Archives
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Non-techie .NET Book request
My business partner wants to get up to speed on .NET, but he comes from a sales and marketing background, not a technical one. Do you guys have any recommendations for good books on .NET for someone coming from a completely non-technical history? Maybe like “.NET for Dummies” or something to that effect? Please let me know. if not I'll have to write one.
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Blogs back online
I finally got my other blogs working again. Since my old hosting provider won't release the hostages, I'm going to have to completely rebuild them. I'm going to pull my best posts out of the Google cache and, even tho my permalinks won't work, hopefully Google will reindex and all will be well. Cross one more thing off my list.
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Coming together
Just two more days until the big launch. Today was a very good day, as now the new servers are all up and running, DNS issues are mostly resolved, and two new community websites are up and running. Now, just gotta wait for the domain names to resolve properly, and those sites should be totally finished and out of my mind. Two more full days of work, and the past two years of work will finally be completed (well, begun really).
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HOLY CRAP!
Seven long hours of work later, and I FINALLY get my new web server to talk to my new SQL server. Geez man this was getting ridiculous. For whatever reason, after installing SQL on the server, I could not connect to it through EM on my local machine. The ports were wide open, but my EM was doing a really good Stevie Wonder impression. The web server couldn't see it either.
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It begins...
I've been heads-down all week working on the finishing touches to everything I have going on. The DNS settings started transitioning over to my new servers, and I've been hard at work prepping the new production servers for the new websites we are launching. It's getting pretty intense now. Only two more business days and the rest of the weekend before the big launch day. This time it cannot be missed, due to the timing of other announcements that are outside my control. Things are moving well tho. I'm in for a few sleepless nights, that's for sure.
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I'd love to go to a PDC Bloggers Party But.....
How about we all go to Universal Studios instead? Um, that would be way more fun than not drinking and yakking for hours about BS that we're all gonna be yakkin about all week long anyway.
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No More MSN Chat
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Microsoft Patterns and Practices Goodies
I stumbled upon the ASP.NET Checklists today (courtesy of Roy Osherove), and have been roaming around the Patterns and Practices section all day. I've found some truly outstanding gems, and just in time to configure my new servers that are slowly coming online.
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Weblogger BOF Is On!
WOO HOO! The Weblogger BOF session topic was selected as one of the first 23 picked on Saturday. I'm really excited that it's a go, and very soon I'm going to put together a working group to help determine how the session is going to work. Currently, the following people are signed up to help:
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How to alleviate spam, a simple perspective
It seems to me like the easiest way to get rid of SPAM would be to have mailservers check to see if the IP address of the e-mail sender resolves to the domain references in the “From” field. This would require people like me to register their home computers in their business DNS system when sending business mail, but so what?
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The real deal, eh?
Who does this guy think he is, Joe Scarborough? I am constantly appalled by the commpany that I work for, and the meaningless drivel they publish. If the media has a liberal bias, then the tech-media version of the political parties would have to be Microsoft (Republicans/Conservatives) v. Linux/Sun/Open Source (Democrats/Liberals). Haven't I read this before? Oh yeah, I have. Scott McNealy talked the same kind of smack 4 months ago. Here are some highlights:
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The power of blogs
I was going over my referrer logs a few minutes ago (still hoping for page view stats someday), and I've been really surprised by the varied nature of how people come to read what I write. I keep seeing this referrer in my logs in regards to my post on the Disneyland accident: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=DISNEYLAND%20ACCIDENTS. I'm an egotist by nature, I'll freely admit it. I like to click through my referrers and see where they're coming from. So I click through. It turns out, thanks to an anonymous poster by the name of “Mr. M. Mouse”, I am #7 on that list of search results.
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I'm at a loss...
So many of you may have noticed that I've been fairly quiet over the past few days. A few people have IMed me expressing concern, and for that I thank you guys. Rest assured, my absence is not anything health related. Unfortunately, the same is not true for Paul at Xheo.com. He has come down with a very persistent case of food poisoning. I hope he gets better soon, and I would ask that you all keep him in your prayers, as he has been sick for the past week.
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.NET Continues Its Quest for Complete World Domination
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Holy Buffer Overflows Batman!
Buffer overflow errors are not just Microsoft's problem. Nor is it just a Windows issue. News.com today reports that IBM's DB2 Database program for Linux has an easy to exploit buffer overflow vulnerability that lets anyone get root access to the entire data store. Yeah, ok the RPC issue in Windows was a big deal but MSBlaster was only a nuisance. Slammer was the same way... it flooded ports and brought databases offline, but the sensitive information inside was not compromised.
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COMPLETELY Off Topic
... but I though you guys would get a kick out of this.
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Blaster vs Everyone, Round 2
Scoble points us to a report on MSNBC that says another MSBlaster-like virus has been released into the wild. It tries to exploit the vulnerability I duscussed in last week's Patch Day Review. If you have not patched yet, you have less than 48 hours before this one will hit in force. You would be well advised to stop what you are doing and patch right now. PLEASE, for all of us.
