Archives

Archives / 2004 / December
  • Christmas Fun

    'Twas the night before Christmas,
    and all through the house,
    Not a creature was stirring,

    Especially my hot water heater,
    which decided to eat itself on Christmas Eve,
    the day before we host Christmas dinner for the extended family.
    Naturally.

  • Visual Studio 2005 November CTP install surprise

    After an interminable download, I finally installed the November CTP version of Visual Studio 2005. The first part of the install - the actual IDE - went without a hitch. The second part - MSDN Library - didn't go so well. It complained that Windows XP SP2 was a requirement for the MSDN Library install. Huh? Visual Studio doesn't require SP2, but the help does? Weird. I'm doing this all in a VM, so it's not really a problem to install SP2. It just seems like an odd requirement.

  • ISO CD burning

    Ever find yourself stuck on a Windows XP machine with only the built-in CD burning support but needing to burn an ISO image to CD? I did over the Thanksgiving. Luckily I ran across Burn-at-once. It's a nice, simple, free (donation-ware) tool that does the job nicely. Recommended.

  • Google Suggests

    The geek world is all a-flutter with the release of Google Suggest. My first reaction was "hey, neat". However, it quickly became clear that the hardcore tech stuff that I usually end up searching for (weird error messages that I'm trying to diagnose, or compiler errors, or things of that ilk) wasn't going to benefit much from the suggest feature. But hey, next time I'm looking for Paris Hilton's latest video, it'll be a snap.

  • No support for ASPCOMPAT in ASMX for Whidbey - disappointing

    According to this LadyBug post, Microsoft is not adding support for executing ASMX requests in an STA thread pool (ie the "ASPCOMPAT=TRUE" directive that is available for ASPX pages). This is something that I complained about long ago, and I'm very disappointed that it isn't being addressed in v2.0 of the framework.

  • I'm baaaack

    Wow, what a crazy few months it's been. First, my fiance moved in. Next, she ceased to be my fiance and became my wife. Our fabulous wedding was followed by a fabulous 2 week honeymoon in Fiji. Back home for a week and a half, then off to New York for a friend's wedding. From there we were off to Amsterdam for a couple of days - the get-over-jetlag stopover on our way to Tanzania. In Tanzania we went on an amazing 9 day hike up to the top of Kilimanjaro (proof below), followed by a week long safari. Six out of eights weeks away from home, 65 hours on planes - it's good to be home for a while. Now it's time to get back to doing real work, and hopefully a little more blogging.