Archives
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Ebay and your credit card info
One of my students just got a spam message telling him to update his eBay account information. Looks pretty professional, and IE tells him the url it takes him to cgi5.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?accupdatev
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Make your own IE Patch
Via slashdot, some enterprising individuals released a “patch” for IE's url spoofing vulnerability. The problem is that it has some pretty nasty buffer overflow vulnerabilities itself. While you have to respect the “if MS isn't going to do it, I'll do it myself!” attitude, you know some conversation happened like this:
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Real
Frank has a great set of links regarding the Real suit against Microsoft. Real Media needs to stop installing spyware and BUFFERING BUFFERING BUFFERING BUFFERING write some software that doesn't suck. Pretty much the only format I like to see videos encoded in is QuickTime or DivX. I still haven't really bothered to figure out what the difference between ASF and WMV files are. All I know is that I can download them...sometimes. Has anyone in the history of the internet had an enjoyable experience using streaming video ala Real or Microsoft's streaming video? The only time it is appropriate is for live events. Otherwise, give me an opportunity to download it while I'm cooking dinner, and let me watch it without buffering.
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The Ol' Apache vs IIS Netcraft Story
Reading the comments to this article on Slashdot made me vomit in my mouth. Hey, Apache is great. It's free! My sister is paying $3 a month for a decent host for service. How are they able to charge so little? Because they pay nothing for the software, and the have some pretty talented people working there for real cheap. But reading through the comments about people switching to Apache because IIS is hard to configure, applications crash on it more (wtf?) and that IIS is chock full of holes and are constantly being hacked is just plain retarded.
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KYdotNET Tomorrow
My plan is to make it up to the KYdotNET meeting tomorrow. If you are going to be there, drop me a line in my comments. If I do go, I'll probably be the 24 year old wearing a navy blue sweatshirt with a hood and blue jeans. It's the only clean clothes I have left for tomorrow. As many geeks will probably be wearing that same outfit, just look for the handsome, suave and modest guy wearing the navy blue sweatshirt with some blue jeans. I'll keep you guys updated on what I'm wearing so that people can spot me in case I either 1) do laundry 2) buy more clothes 3) just wear something that's laying on the floor and doesn't smell that bad.
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sTICKEYkEYS
Sometimes I'll go to type something in, and I'll be holding down the shift key. Lock, loaded and ready to write one kick ass sentence. The problem is that my brain kinda forgets what I'm doing. No big deal, I'm used to it. But the next thing I know BEEP StickeyKeys has turned on. And in a rush of confusion that can only be brought on by when your brain is at idle and suddenly gets beeped at, I simply hit enter. God help me at this point. Pressing shift acts like the caps lock key, the caps lock key seemingly makes the little light on the keyboard mean the opposite of whatever it indicates, and I'm pretty sure the Scroll look key and the SysRq keys switch functions too. Any combination of shift, caps lock and the letter n seemingly simply set caps lock to the opposite of whatever I think it should be at that point.
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KYdotNet: Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
Next Tuesday the local INETA group is meeting and Tim Landgrave is presenting a topic on Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability. Normally, making it to these meetings is kinda a pain for me so I've never actually gone to them (everytime I've had a free Tuesday evening it's been something like “Using Delegates” or something else insanely boring). Anyways, as of right now I think I'll have that night free, and I'd to see some other people's ideas on application performance and scalability. I can't help but think that he'll simply be presenting the “Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalibility” Patterns & Practices or rehash of what was in the webcast (I can't find a link for it, anyone?) based on the name. Tim is the RD for Louisville, so perhaps that might be interested to hear him talk.
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Logging on as SA. It Never Fails
From books on-line:
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Football Loving Geek
Like any good football loving geek (I was nicknamed the Michael Vick of Intramural Football at my college BTW), I was intrigued by our current situation involving USC, LSU and OU. I personally think that Michigan is going to beat USC and OU will beat LSU, so I really am not going to get flustered over that aspect of the polls. But really has me interested is the statistics part of things. Now, I never strived in my statistics courses (I called the courses sadistics 101), but you throw football into the mix and suddenly I want to bust out the TI-83 and come up with my own computer rankings to rule them all.
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Stupid Install Tricks
I never knew this, so it's new to me (duh). Anyways, if you press shift-F10 during a windows setup you get a command prompt. What's the importance of this? You can play freecell while setup runs.
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Don't Make me Think
One of my favorite books on usability is Don't Make Me Think by Steven Krug. One of my favorite examples he presented in the book was the old BN.com “Quick Search” button. It left you wondering, even just briefly, if there was a more in depth search option that might take longer, but return better results. -
Graphic Designers and Longhorn
After seeing Adam Kinney's Snow Covered Textboxes, it has become clear: I need to get my sister developing with Longhorn. My sister is pretty wicked good at Illustration, and is currently working as a graphic designer in Indy. But she grew up with computers, just like me, and has always displayed an uncanny knack for being technically oriented, but never really got into anything because she's more artistically oriented. -
'Tis the Season
The guys at Penny Arcade have started an Amazon.com wish list for the kids at the Seattle Children's hospital with amazing results. Check out all the goodies these kids have in store for them at the Child's Play section of their site. We are talking PS2s, Gameboys, DVD...the works.
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Subtle Initialization Fun
Quick, what's going to happen in scenario #1 vs scenario #2:
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Some Cool Icons
I've been exploring the Glyfz website that the man, the legend Mike Gunderloy pointed towards in a recent daily grind. Pretty nice looking images, but since most of my apps are ran in house, I have no real reason to drop even 60 bucks on some images when I have the Common7\Graphics folder at my disposal. -
Gradient Ahoy!
I've been playing around with Longhorn, and checking out the Whidbey demos, and it's become clear there must be a position some place deep within the bowels of Microsoft that is perfect for me based on my past hacks I've taken at Graphic Design:
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Value PC
Being the nice son and daughter that me and my sis are, we decided to hook my mom up with a computer. For the record, my mom is the reason I have any semblance of computer skills. She and my dad purchased a 286/16mhz beast of a machine way back in the day for my sister and I. They upgraded that to a 486 and later to a 200mhz pentium before I took over the PC purchasing for the fam damily. She also showed me the ways of DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, and showed me the tao of keyboard shortcuts. She helped me install my first modem, even though she had no clue either. Good times.
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A Toaster Running .NET?
I ran across this article on OS News about Microsoft's partnership with the TRON OS (which is used in billions of electronics devices). Interesting to me was:
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Java is the SUV of Programming Languages
No mention of the students struggling with .NET, yet they have all the power and then some on the Java people.
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ASP.NET and ADO.NET 2.0
I felt guilty about reading the outlines for these two books: A First Look at ASP.NET 2.0 and A First Look at ADO.NET and System.Xml v 2.0. Not guilty enough to not post it of course.
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More Cert stuff
As a follow up to the previous post, I thought I'd jot down some thought on the subject of real world vs certs. Perhaps I should reword that. How about certs in addition to real world experience?
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MS Exams
I received an e-mail today regarding the Microsoft Exams. It seems they are moving back to the old format where they tell you what your score was, and even break down the exam so you know what to work on if you had some weak spots. I for one welcome this new change. Of course, you hear a lot of people in the training and certification industry harping on “if it's green, it's green.” The theory behind that is the exams cover such a wide range of topics, that if you do know 75% of the concepts you are doing pretty darn good. We rarely have someone score a 100% on an exam, and if they did we were pretty sure they were using study aids like brain dumps and other illegal study guides. But it was also pretty nice to see those high scores on the ol' VB6 exams :-).
