I thought that webhost4life had poor service.  That was only because I had yet to experience Server Intellect's.  I am more than a little surprised that the likes of Eric Smith and Duncan Mackenzie would have such positive things to say about them.  Here's a peek at my experience:

1. Call Friday evening to create a help desk ticket.
2. Wait for the promised phone call to my urgent issue.
3. Get an email Monday morning telling me to do it myself, though their control panel doesn't do everything I need done.
4. Argue for several days via email until the fateful day that my patience is exceeded and I write this:

Your service is pathetic.  Why has this problem, now several days old, still not been fixed?  What incentive are you offering us to continue hosting our sites with SI?  I expect an apology from your manager and financial remuneration for a week of wasted time.  I also expect this issue to be fixed in the next 24 hours.  You aren't the only hosting company in town and you are far, far from the best.  I am furious that you have wasted a week of my time.

5. Within 24 hours (8 days after the initial phone call), my problem was resolved.

An anomaly?  Not a chance.

1. Last night I emailed about an urgent issue.
2. Tonight I called.
3. Tonight I called again.
4. Tonight I am still waiting for someone from the "24 Hour Technical Support" to support me.  I'm not holding my breath.

My advice for anyone looking for service is to use OrcsWeb.  OrcsWeb took my calls on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and called me back to notify me that the issue had been fixed.  They even stayed on the phone to until I was satisfied that all was well and sent a follow-up email wishing me luck on testing and offering additional help if needed.  That's service.

Whenever I setup a new XP Pro box, I always forget to change this setting. I also quite often forget how to change this setting. This is a reminder - to change the max connections that IIS on XP Pro can accept do the following:

If you have a default install of IIS, then execute the following from the command line:

cscript c:\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/MaxConnections 40

Running iisreset afterward will restart IIS with the new setting.

A bug was opened against the pricing model for Visual Studio 2005 on the Product Feedback Center.  Here's the link if you'd like to vote on its merits.

I'm less than pleased with the announced pricing plans for MSDN subscriptions that Microsoft announced this week.  For about five years, I've been an MSDN Universal Subscriber.  I used to describe it as "everything that Microsoft does that could benefit a developer...basically everything but Money and the games."  Now, things have become different.

The Universal subscription level goes away (as does Enterprise).  In their place is MSDN Premium.  However, Premium itself does not include a Visual Studio license.  (Well, it kind of does...)  You must select Team Edition for Architects with MSDN Premium, Team Edition for Developers with MSDN Premium, Team Edition for Testers with MSDN Premium, or Team Suite (includes the three previously named editions) for MSDN Premium.  Visual Studio Team Foundation Server is not included with any of those packages.

Why am I not pleased with this?

First, it caught me off guard.  All the hoopla about Team System the last two months wooed me to believe that I'd have all that VSTS goodness in the same subscription I've known and loved for years.  Little did I know that the subscription price was doubling (for the first year) and that it would provide less value (percentage-wise) than it did before.

Second, I don't like Microsoft's snow job.  They claim it simplifies licensing and lowers pricing.  So, two levels go away (Universal and Enterprise) and four new ones appear.  On the surface there is one price level (MSDN Premium) but in reality there are four different Visual Studio editions offered with Premium.  The old top tier price?  About 2700 MSRP.  The new top tier price?  About 11000 or 5500.  Where is that cost savings again?  Where is the simpler licensing?

Third,  I wear three hats - architect, developer, and tester.  Not only do I not want to pay 11,000 with my hats, but I also don't want three different versions of Visual Studio installed.  Presumably Team Suite will allow you to install the enhancements for the three roles on one VS installation, but I'm not too sure about that (and the product info pages aren't clear on that either).

Fourth, I want Microsoft to show its developers the respect they deserve.  Development tools should be a loss leader...which MSDN Universal has been for years, I'm sure.  We use the tools, which we get for a low cost, so that we can drive the need for Windows, Office System, and Windows Server System.  Why has .NET been adopted so quickly?  Because developers sold it to the masses.  Microsoft surely didn't do it.

Don't kill the goose that's laying your golden eggs, Mr. Microsoft.

My information comes from the following pages:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/compare/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/chart/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/transition/

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/mar05/03-21DevToolsPricing.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-21vs2005pr.asp

I've had the good fortune begin working with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.  I didn't rush right out and write stored procs in C#, but I have jumped into generics and anonymous delegates.  I'm using the February 2005 CTP and am impressed.

I haven't done a whole lot with new Yukon features, but I have been using the management tools / VS integration for a few weeks.  The first and most glaring issue is the lack of database diagrams in SQL Server Management Studio.  It seems that these will return before RTM, which is a very good thing.  I am very surprised that they were ever cut.  I can understand adding them to the VS integration piece, but I cannot understand removing them from SMS.  There are a hefty number of people that will use SMS and never touch VS...those folks deserve diagrams too.

Visual Studio is much quicker and stable than I expected.  So far the C# compiler has crashed three times on me and the VB compiler has crashed 15 or so time.  Despite that, however, the IDE didn't falter.  The standard send a crash report dialog came up, told me which compiler died, etc., but the IDE kept on chugging.  Kudos on the resilience.

One of my favorite new features is the code definition window...even for native framework types.  For those unfamiliar with it (View | Code Definition Window), it shows the prototypes (or full code if you've got the source) of the types, functions, etc. that you are currently mousing over.  It works like dynamic help does, but instead of showing help topics is shows code.  I've got that window full screen on my second monitor.  It's far easier to glance at that than it is to "Go to definition" then jump back.  It's also easier than firing up Reflector then alt+tabbing back to VS.

A close second to code definition is the added debugging support.  Debugger visualizers have gotten their fare share of press and with good reason.  They are quite nice.  What impresses me more is that enhanced immediate window features and the overall more helpful exceptions (including the exception window popup).  It's now far easier to see exactly where a problem occurred, what the current state of affairs is, and how that state was created...the needed info for problem solving.

I don't want to give the impression that this build is polished, because it isn't.  There is odd behavior now and then that is hard to repro (things just refusing to compile, coding executing and failing but then not failing a little later (same bits)), etc.).  The keyboard shortcuts are a little rough around the edges (right click, g (Generate stub OR Go to definition comes to mind)).  Refactoring / code snippets require an extra [enter] keystroke now and then.  All in all, though, I expect that RTM in a few months will address these issues.

Today marks one year and one day since I began blogging.  It's been an interesting experience.  I've fancied myself as a writer for quite some time, but knew that I'd never do much writing professionally.  After about 12 months of writing imagistic poetry in high school, I lost the knack (if I ever had it) of writing anything that a decent sized audience would find interesting.

12 months ago I was working on working for a software company a fair distance from here.  I was also in school working on finishing my degree.  The insane amount of snow that had fallen around Christmas and New Year's was finally melting allowing me to see the 25 saplings that I'd planted a few months earlier.

Today I'm working for a transportation services company headquartered in my own town.  I'm still schooling and hoping I don't burn out between now and a little after this time next year when I should be finished.  The sapling were uprooted (along with everything else in my yard) to lay the sod that now greets me each day as I return from work.  I'm reading Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and am planning to read Kenneth Pollack's The Persian Puzzle in the near future.

12 months from now, I'll likely still be working for Flying J and will likely still be in school (though nearing graduation).  My sod will probably be leveled out and have had a spring and summer of mowing.  I just might be an agile developer and write test harnesses before implementing design specs.  I'd like to get into TDD or XP, 2005 just might be the year.

I've finally been able to get back to web dev lately.  I started using XSLT in fall 2000 and every few months I find a project where it's a good fit.  I'm thinking of doing up a starter guide to XSLT.  I found that a lot of developers don't seem to know too much about it.  I'm hopeful that in doing the guide, I'll learn it better myself.

http://www.theserverside.net/cartoons/Top10_NET_Thankful/Top10_NET_Thankful.swf

[from David Hill]

I've come across some good links lately.  I'm posting them, so I can find them when I need them (and when I'm not on this laptop).

http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2004/11/19/267089.aspx (Arrays, ArrayLists, STL, and “Whidbey's” generics.

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/sriram/archive/2004/11/18/32707.aspx#FeedBack (Keep technology simple and it'll achieve wider adoption)

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=832017 (ports for various Windows applications / services)

I just saw The Incredibles.  It's a good flick.  It seems that Pixar wrote their own rendering software - Pixar Renderman - to produce it.  I noticed they gave props to Intel CPUs, but I didn't notice an OS.  At a Steve Jobs company, I'd guess X-Serve but that wouldn't run on Intel CPUs.  My next guess is Linux.  Perhaps I'll buy the DVD when it's out, so I can read all the movie credits.

Enough about politics...I've watched a few of the ASP.NET webcasts on http://www.aspnetwebcasts.com/ .  Yesterday, I received my copy of VB.NET and my book of choice.  Here's the deal - watch 3 webcasts (live or recorded), and get a free copy of VB.NET and one of a couple books on ASP.NET.  The offer runs through 30 Nov 2004.

So, intraVnews lost my state.  Losing state was the same reason that I dropped SharpReader several months ago.  To be honest, I've got other gripes against intraVnews.  It often can't seem to read feeds.  After a few tries on a feed, it permanently ignores it (you have to explicitly re-enable the feed by reseting feed history or something similar).  It doesn't tell you when it's ignoring feeds.  It doesn't have an easy to find and explicit means to update a feed right this second!

So, I've switched.  I've been a faithful reader (other than when intraVnews was ignoring the feed) of Dare's for about a year now.  I've read all about the great RSS Bandit and have decided to give it a second chance.  (I tried it a while back and was less than happy about it for some reason.)  Here's to hoping it maintains my state!

Over the past few days, I've seen the outlook.exe process eating up 300 MB + RAM.  A few times, I'd get dialogs complaining of OOM exceptions.  I've got 1 GB RAM on this box, why the heck does Outlook need more?!

I've got Microsoft Outlook 2003 SP 1, intraVnews 1.0.1468.32636, and Lookout 1.2.0.1924 installed.  I know intraVnews is written in a .NET language.  Perhaps Lookout is too.  As it turns out, I installed Whidbey beta 1 this week.  My Outlook addins now bind to it rather than 1.1, which they were compiled against.  I'm guessing a combination of Whidbey being a beta product and differences between 1.1 and 2.0 caused my problem.  After uninstalling Whidbey, all was well again.  OK, mostly well, intraVnews lost all the state info for my feeds, but that's another story.

