been updated with the following changes:

• Improved layout of the editor for usability.
• Add a css class for the quotation panel.

The updated version is available on the BlogEngine.net gallery.

After a long hiatus, BlogEngine.NET has been updated to 2.6, and Codenexus has been moved to a new hosting provider, Winhost.com.  I hope to to make more updates to codenexus.com in the coming months.

I’m looking forward to working with Visual Studio 2010 in (hopefully) the near future.  This little gem came across my RSS reader; an intellisense-like experience for editing XAML.

XAML Intellisense Presenter

And on a side note… can you spot the user experience bug in the screen shot above?  :)

In July 2009 I took a trip to Mont-St-Pierre with some friends to participate in the annual hang gliding festival held there.  What a neat place, and what great people!  Special thanks to Harry and Roxanne for the drive and their wonderful company.  Thanks to Lindsey and the Chew family for our day hike on an iffy flying day.  As always it was great to be in the air with Harry and Lindsey at a wonderful site and to get their wise input into hang gliding there and in general.  Flying there is no sweat for a hang 3 like me, just make sure you talk to the locals about the peculiarities of all the launches as well as micro-meteorology to be mindful of.

I had several flights during the course of our stay in Mont-St-Pierre; most were sledders.  On our last day before the trip back I had a 90 minute flight working the ridge over launch.  The lift band is quite narrow, a lot smaller than what we're used to at Ellenville, so you need good gaggle skills to stay up.  Toward the end of the flight I saw a small squall moving east along the coast toward launch and eventually some of the local pilots standing on launch indicated that I should head for the LZ and land.  I later discussed with some local pilots and was told that the LZ can get really hairy when squalls move through, so this was a safety issue.  On my flight it was not a problem but better safe than squashed.  This flight was a great way to conclude the trip and I really got a chance to appreciate the special quality of the site.

My feeling is that as Ellenville ambassadors we made a good impression.  Don't be surprised if we have some Canadian visitors at our site in the near future!

Harry clowning around.

Harry and Roxanne

Moon over the valley

Sunset on the beach

Panorama of the ramp launch at Mont-St-Pierre, at center. 

Panorama of Mont-St-Pierre LZ, originally uploaded by falcon170ct.

Here is a picture of the landing zone at Mont-St-Pierre.  The peak with the main launch is in the center of the frame.

To see all of the pictures I took on this trip, click here.

Video highlights of ellenvillers at Mont-St-Pierre

Below are a few of the many videos shot on this trip.  There is a link at the bottom for the rest of the videos.

Lindsey makes a landing

Harry makes a landing

On this flight I land in the bushes and relearn the value of not going brain-dead when setting up my approaches.  The camera is pointed in kind of an odd angle but you may notice me popping the glider over a large bush at the very end then parachuting down into the bushes; the grass there was up to my chest.  The good news is, all of my landings after this one were great!

One of my first flights off of the east launch... Lindsey gives me encouragement while Harry records the video (thank you gentlemen!)

Lindsey makes a low transition and a nice landing.

Here is the full playlist of videos from the trip. There are 54 videos in all, and include a number of launches and landings, as well as views of clouds over the mountains and other scenes from the area.