We've increased the amount of storage on Folders from 128MB to 1GB per user.

How can we allocate that much storage for all those Fresh Logic Studios members? The truth is we can't. But it's also true that MANY more people are using Fresh Logic Studios for Atlas alone, and have yet to experience one of the better online file storage user interfaces on the web.

So fill it up, and tell your friends... and if we run out of space we promise we'll figure out how to get more.

Continuous integration describes a set of software engineering practices that speed up the delivery of software by decreasing integration times.

Hudson is a continuous integration tool written in Java. Our experience has shown that with Hudson's growing list of .NET capable plugins it has become a compeling alternative to CruiseControl.NET, Draco.NET, and other continuous integration servers to come out of the .NET community.

What makes Hudson so great? It's web based GUI not only monitors your build projects, it configures them. No need for hand editing XML files!

Let us walk you through how we build and deploy our ASP.NET web applications using Hudson.  (minor gripe: Hudson's UI is made for a fairly wide web browser)

Step 1: Source Code Checkout

We use Hudson's built in SVN source code management feature to grab our latest code.  Alternatively you can use CVS, or install plugins for a variety of systems including Visual Source Safe, Perforce, Mercurial, Git, etc.

Step 2: Build

The MSBuild plugin allows Hudson to run MSBuild scripts.  Note that we're asking Hudson to call three targets in our MSBuild file (Build, Clean, Upload). These targets look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <UsingTask AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Tasks\FreshLogicStudios.Experiments.FtpTask.dll" TaskName="FtpTask" />
    <PropertyGroup>
        <ProductName>atlas.freshlogicstudios.com</ProductName>
    </PropertyGroup>
  <Target Name="Build">
    <MSBuild Projects="..\..\Framework\Source\Framework.sln" Properties="Configuration=Release" />
    <MSBuild Projects="..\..\Sdk\Source\Sdk.sln" Properties="Configuration=Release" />
    <MSBuild Projects="$(ProductName).sln" Properties="Configuration=Release" />
  </Target>
  <Target Name="Cleanup">
    <FtpTask Action="Cleanup" Address="ftp.freshlogicstudios.com" LocalDir="$(ProductName)" Password="bigboy" RemoteDir="\$(ProductName)" UserName="user" />
  </Target>
    <Target Name="Upload">
    <FtpTask Action="Upload" Address="ftp.freshlogicstudios.com" DirectoryExclusionFilter=".svn|obj|Properties|Web References" FileExclusionFilter="*.cs|*.csproj*|*.pdb" LocalDir="$(ProductName)" Password="bigboy" RemoteDir="\$(ProductName)" UserName="user" />
    </Target>
</Project>

Step 3: Deploy

We've setup the last two tasks of the MSBuild file to delete the current contents of our web server then deploy the ASP.NET web application's files using FTP.  MSBuild (nor Hudson for that matter) seem to support FTP out of the box.  We've used a HEAVILY modified version of this FtpTask project.

Our modifications include bug fixes to simply make the FTP transport work, plus the additional directory/file exclusion features you see in the MSBuild XML syntax above.  You'll certainly want to skip those ".svn" folders during deployment, and there's no reason to upload the C# code behind files.

Simply add the directories and files you want to be excluded during the upload process (pipe delimited) to the DirectoryExclusionFilter and FileExclusionFilter attributes of the FtpTask.  Wildcards supported.

You can download the FtpTask binary here.  Copy it to "c:\Program Files\MSBuild\Tasks" and you should be good to go.

Thanks to Evan Cowden of NuParadigm for showing me this fantastic tool!

We installed Xobni tonight.

Pretty much cooler than we thought it was going to be.  With every email we received today we were intrigued with the statistics it was able to mine.

Not sure that the search offers anything more than the default Outlook 2007 behavior.  We supposed it's nice to search both people and mail at the same time, but don't think that's much of a value add.

The "Email Received" heat graph is an awesome feature.  Just wish that the axes were a little more defined.  We only have a rough idea at first glance which of the 4 bars in the chart actually correspond to 6 AM.

Love the rank feature.  You will too, and the results will probably surprise you.

The phone numbers are accurate.  Most of our were pulled from our stored contacts, but we did see a couple that were scraped from email signatures.  It would be awesome to see Xobni parter with a telephony provider so that you could click the phone number to place a call, like the Google Click-to-Call feature.

According to Xobni Analytics the majority of our email traffic happens on Tuesdays... around 2pm.

For those who aren't familiar with geohashing, XKCD comic #426 contains an algorithm that generates random coordinates across the country every day.  These coordinates can be used as destinations for adventures, à la Geocaching. They can also be used for local meetups.

Here's the algorithm:

Every Saturday afternoon at 4:00 PM (local destination time) official XKCD meetups happen at the coordinates that were calculated using Friday's date and DOW opening.

We've created an implementation of this in Atlas for you to try: http://atlas.freshlogicstudios.com/?Xkcd

It's back, along with a couple other new features.  Here's a snippet of the new toolbox.

Few things to note here.

1. When in bird's eye view, we've added the option to rotate the map
2. The compass indicates your current orientation, notice in this case north is pointed to the right indicating that we are facing west
3. We've changed the term "Aerial" to the more friendly "Satellite" and...
4. We've included a small caret menu to "Satellite" and "Bird's Eye" views

Both "Satellite" and "Bird's Eye" views have the option to either hide or show the road label overlays.

Try out the changes @ http://atlas.freshlogicstudios.com

Instead it walks you through a lengthy install process to install the Catalyst Install Manager, a set of codecs, and some Visual C++ runtime components.

Then you notice your hardware isn't working.  So you reboot and notice your hardware still isn't working.  So you un-install the Catalyst Install Manager, a set of codecs, and some Visual C++ runtime components... then you re-install them.

Then you notice your hardware isn't working.  So you reboot and notice your hardware still isn't working.

So you start poking around on your system and happen to find a setup.exe @ C:\ATI\SUPPORT\8-4_vista32-64_t600usb_wdm_61010\Packages\Drivers\WDM\TVW_HSUSB

So you run it and notice your hardware finally works.  And then you laugh at the bullshit they call an icon that was placed on your desktop for an app called "BDARemote".

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1846

Fail.