I found a great page on IANA's site last night for TCP and UDP port reservations.  I'm writing this, so I don't have to Google for it the next time I need to lookup ports.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

I'm sure this has been available for quite a while, but it's new to me.  MSNBC supports RSS.  This page explains what RSS is, what feed readers are, and also a list of MSNBC.com's feeds.  Cool stuff.

Yipee!  From Eric, from Soma.  Yet another item to make Whidbey worth the wait.

Virtual Server 2005 Standard and Enterprise is now on MSDN Subscriber Downloads (think it's for Universal subs only).

To speed up your VPC sessions running Windows XP SP2 (among other things), get VPC 2004 SP1 here.

Last week I bought a new CD player.  The player it replaced had served me well for 10 years, literally.  I was a senior in high school when I bought it.  I even had to fight with UPS to get it a day early (very long story that I don't fully remember).  Anyway, my new player is a Panasonic SC-PM29.  My requirements were few - MP3 playback, WMA playback, CD swapping while a disk is playing.  My old player wouldn't do any of these.

I have 1448 WMAs (ripped from about 100 CDs) and 1621 MP3s (audio books, all but a few purchased at ldsaudio.com).  When I commenced burning CDs for play in my new player, Windows said, “hey, how 'bout HighMAT?”  Since my player does HighMAT (I discovered this after purchase...a nifty bonus), I burned Gospel Doctrine in HighMAT.

All is well, right?  WRONG!  I couldn't HighMAT'ify several of my other MP3s, because apparently it requires 44 kHz or greater sampling rate and my files were 22 kHz (does voice really require that much more?).  I tried converting to a higher sample rate but with a low bit rate.  Nope.  It seems I need a way-too-high-for-my-audio-needs sample rate and bit rate to be HighMAT compatible.  (For instance, my 14 MB files are now over 100 MB.) All I want is the playlist support.  Is this HighMAT being obnoxious or is there a good reason for this?

Yesterday, I received an IM from someone not on my contact list.  I might have considered responding with a “who are you”, but since the sender wasn't on my contact list, I couldn't send or receive messages for that person.  Oh, but wait, I just received one?!  If you're confused, you and I are in the same boat.

My context is this:

• Windows XP Pro, Service Pack 2
• MSN Messenger Version: 6.2.0137
• Only people on my Allow list can see my status and send me messages
• The sender was not on My Block List but is also not on My Allow List.

Ideas?

Note to self: Virtual PC 2004 running Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2 and IntelliPoint 5.2 don't mix.  Very sad, my IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0 was so desirous to spread its legs (wag its tail?).

In no particular order

• Access to the only search engine I use
• Their results return very quickly
• Their results are pretty accurate
• Filters like site: are very easy to use
• Page caching...you can get your results even if the site itself no longer has the page
• Memory of my last 20 searches
• Drag and drop searching - just drop a word or phrase into the search box...you don't even have to hit enter or click Go
• Display of a page's Google PageRank
• One click to see who links to this page (Info Button | Backward links)
• Toggle-able highlighter for all search terms

There are others, but these are the biggest for me.

Back in '99, I settled on the position of my toolbars in IE.  I've changed a little since then, but only slightly.  Whenever I first use IE, I do these things -

1. Right click, Customize...
2. Text Options: No text labels
3. Icon options: Small icons
4. Remove all separators
5. Leave only forward, back, stop, refresh, home, and history.
6. Close
7. Unlock toolbars (of running on Windows XP)
8. Move the icon bar next to the menu bar (overlapping it)
9. Move the address bar next to the icon bar (overlapping it)
10. Remove the GO button
11. Lock the toolbars

Once the toolbars are locked, the toolbars learn that they weren't really overlapped and they make room for each other.  It usually takes a time or two to get just enough (but not too much) overlap.  My goal - maximize screen real estate and let the address bar have enough space to display the URL.

The additions I've made to this configuration are for Fiddler (goes next to History) and for the Google toolbar.  Google toolbar is not an option.  I only do Fiddler, if I'm going to be doing web dev on the box.  The Google toolbar goes just below the Menu | Icons | Address bar.  It is so important to me, that I'm OK with giving it its own row.  That's probably the largest compliment I could give to the programmers who wrote it.

My issue with Mozilla and Firefox, as stupid as it sounds, is that I can't get exactly what I've had with IE for the last five years with either of them.  I can get pretty close, but not an exact match.  Part of this is that the Google toolbar isn't made for Gecko based browsers.  (I'm less than satisfied with the search bar that is included with them...my Google bar on IE is worth the real estate, the search bar on Moz and FF isn't.)  The other part is that Moz's/FF's Menu | Icons | Address bar is too big.  Just too big.  IE's is nice and compact.  This coupled with not having the many functionalities of the Google toolbar (I use it more than any other IE feature except forward and back), is a large handicap.  I'd rather have this than 10,000 tabs and mouse gestures (just an Opera thing?).

I was reading something last week (I think it was on a class newsgroup) how Windows was incapable of hardcore and secure computing.  Such things as online banking and financial processing were far beyond its reach.  Hmm.

I was quite delighted to catch a link to this from Scott Hanselman today.  The article is a case study of Corillian - a company that writes Windows based financial software.  Also of note is the use of SQL Server and the .NET Framework.  Just perhaps, my classmate (assuming that post came from class) was a tad mistaken.

From the article..

Currently, more than 19 million end users—or about 25 percent of U.S. online banking customers—use Corillian technology when they use their institution's online services for transactions such as checking balances, paying bills, and transferring funds between accounts.

These include brand-name institutions such as JP Morgan Chase & Co., BankOne, SunTrust, and Commerce Bank, as well as large credit unions such as the State Employees' Credit Union and the Boeing Employees Credit Union.

Thought I'd take a peak at the site of those who claim the moral high ground on web standards compliancy.  Yep, I'm talking about the Mozilla group.  Kudos to them for validating on HTML 4.01 Strict.  For shame for invalid CSS.  I trust this was just a typo of sorts, for I'm sure they'd never condone bucking a standard. 

It's also interesting to note that spreadfirefox.com's home page has problems.  It is invalid XHTML 1.0 Strict.  The XML document is invalid, so I'll have to wait to validate the CSS.

On a more positive note, these validations were performed via a few mouse clicks on a Firefox toolbar.  Visit here for more info.

Robert has a great entry on security pitfalls in ASP.NET applications.

Will has some additional security thoughts on web applications.

Steve Muench (via odetocode.com) has the low down on Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 and the performance enhancements it'll have for Windows XP Service Pack 2.

K. Scott Allen on sorting with IComparer.

Last but not least, a recent brand loyalty study shows Microsoft with good marks.  Who'da thunk?

Windows XP Service Pack 2 has given Internet Explorer the ability to block installed ActiveX controls.  You can access this functionality by opening IE, and selecting Manage Add-ons... from the Tools menu.  In the last few weeks, I've enabled and disabled Flash several times.  A few sites that I visit actually need it, while most of them only use it to annoy me (ads that make noise, ads that expand and contract, etc.).  Unless the site needs flash (like the games on the zone), I disable Flash.

The problem is that I'm quite tired of going to the menu, selecting Shockwave Flash Object, selecting disable/enable, clicking OK on the message box, then clicking OK to close the Manage Add-ons form.  I Google'd for a bit and found out where the block list lives in the registry.  (Thanks MVPs.)  It lives in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings.  There is a key for each blocked control.  Rather than using IE's dialog, I now click one of two .reg files to either enable or disable Flash.  I'll probably write a little app to do this, so that I can avoid the message box that comes up when importing into the registry.

To create the enableFlash file, copy the following into a file called enableFlash.reg:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000}]
"Flags"=dword:00000001
"Version"="*"

To create the disableFlash file, copy the following into a file called disableFlash.reg:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000}]
"Flags"=dword:00000000
"Version"="*"

To import them into the registry, simply double click on them.

Obligatory Registry Disclaimer:  Editing the registry can harm your computer.  Do so at your own risk.

Norton Internet Security 2004 has a great many components - Anti-Virus, Ad blocking, firewall, anti-spam, etc.  Why does the custom installer not give the user the option of only installing the components he wants?

Second question - why is it that when LiveUpdate fails to update a component, about the only fix available is to uninstall NIS and reinstall it?  (If that doesn't work, I suppose it means you wasted a fair amount of money.)

If I could ever manage to convince NIS to install and get fully updated, I'd see how much I like to compared to McAfee.  For the time being, it seems I'm out of luck.

Ever wonder why IE remembers all the invalid URLs you type in?  Me too.  I typed in http://www.lpark.com/blog (which gives the equivalent of a 404) yesterday, and for some annoying reason, IE remembers it.  What's up with that?

I just renewed my complimentary eWeek subscription.  I can't say that I'm extremely impressed with them.  One of their author's bugs me so much that I punch his picture whenever it makes the front cover (don't remember his name offhand).  That said, I decided that there was some value in it (especially at no cost to me), so I thought I'd renew.  I was pleasantly surprised with their use of DHTML on the renewal page - http://renew.eweek.com/ ...when you mouse to the text box for customer ID, an image appears showing you where to find it on the mailing label of the magazine.  This is far more elegant than having a static image or a “click here to to find out where this number is” link.

n4cer of ActiveWin fame has alerted me to a work around for the “buy, Buy, BUY!” of Windows Media Player 10.

My basic problem is this - I like album art, but I don't like the constant links to buy music that I already legally own.

The workaround -

1. From the Now Playing screen, right click on the album in the lower right hand corner and uncheck “Show Media Information”.  The album cover and buy music link should disappear.
2. Download the Energy Bliss visualization here.
3. Install it.
4. On the Now Playing screen, right click and select “Windows Media Player 10”, then Energy Bliss.
5. Notice that the album art is back (with some dancing blue squares) and that there are no buy links to bug you.

I've been using the RTW of Windows Media Player 10 for a few days now.  Generally speaking, I'm happy with it.  The “I'll keep appearing when you mouse near me“ menu bar bug (or was that a feature?) is now dead.  You can now open an AV file from the Internet and still resume what you were listening to before (big kudos on this!).  Here are a few gripes..

At last count, I had 1460 wma files and 1621 mp3 files.  The files were ripped from CDs I legally own or were legally downloaded (mostly audio books in mp3).  So, all my stuff is legal, yet WMP10 prompts me at every available opportunity to buy the CD of the currently playing song.  Is there any reason I should buy something I already own?  Does WMP10 think that I have illegal songs?  I'm all for helping people to be legal and I'm all for letting people know they can buy music directly via WMP10, but I'm not for the implication (or waste of screen real estate) that my stuff is not legit.