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Poor Design Choice of the Day
What would possess someone to make a drop downlist to choose a time zone that looks like this:
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Critical Updates are Ready to be Installed
I'm pretty guilty when it comes to keeping on top of install “critical updates.” Many times, the little ballon pops up when I'm actually doing something on my computer. Reading an article, playing solitare or perhaps even doing work seems to be it's favorite time to pop up. I've gotten pretty good at dismissing it. Remind me in three days I tell it. I'm not really scared of my PC being hosed by the updates, my concern is having to restart my computer. If I'm at work, I'm probably in the middle of something, or getting ready to start something else. No time for a reboot!
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PDC
Ohmph. I couldn't pull the trigger on going to the PDC. My brain is definitely mad at me, it knows that going there would be a TREEEEmendous venture. But as Garth would say “Live in the now, man. You'll never afford it!” Plane tickets plus hotel, plus cost of admission would pretty much wipe out my weak savings that I've been trying to build up. All for what I really viewed as a geek vacation where I could get some cool toys. Hopefully those toys will be available on MSDN or to MCTs shortly after the PDC, and looking at the list of PDC bloggers I know I'm in good hands when it comes to trusting others to make sure I can stay ahead of the curve.
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Friday Fun
Three day weekend coming up, and I've stocked up on the video games :-). Not really, but it does seem I've purchased quite a few games in the recent weeks. I've been pretty into Madden 2004. It has a new feature called owner mode where you have almost compelte control over a team. Sell the naming rights, upgrade the stadium, set the cost on the beer. All kinds of stuff. Make enough money to bring in the big name coaches and training staffs, fill up the roster with studs and play away. A true football geek heaven. I know people who have bought the game and have yet to actually play an actual football game. They are just simulating the game out. Crazy.
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At my signal, unleash hell.
In a car crash kinda way, I was really interested in seeing what the SoBig worm was going to try to do. Hopefully now that they've identified the servers they'll be able to dissect the payload.
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WORM_MSBLAST.D
It appears there is a new variant of the MSBLAST worm that patches your machine against the DCOM overflow. Keith should expect the black helicopter's any momment now.
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We stay up late so that you don't have to.
I guess I'm the anti-Gunderloy. Historically, like most geeks, I do my best work in the middle of the night. I might be a “night person,” but I think I just feel a little guilty “playing” on a computer during the day. If it's sunny, I could be outside running. If it's raining, I could be cleaning my apartment. But at night, the only thing I have is late night SportsCenter, girl gone wild infomercials and a couple .NET books I've been meaning to dig into. And a wide awake brain.
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KYdotNET.org
I finally got around to signing up for the KY .NET user group recently and I totally forgot about it. You see, the last update to their homepage is has news of Service Pack 1 for 1.0 of the framework; I assumed the group was dead. Anyways, I get an e-mail announcing that they'll be having their august meeting, with a talk presented by Chris Atkins. I fired up google and found out he has a weblog. Kinda cool, even if it is powered by cold fusion. Taking a look around I noticed a link to M. Keith's weblog, right here on ASP.NET Weblogs. Using my powers of deduction, I figure that makes three .NET webloggers in the great city of Louisville (16th largest city in the US).
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Ughhh...network admin time
One of the worst part of being a software guy is that everyone assumes you'd in turn be good at network admin / pc support tasks. And the kicker is you probably are, but being the network admin sucks, and they are just tedious tasks. The network admin can very well get out of doing something by pushing it off to a programmer by saying “sorry, I don't program.” Someone asks what's wrong with their PC, I can't say “sorry, I don't know” because then I get a funny look and the question “I thought you were good with computers.”
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Underrated .NET Classes
Inspired by Bill Simmon’s list of underrated movies, here’s my list of the top eight underrated classes in the .NET framework.
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sp_DontDoIt
A lot of developers commonly prefix their stored procedures with sp_. sp stands for stored procedure, and that's how Microsoft did their stored procedures, so that should be the naming convention, right? Nope. Sp stands for system procedure. As for a naming convention, I personally like usp if I'm going to use one. Frankly speaking though, enterprise manager, ADO.NET and query analyzer kinda make prefixing stored procedures with sp a bit pointless if you ask me, so I don't use them at all.
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Command Prompt Drag and Drop
Brian's post about dragging and dropping assemblies onto the toolbox was pretty cool. Didn't know that.
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Customer Controls You Can't Live Without
Today during class I demonstrated Janus System's GridEx control. Big hit. I think I actually probably sold two copies of the thing by just showing the class the Northwind demo of it. Anyways, anyone have a custom control they can't live without? One preferrably with a free demo version I can play with (or a free copy for me to use in class would be cool too).
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If Everyone Jumped Off A Bridge...
Didn't mean to start a PDC cost analysis flame war. I was just hoping to buy the DVDs of the conference. But all this peer pressure and Scoble's talk of the PDC has pushed me to the edge. I checked my schedule, and I'm scheduled to teach an Intro to Programming class. This, I can get around. As for plane tickets, I might be able to finnagle my mom's frequent flyer mileage with a little pity party. As for the $1600, well, hmmm. Hope my girlfriend will like coupons for backrubs for her birthday (side note: she would). Truthfully, I could probably drum up $1600 doing consulting work by then.
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PDC
I was going to post this in Pascal's comments in response to Robert, but what the heck:
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Microsoft's DOS Attack
I saw a link on MSDN about the DoS that was targeted at Microsoft. Cool I thought, I always like reading how people go about fixing these problems. No dice, it was just blah blah blah we contacted the authorities, no problems with MS software. Boring...
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Exchange Server 2003 Loadfest?
I just got done tweaking our site to feature the Exchange Server 2003 Loadfest. I've personally never heard of this before, but from what I've gathered is that you bring your own server to our center, and basically walk through a one day course with your system so when you get back to the office you've been there done and done that. Has anyone ever gone to one of these? Has anyone taught one of these? Does anyone actually rip out their rackmounted server and drag it in? :-).
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Ordering Pizza Online
Pizza Hut recently started offering online ordering of pizza. Papa Johns has had this for a while, and I've had great success with it. I hate ordering pizza on the phone. Using coupons is a pain, but if you don't they'll seemingly throw out some number for a price that always seems way to high for one or two pizzas. Plus you are running about a 30% risk the kid on the phone is checking out a cute customer and not paying attention to you.
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My Probably Unpopular Opinion of Edit and Continue
I don't see what the big deal about edit and continue in VB.NET is all about. Sure unit testing will save your soul, but I am willing to be that 99% of all VB.NET applications aren't using unit testing, and probably never will. Why? They probably aren't developing that many classes. Does that make them bad people or bad programmers. To me, no. They are simply putting together applications from existing components that have been unit tested. How would you exactly unit test a webform?
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VB.NET in Full Effect
So I just watched the video (thanks Julia) for the VB.NET Whidbey. My ears hurt from the scretching, and my eyes hurt from squinting, and I had a good chuckle at how easy those smart tags are working :)
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Infopath for the Web?
Does anybody have a recommendation for a tool like InfoPath, but for the web? ASP.NET, ASP.OLD, PHP, Perl, whatever. We get a lot of questions like this: "We need to create a survey on our website that would put data into our blah blah blah database. What class should I take?" And the answer is never easy. We are talking like power users of Excel or Frontpage. But even still, in my head I know I could knock that out in probably three hours in ASP.NET. But it would take someone at least 6 months of hard work to get to even a beginning understanding of ASP.NET, ADO.NET and C#/VB.NET.