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Before I'm misquoted....
Before I get slammed for racism here, let me just say that the point I was trying to make in this post not to say that hating Microsoft is akin to racism. The point WAS, however, to quote Chris Rock in Dogma, “You can change an idea, it's a whole lot harder to change a belief.” Some people will go to the grave thinking that anyone who works at Microsft should rot in hell. (Not me.) Just like some people will go to the grave thinking that blonde haired, blue eyed white people should be the only ones allowed to live free (ALSO not me). Because it is a belief that Microsoft sucks, is bad, or evil, that these people hold. And they will likely hold onto it at all costs, because for them, it validates their reality.
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More whining from the MS Haters
Datagrid Girl points us to a site called microsuck.com that talks about, well, why Microsoft sucks. It looks a lot like Microsoft's old site, which is kinda funny. It also whines about why Microsoft is bad and portrays the typical childish rant about backwards compatibility, slams MS for wanting to be compensated for illegal software copies, et. al. And what's better, the site shows it's true childishness right in the title tag of the site. Woo hoo. Let the misconceptions roll.
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Where do you want to go today, dirtbag?
“Word has it that I was next in line to become one of those little Office Assistant thingies..... but I try not to spend my time thinking about 'what-ifs'.“ Red vs. Blue [via Scoble]
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Builder.com Article #6
Woo hoo. Here is my sixth article on Builder.com. Basically, it's how to idiot-proof your assembly versioning when you target different versions of the Framework.
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Not screwed too badly after all
OK, my hosting company hasn't jumped ship, as I finally got throught to someone on their end. I'm still going to need to find a new hosting company very quickly. This was the last straw.
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I think I'm screwed...
Well, I woke up this morning, and my entire web farm is offline. After about an hour of investigation, I find out that my hosting company's entire network is offline, and no one is answering their phones. The last local server backup I have is from August 1, and I don't know if I have any local database backups.
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What Is Skype?
From the makers of KaZaA, ladies and gentlemen, I give you P2P VoIP: Skype.
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Trillian Pro 2.0 Released
Cerulean Studios has released the final version of Trillian Pro 2.0. They've also redesigned their website, and done a fabulous job with it too. It's only $25, so why don't you go pick yourself up a copy? It's awesome.
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Office 2003 Available Monday to MSDN Subscribers
Via News.com.
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In Memoriam
This message is to programmers and people worldwide, not just to Americans:
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Microsoft is so nice...
Dear Valued Microsoft Customer,
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PDR: 10 September 2003 Special Edition
This warning supersedes the warning that discussed the MSBlaster vulnerability. What that means is, this alert deals with the same problems that the MSBlaster one did, and more. If you're reading this, stop what you are doing, and either download the scanning tool, or just install the patch immediately. Don't fool around with this one. The more people that patch, the less likely another MSBlaster will show up.
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What to look forward to today
Well, today is going to be a pretty decent day. First off, today is MS Patch Day, meaning that once again it's time for my Patch Day Review. I'll put together a list this afternoon and post it this evening, Hopefully it won't be as long as last week's, cause that means lots of vulnerabilities.
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myKB 4.1 Released
Scott Cate, leader of the largest .NET Users Group in the US, the AZDNUG, has just released version 4.1 of his killer myKB application. He has made some tremendous improvements on the application's speed, and his work is phenominal. myKB is extremely easy to use, and will be powering an extremely significant portion of my company's business for a long time to come. If you have not signed up for a free account yet, you are seriously missing out. Do yourself a favor and go check it out today.
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Nifty Web Services Trick
Thanks to Brady Gaster for this neat little tidbit. Did you know that you can control the look and feel of the Web Service access page that .NET generates? Habib Heydarian from the Visual C++ team clues us in:
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Dialog Base Classes Released
For my 300th post, I finally got around to getting Jesse Ezell's WebForms Dialog Classes zipped up and put on my site. Included in the download are both VB and C# source code files. I'm gonna try to whip up a few samples that make use of it. If you use them in your code, make sure you give Jesse credit. If you enhance the code, make sure you shoot me an e-mail to robert at interscapeusa dot com, so I can evaluate it and include it in the download. Thanks Jesse for this really killer code.
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PDR @ Only4Gurus.com
Carlos Aquino was kind enough to begin hosting a copy of my weekly Patch Day Review on Only4Gurus.com. I'm currently working out the details on how I want to move forward with it from here. My weekly PDR is targeted at “ungeeks” who don't have a clue about what “NetBIOS” or “RPC” is. but everyone else can read it too. The will be a little humorous, and sometimes sarcastic, cause serious things don't ALWAYS have to be taken so seriously. If it's boring, ungeeks won't read it. You'll see at a glance how severe it is, and I'll have a recommendation on what do do. Most of the time, the recommendation will be to install the patch. And laugh more often.