I don't really like the embedded IE in WMP.  OK, I don't know for sure that it's IE, but I'm pretty dang sure.  IE or not, I'm annoyed that I have to use WMP's menus to navigate stuff.  No forward/back via my mouse (IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0).  No alt+right arrow/alt+left arrow.  No right clicking.  Grr.  You know it's a browser.  I know it's a browser.  Let's stop playing games and let me use it as a browser.

I wonder why Play Count is still not in the standard set of displayed columns.  I care far more about it than I do about genre or whether it is DRM'ed.  What I'd like is a “make all views look like this one” so I can set the columns I want to see in the order I want to see them.

I like the new color schemes, but I think they need a bit of polishing.  First, altering colors still requires too much menu navigation (View | Enhancements | Color Chooser).  What happened to that paint brush icon in the lower right corner that WMP9 had?  Second, the colors are a bit too, well, I'm not a graphic design guy, so I don't know what to call it.  I know, though, that white text on a shiny gold-ish background is really hard to read though.  I know that the mini player looks a bit too much like over zealous use of lens flairs.  Third, why is there no option for the player's color to match that of the currently selected Windows XP visual style?  Fourth, in mini player mode, why does the volume control background color not reflect the color of the rest of the player?  My color is currently gold-ish (I'm trying to match the Olive visual style), but the volume control is light blue.

I really don't like the popup “This is what's playing“ that happens when you mouse near the player in mini mode.  I'd like to disable that.  I don't need to know what's playing (I can hear it), and I don't need to see a mini visualization window.

All in all, I prefer it to WMP9 (and all other players I've used).  Still, there are some issues that I hope are resolved in the next release.

Take a look at this HTML document.

<html>
 <head>
  <script type="text/javascript">
   function process(isIE)
   {
    var element = null;
    if(isIE)
    {
     element = document.getElementById("txtStuff");
    }
    else
    {
     element = document.bob.txtStuff;
    }
    alert(element.value);
   }
  </script>
 </head>
 <body>
  <form name="bob" onsubmit="process()">
   <input type="text" name="txtStuff">
   <input type="button" value="Submit IE" onclick="process(true)">
   <input type="button" value="Submit Firefox" onclick="process(false)">
  </form>
 </body>
</html>

Why is it that if an <input> is in a form, Firefox (0.9.2 / Win) can't use getElementById to find it?  Either method works just fine in IE.

Operating System: Windows XP Service Pack 2 (RTM)

Default browser: Mozilla Fire fox 0.9.2.

Application in use: MSN Messenger 6.2.0137

Problem: When I click a hyperlink in a messenger conversation, the link opens in IE not in Firefox.

Problem with attitude: I'd think that after the whole hoo-haa Microsoft had to deal with over bundling IE in Windows, that it would reign in its applications and make them obey the settings in Set Program Access and Defaults.  MSN Messenger, Outlook 2003 SP 1, and Outlook Express 6 Service Pack 2 all quite often ignore my default browser setting.  I'm not amused, Microsoft.

Joe Beda's explanation of some issues surrounding porting Avalon to Windows XP.

1.1 SP1

1.1 SP1 (Windows Server 2003)

1.0 SP3

Thanks, Eric.

All dasBlog versions are affected.  See Clemens for details and the patch.

I just recently listened to this webcast on the Microsoft Application Updater Block.  The samples were very helpful, since they solved a problem I was just beginning to have last week.  I needed the update to occur synchronously on startup not asynchronously as the app was running.  I'm happy to report that I snagged a bit of the sample code today and now updating is working perfectly.  If anyone else is having the same issue, check out the GAPP.Samples.UpdaterApplicationBlock.Plugins project in the samples.

When I get some time, I've got some blog stories to tell.  For the time being, I thought I'd at least post an entry per month...a bit less than the “at least an entry per day” target I had when I started my blog.

Two of my friends were married and I neglected to give them shout outs.  Congrats to Jeremy and Lauren.  Also, congrats to John and Emma.

One of my classmates posted a link to a nifty tool - http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html  Among other things, it catalogs all the software on your machine.  For all my Microsoft software, it not only listed the Product IDs but even the installation keys.  Pretty slick.  I didn't know that the installation key was retrievable.

Should a competent C# programmer know what boxing is?  or is it just some arcane academic tidbit that only IL reading dorks know?

Any C#ers (or any .NETers for that matter) out there have an opinion on this?

I've been playing (no pun intended) with the Windows Media Player 10 beta for a while now.  I just had a happy moment that needs sharing.  One of my biggest beefs with WMP in the past is that you can't have two instances of it going at the same time.  This becomes a problem when you're in the midst of listening to some audio book (one track is more than an hour long), and you click on a link to hear a 30 second music clip...suddenly you've lost your place in the book.  Ugh.

WMP 10 now has a “Previous” feature to solve this.  At any time, you can click Previous (if you're in standard mode (non skin, non task bar tool bar mode), it's the same as the back button you'd hit for going back one track in a playlist) to return to your previous track.  It'll begin playing as if you had just hit Pause then Play.

One other really annoying bug from WMP 7 - 9 is the “hide my form title bar, unless you mouse over me, in which case I'll reappear even though you told me you didn't want to see me” bug.  In WMP 10, when you tell the title bar (which includes the form border) to disappear, it does.  Period.  You can get it back if you want it, but it won't come back until you tell it to.  Thanks WMP 10, for finally obeying the user.

Generally, it has more fit and finish than previous versions.  Kudos to the Windows Media team for the enhancements and for releasing a pretty stable beta.  I think this is the only beta of a WMP version (other than perhaps the refreshes of 9) that has been stable.

I've heard for some time that one's greatest strengths can also be his greatest weaknesses.  That has never had much meaning to me.  I suppose this is in part due to my evaluation of the word strength.  My first thought is invariably physical strength, though I realize this isn't the only area in which one might be strong.  When was the last time that I looked at a person, who was physically strong, and thought, “hmm, what a weakling!”?  Never.

One of my greatest strengths, arguably, is that I'm a smart guy.  Another strength is passion.  If I go to the trouble of committing myself to a thing, I'm more than likely passionate about it.  The passion and the knowledge, however, have gotten me into trouble more than once.

Twice today, I jumped into a conversation to add commentary on Visio and on Virtual PC.  Now, it so happens that I've read about and have used both of these products, so I wasn't speaking from a position of ignorance.  However, in hindsight, I think it would have been a better idea to say nothing at all.  Was it really necessary to correct my manager and our network admin?  Probably not.  Was I right?  Well, I think so.  In fact, after doing a bit more research, I'm more sure that I was right than I was when I jumped into the conversations.

Chomp, chomp, says my strength (or was that my pride?) as it takes bite after bite out of my common sense.  It is true that I do a good deal to stay current on all sorts of Microsoft related technology issues.  It is true that I'm skeptical of the stuff that I read, listen to, or watch in my pursuit of staying current on Microsoft related technology issues.  As such, I credit myself with being pretty knowledgeable and accurate about a good deal of stuff.  Want to know when IE 5 had its second public beta?  I believe it was late '98 / early '99.  How 'bout beta one of Visual Studio .NET 2002?  Fall '00.  What does Anders Heijlsberg think of virtual methods?  C#'s methods are non virtual by default for a reason...

Of course, this know-it-all behavior isn't always a bad thing.  I think that more than once it has landed me a job.  (Perhaps this is because if I don't know what I'm talking about, I try not to talk.)  However, I'm quite annoyed with myself that I have to have things just so.  This makes me a great software tester, and arguably a good software designer, but it can make communicating with me a not always pleasant experience.  Perhaps the next strength I acquire will be the ability to keep silent.

Thanks to Sam (see comment on previous post), I now know a far simpler means of clearing IE's AutoComplete information (that which I referred to as its type ahead info).

To clear out AutoComplete:

1. Open IE
2. Select Tools | Internet Options | Content
3. Click the AutoComplete button.
4. From here you can alter your AutoComplete settings or clear existing history for web addresses, forms, and usernames//passwords on forms.

Yep, I'm still alive.  The FlyingJ experience has gone well.  Last week they invited me to upgrade from contract to employee status.  I'm in the processing stage now, so soon I'll be a normal employee again.  Wow, it's been a while.

I've got some unrelated items to post about, so here they are in no particular order -

If you are doing WinForms development and need borders on your custom controls, you might consider inheriting from System.Windows.Forms.Form rather than from UserControl.  You'll have to remember to set TopLevelControl to false and to set ControlBox to false, but otherwise, things will be very similar to deriving from UserControl (with the exception of a much richer set of properties and events).  Oh, one other thing, remember to explicitly set Visible to true, when you add your new control to the Controls collection of a form or control.

Two weeks ago, I dreamed that Robert Scoble stopped blogging.  He declared that he just didn't see the point of it any more and had better things to do with his time.  I guess my mind didn't see that as too strange considering some of the other things that have happened lately - Microsoft and AOL settled and stopped throwing mud, Microsoft and Sun settled and stopped throwing mud, W3C and many others came to Microsoft's aide in their fight against Eolas.  I don't know what in the tech world would surprise me at this point.  Perhaps Ellison could publicly call Bill a nice guy?  Hmm, some things are just too far fetched.

I picked up two new (but old) CDs - 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged and The Cranberries Unplugged (a compilation of several live/unplugged events).  With the 10,000 Maniacs purchase, my music collection is now fully legal.  I've had one dubbed tape, which I received about 10 years ago, that was holding me back.  Horrah!

I finally watched, for the first time, the movie AI.  Not sure what I think of it.  It was interesting and certainly far better than Anti-Trust, another movie from a similar time frame.

Last but not least, after fighting with the beta team on a previous Microsoft beta that same team invited me back...oddly enough, it seems the structure of the beta has changed somewhat and is now in line with what I suggested.  I doubt it was me that made the difference, but I'm glad to know that Microsoft learns even from folks who fight with them.

I'm writing this from Windows Longhorn build 4074.  I finally downloaded and installed it.  So far it's worked out much better for me than the PDC build did last fall.  It definitely needs a lot of work, but it looks good considering it's pre beta.

One less than happy thing is that FreeTextBox (the default input method for dasBlog) doesn't seem to like me typing in it.  Not sure if it's a Longhorn issue or a Longhorn via Virtual PC issue.  Either way, it's very annoying.