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necho
I have a small favor to ask to those on the (not) echo group. Can we call "feeds" wafers. Like necho wafers. That would really make my day.
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I'll be damned
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70-310 and Safari
It appears Safari is adding a lot of Que's training guide books, including Mike's 70-310 training guide. In the past two weeks I think I've gotten at least seven people to sign up from my classes at work. I wish I would have given them another shot earlier than I did.
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DoNotCall .NET
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More Validation and Cancel
Edit Big Time: Setting e.Cancel = false in the form closing event actually let's you exit the program. Go figure. And I feel like an idiot for not figuring this out sooner. Is today still Monday or something?
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Validating and Closing a Form
Ok, I give. If you set e.Cancel = true in a validating event (for a textbox for example), how can you make it so the form can be closed? Like clicking the X or even calling me.Close.
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Missing the Future
In regards to the (in)famous Missing Future article, I just wanted to throw in my somewhat related rambling.
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Underpant Gnomes
Kent's suggestion to build your own compiler reminded me of my great idea. A new programming language called D-Flat. It would be C# without the stupid case sensitivity.
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Testing User Input
Scott Lock's post about people wanting to enter 1-800-CALL-ATT into a phone field reminded me of a data entry "problem" some students of mine ran into a couple years ago. Keep in mind that while I live in the wonderful city of Louisville (15th largest US city), it happens to be surrounded by Kentucky. Anyways, these students from eastern Kentucky (think the Hatfields' home) happened to be doing some type of batch updates. If I recall correctly, they were trying to get a whole bunch of records from one hospital merged into another system. Problem was, in this batch of seemingly properly formated data, it was failing to do the update. So they went to task finding the problem record.
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70-310
Lorenzo is looking into the 70-310 exam. Not to scare you, but that exam was easily the hardest exam of the MCSD.Net track in my opinion. The problem that I had going into the exam was the title was basically yelling out "XML Web Services" so I was like "oh, just throw on a WebMethod attribute, a little WSDL and a way I go." The problem is the "and Server Components." They really should have called the exam ".NET distributed applications." I think I got more questions on remoting than XML Web Services, which would surprise a lot of people who take the tests without looking at the exam matrix (which happens a lot, many people failed the VB6 exams because they thought the knew VB back and forth. The problem, they didn't know jack about COM).
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Almost Free Full Tech Books
After signing up for Safari for a trial membership, I decided to go ahead keep it on a subscription basis. Well, not a week goes by and I have already filled up my bookshelf. You see, when you sign up you get to choose how big you want your bookshelf to be, the smallest being five bookshelves and the largest being thirty. If you "check out" a book, you must keep it on the bookshelf at least thirty days. That means if you have a five slot bookshelf, and you check out five books on the first day, it will be thirty more days until you can grab another one. It became pretty clear that a ten slot bookshelf just wasn't going to cut it for me, so I decided to go balls out and get the thirty slot bookshelf. Even I would be pressed to read thirty books in thirty days. I've managed to fill up 20 slots, but in a week a couple of my books should be available to be removed in case any new books become available that I'm interested in paging through.
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Microsoft Concedes Defeat?
Microsoft recently announced that they were dropping IE for the Mac because Safari is better due to it having access to the underlying Mac API (see Scoble for a bunch of relevant links. I guess you could have figure that out for yourself though). Besides all the irony involved in this, it just doesn't seem like Microsoft to just give up on a market. I just don't get it, especially coming after the announcement that IE can't be upgraded without a change to the underlying OS. But here's my knee-jerk reaction.
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Mozilla/IE Control
You know what would be a neat control? A wrapper for the IE webbrowser control AND the mozilla brower chumpy. It would have basically an enumeration that let's you choose which one the control creates, and have it delegate the calls to the control of your choosing. Maybe a method called IsMozillaInstalled would be nice too. Really should be easy to create I would think. Of course, I'm a complete idiot when it comes to COM interop.
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emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf
I decided to start reading Open Source Web Development with LAMP over on Safari to broden my horizons. Everything is going fine until I get to this paragraph in the intro:
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IIS 6.0, Content-Encoding: gzip
Today I decided to play around with IIS 6.0 and kick the tires when it came to gzip support. IIS 5.0 was all but useless when it came to gzip unless you had some serious cash to buy third party support for it, so I was interested to see if gzip even worked. My first problem was just finding the darn thing, and I feel like an idiot for even having to post how to find the options for enabling compression. But I am an idiot, so this kinda all works out. What you need to do is hop into IIS manager, and right click on the Web Sites folder. Not the computer, not the default web site, not a folder but the web sites folder. Bring up the properties window, and the last tab is called Service. It looks a little something like this:
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Moving to Firebird/Phoenix
I moved to Firebird about a month ago. I've had some sort of gecko based browser on my machine for a while, mainly for testing out web pages and making sure they worked in non-IE browsers. After a while I found that if I designed solely for Gecko browsers, then the sites would look fine in Opera/Gecko and usually IE. The only problems I had where simply bugs in the IE CSS rendering engine, and it looks like implementing something like max-width can't be done without a change to the underlying OS.
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Backups and Decompiling
Pascal is in need of heLP after a terrible crash at the worst of time: no recent backups and was asking about decompilers.
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Web Matrix and Theming
In case you missed it, Nikhil has posted a screenshot of the new Web Matrix. Looks pretty cool, but I'm wondering about the theming comment. Now, is web matrix simply taking advantage of the built in windows theme, or are they doing something magical to give their app a new theme.
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vLane and MSDN
I was also curious about vLane.com. I get a lot of students in my classes where purchasing VS.NET along with all the server software just gets to be astronomical cost wise for them, so I've been pointing them to vLane.
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Ramblings
I installed ASP.NET on our production server to get our website running against 1.1. No problems with the main app, the problem is with *my* weird site that I had setup to play with in class to demonstrate XSS attacks. I went to show how easy it is to send things like session data and the such, and the stupid ValidateRequest blocked my attempt. Argh :)
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Software Legends
I've been reading a little of the TechEd propaganda about the "Software Legends" that will be giving presentations this afternoon. That combined with the hours spent playing NBA Street Vol.2 recently has got my mind acting silly. You see, in NBA Street you unlock "Street Legends" as you progress through the games, along with throwback jerseys. So now I'm wondering if they'll be giving out throwback geek shirts at the contest. You know, like MS Bob or Win95 t-shirts. Heck, maybe even go old school and get a MS-DOS mesh hat. Heck, I already have a G. Andrew Duthie playing card, so I guess anything is possible.
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C#ase Sensitive
I've been doing a lot of training for companies moving to VB.Net and one of the big reasons that keeps coming up in why they aren't moving to C# is the case sensitivity of C#. And the only answer I have to why C# is case sensitive is that C/C++ and Java are case sensitive, and C# is designed to be a language comfortable to those developers.
But then the question is: Who in their right mind would ever leverage the ability to have a function named SquareRoot and another one named squareRoot in the same namespace? Imagine a dialog between two developers, Steve and I'm Too Damn Smart for My Own Good -
Holy Crip! Passport is crappled!
http://securityfocus.com/archive/75/320768/2003-05-05/2003-05-11/0
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64bit
Well ain't that a pisser. With all the talk about the Opteron out there, AMD got me giddy at the thought of 64bit fun, dual proc workstation fun. But alas, my hopes and dreams have been dashed yet again.
