Joe Levi

Before I get to the "begging for help" part, let me quickly tell you who I am:

• I'm a Senior Web Developer for a relatively large company. I use Visual Studio 2008, connect to SQL Server 2005, and use IIS6 on Server 2003.

• I own two copies of Visa Ultimate Edition (one for my Tablet PC, one for my Media Center server).

• I've had Windows Mobile devices since I replaced my Newton MessagePad 130 with a Casio Palm Sized PC (and currently have an AT&T Tilt).

• I was an early adopter of the XBOX Original.

• I bought one of the first Zune's to market.

• I use BlogEngine.NET to run my personal blog, and SharePoint 3 for my family portal.

• In short, I'm a Microsoft supporter through and through.

...

More  at source: http://blog.joelevi.com/post/2008/04/Open-Letter-to-Microsoft-about-my-XBOX360-Failure.aspx

Register.com will charge you, what, $35/year to register a domain name with them. Other domain registrars like GoDaddy are less than $10.

Why everyone doing business with Register.com hasn't jumped ship is entirely beyond me. I jumped years ago.

Today I got an email from register to "get big business email for a small business price."

They say "D. Joseph.Levi@thebiglerfamily.com" beats "joe (at) joelevi.com"

What?! I'm Joe, my website is JoeLevi.com, but for some reason my full name (with a space in it? I didn't think that was legal in a properly formatted email address) at some other domain that I registered for a client beats my "me at my site" address? Really?

Wow.

First of all, I really don't like MSIE7's rendering mode, but it is better than that of MSIE6.

MSIE8 (Beta 1) is expected to ship in "standards mode" by default, in other words, "not compatible with MSIE7 pages mode." That could be a problem.

I use Yahoo!'s YUI CSS libraries to "zero out" all the discrepancies between browsers so I have a clean slate on which to build. Most of the time it works pretty well -- until MSIE8.

Even in "standards mode" MSIE8 renders my pages MUCH differently than MSIE7, Firefox 2/3, and Safari 3. Why? No idea yet. In the meantime, here's how to make your pages load the same way in MSIE8 as they did in MSIE7.

To see how this magic works, head over to JoeTheWebGuy.net

Recently we started getting the following error message on our ASP.NET 2.0 web application running on IIS6.

• Exception type:
  • CryptographicException
• Exception message:
  • Padding is invalid and cannot be removed.
• Stack trace:
  • at System.Security.Cryptography.RijndaelManagedTransform.DecryptData(Byte[] inputBuffer, Int32 inputOffset, Int32 inputCount, Byte[]& outputBuffer, Int32 outputOffset, PaddingMode paddingMode, Boolean fLast)
  • at System.Security.Cryptography.RijndaelManagedTransform.TransformFinalBlock(Byte[] inputBuffer, Int32 inputOffset, Int32 inputCount)
  • at System.Security.Cryptography.CryptoStream.FlushFinalBlock()
  • at System.Web.Configuration.MachineKeySection.EncryptOrDecryptData(Boolean fEncrypt, Byte[] buf, Byte[] modifier, Int32 start, Int32 length, Boolean useValidationSymAlgo)
  • at System.Web.UI.Page.DecryptString(String s)
  • [...]

The application provides forms authentication as the login mechanism for the end-user.

To see how I fixed this see my article on JoeTheWebGuy.net.

"It says here that you're a professional 'booger?'" "Blogger."

That's the punch line from a comic at blaugh.com. Those of you have been following my posts for a while know that I've just been some guy on the Internet posting "stuff" from my life that I hope someone else out there will find helpful. I run ads and have a PayPal donation link if you want to shower me with money, but I've never done any of that to make money, more to just break even.

Well, today I'd like to officially announce, I've added the title of "Professional Blogger" to my resume' as I'm one of the bloggers on Lifetime Products new blog: Lifetime365. And no, I didn't pick the color scheme, and yes, it hurts my eyes when I look at it, too. Thank goodness for RSS Feeds!

I'll be cover MIX08 day by day, session by session over at my other blog, head over there for all the details: http://blog.joelevi.com/?tag=/mix08

Even the world's best blog is nothing if no one can find it. Making sure your pages are indexed by search engines (and optimized for that purpose) is a good start, but you need to let some other guys know, too. Those guys are known as ping servers.

Basically, when you post a new article you "ping" these servers with the address (permalink) of your new post, they then schedule a crawl to include your new post in their database, which is then spidered by others, including search engines.

So, how do you do this? You can do it manually, or you can add a list of ping servers to your blogging engine (most engines support this).

Check out my list at JoeTheWebGuy.net.