While I'm being annoyed at things, here's something else.  I'm annoyed at DVD players that require remote controls to work.  I've got buttons on my player, shouldn't I be able to use them to navigate a menu if I lose my remote?  I think so.  Toshiba didn't.  I was talking to my brother about this issue last night.  Tonight, ugh, I lost my remote.  Fortunately, it only took me about 10 minutes to find it, but...I'd still prefer to not need the remote to play a disk.

I'm also hot and bothered by my sunburn.  One advantage of living in the desert is that I can get a sunburn in about 15 minutes.  Yesterday, the sun had me for several hours, so my arms, face, and neck are quite red.

I've just upgraded to dasBlog 1.6.  The most noticeable change is the new monthly archive on the right menu.  Keep up the good work, Omar et al.

To enable archiving of my website, my hosting company moved it from a Windows 2000 Server to a Windows Server 2003 box.  As a result, permissions were and IIS settings were a bit off.  If you were visiting during the week (not that I was writing during the week), that's what was going on if you were getting page errors.

Hmmm...not sure what's up, but dasBlog decided to create several dozen (71 to be exact) bogus content files.  It then got mad that it couldn't open them (it didn't name them correctly to be opened), so it refused to display any content.  I've deleted those files, and now the content is being displayed again (you can see this right?).  I apologize for today's down time.

Grr.  Why doesn't Add / Remove Programs have rich sorting ability (sort by install date would be nice).  Why can't I start typing the name of the application and navigate to that entry like I can in Windows Explorer?  (I think I know the technical reason, but I'm sure some smart guy at Microsoft can overcome it.)  Why is the last used date almost always inaccurate?  When you click on the usage terms (Rarely, Occasionally, etc.), why does the definition window pop up centered on the screen rather than centered to the Add or Remove Programs window?

I failed to comment on my new job.  Let me correct that.  Starting tomorrow, I'll be coding for Flying J.  I'm not sure what's good to talk about and what isn't, so I'll not comment on projects.  Below are a few tid bits on Flying J.

http://www.flyingj.com/company/index.html

http://www.informationweek.com/803/genera2.htm

http://fleetowner.com/ar/fleet_flying_continues_wifi/

http://radio.weblogs.com/0110120/2003/03/17.html#a578

I just had one of those “ugh, I'd so much rather use Visual Studio” moments.  Unhappily, I'm writing Swing applications using Eclipse.  What took an hour or so to cobble together with the Java/Swing/Eclipse combo, I could have done in five minutes with the C#/WinForms/Visual Studio combo.  I suppose that my familiarity with the latter is one reason for such a drastic difference, but I don't think the difference should be as great as a factor of 12.  My first impression of Swing is far less than positive.

Wow.  I've heard that www.systemwebmail.com was quite the resource.  Earlier today I had a COMException that was baffling me.  I google'd for three words of the error on systemwebmail.com, and found detailed steps to change a setting in IIS.  Now all is well.  If only all debugging were this easy.

I've been using Outlook for a long time now.  In fact I've used every version (97, 98, 2000, 2002, and 2003).  Only a few minutes ago did I realize sometimes when Outlook displays a number after a folder (like the number of unread items in the inbox) it some times encloses the number in parentheses and other times in square brackets.  Also, the number is some times blue and other times green.  Why is this so?

True to their word, the Canon PowerShot A60 that Dell promised me arrived today.  I was a bit surprised that AirBorne didn't make me sign for it.  I guess I didn't hear them knocking, because I only discovered it when I went outside to get my mail.  Anyway...

Since I've barely even held a digital camera, much less owned one, I'm enchanted by it.  Truth be told, I have no idea how good of a camera it is.  It has menus and buttons all over, so, I suppose it must be good. 

My likes so far are the auto focus, auto zoom, and auto lighting.  It seems to be saying, “Look, I'm a camera, and I know how to take pictures.  Unless you're really sure you know what you're doing, you just point and click and leave the rest to me.”  I'm happy with that arrangement.  The pictures I've taken are really sharp (and really huge - 1600x1200 by default).  It even turns itself off (covering the lens and everything) if left idle for too long (I think three minutes).

My dislikes are that it doesn't auto sync with some atomic clock to get the proper date and time.  Yeah, this is picky, but if my cell phone can do it, surely my camera can too.  My other annoyance is that for the download picture software to recognize the camera is connected to the PC, the camera has to be in review mode (where you see all the pictures you've taken but can't).  Silly me, I didn't figure it would matter, so when I first plugged it in, the camera was in picture mode (the “I'm taking pictures” mode).  I think you should be able to download and upload (why would you want to upload pictures to your camera?) in either mode.

So, overall, I'm a happy new camera owner.

In August '98, I signed up for my first personal email account.  Mine all mine.  In the years that followed a acquired several more.  Other than Keith sending me virii/worms, so I could check out their source, did I have receive evil email.  The tide has begun to change.

I'm not claiming causation here, but I will state circumstance.  Since I began attending University of Phoenix last June, I've begun receiving evil email.  More accurately, I've begun receiving evil email at the only two email addresses that UoP knows about.  More precisely than that, I've begun receiving evil email at two email addresses that are only used for corresponding with UoP - one, my account on UoP's domain for the purpose of posting to class newsgroups, the other, an inbound only account on my own domain that I created for UoP to send me mail.  Other than, perhaps, the federal government when I filled out FAFSA last year, the use of these two accounts has been limited to UoP or those attending UoP.  Very curious.  I'm not blaming UoP, but circumstantial evidence does point to some connection between them and my receiving evil email.

Smaller scale and, apparently, less interesting worms found me last summer at the aforementioned addresses.  Recently, several Bagles have come visiting.  Kudos to UoP for blocking the attachments from reaching me (using Network Associates' server AV software) and kudos to Dell for hooking me up with McAfee's AV software to protect my other accounts.  I'm glad the AV software knows that I prefer English Muffins when given the choice.  I'm hopeful that Win32.EnglishMuffin won't be a worm in the near future to visit my inbox.

Thanks to Raymond Chen, I've created a huge URL for my blog.

http://www.hugeurl.com/?M2E0NmJiMmM1ZTM4NDY2YmI5OTE0MzY3YWE5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V2JGaGpla1pxWWtad2VGVnRlSGRpUjBwV1YydHdWMDFxUmtoV1ZFWkxWakpP
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VWM1YVUxcmJEUldNalZUVkd4S1JsZHVTbFZXYkZvelZGVmFZV1JGTlZaUFYy
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U2EzQjZWbGQ0VDJGV1RrWlRhM1JYVFc1b1dGZFdXbEpsUm1SellVWlNhRTFz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I've been interested in the how's and why's of the consumer financial industry for some time now.  What do those numbers on the bottoms of checks mean?  What's the relationship between my credit card number and the bank that issued it?  Are there sets of credit card numbers that are invalid?  How is McDonald's paid from my credit card, when I buy my Double Quarter Pounder?  Etc.

I have peppered the few people I know in the financial services industries with questions.  Still, I had many unanswered questions.  Joe Ziegler has provided many answers.  I found a link to it when searching for credit card validation for use on e-commerce sites.  If you are interested in either subject, visit the sites below.  If anyone knows of good info an ABA routing, please let me know.

Credit Card 101 - Joe Ziegler

Credit Card Validator control for ASP.NET - Paul Ingles

Now, I'm mad.

On Sunday, February 29, 2004, I called Dell to report a problem - when I picked up my laptop everything froze.  This happened in Windows, in BIOS, whenever.

2 March 2004, a tech support man came to visit me with new parts to solve my problem.  Though it did solve my problem with not being able to pick up my laptop, it disabled several keys on my keyboard.

3 March 2004, the tech support man returns with a new keyboard.  No dice.  Same disabled key problem occurs.  Dell decides to ship me a new laptop and forgo piecemeal troubleshooting.  OK, I'll wait for my new laptop to come.

12 March 2004, my new laptop arrived with the wrong power supply (70 watt not a 90 watt) and the cooling fans are broken (make horrid noise, sometimes don't run at all, sometimes run for hours).  I called to let them know the problem, and they told me I had to send my new laptop back first.  There's also the problem that my support contract would expire on the 14th and my old laptop wouldn't arrive by then.  I can only renew my contract M-F 8-5, so I have to wait till the 15th to resolve that.  All of this aside, there is no reason for Dell to hassle me about the old laptop, since they sent me a defective old laptop to begin with.

13 March 2004, I call Dell and report the problem again and get the same result as the night before.

15 March 2004, I call to renew my contract.  I give a credit card number.  All is well with the contract.  Actually, not quite all well.  My “new” laptop is really a refurbished laptop, and Dell seems to think that the previous owner still owned it.  Ugh.  After resolving that, all was well with the contract.

I also, tried again to get my new laptop fixed without sending the old one back yet.  The issue is this - if the power supply or fans cause my new laptop to die, I need the old one to fall back on.  Nobody at Dell cares about my needs, though most of them agreed that their company policy on the matter was foolish.  So, I ship my old laptop back on Monday (less than one business day after the new one arrived, and I'm supposed to have 15).  I was promised that a new AC adapter would be sent, but that the fans couldn't be fixed until the old laptop was sent out.

17 March 2004, I track the package and Dell received the old laptop early in the morning.  It's now two days since I renewed my contract, so that should be updated in all the systems now.

19 March 2004, Still no new AC adapter.  I called to get my laptop fixed and received personal assurance that all would be well and I'd get a phone call from that tech support agent on Monday if all wasn't fixed yet.

20 March 2004, I send several emails to Dell via their support web site.  I receive no response.

22 March 2004, I receive no phone call.  I have no AC adapter.  My fans still sound like banshees.  I receive an email saying my support contract couldn't be processed because the contract I wanted isn't available for refurbished systems.  The agent tried to call, but number was disconnected.  Ugh.  Of course the number was disconnected, I moved two years and nine months ago!  Dell knows my new number and address.  It knows my cell phone.  It knows my email address.  Still, I didn't get contact until a full week had passed.  Grr.

I also received an email (response from the emails I sent on Saturday via the web site) saying a tech was coming to fix the problem.

24 March 2004, No phone call.  No tech.  No AC adapter.  Very mad customer.  I emailed a few times and told Dell my opinion of their service.  I got more apologies and a new promise of a dispatch.

25 March 2004, I send a few more angry emails in response to Dell's “truly regret[ing]” my inconvenience.  I call Dell and discover that the previous support dispatches had been canceled because my contract had expired.  Of course, nobody called to tell me they were canceled or what I could do about it.  I'm currently on the phone and have yet another personal promise from tech support that the problem will be resolved (e.g. a tech will be at my house tomorrow) and that she'll see to it personally.