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No elephant books.
I can't sit on my wallet, because my credit card is burning.
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Close, Dispose and Zombie.
I was digging around with Anakrino after I read that calling Dispose on a connection removes the object from the connection pool. From what I can tell, they are mistaken (of course it is 2:30am, hey prove me wrong if you are reading this. hello, is this thing on???). Anyways, I thought it was funny that SqlTransaction has a "Zombie" method that nulls itself off. All I could think about was SET ISOLATION LEVEL NEED BRAAAAINS. I'm drunk again by the way.
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VB.NET, Stack, Heaps, Pointers and Causing a Nuisance
Just got done teaching the "Object Oriented Programming in Visual Basic .NET." Imagine taking the stereotypical Mort and transforming them into Super Morts. Good times. We had a good time playing "guess the value" as I passed in structs and classes into functions ByRef and ByVal. I think they all began to understand what's going on in the scene, and why things work the way they do.
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VS.NET 2003 Evaluation Guide
The Microsoft Download Center feed just alerted me to the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Evaluation Guide. 308 pages of wonderful VS.NET / .NET propaganda.
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CSS Stuff
Pretty cool site for setting up three column pages in CSS. I'm going to be doing some code-review on our companies site, and one of the things I'll probably look into doing is weening us from a table based layout too a full CSS layout. I used this templating tool that I found via Fabrice's tool list. For the simple layout stuff I do, it has worked great for me.
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VS.NET 2003 in the classroom
I'm currently in the process of setting up my course for next week, Programming in VB.NET. Basically a 5-day class to get VB6 people up and running in .NET land. Creating more Morts I guess. Anyways, this is the first class I'm teaching that has a new version of VS.NET out, and I'm not too sure how to handle this in the classroom. In my previous classes, I had a copy of the beta shared out on my instructor machine that people could install and play around with if they so desired. I think maybe only 5 people actually installed it in the classroom, and they did so on a Friday just to see if 2003 would in fact run SxS w/ 2002.
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IsoBuster
G. Andrew Duthie (would it just be G.? Andrew?) is talking about ISOs and how to work with them. If you dig around you may find an old XP PowerToy that will add the ability to right click on an ISO file and "burn to CD." Unfortunately they pulled, from what I'm told is an issue with data corruption. Of your ENTIRE hard drive. Not quite sure how something that takes a file and writes it to your burner can hose a HD, but download at your own risk. I don't have a link because it was pulled from MS's Powertoy's site, but I've seen rogue copies here and there.
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cl OpenBSD.cpp /GS?
Is this the same as the /GS option in VC++ and with from what I understand Windows 2003 Server? The only real reading I've done on this is Sam's article, and from what I understand is that they are doing the same StackGuard type prevention. Am I right?
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I'm a Mort!
And a wall poster whore too I guess. Show me the poster!.
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Certifications
Ok, more talk about Certifications going on from Kirk, Duncan and Joshua talking about certifications. I have some certs, and I plan on getting some more. Mostly because taking those tests is a personal goal with a definite results. Right now I'm aiming for finishing my MCDBA, but I'm slacking because the tests I need to pass are admin related. Well, I'm not much of an admin. Yet. I have tons of resources available to me because of my job (MCTs get all the MOC courseware to download), and lots of talented people around me to pick their brains. Hopefully the end result will be a smarter, more admin-savy Phil.
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Friday Shenanigans
Don't click this if you are someplace where it would be considered inappropriate to see a puppy peeing on a laptop [via Hard|OCP].
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The Sports Guy and Iron Mike
I'm a big fan of sports writing and I think Bill Simmon is one of the best out there. He has a TREEEEmendous article about Mike Tyson and his pigeons. My whole perspective on Mike Tyson just hooked.
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Mozilla for Testing Web Apps
Normally, I try to avoid Slashdot articles because reading about MS stuff is like watching FoxNews cover the democratic national convention. But here's an article that while poorly written does have a good point Using Mozilla in testing and debugging web sites. The article is pretty much just showing how much better Mozilla is than IE for debugging websites, but it still points out some nice features of Mozilla. One thing it does leave off is Checky. Checky does all sort of validation on your pages. Normally you just hit F10 and the agent runs (which I have it do HTML and CSS validation), but I'm having trouble with the beta 1.4 version of Mozilla. Still a great tool. If your website isn't displaying properly in Mozilla, you probably goofed on the CSS someplace that IE is letting you get away with.
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Pocket TaskVision
.NET Compact Framework Sample: Pocket TaskVision via the Download Center feed.
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Wide Spread Piracy
CNet is reporting that a volume license key is already floating around the net for Windows 2003 Server which "could lead to widespread piracy of the software." They go on to mention the fact that Microsoft will make it impossible for people to update their servers that are using this key. I cannot comprehend why one would install a server that can't be updated. I guess the same type of people that would run their company on stolen server software are the same type of people that wouldn't update their server too.
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SimCity Updates
Totally off topic, but SimCity holds a special place in my heart because the original SimCity was what got me hooked on computers. Anyways, Simcity 4 had some bugs that prevented the biggest sky-scrapers from appearing. If you want to see something scary, check out their message boards. People were threatening lawsuits against Maxis, demanding that the patch be released immediately, and making all kinds of threats about Maxis telling them to tell a date they will release the patch, and Maxis could only tell them soon. Be thankful that you only have to develop mission-critical software, and not games for 15 year olds. SimCity.com has a poem for the patch:
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VMWare 4.0
VMWare 4.0 is out. Upgrade (you do already own VMWare, don't you?) for $99.
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More SharpReader
One little cool feature I found while playing with SharpReader. I was dragging links around from Brad's site, and it was adding them with no problem. Until I got ot Ingo's site. It couldn't add the site for some reason. So I went to Ingo's site, found the RSS uri and did it myself. Weird, I wonder why drag and drop doesn't work for that site. Well, it seems it uses some sort of hueristics to make a good guess at the RSS file for a webpage. I had actually been dragging links to the blogs, not the rss file from Brad's site. Neat-o. Not perfect (adding Tim's site picked up the uri for the MSDN feeds for his feed), but still a nice little feature.
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OPML
I'm playing around with the highly acclaimed SharpReader, slowly adding in a bunch of links. Anyone willing to post their OPML file with their links of .NET (and development in general) file? Adding in dotnetweblogs.com RSS helps cover a lot of the blogs I read, but there are still 100s more it seems.
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browseCaps
Mitch was asking about an updated Browsecaps file. Supposively, CyScape is keeping this updates. All you have to do is give them your life story so they can probably spam the hell out of you in exchange for a browseCaps.ini file from freakin' Feb 2000. Great....
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More InfoPath
As Don said: "It's important to note (as James Snell does) that InfoPath was developed by the Office team for the Office customer. "
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Code Bloooooat
Sam has discovered the wonders of .NET sucking up disk space. Although, I'd be surprised at it already eating up 6GB with just the OS. I've got VS.NET 2002, all of Office 2003, and SQL Server and right now I'm at 5.5gb. If I was to take a guess, it would be a paging file out of control. Right now, w/ 512mb of ram the max size is set to 1.5gb. I'd image that if you had 1gb of RAM, it would swell to 3gb. I mean, it's hard to imaging that you could get 6gb of data from one CD :)
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All the Rage
Stuck at work setting up my class, so I've decided to blow some time with this BlogShares thingy after seeing Scott and Eli joining on. Now I just need to figure out who to invest in.
