Tales from the Evil Empire

Continuous integration enables developers to have an automated way of validating the quality of their check-ins. A CI server will monitor your version control repository and on every check-in will build the project and at the very least run unit tests. If anything goes wrong (compilation error, failing test, etc.), the server will send e-mail to the team so the developer responsible for the faulty check-in can investigate and fix the problem.

I vaguely understand why this weird key combination from the 20th century offers some security advantage that somehow justifies that it’s still present on enterprise versions of Windows, but why does it have to be so hard and inaccessible?

It’s the week-end, which is the perfect time for a slightly off-topic post. It’s still engineering of sorts though in that it provides what I think is an original and cheap solution to a real problem.

I apologize for the neologism. What I’m going to demonstrate in this post is a technique I prototyped a few months ago to make it very easy to embed an ASP.NET page’s content in another page, even if it’s using another server technology. This of course works cross-domain.

I was writing a wiki page when it happened. The system restart dialog from Windows Update had been blinking helplessly in the task bar for a few hours as I didn’t have time for a reboot yet.

I’ve shown before how to generate thumbnails from ASP.NET server code using the WPF media APIs instead of GDI+ (which is unsupported when used in server code).

Dear readers, if you haven’t checked out the SEO Toolkit yet, you owe it to yourself to go there now, download it and start using it. Point it to your sites and it will explore them and give you a full report of all the little problems that are getting in the way of search engines.

As I’m in vacation, I thought I’d make a post on something different but still quite geeky. I really like to see how people set-up their video systems: there isn’t just one way to do it right and I can’t think of two friends of mine who have something even remotely similar. So I’ll describe my setting and invite you to drop me a comment and describe yours. I’ll also tag a few friends and ask them to describe theirs. I’ll post links here.