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Kinda freaked out
I just found out that one guy died and 11 people were injured when a locomotive separated from the cars on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland. Both my twin sister and I were just there not 4 days ago. My twin worked there 2 summers ago, and said it might be the first death in the park where Disney is at fault.
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My Recommended WiFi Configuration
I had a request from one of Scoble's loyal readers to post my reccommendation for a WiFi setup. I helped Scoble set up his when I was in Redmond last month, and from what he says, it seems to be working great. So here it goes.
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CSS Fun Part II
Richard Bornost pointed me to an entry in his blog where he talked about CSS. Plenty of reading for me over the weekend, when I bone up on CSS layouts so I can fix my Corporate Blog. It will be nice to be finished with this project I am working on so I can get paid and get back to my stuff. I've lost nearly two whole weeks of work. Man it's frustrating.
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New BOF Topic
I posted another BOF topic as well. I'm not leading this one as much as I am coordinating some people who I want to lead the discussion. It's shaping up to be pretty cool... I'm hoping that as interest grows I'll be able to post a “Scheduled to Appear” list. Anyways, here it goes:
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Updated BOF Topic for PDC
OK, I got a little flak for my old BOF topic. I was told it sounded too much like a marketing piece than a group discussion. So I had the wording changed. It now reads as follows:
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I love TweakXP .net
Last night, I posted about the new version of TweakXP for Windows Server 2003. Well, my computer is running TONS faster. The biggest performance increase came from the “Enable Core System Performance” tweak, in conjunction with offloading my paging file to another disk. Another tweak that really increased startup performance was the “Speed up Network Access” tweak in the “Windows Tweaks II” section. Since I'm on a cable modem, startup would often take a long time while the network got its bearings and pulled an IP from the router. Now startup is nearly instantaneous after login.
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Fun with .Text
I spent this morning customizing my skin for my Corporate Blog. I decided to rant this morning about Business Process Outsourcing, so I figured I might as well make my blog look like my corporate site. Overall, the templating experience in .Text is not bad. It was fun *sarcasm* trying to track down what CSS entry was affecting which section, and I am still having problems with my menu not going to 100% of the height, but oh well. I may move the site to a basic table format so it is easy to manage. CSS can be wholly unpredictable sometimes.
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PDR: 3 September 2003
Everyone keeps coming up with these themes to write about every day. You know, some kind of summary of the stuff they came across during the day. After my rant about software updates, I'm going to post a weekly synopsis of the patches released on TechNet. In case you didn't know, every Wednesday is Microsoft Patch Day (corroboration here). So I'm starting a weekly Patch Day Review (PDR). Each week, I'll give you a brief summary of the new patches available and give you direct download links, so you don't have to wade through all the garbage to get to them. This took me a lot of time to compile, so I hope it's useful to someone.
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Have your website e-mail you errors
A friend requested that I post about this. It's a little snippet of code that I whipped up to e-mail me when my site craps out. It has come in handy a few times, and led me to extend the concept for a future software product of sorts. This one is different than most you'll see because I have it send me the stack trace too. You can also extend it to do any inner exceptions and inner stack traces. This is helpful when toubleshooting website components.
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Great Windows Administrator Resource
This site needs no explanation. It's extremely basic, but hey, it works. Maybe they should get a myKB.com account and move it to there. It might be a bit more user friendly (and RSS accessible) that way.
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More cool tools
I got lots of feedback yesterday about some really great SQL Diff programs. Thanks guys. I can't wait to check them out.
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My New Favorite Tool
I needed to do a SQL Diff today <coughing>Yukon team pay attention</coughing> and I came across a great program called Beyond Compare. It lets me load up 2 files side-by-side, and shows me where there are differences. It let me compare the outputs of SQLEM-generated scripts, and see where changes were made. It was a HUGE help. It is not without problems though. Line editing is clumsy (you can only edit one line at a time, and you can't edit the file directly) however they do make it easy to copy text between the files. All in all, it's a great product, and well worth the $30.
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Microsoft = bullet-riddled software
I was catching up on Neowin news, and I saw an entry entitled “Microsoft software 'riddled with vulnerabilities'”. I was shocked, nay dumbfounded, to see so many pro-Microsoft comments. Especially along the lines of my rant before I left for the weekend. A few quotes:
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Weblogger meet @ Downtown Disney
Just got back from Cali. Since it's the first time I spent a whole weekend away from my computer, I'm going to blog about it in my personal blog. I did however, get to spend nearly three hours with the nefarious Paul Alexander from Xheo.com (He was the only one that took me up on my weblogger meeting offer). I was really glad to finally meet the guy after doing buiness together for so long. I'm really excited about the stuff we have going on over the next few months. The guy is really down to earth, one hella nice guy. Supposedly he's coming to Phoenix in the middle of October. Anyone up for a .NET Golf Tournament? We can play a few rounds and then party at my place on the tenth green. Any takers? Dan... Brady... Scott??