Archives
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Ben Lowery's HttpCompressionModule and Excluding Paths
We've had a lot of success using Ben Lowery's HttpCompression module in regards to cutting down our bandwidth on text intensive pages. The only problem we've had with using the compression module has been with existing pages that were using Response.Flush (it would throw up the "Server cannot append header after HTTP headers have been sent" exception) . Well, no problem, right? Ben's excellent module supports the ability to exclude paths in web.config. And this solution works great on our test machines. The problem was that when we went live, everything broke in regards to excluding paths. It would start throwing the "Server cannot append header after HTTP headers have been sent" all over again.
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Firefox 1.0 Released
Firefox 1.0 has been released today. Good times. Right now the link is being hammered, but some peeps at slashdot have posted mirrors. Btw, here's the default homepage when you install Firefox - hosted on google.com. Interesting...
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High Five to the MSDN Folks
I just accidently went to MSDN in IE, and wow! I say accidently because normally I'm running Firefox and MSDN used to be all jacked up in non-IE browsers. So, I just got in the habit of using IE for MSDN. But, my habit slipped and I hit the MSDN page in Firefox. I had to actually checked to see what browser I was using because I was so surprised to see the MSDN logo, and the bullet points not do crazy stuff. Good times, good times.
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Hactoring in Real Life
If you haven't checked out the Metasploit Framework yet, check it out. If you haven't heard of the thing, it's basically a tool for testing exploit code. But it comes with a bunch of exploits and payloads set up and ready to be ran against machines. I'm far from a hax0r, but I was able to open up a VNC connection to some random machine in my classroom that hadn't been patched in the last few weeks. Very impressive.
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wmdmlog.exe is dirty, dirty spyware
I rarely use IE anymore except to go to my banks site, because I guess their site developers are idiots and can't manage to create a simple four page site that works in Firefox. Anyways, while I'm on their site, I decided to browse on over to some other banks to see how friendly they were to Firefox. I'll repeat that because I think it bares repeating: I'm thinking of switching banks because my bank requires IE. Anyways, I accidently searched for 5/3 (actually, +5/3) in google from IE. When I load the page it briefly displays 5/3 bank at the top, but quickly a "IntelliMover Business Edition 3.5 - 5-Pack - Dell" pops up, along with "Jurlique - 3.5 Hour Relaxation Retreat." Not good times. So I run Spy Boy. I run Adaware. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. So I start going through my processes and BHOs. Nothing out of the ordinary in the processes, but I run across wmdmlog in my process list. I do a search on the ol' web, and I learn that wmdmlog is a support file for Media Player. Let me rephrase that, wmdmlog.dll is a support file for Media Player. Time to die wmdmlog.exe. Sure, enough, problem solved.
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What came next? Flamethrowers, of course
A couple weeks ago I thought I had a novel idea with spam poetry. Zero comments and zero referrals later, I felt like an idiot. But I noticed a couple of people finding me by searching for "What came next? Flamethrowers, of course." Not knowing why someone would be searching "flamethrowers of course," I hit up google. I found not only my spam poetry post as the source, but also uncovered The Register's Spam Poetry Contest. The first article from The Register was written two days after mine bringing up a contest for Spam Poetry. The coincidence doesn't end there, by god. Their follow up article from a couple of days ago ended with "What came next? Flamethrowers, of course."
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Spam or New Age Poetry?
I've been getting a big kick out of reading the text that's been accompany my spam to get around bayesian filters. I've found some of them oddly poetic, so I thought I'd share my poem I received about Vietnamese Girls. Perhaps I could write a book full of them. Maybe even get a grant.
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Looks like TODO-Driven Development has a pretty limited scope now
On the heels of SecretGeek's newest methodology, TODO-Driven Development, comes news that Microsoft has patented "A method, apparatus, and software are disclosed for assisting a software developer in managing tasks to be completed by providing a task list as a unified location for developers to locate errors and warnings in code, as well as specify user-defined tasks." Looks like this methodology will be limited to Microsoft technologies.
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Free e-Book - "Budget Design: Increase Profit by Improving Process"
For those who don't read Didier Hilhorst and Dan Rubin's weblog, Superfluous Banter, I thought I'd drop a line about their new e-Book "Budget Design: Increase Profit by Improving Process." It's a short little read, but it's the type of stuff anyone doing web work should be down with. And it's free for a short period of time (I think four more days...)