I'm not holding my breath.  26 days and counting, and I still don't have a fully functional laptop.

Dell still hasn't updated my contract, processed that they've received my old laptop, and as a result sent me a new power supply and fixed my very noisy cooling fans.  It seems that they are going to get on the ball and make everything all better for this growing very disgruntled customer.

As a result of my fan issues, though, I've found out something nifty.  It seems if my laptop gets too hot and doesn't seem to be able to cool itself off, the processor drops its clock speed.  I think I knew this already, and I think its called Intel SpeedStep.  This is nifty in its own right, but what impressed me is that when viewing system information (Start | Control Panel | System | General tab), the section that tells me about my CPU (I think a custom Dell extension) actually changes the clock speed figure to the current clock speed.  I was guessing that his was a hard coded value based on the max speed of the CPU, but, no, it seems to be the current clock speed.  The Support Information button just below that, which gives the service tab, express service code, and support phone number are nifty too.

Combing my referral logs revealed that someone found my blog by looking for “Kurt Cobain's height.”  Since I didn't remember mentioning his height (especially since I don't know it), in my post about him a few weeks ago, I investigated further.  It seems Yahoo! Search indexed my RSS feed (which includes embedded HTML) and associated the words “Kurt” and “Cobain” from my post text with “height” from an IMG tag.  It seems to me that Yahoo! needs to tweak its algorithm to learn what is content and what is not.

Too funny!  Almost as if Network Associates (or the admins who provide me with my IMAP account) read my previous blog entry, I just received this...

Network Associates WebShield SMTP V4.5 MR1a on <email server> detected virus W32/Bagle.j@MM
in attachment Message.pif from <email address> and it was Deleted

I was surprised this morning to discover I had sent myself a warning about the capacity of one of my email boxes.  At second glance, I discovered that Bagle.J (McAfee's name for it, Syamantec calls it Beagle) had sent it to me.  I saw a handy text attachment from McAfee letting me know that the .zip file had been infected with Bagel but was now clean.  Hmm, so my AV software did its job and killed the virus, but still delivered it to my inbox?  What's the point?  FYI, you were attacked, but I made you safe!

McAfee's parent company, Network Associates, seems to have the same digestion problem.  Its server based AV software began to eat two Bagel'ed emails on one of my IMAP accounts, but it only ate the attachment.  It left the email itself (plus message telling me I was now safe) in my inbox.  Again, what's the point?

It seems to me that a better thing to do, and one far less confusing to consumers, is to finish eating the Bagel.  Bagel, NetSky, MyDoom, etc. have no business in my inbox even if their attachments are now clean.  Don't just cleanse it.  Delete it.  If you want a pat on the back for a job well done, then, perhaps, send an email with the text “You were attacked, via email, by , but I made it all better.  (signed) The wonderful folks at ”  Even this notification should be optional.  Perhaps there already is such an option that I haven't found yet.

I've created a new category called “Software Review” and this is the maiden entry.  Since I talk about my experience with software quite often, I think I'll put all future entries that deal with quality or quirkiness into this category.

I wonder what should be the result of this formula...

Windows XP Pro Start Menu + Visual Studio .NET 2003 = ?

Apparently, it means the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Command Prompt jumps into my most recently used (MRU) apps list on the Start Menu even though I never use it.  Perhaps it was used during the install of VS so extensively that it demanded placement in the MRU list.  One of the oddest things, in my opinion, is that it gets a decent placement on the list (usually in the top 10 out of 20).

McAfee's consumer AntiVirus, FireWall, etc. software came preinstalled on my new laptop.  (Actually, it's only partially preinstalled.)  On reading through the Dell branded McAfee SecurityCenter, here are a few thoughts.

Sadly, I ranked 1 out of 10 on the My AntiHacker Index.  I'm scared!  I'm vulnerable!  The bad guys will ownz0rs me any second now!  What do I do?!  SecurityCenter to the rescue.  I can install McAfee Personal Firewall Plus.  That'll make everything better.  But wait, why don't I use SecurityCenter to “Test My Computer's Security” first.  Clicking on that link opens a browser window on hackerwatch.org.  I opt to do a Port Scan.  Not surprisingly, I pass with flying colors (“No open ports were found.”).  McAfee's own hackerwatch.org site says I'm totally secure (because it can't get passed my hardware firewall), even though McAfee's SecurityCenter flunks me with a 1 out of 10.  Seems that 1 out of 10 doesn't mean I'm not safe from the bad guys.  It really means, “You don't have the McAfee Personal Firewall Plus or other similar McAfee product installed.”  Incidentally, to score 10 out of 10, you can install Personal Firewall Plus and leave it disabled.  So long as you are paying McAfee, that's enough.  You don't actually have to use the software.

Now that I know the AntiHacker Index is of dubious value, what about the AntiAbuse Index and AntiAbuse Index?  SecurityCenter explains the My AntiAbuse Index in these words: Your AntiAbuse Index provides a measure of how secure your computer is against the latest privacy abuse outbreaks.  The index is computed based upon which types of privacy abuses currently exist and how prepared your computer is to defeat these abuses.

One of the factors that influence your AntiAbuse Index is external privacy abuses.  For example, if there is a privacy abuse outbreak, does your anti-abuse software protect you from this scenario?...

I don't know what a “privacy abuse outbreak” even means.  It seems to me if there is an evil piece of software running around invading my privacy, it'd be classified as a virus or a worm.  My antivirus software (which just happens to come from McAfee) should take care of that for me.  By using a term like “outbreak” it scares the reader into thinking you need a special product to protect you.  However, I say that's a load of marketing unreality just like saying I need McAfee's firewall, because SecurityCenter was too inept to test for a hardware firewall.  The reality is if there is an outbreak of anything, antivirus software should deal with it.  The day to day, social engineering kind of things (warning: you are transmitting your credit card, social security number, etc. in plain text!!) should be handled by privacy protection software.

So far SecurityCenter has two strike against it in my book.  It lied to me about needing a firewall.  It tried to deceive me by instilling irrational fear of privacy abuse outbreaks.  Let's see what's next on the list.  Ah, My AntiSpam Index.

Arggg!  I've got a 1 out of 10 for that too.  My Inbox must be bursting at the seams with spam.  Please save me, McAfee!  First, let's see what that My AntiSpam Index is.  According to SecurityCenter: Your AntiSpam Index provides a measurement of how secure your computer is against receiving inappropriate, unsolicited, and virus-infected email.  The index is computed based upon which types of spam abuses currently exist and how prepared your computer is to defeat these abuses.

One of the factors that influence your AntiSpam Index is external spam abuses.  For example, if there is a spam abuse outbreak, does your anti-spam software protect you from this scenario?...

Hmm, that sounds just like the AntiAbuse Index.  A few thoughts - first, I have Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 installed.  I have my junkmail settings set to Safe Lists Only (the highest setting offered...basically, if I don't explicitly trust an address, any mail from that address is considered spam and doesn't get to my inbox).  OK, so SecurityCenter lied to me about being protected against unsolicited email.

Second, since I'm using McAfee's antivirus software, shouldn't that take care of protecting me against virus-infected email?  Either McAfee's AV software is lousy, or SecurityCenter is deceiving me again.

Third, what the heck is a “spam abuse outbreak”?  Some have said that at least 50% of email delivered each day is spam.  If we aren't already in an outbreak scenario, I don't know what an outbreak is.  Since I'd say we are already in an outbreak scenario, and not one piece of spam has hit my inbox in months, I'd say Outlook is doing a great job.

All in all, it seems that SecurityCenter is throwing around technical terms and scare tactics to sell its products.  The indices aren't based on how secure, private, etc. you are.  They are based on how many McAfee products you have installed (even if they aren't running!).

I just had a typical Explorer moment.  I decided to remove an IIS application.  Simple task, right?  All you need to do is delete it?  Well, no.

In IIS, you can remove the application (open IIS, open web site, right click on application directory, select properties, on the Virtual Directory tab under Application Settings click the Remove button), which causes it to become a standard virtual directory.  Then, you just delete?  No, Explorer will whine and give access denied or file in use errors.  You have to recurse through the directory structure yourself, deleting as you go.  Once you've deleted all the internal files/folders, suddenly the directory is no longer locked and you can delete it too.  Sure would be nice if Explorer would do the recursive delete for me and not whine about locks which obviously don't exist (if they did, then a manual recursive delete should fail too).

The introduction of File and Settings Transfer Wizard in Windows XP was a great idea.  What would make it much better, would be support for non Windows settings.  By that I mean, it should support migrating settings for all of your applications, not just for the apps installed with Windows (IE, OE, WMP).

My current config with Outlook 2003 consists of 5 .pst files.  One relates to an IMAP account, one to an HTTP account, one to collect blog posts, one for archive, one for POP3 mail.  My 10 email accounts, rules, contacts, calendar, and most of my mail live in or are connected to this .pst for POP3 mail.  It's a less than pleasant experience copying it to a new install of Outlook, retyping all the info for my email accounts, convincing contacts to display correctly, etc.

FSTW could easily grab all this info for me and transfer it.  The way I think it should work is this - the API for FSTW should be extensible.  By that I mean, any app vendor should be able to write a plug-in for their apps.  It shouldn't be Microsoft's burden to migrate your QuickTime settings or you Mozilla bookmarks.  Microsoft should write plug-ins to migrate Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server Enterprise Manager, etc.

Yesterday, I opened the box with my new laptop, plugged it in, turned it on, and was greeted by AOL Buddy.  Earthlink and Real also tried help me feel welcome.  I was also surprised to find .NET Framework 1.1 anxiously waiting to execute some managed code for me.

Real has filed a 1 billion dollar law suit against Microsoft, in part, due to the inclusion of Windows Media Player in Windows.  Real says this hurts their business.  Curiously, Real Player and Windows Media Player were preinstalled on my new laptop.  It seems to me that Real needs to sell its player a bit better and form deals with OEMs to have it preinstalled, just like Microsoft has with Windows and Office to have them preinstalled.  You can say that Microsoft gets a free ride now, but in the beginning, Microsoft had to fight just like everyone else.

Sun also has a suit against Microsoft, in part, due to the inclusion of a Microsoft Virtual Machine for Java in Windows and the lack of a Sun JVM.  What I find interesting is that the .NET Framework 1.1, which is not part of Windows XP Professional or part of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP Professional (both of which were preinstalled on my new laptop), was preinstalled.  That tells me that Microsoft talked nicely to Dell, hooked them up with an easy to use setup program for 1.1, and the rest is history.  If Sun is so adamant about consumer Java development, why doesn't Sun (or why hasn't Sun for the last several years) talk nicely to Dell and other OEMs, hook them up with a nice J2SE setup program, and let the rest be history.