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impersonation enable="true"
I'm curious to how many people are simply adding ASPNET to their logins in SQL Server instead of using impersonation. Most books I've read simply don't mention it. My 2310 course (Developing an ASP.NET Web App) only faintly mentions it as an option in configuring your app.
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C# vs VB.NET books and the such
Don mentioned the fact that the C# version of the books have been doing much better sales wise than their VB.NET brother (or little sister depending on who you ask). I happen to have been collecting some data on the training worldwide in a side project from our corporate headquarters, www.newhorizons.com. Now based solely on the dates on the website as of two weeks ago, here's the breakdown in scheduling of the classes. I should mention that I don't speak for New Horizons or even my individual center. I just went to their website and grabbed data. Break it down:
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Essential ASP.NET
With Sam raving about Fritz Onion's Essential ASP.NET book, I decided to pick a copy up myself. Heck, it meets Phil's Theory of Book Buying #3: "Buy anything with Ted Pattison's name on it." Plus, I'm teaching an ASP.NET class next week and maybe a bit of Fritz's brilliance will rub off on me :)
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Google & .NET
That's true as long as you don't actually use MSDN to do your searching. Compare the hits from:
Searching MSDN for ADO.NET
Searching Google for ADO.NET (limited to Microsoft.com) -
Double Whammy
Argh. The dreaded double whammy. Not only is my team out, but my bracket is more hosed than normal. I've did much better in past years when the Cards haven't been in the Tourney.
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Ok, But That's the Last Straw
Argh. If someone at Microsoft happens to read this, here in Louisville (the 16th-largest US city) we do have Computers and even people using VS.NET. And I could use a new t-shirt :)
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Hey Jay Bilas, how's your Bracket?
Greg 'Big Daddy G-Man' Robinson is in the lead in the prestigous .NET NCAA Tournament challange after a couple of serious scares from Maryland and Wake. Not only that, he's doing better than 98.4% of the country.
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Mono
Mitch Rupp pointed towards an article on Internet Weekly about the progress of Mono. Some quotes I found interesting:
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C - A - R - D - S Go Cards Go!
Instead of cluttering up this place with even more ramblings from myself about the games, I've brought back my Radio Blog with running thought from the NCAA games.
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Day One
Some people go overboard decorating their house for christmas, some people create full out haunted houses for a halloween, and I have March Madness. From the Daily Quickie:
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Micro vs Macro Optimizations
Scott and Victor had a little discussion about getting the value inside the loop vs outside the loop. Now common sense would dictate to me that outside the loop would of course be faster. So, for my own amusement I threw together a little test. I simply ran their code and tried to figure out which one was faster. Going through a 12 item array, declaring with the loop (i < array.Length) actually was 2 seconds faster than getting it outside the loop. Of course, to get a 2 second difference I had to run each chunk of code 500,000,000 times. The difference may have simply have been the overhead of declaring a variable to store the length. I'm not too sure, I didn't dig into the IL.
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Sudelbücher
A little bit of an internation feel of things with Ralf Westphal's posts. He's got a pretty cool word in his title "Sudelbücher." It's like a journal I guess, but a little more informal. Found this definition from google: "sort of an informal notebook where you keep your trip expenses, that sort of thing, collections of thoughts, random, flashes, worked sentences."
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Unchecked Buffer
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-007
Unchecked Buffer In Windows Component Could Cause Web Server Compromise (815021) -
ASPNET
I was playing around with some code that we use in one of my Microsoft courses. Not a complex example, and it assumes you've granted privledges to the ASPNET account datareader for Northwind. No biggie I guess (this is actually quite common in courses that don't focus on ASP.NET. Getting into identity might be considered overkill for many of these classes). Well, this is all fine and dandy unless you are running 2003. I get a big ol' Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE' error message thrown at me. Bastards!
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SQL Server System Table Map
Pretty old stuff, but my partners in crime is teach SQL Server Admin this week, and it reminded me that I wanted to post a link to the Sql Server System Table Map. It's in chm format, so it's pretty easy to navigate with pretty pictures of all the tables and how they are related. Granted, you should always use the system procedures or information_schema_views, but sometimes you just need to go gonzo and dig into those system tables.
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InfoPath, No Cure for Cancer. Well...
A lot of talk about InfoPath. Just got my beast of an Office 2003 beta kit in the mail, so I've been playing around with it. I wouldn't say I've drank the kool-aid, but I definitely have sipped it. Not my favorite flavor, but I definitely see where others might enjoy it.
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Can You Feel It?
Ok, I went ahead and created a group on ESPN's tournament challenge. If you don't have a username/password, well, you'll need to signup. I've never recieve mail from them in the three years I've done this (besides they "hey dummy, fill this out" type stuff I suppose). After that, click on the second link below and join the group. It's that simple! Pass this along to whoever you want, as long as they don't think of those singing Jamacan's when you say CLR. I'll post reminders until Thursday. In an act of brilliance, I asked for vacation days in November for Thursday and Friday. MWwwwwwwwahahahaha.
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Tourney Time
I'm going to put together a ESPN.com Tournament Coverage thingy later tonight. Any .NETer is invited of course, not just people with blogs here. I know we got a couple guys from Cinci, Scott's a cameron crazy, Jason Bock went to Marquette, and it should be a little fun with some competition.
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Jason Bock
Stumbled upon Jason Bock's weblog today via my traceback / postback chumpy. Jason wrote the excellent CIL Programming "Under the Hood of .NET". This book is from APress, which while I feel they might need to get on the ball updating some of my favorite beta 2 books, still have perhaps one of the most talented group of authors working for them. One Apress title I'm looking forward to is .NET Game Programming with DirectX. Game programming isn't something I ever got to big into, and maybe this will help me push myself towards that.
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WROX Press
Word on the streets is that Wrox is closing their doors. Wrox has had some good authors and good books, but unfortunately they are few and far between. I got to the point where I wouldn't even glipse at a Wrox press book unless someone specificaly pointed me to it, or I knew THE author. Great books from Wrox: Beginning Visual Basic 6 and Professional SQL Server 2000 (and the 7.0 book btw).
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It's a System!
Try the Microsoft Office System: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/orderbeta.asp
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VMWare 4.0 beta
I was curious to see how VMWare 4.0 works (in particular the Windows 2003 Server RC2 installs went), so I signed up and downloaded the beta. Now, since this is a beta I naturally didn't want to hose my home machine, so I instinctively fired up VMWare to create a virtual machine to test VMware on. I think I just went cross-eyed.
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For what it's worth
A lot of interest amongst the DotNetBloggers about InfoPath, so perhaps some will find this helpful: http://microsoft.order-5.com/officeeval/
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Hooray for School!
Finally got into the 70-300 exam after a week of teaching SQL. Pretty interesting exam. The case studies weren't your typical "you are developing an n-tier accounting system..." types stuff. A little new app development, extending an app, and replacing AS/400. Three case studies and I was out. I felt pretty good about most of my answers. Had one question about ORM that I had to reach into the cellars of my brain from the MSDN video on it. Overall, I haven't the foggiest of ideas on how to tell someone to prepare for that exam besides "work with a lot of .NET."