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Picking Color Schemes
One thing I've always had trouble with web development is coming up with color schemes. To be honest, every design I've been happy with mostly involved spending some time with the color picker tool in photoshop. I can recognize good color schemes, and even tell you why they are pleasing to the eye. Needless to say when Dave Shea wrote up some stuff on color schemes, I was all about it. Tons of great tips and articles in the comments too.
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Sizing Text with ems
Richard Rutter has a nice tutorial on sizing text with ems instead of using pixel based text sizes.
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Hardened PHP and, uh, adult oriented natured sites.
I've used PHP for quite a while now, but dropped it like a bag of rocks once ASP.NET came out. I still like following the project though, so when I saw an article on something called Hardened PHP I jumped right into the comments to get a "pulse" on what's happening. Anyways, one of the top rated comments was about a guy running a high volume site that deals in boobie pics, written in PHP. Followed by quite a few comments from people doing similiar work in PHP.
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Well, I guess if I ever need a Red Book...
In the past three days, Safari has posted 120 of IBM's Redbooks. MS Press has quite a few books on there, but it seems as of late there hasn't been as many posted. Luckily the phenominal addison-wesley series all seem to represent, but it would be nice to see some more .NET type books on that site.
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More Blogger and CSS.
I found a list of all the redesigns on Phil Ringnalda site. So here's a list of my favorites:
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The New Blogger.com and CSS
Over on StopDesign, Doug has a TREEEEmendous write-up about the redesign of the new Blogger.com. He's also thrown in some screen shots of the beautiful new templates, all CSS based and all standards compliant. Awesome stuff. Dan Cederholm's TicTac design is extra smooth.
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Removing WinFS (at your own risk of course)
I was a bit taken back by the memory consumed by the WinHEC build of Longhorn. It turns out WinFS is sucking up around 200mb of RAM. Well, as of right now I'm not planning on learning much about WinFS (nor do I have the resources in a VM to properly take advantage of it), so let's get rid of that sucker. To remove some components, I had to edit the C:\WINDOWS\INF\SYSOC.INF file (do so at your own risk, I'm just kinda winging it here in a VM, so I can easily start over). I had to remove the HIDE keyword from entries to be able to uncheck them in the Add/Remove Windows Components dialog. Once I did that I was able to go into add / remove items, and uncheck WinFS. 200mb of memory almost instantly reclaimed.
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Even humor is being outsourced. Ha ha from that! Booger.
Dave Barry takes on outsourcing.
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Longhorn 4074 on Virtual PC 2004. Good times.
I just installed the WinHEC build of Longhorn in a Virtual PC, and everything is smoooooooooooooth. I actually left the computer, did some laundry, played some Splinter Cell, and came back to see if the thing had crashed remembering the ordeals of the PDC build with a VM. To my surprise, it was up and running. Granted, it was 640x480 w/ 16 colors, but a quick install of the Virtual Machine Addins took care of that. I really is running great on my machine. I should mention that I've been working on my machine tuning it for VMs so it probably runs better than a lot of people out there. Here's what I got:
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Font Add-In for Reflector
Feel free to ignore everything posted here. Reflector has a switch, /fontsize:14 that would do the samething. The moral of the story, as always, is that I'm an idiot. I'll leave this posted so people can point and laugh at me.
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Square Man Hole Covers
I'm out of town again this week in the lovely city of Cincinatti. The last time I was here I managed to watch exactly 19 episodes of Law & Order. And two episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Because that is probably not good for the mental health, I decided to stop by the book store and grab some reading materials. My first thought was that I'd grab the Test Driven Development and Object Thinking book. Unfortunately, my local bookstore is ran by clowns. When it comes to computer books, you run into two barriers. Barrier #1: Lack of new materials. It seems this particular book store has been pretty lazy about getting the latest and greatest computer books in stock (and based on the fact that they still have a book on the .NET Building Blocks on the shelves, I'm not surprised).
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The Dreaded 70-320 / 70-310 Exam
I promised a while back in my post about the 25% of MCSD / MCAD related tests post to write up some more stuff, and I've managed to not write a single thing. The moral of the story, as usual, is I'm not to be trusted. To correct that, without further ado, a little help on the dreaded 70-320 / 70-310 exam.
