Jason Alexander's Blog

Blogmailr on Digg!

jlalexander — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 21:56:32 GMT

Wow, we made it on Digg. Check it out:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Free_Blog_by_email_Service_to_Simplify_Blog_Publishing

If you have a few seconds, run out and give us a Digg!

Published with BlogMailr

WTH IE Team?

jlalexander — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 14:14:00 GMT

So, I normally post over at my personal site (http://JasonA.net), but I'll be honest - it doesn't get the exposure that this site does. ;) And, that's okay... but I wanted to make sure someone (*cough*the IE team*cough*) saw this.

My question is: What the heck happened with the latest Windows updates, IE Team?

Now, granted, maybe I'm a bad boy for having FireFox installed on my system *smirk*, but ever since the last windows updates were applied, I can no longer even use Internet Explorer. When I type in an address in IE and hit enter, it spawns FireFox and FireFox opens it.

I've tried uninstalling FireFox, re-installing IE, everything, to no avail.

Normally, I would call this an update anomaly and re-pave my machine, but it's now happened on two of my computers after applying the updates (one XP Pro box, and one Server 2003 box).

<sarcasm>
I didn't realize you guys would give up so easily to FireFox! If you want me to switch full-time, just say so!
</sarcasm>

:-)

My blog is moving to http://JasonA.net!

jlalexander — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 17:01:00 GMT

As I hinted to in my last post, I'm moving my blog off of weblogs.asp.net to my own domain:

http://JasonA.net

Please update your readers to:

http://jasona.net/blog/rss.aspx

Thanks!

-Jason

More on the Telligent Positions at http://JasonA.net

jlalexander — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:13:00 GMT

Heads up, I've explained a bit more about Telligent's positions and requirements from Rob's original post:

http://weblogs.asp.net/RHoward/archive/2004/09/21/232682.aspx

over at my new blog, http://JasonA.net. If you're interested, check it out:

http://jasona.net/blog/archive/2004/09/22/22.aspx

Setting up nGallery on Mono

jlalexander — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 20:36:00 GMT

I met Joseph at our last PDNUG meeting. Great guy! One of the few out there that shares my love, and respect, for the Mono project.

I recently came across a post of his explaining how to setup nGallery to run on Mono. If you're interested, check it out:

http://www.monotropa.net/MonoTropa/nGalleryHowTo.html

Cool stuff. I knew we were Mono compatible (verified by the Mono team) but didn't have all the setup instructions (from a clean machine) myself. It's awesome to see Joseph document this!

Mistake identities

jlalexander — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 13:44:00 GMT

Too funny, Rob posted about how he's constantly getting mistaken for “Ron Howard” of current directing fame, former Happy Days fame, and so on.

And, then he just has to go there... ;)

Yes, I constantly get the, “Hey, 'Jason Alexander' isn't that that guy...” “...from Seinfeld?”, I'll interrupt. It was really bad during the Seinfeld days where it was still in production. Over the past few years it's slowed down as Seinfeld has slipped in syndication, and as the overweight, bald actor slipped into obscurity.

But, then he had to go and sign up to do those KFC commercials! And, before I knew, it had all started again! Luckily, he shot off his mouth and quickly got “let go” from the KFC gig.

But, much to my chagrin, I saw a commercial the other day for a new show he's coming out with. I just groaned, as my wife giggled in the background. :)

Database Schema to Wiki Trick

jlalexander — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 22:24:00 GMT

Ok, this is a really slick trick for generating wiki mark-up for the database schema in SQL Server. One of my buddies, Terry Denham from the Community Server :: Forums team (previously the ASP.NET Forums) and co-worker here at Telligent, came up with this nice little script:

select '!!!Database Schema', '1' as [dorder]
union all
select '!!!!' + o.name, '2.' + o.name + '.0' [dorder]
         from sysobjects o where o.type = 'U' and o.name like 'forums%'
union all
select         '||''''''Column Name''''''||''''''Data Type''''''||''''''Nullable''''''||''''''Key''''''||''''''Description''''''||', '2.' + o.name + '.1' [dorder]
         from sysobjects o where o.type = 'U' and o.name like 'forums%'
union all
select        '||[' + c.name + ']||' + type_name(c.xusertype) + '(' + convert(varchar(20), convert(int, c.length)) + ')' + '||' + case when c.isnullable = 0 then 'no' else 'yes' end + '||||||'
          , '2.' + o.name + '.2.' + convert(varchar(20), c.colid) [dorder]
         from sysobjects o inner join syscolumns c on o.id = c.id where o.type = 'U' and o.name like 'forums%'
order by 2, 1