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Windows Server 2003 Pricing
Microsoft has announced pricing for their different flavors of Windows Server 2003. Most interesting is that the web server edition is coming in at $399. Here's a table showing how the different editions differ.
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Ted Neward, you are my ambassador of Kwan.
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Building Communities with Software
Here's a sanitized version of Joel's Building Communities with Software article mentioned previously. You can never go wrong with a StrongBad reference either. They say smart people use StrongBad reference's on their blogs. And choose green.
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identical two-phase commit in a mental state of complete tedium
On the Path to XML Hell [via Scripting.com]. Hey, I feel this guy's pain. I'm teaching courses 1013 (Mastering VB6) and 1017 (Mastering Inder-freakin'-dev 6) in the next few months. At which point I will be faced with chapters talking about how DHTML Scriptlets are the solution to everything, how COM will last forever and ADO is the most usefull technology for accessing databases.
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Notify Me Checkbox
Not sure how many people subscribe to Joel on Software and got his "Building Communities with Software" e-mail, but it is an interesting read. Drop me a line if you want a copy - Joel asks that nobody reprint the article on their site and has choosen not to make some of the info public. Anyways, he mentions the fact that the "notify when somebody replies to me" is not implemented because it kills a site because people will post something, leave the site and never come back. "The end." This is somewhat I feel about RSS. While having a news aggregator is nice and makes things easier to read more "stuff," you never get a feel of community and it's harder to get a feel for the poster. For a long time I was reading blogs without an aggregator. I got to know blogs not just on their content, but also on the links they provide, what it looked like, what software they were running and so on.
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NULL
I'm working on a few sprocs for our schedule and I'm about to throw myself head first through the window. Some of the courses in our schedule do not have a "part_id" to identify them. Basically, they are courses that our corporate HQ doesn't consider official, so I have no outlines, books, exercise files, etc for these courses. No problem. In those cases, it looks like they've used NULL to indicate the lack of a part_id. Sometimes, they've taken that to the extreme. Some records have a NULL value, others have the text "NULL." Argh.
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Bin Drinkin
Roy's post on RSS got me thinkin'. Well not thinkin, more got me in the mood to post something. I don't think RSS is the wave of the future, I don't think bloggers should be considered in the same realm as professional journalism (no matter how unprofessional other paper journalist may be). I've had a "blog" since freakin' 1996. Long enough that I remember adding tables and background images to it because I thought they were cool. I don't think my opinion matters at all, and I don't bitch everytime an article gets posted about online coverage of an event and the "blog community" doesn't get included in the "media" that covered it. I take weblogs as they are: A technology to easyily get people talking. It's like XML Web Services. It is no different than what I did in 1995 to make sure I could detect client side when an update was available to my machine. But a "little" more standard than my custom format was.
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A Little Video Fun for a Friday Afternoon
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Uh, will you hold my wallet for me while I take the test please? There is a thousand dollars in there or maybe there isn't.
Still trying to take the flippin' 70-300 exam. Same problem as yesterday. In the mean time, I'll be productive. You see, normally I'd just go to espn.com and read some articles. But I can't make it to espn.com without having to see a big freakin' picture about U of L falling apart at the end of the season. Hopefully Rick gets the boat righted before the NCAA (if we make it of course). So today I'll try to make some sense out of the ghetto CSV file that I have our course schedule data was set in.
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Get him a bodybag ... yeahhhhhh
Not sure how many sports fans are out there, but if you haven't stumbled upon ESPN Motion yet (or are scared to install it), I'd give it a shot. Basically it is a background app that downloads videos in the background. I usually hit ESPN.com three or four times a day (once in the morning, once when Page2 is out, and once at night) and when I do they have a video (usually NBA tonight or perhaps top 10 plays of the day) ready to view. No streaming, not waiting, and pretty good quality too. Very smooth. No idea how it works on Macs or Linux, but it works great for me. Also cool is the new ESPN Intelligence page.
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Out of order? Even in the future, nothing works!
Tried to register for the 70-300 (Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures) exam today. I called up Prometric and the lady on the line said that things were running terribly slow on their system. On Tuesday when I called last the other lady on the phone told me that the system was responding slow ever since they upgraded to the new system.
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Justin Gehtland
Justin Gehtland's blog has moved with his switch to BlogX. Justin is one of the authors of one of my all time favorite VB6 books "Effective Visual Basic : How to Improve Your VB/COM+ Applications." Part of the "just buy all of Ted Pattison's COM books" recommendation I always am always willing to hand out to the VB6 students trying to wrap their heads around COM. If I ever get a chance to write a book, I hope it is as informative, interesting and easy to read as that book. Sure book's like Tim Ewald's Transactional COM+ book are full of good info, but that thing was a beast to read and I like to think I'm an above average developer.
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Descriptions and Bandwidth
Scott was talking about descriptions, and RSS and the such. One of the more interesting post abous this (well, same topic but October) is from Joel:
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Life is like a mop.
Had a pretty rough day with the whole car fiasco, but I came home and installed Diskeeper. Man, they should package Defrag software with those Pure Mood CDs from Target. Most relaxing thing I've seen this year 28% fragmentation to 0%. I forgot how much more info they showed in Diskeeper than the Win2k version. I still can't get over they have a button with a caption of "Set it and Forget It" on the main form. I'm talking to myself again.
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Popping Zits
Executive sent me a NFR copy of Diskeeper to play around with hoping that I will pimp their product like I am right now. I'll probably going to just throw it on the machine I use in class for demo purposes. It has scheduling, networking and all that built in that normal defrag doesn't. But where is the fun in that? Clicking on analyze and seeing a whole mess of red, and then watching little ol' defrag move everything around is one of the most rewarding experiences there is (besides watching DOS Defrag work of course). Now, some would say that never having to run defrag is rewarding, but these are the same tortured souls who probably keep their house clean at all time and never know the joy of spending a satuday and sunday getting things looking good.
The Diskeeper site actually says "Set it, and forget it." -
Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb
Good Times:
Decided to go ahead and try the Developing Windows Apps in .NET exam. A two and a half hour exam, I finished with two hours left. After the XML Web Service exam, this one was a joke. The only reason I even went through my questions again was to make sure I didn't goof up due to the crappy mouse and keyboard in the center. One thing I didn't feel comfortable with was the CAS stuff. Something I definitely need to go over again. I probably scored 95% or better I hope. Two exams, two days, two passes. Tomorrow I'm sitting a Time Management class so I might not continue my streak of sitting exams. But on Thursday I'll look to pass my 70-300 exam to get my MCSD for Microsoft .NET. -
Just because I'm on vaction, don't mean I'm out to lunch.
I'm not teaching this week so I thought I'd take some exams. First on the list: Developing XML Web Services and Server Components. Holy jeez that was a beast. All kinds of questions on remoting and a bunch that are along the lines of: You build version 1.0.0.0 of your component against version 1.2.0.0 of some .dll. Later on, someone puts that .dll in the GAC. Then, someone create a version 1.1.0.0 version and creates a publisher policy in the GAC. Then you rebuild your app. What happens?
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humph
People sitting behind the play-by-play guys during the half-time show that are on their cell phones waving and grinning like an idiot need to be immediately removed by the arena security. I feel very strongly about this.
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Download!
