December 2004 - Posts
This is way too dang funny (and right on the dot) not to link to.
My favorite quote has to be, "Who appoints these a-holes Police Officer of NNTP?"
I can just see the new reality series now.... "NNTP Blue"...somebody please photoshop an NYPD badge for these people...they'd be so proud.
I've seen the tip before about how to type something like "javascript:resizeTo(800,600);" to get your browser to resize to 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. Very useful. What I found even more useful however, is to create a series of favorites/bookmarks in IE, Firefox and other browsers and set the URL to something like "javascript:resizeTo(1024,768);" and name the favorite "1024x768"
I have a few of them in all of my browsers now...comes it handy when doing web development.
The more web development I do (where I'm responsible for the (X)HTML/CSS/JavaScript) the more I have to worry about what my pages look like in different browsers on different platforms. Windows, Linux, Mac with IE, Safari, Opera, and Firefox, quickly lead up to many different platform test scenarios.
While looking around today I found BrowserCam. They have all the configurations already setup for you to test on. This is pretty cool.
It was interesting to read Scoble's predictions for 2005. Wonder what he'd have to say about this.
I just read this over on Paul Wilson's blog. This hits particularly close to home because a long history of breast cancer runs in my wife's family. Both her grandmother and great-grandmothers survived through breast cancer on her mother's side. All I can say Paul, is that I'll keep you in my prayers and wish the best possible outcome for you and your wife. May god bless Jenny with a quick recovery and may she suffer as little affliction as possible along the way.
I know this isn't the kind of news you want to get around this time of year so, hang in there. It sounds like you've already got your priorities in order. Software can wait.
I'm guessing that most of you reading this are geeks, which is why I'm posting this here. My father is a pretty difficult person to shop for at Christmas time. It's not that he has everything; he just doesn't ever want anything. So, my sister finally got it out of him what he'd really like from me.
My time helping him on computer-related issues. Basically some free tech support from me.
So, for all you geeks out there that are good with computers, consider helping out your family and friends that aren't so technically inclined. I'm going to make up some vouchers in Word or Photoshop or something that say "good for (x) hours of technical support" and give them as gifts to people. If you want to use the one I make, drop me an e-mail (or use the contact form) and I'll e-mail you what I come up with. In reality, I'll probably end up giving them more of my time than just the hours on the voucher, which I don't mind. It's the thought that counts, really.
Since I almost exclusively use an aggregator these days to get my info from the web, I'm probably late noticing this. Anyhow, I just noticed today that foO implemented a pretty cool blog archive search on his site. Go to the 'Live Search' area of the home page and type in your search and watch the page dynamically return search results right underneath! Pretty awesome, I think. So seeing this got me thinking, "What other cool applications are there for XmlHttpRequest?" We've already seen it used for e-mail (and spell-checking) with GMail and OddPost. We've seen it used for type-ahead with Google's Suggest, and now search results on foO's page. Does anybody know if MSN Web Messenger is powered by XmlHttpRequest?
I'm seeing it in use a lot more lately, and I like it.
Started out the week solving a mysterious problem. Come to find out that on our web server (running IIS) that port 80 was being used by some other process than inetinfo.exe. Trying to start IIS yielded the "Address already in use" message. At first I tried netstat -an but that didn't give me anything very useful. Next I ran TDIMon to see which processes was blocking port 80. It turned out to be mswmi.exe . I have no idea how that happened. I don't think we got hacked but, I could be wrong. So I went to Task Manager to kill mswmi.exe but it wouldn't let me. "Access denied", as they say. So I ran ActivePorts 1.4 which confirmed that it was indeed mswmi.exe blocking port 80, but, more importantly, allowed me to kill the process and start the website so that inetinfo.exe could bind to port 80 again.
Anybody know what mswmi.exe is? From the name I guessed it had something to do with the "WMI" we all know of but, that doesn't seem to be the case. The file itself was in %system32% so I am reluctant to delete it.
I don't mean houses, I mean websites.
I'm helping a friend of mine (who's a broker) put together a website for his agency. Right now his website looks pretty cruddy (sorry man but,...it's old looking) and their methods for managing listings has traditionally been to send the information to the guy that does the pages, on a 3.5" floppy and have him create a new page or change an existing one. So, they know nothing of dynamic pages really.
Having said that, anybody ever done a website for real estate companies before? Any pointers or suggestions you could make? Here's a list of "features" I got out of them during our first "what do you want" meeting:
- Listing Management Capabilities
- E-mail and contact information on the site
- Web Form for submitting e-mails
- Ability to manage floor plan images
- Page Statistics (see how many times a listing has been viewed, etc.)
- Recent Sales Listings
- Mapquest links (address/directions to Office and listings)
- Automated e-mail notifications
- Keyword/Search Engine optimization (to help them achieve higher rankings among search engines)
- Listing Search capability (search by number of bedrooms, price range, etc.)
- Newsletters sign-up
- FAQ page
- Latest News page
None of the technical issues behind doing this stuff has me worried...but I wonder if there's a good way to present it all that I don't know about in terms of the visual layout of the site. I want to make sure I get the color scheme right, working in all browsers, secure, etc. Anyway...comments are welcome.
Part of the reason I've been so quiet on the blog lately is that work has picked up in an exciting way. Our product, EVS, which is already in production use now at Exelon, has been given the green light to be put in at another big company. I'm not sure if I can mention the company name because of NDA's we've signed with them about the implementation, but they are a very large leader in the aerospace industry.
We also received word that another nuclear energy/power company got their budget approved and is going to buy the software this month. Seems like all the hard work is finally starting to pay off, which is always nice when you're the sole developer of something.
Hopefully now we can find some VC's interested in what we're doing now so that we can take EVS to where we have envisioned it. I wonder if someone like Scoble (or my readers) know the best places to find software VC's.
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