Why can't Real or Sun do exactly what Microsoft had to do to get its software preinstalled on PCs?  Why should they get a free ride?

My laptop difficulties are nearly over.  My replacement laptop arrived today.  Its 2.4 GHz P4 M, 1 GB RAM, and 40 GB 5400 RPM HD jumped at me and said, “We're here to make you happy!”  The cooling fans, however, had other ideas.  Apparently the fans didn't like that fact they had to cool off such a CPU.  They have decided to make loud scraping noises whenever they run.  The good folks at Dell said they'd make the fans behave.

For the record, I'm very pleased with Dell tech support.  It takes a while sometimes to get totally satisfied, but Dell makes good on its support contracts.  They've definitely won me over as a long term customer (as long as they are selling Tablet PCs when I finally get around to buying one).

Seems the new tentative release data for Visual Studio “Whidbey” (or Whidby if you are spell check challenged as I was a few weeks back) and SQL Server “Yukon” is now first half of 2005.  The tentative names of the products are Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.

I've read several complaints about the slip (did Microsoft ever promise they'd be here in 2004?), and I think only a few are valid.  The only valid concerns, in my opinion, are the Software Assurance agreements some companies signed in 2001 in hopes that the new SQL Server would be out by 2004.  However, you do take a gamble at that if they company doesn't have set in stone release dates.  The other concerns I've heard are just foolish.

It's much better to have a solid product a few months later than expected than it is to release on time but be buggy.  I think Microsoft is living up to part of the promise of its Trustworthy Computing initiative by delaying the release dates of .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005 until they are of release quality.  Microsoft is often criticized for its software quality.  Since they are doing something about it now, let's give let them do it and stop moaning about getting more reliable software a few months later than expected.

Sup, yo!  I decided last night that now was a great time to see what the hubbub was about with JSP.  I've since installed Tomcat (5.0.19) and have written my first JSP.  Other than the use of Java in place of VBScript, it seems surprisingly similar to ASP.

I just took Michael Platt's quiz and got a 60%.  See his post to determine the meaning of the score.

I got an error last night using the WebDataInput control from Infragistics NetAdvantage 2004 vol. 1.  I google'd to no avail.  The error was “can't init editor” appeared in my status bar.  That message lives in a section of script that tries to call nother section of script.  The problem, and a really foolish oversight on my part, was that I forgot to copy the script file that WebDataInput uses up to the website I was working on.  If anyone else runs into this problem, hopefully Google will lead them to this entry and the very easy fix.

To correct my assumption from yesterday, it seems that TDD is a subset of XP.  I finished reading the MSDN Magazine article I mentioned yesterday.  I'm not sure where design fits in to the picture.  It seems that they advocate putting off design decisions as long as possible.  If you are writing a test for a specific case, you are mandating a feature of the design.  It seems that the tests themselves are the project design documentation.  I'm not sure where design meetings, use cases, etc. fit into the picture.

I've been thinking about eXtreme Programming lately.  It and Test Driven Development (they are the same thing, right?) get a lot of press, but I hadn't found a good primer on the subject until today.  The latest issue of MSDN Magazine has an article by Will Scott and James Newkirk on the subject.  I'm not finished reading it yet, but so far it sounds pretty reasonable.  I wonder, though, how well it works on smaller projects.  I think I'll try it out and see how it feels.

The unthinkable happened.  The motherboard that Dell installed yesterday (actually, it was Unisys on behalf of Dell), is defective.  Dell has decided that my laptop is entirely too troublesome to deal with, so they are sending me a new system!  The good part is, when it arrives, I'll likely have a keyboard that works.  The bad part is, it won't arrive for 7 - 21 business days.  Ugh.

In other news,I think Java's errors are nearly as cryptic as COM's errors.  In the nearly four years that I've used .NET, I almost always understood (or at least had a vague idea) where the problem was.  In the last week using Java, I can't say the same.  Perhaps I had similar experience with .NET a few years ago and I've forgotten it.  That seems unlikely to me though.

The nice man from Dell came to visit me today.  He replaced my motherboard and RAM.  All was great, until I got to the Windows login prompt and discovered several of the keys on my keyboard didn't work.  As a result, I'm currently sitting with my laptop on my lap and an old Microsoft Natural Pro keyboard on top of the laptop keyboard.  Now is one time I wish I had purchased a port replicator.  Oh well.

Tomorrow, I'm told, I'll get a new keyboard.  I'm hopeful that all will be back to normal then.

From the good folks at the AP: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4400653/

I'd like to see more written on RSS, so the general surfer will be as comfortable with it as they are with email or site URLs (please nobody say that an RSS feed lives at a URL too, I know that ).  Perhaps, though, we should solve the RSS vs. ATOM debate first.

I started a new class today.  OK, the class really starts tomorrow (Thursday), but I began a day early.  It's a Java class.  I got the latest Java SDK (didn't that used to be called a JDK?) and also nabbed NetBeans.  In times past, I wrote pure Java using J++ 6 (contrary to Sun's claims it is very possible to not use the com.* classes and remain 100% pure), but I figured I'd try out Sun's IDE.

Wow.  If my NetBeans experience is any indicator, I can see very clearly why there are few client apps written in Java.  It feels just as slow to me as it did 5 years ago.  And the memory footprint?  100 MB!  100 MB so it could help me edit two text files.  Pathetic.  Needless to say, I'll write and test my apps for this class in J#, then compile them via command line to hand in.  Although J# only supports Java SDK 1.1.4, that is quite sufficient for my needs.  I suppose I didn't give NetBeans much of a chance, but it was far too clunky to deserve one.

In case you missed it, I added search funtionality to the blog earlier this morning.  It currently does single keyword searches of content on this blog.  When dasBlog 1.6 is finished, I understand that search word highlighting (a la Google searching), among other things, will be added.

For those of you using dasBlog 1.5, adding search to your blog is very easy.  Here is the macro you need - <%newtelligence.search()%>.  Just add that to your .template file and, poof, you'll have search.  Since dasBlog's info seems to live in three different places, the hard part about adding search, was finding the name of the macro.

From a typical February month perspective (28 days), my blog has been up and running for a month.  Here are a few tidbits I've learned during that time.

Almost nobody has heard of RSS, or ATOM, or news aggregators in general.  There are bloggers, who don't even know what these things are.  One of the many things that we as an industry need to work on is simplifying the adoption path of new technologies.  I'm not sure I have great ideas on how to do that, but I'm convinced of the need.  One helpful item, I think, would be to reduce the ridiculous format competition (for most people, is there really a need for whatever goodness ATOM supposedly offers?).  We take something already complex for non tech people and make it more complex.  Bad move, I think.

The Internet is as unreliable as ever.  Referral hits don't always mean someone is linking to you.  Email notifications don't always arrive.  Stats tracking software falls asleep sometimes.  Google's ranking algorithm is more fickle than a 2 year old deciding what to eat (or not eat, or throw on the floor, etc.) for dinner.

Most importantly, blogs allow me to communicate with many people.  According to my logs, I'm regularly read by folks from at least 10 different countries and at least two major software companies.  It is interesting to think that my voice is heard by so many (though very few compared to many other bloggers).

Thanks to Mario, I've discovered there's a newer version of dasBlog.  I just upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5.  Everything seems to be working correctly to me.  Please let me know, if you have any problems.

It seems that Whidbey beta 1 will be out in June. (courtesy Scott Guthrie on Chris Garty's blog)

intraVnews is not high on my like list today.  You see, I decided that rather than take up 200 MB of blog posts in the .pst file where my email, contacts, calendar, etc. reside, I'd make a special .pst just for blogs.  I moved the intraVnews folder from the mail .pst to the new “for blogs only” .pst, and all was well.  OK, all was well in appearance.  A few hours later, I realized I'd received no new blog posts.  I checked my feeds, and intraVnews couldn't find any of the folders for the feeds.  Ugh.

On further investigation, I discovered the problem.  Rather than store a path like \\blogs\intraVnews\Microsoft Employees\Dare Obasanjo\ (blogs is the name of my “for blogs only” .pst), it hardcodes the Outlook folder ID.  So, if you rename the folder, it's OK, because the only important thing is the ID.  If you move the folder (in the same .pst) all is OK, because of that folder ID.  If you move to a new .pst, then all bets are off and all feeding is stopped.

To solve the problem, I exported my OPML, unsubscribed from all my feeds, imported my OPML, and let the feeding begin.  Since all my state was lost, I had to manually reset that.  Also, since the OPML did not reflect the folder categories I had created (it reflects categories by wherever the feed's folder first lived, changes are not reflected in the OPML grr), I had to move folder around and do some renaming.

All in all, it is still a better experience than I had with SharpReader, but the a bit of brightness has worn off.  I should also mention that I tried NewsGator again, and it still doesn't behave the way I want it to for NNTP.  Until it can handle NNTP as well as Outlook Express, it isn't worth its price tag (since the free OE and intraVnews cover the same functionality).

Korby points to an article by Steve Gillmor, which makes an unsupported, in my opinion, attack on the use of comments on blogs.  Gillmor says:

Take blog comments—please. The CTOs of the various campaigns defend their use as a simple user interface for casual involvement by newbies. But converting the undecided into active offline participation involves more than just the harvesting of good ideas. Comments destroy the signal to noise ratio of blog brands, trading the appearance of democratic participation for muddied messaging and vulnerability to comment spamming. (emphasis mine)

He has a point regarding comment spam, however, I think the good outweighs the bad.  If blogs are to be an interactive communications medium, then blogs for everyone (which is possible, of course, but doesn't occur in practice) or comments are required.  If I have knowledge that can expand upon what the author of a post has said but can't do so because comments are disabled, then part of the usefulness of that blog is now gone.  Not only can I not add to the author's content myself, but I can't learn from others who can add to the author's content (and neither can the author).

Some will say, and I understand that Dave Winer is one who says this, that everyone should just get their own blog and spout if they so desire.  That's a nice idea, but very impractical.  First, many who read blogs, don't want to write them (I fell into this category until just a few weeks ago).  Second, that's like trying to have a conversation with several people via email, where every email sent only goes to a portion of the recipients.  Each person in the group has a different idea of what is being said, which speaks volumes about the quality of this conversation.  To have a real conversation, you need to reduce, as much as possible, the obstacles.  Personally, I think that comments are a bit too removed.  Eliminating them altogether is a huge step backward from what blogs offer.