Something came up at work where one of our larger partners would like to get our schedule database in some sort of XML so they can put our schedule on their site. Great! Piece of cake to do, plus more sales for us. Well, now they want all the schedule data from all the centers, world-wide I assume. Now, our corporate HQ hold the data and there is no direct way to get at it. So what I have is a little command prompt app that simply hits their public website and strips off the classes and dates for our schedule. Best I can do. Requests for an XML Web Service or even a CSV file have gone unanswered, so this is what I was left with doing.
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MCAD / MCSD
I've been fooling around preparing for the XML Web Service exam. This exam is by far the more difficult of any of the other exam, mostly because it covers stuff I simply have no reason to work with on a day to day basis. Giant chunks of remoting seem to be in this exam. I mean, I know how to work with remoting and I understand it, but I really don't see where your average developer looking to get their MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer) really should be an expert at writing remoting components. It just isn't something used in most applications by people I think this cert is targeting.
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Extended Markup Language (XML) Web service
I'm taking a practice exam for the XML Web Service exam, and they pose questions like this: "You create an Extended Markup Language (XML) Web service..."
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Catch ex as exception when IL = WTF
Roy's post about the when statement in VB got me thinking about how that would be implemented in IL. I'm not an IL expert by any means, but that doesn't look regulation to me. I can follow it, but it looks like spaghetti code to me. I'd stick with an if statement or something.
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qqqqqqqqqqqq
The man, the legend ScottGu has posted some info about some pretty snazzy ASP.NET utilities, including QQQ I played with the other day. I didn't have ACT installed on the machine, so I wrote a ghetto console stress test to try it out on some dummy ASP.NET. Today I'm going to try it on the latest build of our new site and see what happens.
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By Popular Demand
Download TopMenu.ascx. The zip file contains an example on how I broke apart the DHTML menu from BrainJar.com into an ascx, css and js file to make the thing a little more reusable in my app. I didn't include the .vb file for TopMenu.ascx because there is no server side code on this guy quite yet. But it works fine for normal navigational purposes. I have it setup so the menu drops down automatically when you hover over some text, the demo on BrainJar you have to click to expand the menu. I think mine works a bit better for my site's purposes.
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Bork Bork Bork
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ASP to ASP.NET Migration Handbook
Its official, my book copies came in today's mail. Wow, it is pretty cool seeing your name on the cover of a technical book. Someone actually allowed me to share my thoughts and actually published them...now that is scary!
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"Super Saver"
I finally picked up the Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls and Components book from Amazon.com. I opted for the Super Saver because I really didn't need it quite yet. Well, I kinda hit a snag in a project and I was hoping a quick skim of that book might get me back on track (I need to create a simple server control...I think). Well, it shipped out from Amazon's warehouse in Lexington early yesterday morning. Great I thought, it will be here Wednesday (Lexington is an hour drive from Louisville). Nope, it went right to Cincinatti (two hours from Louisville, about an hour and half from Lexington). So it will probably make it to Louisville sometime tomorrow, if they decide the book doesn't need to tour Virginia too. Followed by HOPEFULLY a delivery in time for the weekend.
For the record, I could have jogged to and from the warehouse much quicker than the postal service. That's what I get for being cheap I guess. -
Index Tuning Wizard
I've been finding out that a lot of VB people out there are getting stuck with the role of the DBA. They can create the tables, data integrity stuff, stored procedures and all that just fine. They might even pick up some security and backup knowledge. But something that many just don't have the time to learn proper is indexes and the index architecture. Some really cool stuff in there, but many people are too busy creating apps to worry about creating an index that might perform a little better than what we have out there already.
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MCAD / MCSD
Not sure if anyone is looking to get their MCAD / MCSD for Microsoft .NET out there, but a couple of links that I've found treemendously helpful are Tim's Exam Links. What he's basically done is taken Microsoft's list of skills you need to pass the exam, and provides links to MSDN or other websites where you can pick up the skill. So say you haven't done much in the ways of "Provide multicultural test data to components, pages, and applications," there are three links to get you up to speed on that topic. I like resources like this because I never really prepare for exams, I just kinda take them. That willy nilly stuff was fine fof VB6 because, well, I did all that stuff all the time. Now with .NET, there is just SOOO much that I just don't touch on a day to day basis (like multicultural stuff), things like this are a god send if I want to confidently pass an exam.
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Konfabulator
All this hype about Konfabulator is kinda making me jealous. That was my idea! I never did much with it, but my idea was to basically do what they did, but instead host ASP.NET and serve up "applications" that way in an applications. I'm sure if I was wiser about Smart Clients, I could figure a way to do some cool stuff like that....
Edit: More Links
- Reference for Creating Objects
- Gallery of Stuff people have done so far (link is misspelled in their menu).
- Article in MacWorld.
- Wired News Article <- best info IMHO.
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MCSD
Not sure how many people here are MCSDs, but if you are, starting March 1, 2003 you qualify for a free exam voucher for exam 70-300 (Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures) which should help you obtain the new MCSD for Microsoft .NET. See the secure MCP site for details.
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Me Too
Not to be another "me too" on Ingo's redesign, but what's up with this ;)
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Macromedia DevNet
Macromedia DevNet [via CNet]. Who are these people using freakin' Dreamweaver and Flash that need to drop $1,500 on DevNet. It's upgrades and their resource kits. And upgrade costs what, $200 bucks for each piece of software? So you are paying $1000+ for info most people have available for free on the web? Hmmmm. I have no problem with the subscription system (god bless MSDN Subscriptions), but it's kinda like paying $900 bucks a year for Sports Illustrated and access to CNNSI. You could easily buy the magazine at the store and hit up another website for the info.
I feel I'm missing something here. $1,500 seems a bit high for what you are getting. Oh, BTW, Tim's blog got me interested in Flash Remoting until I saw the price tag. Which took a couple of days to find out, because Macromedia's "Dynamic content" was down yesterday. Not a good sign when evaluating their dynamic content type applications... -
Because Every OS Sucks
I'm feeling kinda left out by the OS thingy, but for the record I'm Debian Linux. I figured out my OS way back before finding out you are DR-DOS was cool.
http://homepage.mac.com/deadtroll2/.Movies/ossucksref.mov -
The Java Problem
In case you haven't seen it yet, an internal memo about "The Java Problem." Not going to get in a language war, but it is still interesting to read, and hope that .NET doesn't end with issues like the size of the JRE and the "Extensions do not support modularity" type stuff. I'm a little worried myself between whether I should be creating Windows app at all with version 1.1 of the framework...Ever. Or is it 1.0? That might just be my ignorance on how a system that has version 1.1 installed, and not 1.0 which my application is running with. According to Sean and Scott I better deploy the framework, but having a link for people with version 1.1 installed to download version 1.0 seems just down right shady to me. Time to read some more...
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Things are Gonna Change...I can Feel It
Just got an e-mail back from Danny from Daypop about what he thinks is happening. Best guess is that people are submitting the wrong url in their .blogger.com website, which is resolving to www.blogger.com (no linky for you for screwing up Daypop) and it's Fresh links section was being given way too much weight. Hopefully Danny can tweak it a little bit and get those rogue sites off the list.
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MSDN installs
Is there a way to install the MSDN library on a network share? If I've got 16 people in a class, having that 1gb of data on each machines seems silly. I would think that they could just put the index on each machine locally like the VS6 MSDN, and then retrieve the content remotely. Am I just overlooking an option here?