Just paste the output into your favorite wiki (this has been tested with FlexWiki) and, voila, you have your schema in a nice readable wiki format!

Also, you can run the following SQL script to generate the corresponding data dictionary:

select '!!!Data Dictionary', '1' as [dorder]

union all

select distinct '[' + c.name + ']', '2.' + c.name from sysobjects o inner join syscolumns c on o.id = c.id where o.name like 'forums%' and o.type = 'U'

order by 2, 1

This works great when you have pascal cased columns because your columns will become wiki links, and you can then use the latter script to gen the corresponding data dictionary.

Very nice!

(NOTE: Apologies on the poor formatting. Somehow this editor has mangled my poor post!)

The New ASP.NET Site & a 2.0 Tip

jlalexander — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 17:47:00 GMT

One of our great first projects here at Telligent Systems has been to take up the ASP.NET website and:

Update it to run on ASP.NET 2.0 B1
Give it a bit of a facelift.

There's many little things we've learned along the way in this project (and I hope to capture more of these later), but one of the most important ones I've found so far has been the ability to install the 2.0 framework without affecting any other vroots installed on the server. In our case, we needed to install the 2.0 framework on the current www.asp.net server farm without upgrading the 1.1 vroots (i.e., the current site).

Fortunately for us, there's a great set of command line switches to do just that:

dotnetfx.exe /q:a /C:"install.exe /q /msipassthru MSI_PROP_BEGIN""NOASPUPGRADE=1""MSI_PROP_END"

This is pure greatness.

And, if you're interested in seeing what we're doing exactly, you can hit:

http://beta.asp.net

We're doing a nice and quiet “soft roll-out” this week while tweaking and suring things up. And, as you can see, it's only the home page at this point. But, you'll get the full site soon enough, I promise. ;)

So tell me, what do you think?

More great news!

jlalexander — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 13:32:00 GMT

As Scott announced yesterday, yesterday was his first day with us here at Telligent Systems! We're super excited to have him on board! We're quickly staffing up with all-stars, and really building a sound foundation. We have nothing but great things going here!

And, to follow that up, you see that Rob announced our product line yesterday, as well! Also, very exciting! It's great to have so many wonderful products under such a strong umbrella: ASP.NET Forums, .Text, and nGallery!

Of course, we can't say much about the long-term plans. But, I can say it's going to be pretty incredible. Keep your eyes peeled!

Has Moore's Law made us lazy developers?

jlalexander — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 14:24:00 GMT

So, my shower thought this morning: Has Moore's Law made us lazy developers?

Jumping back a sec to explain a bit, I was reading Plip's blog about how your windows look and the side bar application caught my eye. Being one that's always interested in more eye candy and nifty toys, I ran out and installed it immediately. I've been playing with it, and tweaking it for the days when I realized that it's taking up around 50MBs of memory.

I was amazed. I tried removing a few panels and modules and tweaking it down a bit. But, to no real avail.

And, okay, 50MBs is nothing on my desktop that has 1GB of RAM. But, still, when did this become acceptable? I understand memory usage is relative. And, with our old TRS-80's from when I was a kid has little-to-no RAM, but I just found this interesting.

It makes me wonder if developers these days still worry about writing as efficient code as possible and conserving as much memory as they can, or do they chalk it up to Moore's Law and just say, “Add more memory!”

Of course, this isn't a new topic. I'm not being terribly insightful or thinking a new thought or raising a new question. I'm just curious and reiterating the same concerns, I suppose.

Anyways, I'm rambling now...