My problem with comments is this - if I am the author of the blog, the blog engine likely notifies me when comments are posted.  However, it won't notify those who left comments.  This makes ongoing conversation difficult.  It's not like a newsgroup, where many can post and every time you login, you see the new posts.  It's like (exactly like) non-RSS enabled websites.  The only way I know if there is new content is if I go back to the site (or if my aggregator supports commentRSS if I refresh the feed and return to the post to check for new comments).

In brief:

• Comments enable communication with the blog author.
• Comments enable fostering of a community of readers.
• Comments enable readers and the author to interact.
• The quality of this interaction is bounded by the lack of notification for non-author comments.

Korby Parnell has given me a few things to think about this week.

I wonder... how do you think democratizing technologies like blogs might someday manifest themselves in the television medium?  Can television (or radio for that matter) be “democratized“? Or is it an inherently command and control medium?  For instance, is it completely insane to imagine a world in which people create and consume personal TVBlogs?  Might I someday be able to switch from the MSNBC news feed to the Slate news feed to the Dave Winer news feed?  Is it completely inconceivable that I might someday receive popup-style alerts on my home television (ala Outlook 2003 or SharpReader.NET) that a friend has posted to her blog while I'm watching a sitcom on NBC or ESPN?

I think such a thing is very possible. TV is already being incorporated into PC usage via Media Center PCs (among others).  Benjamin J. J. Voight was talking about video blogging a few weeks ago.  I can easily see text, audio, and audio/video blogs in the future co-existing with “professional” articles, radio shows, and TV shows.  I could also see some RSS-like technology, perhaps attached to a Media Center PC or Tivo, allowing for easy subscription and aggregation of those unprofessional and professional works.

In the last few days, I've received two or three copies of any emails that were processed by my Outlook rules.  After not working too hard to solve the problem, I had a brilliant idea - restart Outlook.  Actually, I think I had already done that.  What I didn't do previously, though, was check Task Manager to see if any other Outlook processes were running.  Surprise, surprise, there were two outlook.exe processes running after Outlook had closed.  I killed those processes, reopened Outlook, and sent a test email that a rule would process (one which previously gen'ed 3 emails during previous tests).  Happily, I only received one copy.

My thought is that each process was processing incoming email and had access to the .pst.  When they got to the “move to folder“ part, I'm guessing they each deleted the object they had in memory (I'm guessing new email stays in memory and not on disk, until the rules have finished processing) and each created a new object in the appropriate folder.  It seems to me that my .pst should have been locked by one of the processes, but this is the best theory I have right now.  I'm hopeful that I won't see this annoyance again, and leave the hardcore debugging of the situation to the Outlook team should they ever see this problem in their labs.

Someone recently asked me how to break into the IT industry.  Meaning, how do you get started?  I answered:

I think the most important thing to do is develop (and nurture) an insatiable love for knowledge in your field of choice.  That is what will get you in many doors, will put you in contact with people who can teach you and who can hire you, and will get you to the point where you are worth hiring/training/etc.  I'd never hire someone with a passing interest in coding.  I have hired people with aptitude and desire, but with little experience.

Another person asked me how I got started.  I answered along these lines:

neowin supposedly reported this, but they are down at present.  Yikes.

Update: CNet has a little bit more info.

Update: Betanews also has some things to say.

Last update:  Washington Post (thank n4cer for the link) says it's the real deal.  It's only partial, but this is still a very sad thing.

I've had a few biting smart application experiences lately.  About a week ago, I was editing some .acx files in FrontPage.  Why FrontPage and not Visual Studio, you ask?  I don't really have a good answer for that.  It was a convenience thing.  VS takes forever and a day to get itself back in physical RAM after my laptop has hibernated.  FrontPage comes up much, much faster.  Since I was doing some non code edits (CSS and HTML stuff) and some site maintenance stuff (deleting orphaned files, backing up the site, etc.), I used FP due to its lower memory overhead.  Hmm, looks like I had a good reason after all.

Anyway...the non blog portion of lparky.com is composed of a few user controls to construct the header, footer, menu, meta info, include the style sheet, etc.  At least three of the controls have broken tags (the open or close but not both).  Well, FP decided it wanted to be uber helpful, and it generated the missing tag part for me.  This resulted in less than satisfactory HTML (my HTML was well formed).  Despite telling it in no uncertain terms that I knew what I was doing, it insisted on “helping” me.  Finally, I opened them as plain text, and FP left them alone.

I had a similar experience yesterday sending previews of HTML email to one of my clients.  I've not yet figured out how to directly edit the HTML source of an outbound email from Outlook (if it is possible, please let me know how), so I used Outlook Express.  (In retrospect, it would have been easier to just write a script to send them, but I didn't realize that OE was going to “help” me so much.)  I copied the full HTML into the email and sent it.  I unhappily discovered that OE wanted to be as helpful as FP.  It removed a few quotation marks, added a few tags (my HTML was well formed), it butchered my spacing, etc.  I was less than pleased.  Finally, I sent my client links, so he could view the emails online instead.

These are issues that don't do a lot of damage, but they waste time.  They take control over my content.  Microsoft Office XP started in the right direction with Smart Tags (do you want to turn off this behavior?).  Options like these (I've just changed this for you...do you want me to keep doing that, or what you rather I leave you alone?) need to be more prevalent.

Joshua Allen and Dare Obasanjo are discussing metacrap.  I think the scenarios Joshua mentioned are, at present, very unlikely, and I don't see much reason (he surely has not given any) to expect things will be much different in the future.

First - people need to have information capturing devices / applications.  Second, those devices / applications have to capture good metadata (time, date, position, etc.).  Third, that information needs to be related to the other data of the user.  Fourth that data needs to be associated with the data of other users.

I think it is a huge leap to even say that a large number of people will get to the first step.  I'm a relatively gadget getting geek, but I don't have a digicam yet.  I use Outlook, my cell, and my PDA like nobody's business, but those don't share data too well.  Yes, there are models that reasonably well, but mine are dumber models.  So, the first step is a huge leap...people need to have smart devices and applications.

The second is also a huge leap.  Many people have cell phones, but how many have smart phones?  How many cell phones will willingly share useage data, address books, call timers, etc. with others .  Even smart phones, so far as I'm aware, will only do address book syncing.

Presupposing that the first and second steps are met, we can depend on the holy grail of Longhorn's WinFS to automatically create relationships between the data (and metadata?) points.  Step four, well, I don't know of plans regarding this.  I suppose p2p networks are a good foundation...so, we'd have secure (?) personal data sharing via p2p networks?

I'm not sure that I buy any of this as close to feasible or conceivable in the next few years.

Infragistics has released their latest component suite.  I started using NetAdvantage about a year ago (2003 vol. 1).  In fact, the menu on this site (well, all of this site, but the blog) is an UltraWebListBar.

It seems that for all the talk of xcopy deployment of ASP.NET applications, I always have to do a good deal of tweaking.  Take this for example -

I wrote a relatively small app in pseudo n-Tier fashion.  I deployed it on an intra net.  I made modifications on a test server.  I uploaded them to the intranet server.  Suddenly, everything was broken.  I'll have to remember the errors I get (nice big, breaking errors!) some other time.  Here are the steps I always seem to have to perform to deploy a new version of an existing ASP.NET app -

1. Remove the vdir as a registered application in IIS.
2. Kill the ASP.NET worker process.
3. Delete the former app's directory in Temporary ASP.NET Files.
4. Copy the new site over, replacing any existing content (.dlls, .aspxs, etc.)
5. Reset permissions on the directory.
6. Recreate the vdir as an application in IIS.

It seems that if I don't do all of these things, the requests bind to the old version of the site (which is why I delete the content in Temp ASP.NET Files, and to delete them, you have to remove IIS's lock) or something similar.  These are problems I never had in the world of ASP (other than when using custom COM components).

In the world of ASP, I'd simply copy the new pages and all would be well with the world.  This has me thinking that I might abandon the code-behind style of coding ASP.NET sites, so that I can have real xcopy deployment again.  I can still have custom .NET components (just not the site itself).  The only troubling thing, that I can see, is the lack of IntelliSense in Visual Studio.  I'm coming very close to thinking that it is worth giving that up (which, of course, won't be an issue in Whidbey), so that I can decrease my deployment time.

If I ever find myself cursing the C# compiler for doing something I don't like, I need to remember this moment.  Whatever quirkiness C# has, it has nothing in C.  I'll quite whining now and get some more useful blog posts up a bit later.  I just realized that I haven't had breakfast (Yes, I know it's 7pm and I've been up for like 12 hours...I was busy.)

I'm learning (or forcing myself to accept) that I can learn things from even the most unlikely of places.  Going through horribly written code, I can still learn a function or two that I've never seen before.

Pinging Weblogs.com failed: Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every half-hour. It's cool that you're updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice -- take a break, you'll enjoy life more.

You may not be so bold!  Besides, I was over half an hour by 13 seconds.

I've been thinking a lot about interviewing lately.  I've been interviewed and I've been the interviewer as well.  Here's my take on it.  (I should also add that when I was the interviewer, I was employed by small companies.)

When I interview someone, I've never been too interested in any of the material things (tie color, shoes, etc.).  In fact, I only remember that the interviewee is not outlandish in appearance.  What interests me is the conversation.

I ask about what they know.  I ask how to apply things they know.  If they don't know something, I explain a concept and ask where it would apply and why or why not.  My goal is to gauge aptitude.

I always browse over resumes, but I never pay them too much attention to them.  Resumes can be made to say almost anything.  The most important thing for me is what a person knows and is capable of knowing, not how well they can express that in a resume.  I'd prefer to not have to be so formal about an interview, but if I've never met the person before, I don't have much choice.

I think it's been three years since I was last interviewed.  I think I had that job wrapped up before I walked in the door though.  My future employer found me at a conference Microsoft held in Salt Lake.  During Q&A, I argued with the presenter over the capabilities of ASP.NET server controls.  He said, you can't do that, and I said, yes, you can, I've done it.

He and I faced off again over whether Windows 2000 was truly a .NET Enterprise Server.  I argued that it couldn't be, since it was released in February, and .NET wasn't announced until June.  Whatever Microsoft said on the matter, throwing Windows 2000 in the mix just didn't make sense.  As I recall, the audience supported my answer (the question was to name all the .NET Enterprise Servers), so I got the copy of Office 2000 Premium anyway.

