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Monday, November 30, 2009
I was unusually quiet over the last couple of weeks. Why? My former host apparently packed too many sites on one machine and caused this page to experience OutOfMemoryExceptions galore. I run a number of sites for various purposes and decided it was time to move up to a VM host. I’m currently on MaximumASP and am using a MaxV server. Setup was pretty simple, support was helpful for a few of my questions, and I’m happy to have my blog engine up and running again.
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
I want to say thanks to everyone who came out to watch me speak about OpenSocial at the Chicago Alt.NET meeting. Thanks for inviting me to present and for making the time so enjoyable. I’ve posted the slides and the code for the Canvas page here.
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Sunday, August 09, 2009
Edit: This post is no longer valuable. The updated software on AT&T's site now supports Windows 7 just fine without these workarounds. I recently upgraded my laptop to Windows 7 x64 RTM bits. I also tether my BlackJack II (aka Samsung SGH-i617) to the laptop so I can get work done pretty much anywhere. To help others who will be going through the same thing, here is how to make this work until AT&T or Samsung come out with a proper setup for Windows 7. I suspect that these instructions also work for x86 (32-bit) Windows 7, but I haven’t tried it out and no one has confirmed yet. Step 1: Download and install the Communicaton Manager Software for XP/Vista. They only have a 32-bit version. Step 2: The newly created desktop icon for the at&t Communincation Manager has now appeared. Right click on the icon and select ...
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Windows
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Tuesday, May 05, 2009
I ordered a laptop from the Dell Outlet a few days ago. The Dell Outlet has a well known issue in their system: a package’s order status will correctly move to Shipped when the package is assigned a FedEx tracking number and moved to the loading dock but the carrier and tracking information will forever say Data Temporarily Unavailable. I say FedEx because most of us using the outlet will also opt for the free 3-5 day shipping which, in 2009, is provided by FedEx Ground for United States shipments. Knowing that they use FedEx, you can look up the information without calling up Dell customer service. How do you do this? When you placed your order, you should have received an order number. If you don’t have the information handy, login to the Dell site under the My Account link (usually on the top of the page on ...
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
This has been on my TODO list for over a year now. I’m going to learn PowerShell. To do so, I have to forget the that the command line exists and start learning how to do all my old tricks in the new environment. What has prevented me thus far is pure and simple inertia. When I need to kill a process (say Firefox), it was so easy to pull up the old DOS prompt and type: tasklist | findstr /C:"firefox" After finding the process ID, I would then enter taskkill -f –pid [process ID from above] I use taskkill because it can be more effective than the process explorer. Today, I did something that caused firefox to hang. Remembering that I need to overcome my intertia, I found the commands and popped open PowerShell. The preceding action wound up being much easier to type in: get-process firefox | kill...
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Microsoft
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Friday, April 10, 2009
To everyone who came out to the Midwest Cloud Computing User Group (Chicago/Downers Grove), I want to thank you for coming and listening how the various cloud platforms work. For those that missed the talk, I’m busy turning the comparisons into more detailed blog postings. I’ve probably got 2-3 months worth of posts that will present more details. Those posts should start showing up next week Monday (4-13-2009). I also mentioned that I am helping organize a Code Camp on Saturday, May 30, 2009 at the College of Lake County, Grayslake Campus. This Code Camp will have talks on .NET/Microsoft topics, Test Driven Development, Python, Google App Engine, Ruby, and more. Please visit www.ChicagoCodeCamp.com for details, to submit proposals, and to figure out how to register.
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Friday, April 03, 2009
I had a lot of issues with Comcast and their customer service. The last straw came 3 weeks ago when I got a bill indicating that they wanted money for a service I had cancelled on January 5, 2009. I had spent a total of 22 hours on the phone or going to their offices in person to explain that I only wanted Comcast Internet service—no phone, no TV. Their billing system was beyond repair and I just don’t have the time to fix my bill every month that they f*ck it up. I’m using AT&T Internet only (no land line) DSL service. Hook up was painless. Speed is well in the land of good enough—I can watch TV shows on Hulu and listen to online radio stations just like before. Real big downloads (think downloading an MSDN copy of Visual Studio 2008) only moves at 275-300KB/second. Comcast used to ...
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Monday, March 23, 2009
One of the LCNUG members, Kurt Schroeder, has volunteered to present at this month’s regular meeting. We’re a typical INETA group: food/tech/discussion during the 2 hour meeting. Kurt’s talk is definitely technical, but his talk focuses on the lessons learned while constructing a system quickly and then rebuilding it to make the system better (easier to maintain, enhance, and comprehend). Kurt will be spending a lot of time in code, showing the original implementation and showing how it morphed over time. We all have bad code in our systems that we want to make better. See how Kurt evolved the ever so sexy sounding “stock market system based on point and figure charting.” Trust me—it’ll be interesting. Join us: Sign up at: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/300902006 When: March 26, 2009 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM Where: College of Lake County: Technology Building in room T326-328. Directions Campus map
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.NET
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Monday, March 02, 2009
I just got done reading Penny-Arcade's 2009-2-27 post on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. I had high expectations for this show. I waited for the show to be ready for my Media Center to record on a regular basis. The promos looked interesting and he did have a reputation. A few weeks ago, that first show appeared in Recorded Shows on my computer. My wife and I fired it up. 20 minutes into the show, we looked at each other, said "This is crap. Let's delete this thing from our regular recordings and go wash the dishes." Yes, dishwashing was more appealing than watching the remainder of the show. Furthermore, we had no desire to assault our senses with the show EVER AGAIN!!! The acting was horrible, the premise sucked (reminded by of My Own Worst Enemy without the decent actors). Maybe Whedon should listen to his comedy muse instead of ...
