I have talked before about some of the Major League Baseball apps on this blog before.  They have added another application to their arsenal this week: MLB.com OnBase.  This application is built on Adobe AIR and is one slick little app.

When you first start the app you can choose your favorite team or teams or you can flag your favorite players.  It then uses these settings to notify you of any news or updates involving your selections.  So for example, you will get an alert when the lineups are set for your teams games.  There are also alerts for in game notifications.  When a team scores in a game that involves one of your flagged teams, an alert pops up informing you that a run or runs scored and how they scored.  It also displays the scoreboard of your team’s games.

Twitter is also an integral part of the application.  Part of the news feeds involving your favorite teams or players , are tweets that are found matching your selections.  This updates every few minutes.  You can also hook up your Twitter account and send tweets directly from the application.

I have always believed that Major League Baseball is at the forefront of internet related technology in the pro sports.  Their MLB.tv offering is the best streaming technology in sports, bar none.  With the release of this application they continue to be the front runners in cool technology.

If you have experience in programming in ASP.NET over the last few years, I am sure you have noticed how bloated the web.config file has become.  Most of it is very confusing looking lines of various calls to load modules and handlers.  It appears that is changing in .NET 4.0.  Microsoft guru Scott Guthrie is starting a series on his blog about the new features that are new to .NET 4.0.  The first topic is how clean the web.config files will be.  Check out Scott’s post and make sure you visit his site often to check out the rest of the topics in this new series.

Clean Web.Config Files by Scott Guthrie

Since installing Windows 7 RTM I have been slowly reinstalling all of my development programs.  The only one that has given me a fit has been SP1 for Visual Studio 2008.  The base program installed just fine, but SP1 failed every time.  Even after trying some suggestions I saw while searching, nothing worked.  But, earlier today I finally found success.  Prior to firing up the install for SP1, run the following from the command line (make sure you fire up the command prompt as an administrator.

 DOS | 
 copy code |
?
 
1
reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f

After running this command, SP1 installed with no issues.

Most of you know that my favorite Twitter client for my BlackBerry has been UberTwitter.  I started using it since their first beta release and have been an avid user ever since.  Yesterday saw a new update to the application, Beta 4.  Two items included in this update jumped right out at me.

It appears that Twitter is still experiencing some issues with some API calls.  UberTwitter is still not returning any data on my BlackBerry, and my news aggregators that post to Twitter using TweetSharp are returning nothing via the response.  I would take a guess that these issues are related to the DDoS attacks yesterday.  Hopefully things will be back to normal soon.  Anyone else having issues with the Twitter API?

 I am sure that most of you are aware of today’s attack against Twitter.  The attack crippled the service for a good portion of the day.  News is coming out now about the attack, and according to an article by The New York Times the attack could be related to cyber warfare.  The article cites Bill Woodcock, an expert in this area, who believes the attack was a result of the conflict between Russia and Georgia.  Woodcock stated the attack was not like a normal DDoS attack, as these attacks were using spam emails to overwhelm the service.  Hopefully this is not a sign of things to come.

Twitter seems to be experiencing a rather massive outage this morning.  The social media site has been down for around an hour and a half.  There is no word on what the issue is or when it will be resolved.  Twitter’s official status blog states they are looking into the issue: Twitter Status

Yesterday afternoon ESPN released a memo to it’s employees detailing guidelines in their social media policy. I’m not sure they were really guidelines, but appear to say you cannot participate in any social media conversations that involve sports (without prior approval from your department head). You can judge the policy yourself by reading the memo as sent to Mashable.