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Holy Crap, they are coming to Louisville
I notice that the Visual Basic World Tour is coming to beautiful Louisville, KY. Normally the 16th largest city in the US gets the shaft when it comes to Microsoft events so I usually miss out on these things while Cincinatti (aka the armpit of america) gets all the love. But not this time baby! Granted it is “only” the Visual Basic World Tour, but it's a step in the right direction, and not something cool like DevDays or even AdminNights (bow chica wa-wa). But it's a step in the right direction. The right direction being, as usual, me getting more free uglyass XL t-shirts.
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ooooh, this is one nasty IE vulnerbility
There's a pretty nasty vulnerbility in IE's ITS protocol. CERN has a write up about it. Here's a proof of concept that over writes your wmplayer.exe, and launches it. Definitely not good times here. Overwriting system files and basically launching whatever code you want.
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More Ego Stroking Google Searches
Follow Adam's lead, here are some of the searches the frequently drop people at my site according to my referal log:
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70-310/70-320 and COM+
No more than 45 minutes after I post a comment about writing more about the certification tracks do I get inspiration to write a post about an exam and taking courses to meet objectives required by those exams. And if you are my loyal reader, you know that my inspiration is 99% anger.
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25% Off MCP Tests
Pearson Vue seems to be running a promotion to get people Microsoft Certified and has sent me a code where you can get 25% off MCP exams. Register for the discounted exam online at www.pearsonvue.com/ms or call at 1-800-TEST-REG. The code is MSUU2C8E0456 (that's a zero after the E).
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Breaing People's Hearts
One of the best parts of my job as an MCT is when people come in with problems that have been tying them up for weeks (or even months), and you are able to get them a solution and make sure they understand why it works. The worst part of being an MCT? When a client comes in, tells you about some software they purchased for $300,000 and they can't figure out how to audit the updates as required by the government. And you have to tell them that $300,000 piece of software that they purchased was written by idiots.
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Performance Testing Data Driven Website
As an MCT for a CTEC, I'll get some pretty insane questions from sales people looking to help out local companies to help drum up business. One of the all time greats was a company that wasn't sure that ASP and SQL Server could meet their needs for a “high demand” website because they were experiencing extreme slowdowns. In fact, things were so bad that they would stop taking orders for hours at a time to let ASP “catch up.” The high demand site? They were taking ticket orders online for a play. They had a total of 30,000 total tickets to sell and they were selling about 100 an hour. Ok, so something is seriously wrong with their code I figure. What someone could possibly do to drive SQL Server and ASP to below 2 requests per second I had no idea. So the sales guy goes and visits the center to talk about me coming in and doing some ASP training for these people.
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Going into Rory and Stickfigure Withdrawl...
Hmmm, Rory and his ghetto hosting provider seem to have gotten all choked up. Why Rory didn't think to check for the “minimum query memory is not available“ exception is beyond me (I mean, come on). I'm actually hosted by the same people as Rory at my site, and I'm not having any problems at all. Interesting.
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A Humble Request for the MSDN Homepage
Can someone @ MSDN throw a padding: 0 into the CSS for the MSDN homepage for ordered and unordered list? I don't know why, but this drives me insane. I of course can live with it if the CSS head haunchos don't want CSS to that takes into account browsers besides IE, but it seems like a doable request.
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Dropping F-Bombs in the Windows Source
The BBC is running an article about why the release of the Windows source code is bad for Microsoft. One of the problems is that it is “littered with profanity.” Judging by some of Raymond's posts, I'm not surprised.
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SlashRory.org
Found a pretty cool site called Mix Master. It takes the layout from one site, the content from a second site and mixes them together. The obvious thing to do is take infamous Microsoft whore and baby seal clubber Rory, and mix his site with Slashdot giving us SlashRory.org.
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Latest Update to IE?
Someone sent me this link today regarding the “latest security update to IE.”
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The Creative Process
I ran across a cool quote by William Goldman (he wrote the Princess Bride) in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?:
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Performance of Nine Languages Compared
OSNews has an article comparing the performace of different languages to each other. C# kills VB.NET in the IO category. Why? Take a look at the VB code vs C#.