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Tuesday, February 03, 2009
I'm cheap, watch a lot of network programming, and all my favorite cable shows are on hulu or elsewhere on the web. To save a few bucks, I spent the week between Christmas 2008 and New Years 2009 upgrading my house to digital TV and canceling cable for all but my Internet connection. My home's primary TV is attached to a Windows Vista based Media Center. Something that I've hated since switching was the craptacular viewing guide. I had a hard time believing that Microsoft hadn't put out an update to Media Center where they could handle the new channel format. While looking for solutions today, I found out about something called TV Pack 2008 (yeah-- I'm a Media Center user, not a fanatic. I'm late to this party...). The more I read, the more aggravated I got that my Windows Vista installation didn't get this upgrade. You see, the ...
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Windows
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Thursday, January 29, 2009
I needed a favicon.ico file for a web site I'm working on. I had the image that I wanted to use and needed a quick and dirty way to generate the correct icon file. Keep in mind, I'm a developer with limited artistic skills. After trying some icon editors (FAIL), I found a site that claims to make an icon based on a file you upload. Seemed to easy, but it was exactly what I needed. This is a great tool at a perfect price: http://www.favicon.cc/. It took my Twitter image: and gave me a favicon.ico:
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Wednesday, January 28, 2009
This article discusses a coding practice that I discovered while an undergrad a while back, maybe 1994. After doing some code reviews recently, I am reminded that this particular practice still needs more publicity. When writing code, a developer typically likes to worry about edge cases first, then handles the normal case. This practice has some benefits: the cases you worry about most get handled early. And, this practice creates maintenance nightmares. This practice has a some detrimental effects: Code readability is reduced Precious cycles are wasted on the uncommon cases Code complexity frequently increases People remember and read positives easily. They have more issues with negatives. Consider the following C# code: 1 FileStream fs = null; 2 const string filename = "someFile.txt"; 3 if (!File.Exists(filename)) 4 { 5 fs = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.CreateNew, FileAccess...
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
January Meeting: NHibernate January 29, 2009 6:30-9:00 PM PM ABSTRACT
We'll be introducing NHibernate from the ground up.
The problem of O/R Impedance Mismatching.
The benefits of utilizing a transparent object persistance framework such as NHibernate.
How to get started with NHibernate with an example class library and the mapping files required for NHibernate.
Some best practices regarding persisting and retrieving objects along with code examples. BIO: Robert Dusek I began programming in various incarnations of BASIC at a young age, but began my career in IT Operations as a network administrator. About 4 years ago, I stumbled onto .NET in order to solve various development tasks that my employer needed, eventually choosing to transition into C# Software Development full-time. I currently work with Hudson at GFX International building client-facing applications using MVC.Net and NHibernate. Recently Hudson and I along with Ricardo Borges have taken over as maintainers ...
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Kenn Scribner and I are busy getting our book, Effective REST Services via .NET, ready for publication. We've already written all the content and received the technical reviews. This past weekend, Kenn spent some serious time making sure that the voice in the book was consistent. Today, the editors get there hands on the manuscript in order to fix punctuation and English. That's right, the folks with degrees in English will fix our prose. It's exciting to know that this book is getting closer to being on bookshelves and available for ordering from Amazon. Unlike the other .NET REST titles out there, we don't spend 300+ pages talking about WCF and how cool it is. Instead, this book walks through all the different ways that a .NET developer has created to expose and consume REST services. IHttpModule, MVC, Azure, ADO.NET Data Services, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest...
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Azure
Microsoft
JavaScript
WCF
.NET
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Thursday, April 10, 2008
I was checking out the ads for the local office supply and electronics stores during my lunch hour and I saw that Office Depot was selling the ViewSonic VX2235wm for $259-- the same price as I paid for the hunk of junk Samsung. I plugged it in to my laptop and IT JUST WORKED! Everything is crisp, clear, perfect! The installation experience went like this: I plugged in the monitor to power and my laptop. Vista asked me if I wanted the display on the left or right of my primary display (right) and then I was in business. This is NOT what happened this weekend with the Samsung. So far, I've adjusted nothing on the monitor. I'm so HAPPY that this thing works. ViewSonic is just a better monitor manufacturer.
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Friday, February 15, 2008
Just some random thoughts while reading the news over lunch. Nielsen Rating apparently released their numbers for websites for January 2008. According to the numbers reported at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/131937.asp, Google got the most eyeballs in January. What I find interesting is that the numbers for time spent on the web site implies a different ranking. I whipped out Excel for some simple analysis. The results? The top 4 companies in terms of eyeball hours are in the exact wrong order. Companies are presented in order of unique audience #s, measured in thousands (000). I added the 'Person Hours/1000 people' and 'Rank on Person Hours' columns. Parent Unique Audience (000) Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss) Person Hours/1000 people Rank on Person Hours Google 124279 1:37:35 202125:59:05 4 Microsoft 121920 2:22:33 289661:36:00 3 Yahoo! 113874 3:19:43 379042:15:42 2 Time Warner 104837 3:57:38 415212:45:46 1 News Corp. Online 75381 2:02:49 154300:43:09 5 eBay 65758...
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