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Development Computer
Ok, so I've gotten my home PC up and running. Seems to be going great. Here are the requirements I set forth when building the thing:
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my monkeys wanna go to Arnhem
According to Daypop, this is the #19 entry:
i am back ! :) my monkeys wanna go to Arnhem,so i'll be alone here..wOw man cool..!! ey guys i lost my ring :( i really need it and i'm still looking for it,but till now i can't find it..my dolphin's ring,my favorite's ring :( ada pesen neh..buat ollie,bagus tuch layoutnya! gitu dong lie,it's cool man!!, erwin,lha ko biru? lagie ngedit layoutnya yah? moga² sukses slalu ;),L,oke deh tenang ajah...tgl 15 ya?
I'm going to set myself on fire. I wonder if blogger.com did this on purpose. I mean, it is pretty clear that someone submitted sites to daypop that would drive blogger.com marketting onto the list (which I believe happened a week ago), and now those sites are junking up everything else. I wonder how hard it would be to create a .NetPop service that handles all the .NET blogs (or any dev blog for that matter)...
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Daypop and Blogspot
Man oh man has
Blogspotblogger.com ruined Daypop. I'm not saying I have the best weblog in the world, or perhaps even in even in my apartment complex, but how do Lucy's Website, ::BUTCHER KNIVES::, +eye-candy+, caricature, and other crap make it on the list. We'll, because all these people submitting their sites to Daypop, and then having on the left hand side "most recently updated Blogspot web pages." They hit the daypop traversal magic hour, and suddenly they are on the Top 40. I'm calling shenanigans and saying that Daypop should just ignore links to Blogspot.com sites fromother blogspot.comblogger.com sites. -
Shellacking
Louisville is taking it to Houston right now, so I thought I'd play with my little blog for a bit. One thing I'd personally like is a toolbar icon for inserting an image, that'd be kinda handy and some how keeping the toolbar from scrolling too...
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Vrrrrrrrrooooooooooooom
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Linux.Slapper.Worm
http://www.redhat.com/support/alerts/linux_slapper_worm.html
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Hey, do they have Krusty's Partially Gelatinated Gum-Based beverages?
Looking good Scott!!! And look at little ol' me up there. Just 1315 more posts until I'm the first person listed on the left.
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Windows Update
Just put together a new PC, so I'm windows update installing all the fixes (32 Critical Updates and Service packs for the record). Sweet sassy mollassy is this thing slow. It's been installing for the past 30 minutes. I'm worried it has something to do with the PC, but it seems pretty peppy in everything but Windows Update. The problem is that this machine is for my dad, so I need to make sure it is solid as can be before he takes delivery. I think I'll download Sandra and run some benchmarks...
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Mobo
My new motherboard and video card are sitting at the UPS hub at the airport here in Louisville. Won't be delivered until tomorrow it looks like. My family ordered a PC from gateway and had to pay $100+ to have the computer shipped 4 miles.
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Joel vs Dave
Joel's latest post about being slashdotted, followed by Dave's response, has led to Joel responding about reads vs hits. You hit a radio blog, there isn't much to keep you along like there is on Joel's page. It's pretty simple. He has articles, and a booklist over there. It is easy to find more content on Joel's site, while if I hit Dave's site for example, holy jeez is there a lot of just junk on that page. Now, don't get me wrong, I've found some neat blogs to read, but not much to keep you there.
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The only thing better than a crawfish dinner, is five crawfish dinners.
Michael Bush signs with U of L. I hope this doesn't hurt our chances getting Brohm froooom ... Trinity High School. The best high school in the world of course. Tonight the Cards play Cinci. I fear that this game is going to be pretty rough with the Bearcats hungry for a win. Either way, the cards will have to win by eleventy billion points to stay ahead of UK in the polls after last nights game. Holy jeez, I think my little sister could have scored 14 on Florida last night.
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Presentation Skills
You'd be surprised how often people comment that they really like my teaching style, which they say is "not reading to them." I've had people that have been taking technical training for 30-40 years, and they ask me where I learned my teaching techniques. It just seems almost common sense that if you are teaching someone something that you need to be filling in the blanks. There are many different ways to do this, and I've never been able to pinpoint how it happens. Some classes you get everyone on the ball, who really like digging into stuff and playing. Good times. In some classes, the students have been moved from data entry and they need to learn how to maintain a simple VB front end. Sometimes, nothing seems to be going right at all.
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Crystal Report Book
I've seen some links floating around to Brian Bischof's Crystal Reports for .NET book. Brian's a good guy, and also an MCT / MCSD like me. His error log for course 1016 is a thing of legends. Here's a course that features NT 4, MTS, MSMQ, SQL Server 6.5 and VB6 and MCT's are still looking for that log for when they teach it in 2003. His The .NET Languages: A Quick Translation Guide book is usually a big hit with all the Visual Basic developers coming into my classes. They like such a short and to the point book to get them over some hurdles and brain farts between the languages, plus the C# helps them at least read some of the more advanced .NET books like Essential .NET or Applied .NET Framework Programming.
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Link, link, link
Importing an OPML file would be handy on the links. Doing this sucker by hand is a weee bit slow.
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Beta 2
Scott, really digging the new interface for editing. I'll keep playing around today.
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Windows 2003 Server
A little more information about the worm, from a technical point of view. Now, from what I understand from Sam is that there is built in protection from these types of attacks. Anyone running SQL Server (unpatched) out there on Windows 2003 Server that can tell me the results? I'd give it a whirl myself, but our firewall "unfortunately" prevents me from infecting anything here.
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Honker Union of China
Missed this article in eWeek about the source of the SQL Slammer worm. Some experts are saying the code signatures point towards it being at least based on code from the Honker Union of China. They point out their anti-American standings and then go on to talk about how it did the most damage in Asia. Interesting that most of the unpatched servers where Asian though, I wonder if the wide spread piracy had anything to do with it. I'm willing to bet there are H0nk3rs all over the place there running copies of SQL Server unpatched because they got it for $5 bucks of the street.
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A flute without holes, is not a flute. A donut without a hole, is a danish.
I'm setting up my SQL Server 2000 course for this week. 12 machines, twelve copies of SP3 that need to be installed. I'm sure this could be done in some sort of automated fashion, but I've never learned all those methods because AutoIt has been so good to me. Just throw SP3 on a network share, and run the script from all the machines. Pretty painless.
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I'm picking out a Motherboard for you! Not an ordinary Motherboard for you!
Argh, I'm putting together a new PC for playing around at home. I've been using my Gateway laptop for the past year, and it has worked fine. I just need more power (laptop is a PIII 1.2GHz) for VMWaring, VS.Net and the ever important Sim City 4. So I dig around and decided to go with a motherboard built on the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset. It's getting some good reviews and also shows some excellent performance, along with the added bonus that it has on board LAN, Video and Sound. I specifically went with the Leadtek WinFast K7NCR18G due to its dual CRT feature built in. A risky motherboard manufacture, I know.
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Security Pixie Dust
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Heineken mini-bar "worm" virus
Oh, a big thanks of course to Scott Watermasysk for the weblog stuff. Enough playing tonight, back to the luxurious Extended Stay "We are Saving the Environment by Giving you Crappy Towels and no Shampoo" America.
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Blasting forth with three-part harmony
I at one time had a radio blog, but I only had radio installed on my laptop, and I never really had my laptop with me for some reason when I wanted to post. So it kinda went down the crapper. I guess I could have figured out how to set the thing up to remotely work, or the bizarro scripting library, but let's be honest, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City just doesn't reach 100% completion on it's own.