As soon as the conference was over, this stranger (my future employer) came up to me and asked for my name and number.  We talked for a little bit about web development.  I think due to the Q&A of the conference and this five minute “interview,” he decided to hire me.

As I think about being interviewed again, I wonder how I want to present myself.  I think that I want my employer to know what I can do and to know who I am.  If I'm not a good match for the company or the company isn't a good match for me, it makes little sense for us to hook up.  Rather than play what I consider silly resume or interview games, I'd much rather be straightforward about it.  I'd rather my future employers read my blog and get inside my head a little to know if I'm what they are looking for.  (Perhaps that means I should talk a bit more about the kinds of projects I've worked on.)  If I'm not, then all the resume and interview skills in the world shouldn't land me the job.

I misspelled the codename of the next version of the .NET Framework.  It's “Whidbey” not “Whidby.”  I'm sorry if I led anyone astray with my ignorance.

I just started a search.  I set it up very nicely in advanced options.  I then decided that I need to look through “Any type of Outlook item.”  annoyingly, Outlook decided it needed to reset all my other search parameters.  That's down right not user friendly of it!

I just did a full system virus scan (102, 222 files).  Not surprisingly, none were infected.  I live behind a hardware firewall in my router and a software firewall on my laptop.  I use Automatic Update for Windows XP to keep me patched.  My anti-virus software auto updates itself as well.  So, I have to do almost nothing to stay pretty well patched and secured.

Additionally, though, I don't open things that look odd.  If I get an email that (especially with attachments that get through my Outlook security) that I'm not expecting, I hope over to Symantec's web site to see if the subject line or filename matches a new worm.  So far, I've never been infected.  I've also never fallen prey to a hoax (delete the Java debugger, because it's some evil spyware/malware app!).

I suppose I'm more tech savvy that many, so this isn't too surprising.  Not to be too arrogant, let me say that most people I know in the tech industry are far more tech savvy than I.  Still, even on the low end of tech savvyness (I wonder if I can use “savvy” a few more times in this post), there are a good number of people who just don't have a clue.

CNet asks what more can be done about it.  Here's an idea...remove the problem from those who don't have a clue to those who do have a clue.  Is it easier for a few hundred million users to update their AV software or for ten million trained admins to update the AV software on their public servers?  If every public SMTP node on the Internet had current AV software, how would an email borne worm like MyDoom spread?  That's right, it couldn't.

This wouldn't address the issues with Slammer or Blaster, but it would have prevented Melissa, ILOVEYOU, SoBig, MyDoom, and many others from spreading.  I'm appalled that so much focus is on educating the non tech masses and so little is on educating the “educated” admins.  To make it a little easier on the admins, Exchange, SameTime, sendmail, and any other widely used mail server should bundle in self-updating AV software.  It's the least you can do for your customers.  It's the least you can do for yourself.

I have a few thoughts on port worms like Slammer and Blaster, but I'll save them for another day.

What I'm wondering is this - am I off base here or are a good number of admins really as lazy (or cash strapped to buy/install/update AV software) as I think they are?

I've read several blogs in the last few days about posting using Word or OneNote.  I tried w.bloggar and Zempt last week.  In the end, I've decided to stick with the web based dasBlog entry editor.  At some point I'll probably check out Word or OneNote and do the email to blog.  My reservation with this is the typically horrid HTML that Word generates.

No offense, but I'm not looking to learn about scandals, pr0n sites, or how to free Cuba.  However, such sites are appearing in my referrer log.  Perhaps those who want to free Cuba also want to read my blog?  Yeah, I don't think so either.

So, here's the problem:  my referrer log is full of sites that don't have links to my blog.  How then, do those site appear in my log?  Is there some browser bug munging the referrerUrl in the HTTP request?  Is someone practicing some bizarre spoofing technique, so I won't discover where they are coming from?  Is there a DNS snafu somewhere?  I'm at a loss on this one.

Any ideas?

Yesterday, I switched to intraVnews.  Today, I read Harry Pierson's blog about switching to intraVnews.  I thought I'd repost here the comment I just left there.

Here's how I solved the new blog entries vs. new email issue.

1. Right click on "Unread Mail" and select "Customize this Search Folder"
2. Click Browse.
3. Clear all check marks, then check Inbox.
4. Now, the "Unread Mail" search folder will only contain mail items and not blog posts.

To create a folder for blog posts...

1. Right click on Search Folders.
2. Select New Search Folder.
3. Select Unread mail.  (by default, it will search for mail in Personal Folders, we'll fix that in a sec)
4. Click OK.  (Outlook will create the folder and start running the query.)
5. Now, right click on the newly created search folder, probably called "Unread Mail1"
6. Select "Customize this Search Folder"
7. Click Browse.
8. Uncheck Personal Folders.
9. Check intraVnews.
10. Click OK
11. You can then name this something like "Unread Blogs"

Now your email and blogs are completely separate.

I was very much impressed by a post from Chris Sells about Longhorn.  Here's a snippet:

If you're not a super early adopter, than Longhorn is just going to be noise that you should ignore 'til the beta hits.

Wow.  He then goes on to talk about .NET Framework 1.1 and the up and coming 2.0.  In other words, he's saying exactly what I said in Moo.  I was beginning to wonder if everyone at Microsoft was drunk from Longhorn Kool-Aid.

A quick edit to the CSS and backgrounds now show up in the intraVnews generated Outlook posts.  The issue?

The CSS had this declaration before:

background-image: url(themes/candidblue/lestexture2.jpg);

now it has an abosolute path:

background-image: url(http://www.lparky.com/blog/themes/candidblue/lestexture2.jpg);

The world of blog views is curious.  By blog views, I refer to the different ways in which blogs can be viewed.  For many months, I've read stripped down feeds (mostly black text on white background with no borders, images, etc.) in SharpReader.  I played with RSS Bandit a bit and applied several XSLTs to the XML feeds.  Most recently, I've been reading via intraVnews in Outlook.  Oh, and I can't forget to mention the occasional view in a browser.

The interesting thing is that I designed my blog (OK, so only about 10% of the effort was mine) with the browser in mind.  I haven't tested the XHTML in the RSS feed.  I didn't design the site to appear well when scraped into an intraVnews generated Outlook message (it strips the gray background image).

Frankly, I'm not sure what to do about this.  I think I'll just hope that my words are interesting enough to keep people reading despite the possible bad aesthetics.  Oh, and that my pages are search engine friendly enough, so new readers can find me.

Until a few hours ago, I had three Personal Information Managers.  For the record, I lump blog aggregators into the PIM category.

I had Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.  I had Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0.  I had SharpReader.

I use Outlook for 9 POP3 email accounts, 1 HTTP (Hotmail), and 1 IMAP.  Outlook also processes the catch all account for my domain email.  I have aggressive spam filtering and 42 rules going on.  I have work, budget, and personal recurring tasks.  I have a healthy contact list with recurring items created in my calendar (birthday's, anniversary's, etc.).  Outlook and I spend a lot of time together.

I use Outlook Express for newsgroups, because Outlook is too proud to stoop down and support NNTP.  For some unknown reason, it happily will let you surf with an embedded browser, but it refuses to be a newsgroup reader.  Thanks, Outlook.  If for no other reason, I go to school via newsgroups.  (I'm an online student at University of Phoenix.)  So, right next to Outlook, I also always have Outlook Express open.

Until yesterday, I also always had SharpReader running.  Quite obviously, I used it to read a hundred or so blogs.

I've heard a lot about consumer electronics device convergence.  I'd like to know when we'll get information software convergence.  Outlook 2003 needs a few additions.  It needs to support NNTP.  Period.  It needs to support RSS/RDF/ATOM et al.  Outlook 2003 + intraVnews (which is a 3rd party Outlook add-in) is a good start, but I want more and better.

I don't know how Inktomi works exactly.  It seems to have a different crawl pattern (or frequency at least) than all the other spiders.  It Slurps nearly twice as often as Googlebot.  It's hit me more then three times as often as Jeeves.  I hope it enjoys drinking the Potato Juice and keeps coming for more.

This blog is my first (if you don't count a little site I wrote after my mission that nobody read) attempt at Internet honesty.  By that I mean, whenever I posted anything on the net until now, I've done it hiding behind an alias or the name of some corporation (like my clients or my employer).

I came to a startling conclusion not too long ago.  It goes like this - it's nearly impossible for the common man to hide his identity on the Internet.  I'm not the most tech savvy guy around, but I've sniffed out more than one person myself.  I read referral logs.  I read user agent strings.  I check properties on the email and newsgroup posts I receive to see where they come from and, if possible, what email client and OS (even OS service pack) was used to create them.  I read WHOIS records.  I even do the occasional tracert.

I thought to myself, “How hard would it really be to follow this path?”  Look at my email address.  Hmm, that doesn't look like a corporate address, I wonder what it is.  Let's see what's at lparky.com.  Hmm, LEP.  I wonder if that stands for Louis E. Parks.  Let's check the WHOIS record.  Wow, good guess.  Perhaps we should give him a call or mail him a letter.  Perhaps we should check to see how much he paid in property taxes last year.  Yeah, no privacy.  All from a little email address.

With such an easy path, I figured that using my real name was almost as safe as posting with an alias.  So, there you go, security through obscurity doesn't provide much security.  Besides, it's quite a feeling to Google for myself and appear on the first page of results.    Currently, I'm 2nd and 3rd.  Yesterday, I was 4th and 5th.  Last week, I was 8th.  Potato Man isn't doing too badly either.

I've talked about being a tester and a programmer.  I just thought I'd clarify my work history somewhat.

When I returned from my mission, I started school at BYU.  Within a few weeks, I got a job at the MTC testing T.A.L.L. (Technology Assisted Language Learning) versions 2.3 and 3.0.  Primarily I focused on the Russian version.  I also tested associated content creation and management tools, as well as the teacher component of T.A.L.L., Teacher Assistant.

I had a wonderful time testing.  Complain, complain, complain.  Many of my bugs were overruled, but many of them were accepted.  It's quite a thing to look at a product and know that you helped bulletproof it.

I spent about a year testing eventually become head of testing before taking a dual role as tester and programmer.  Keith Borrowman moved on to green pastures, and I replaced him as the programmer for Teacher Assistant.  DJ Dewey then replaced me as TA's tester.  (Ugh, I still remember that almost impossible to fix half check mark bug he found!  I also remember his future wife, Kim, mocking my use of Courier to align some text.  Here's a link to pictures of Deej and Kim.)  Though they'd probably dispute it, I still consider Keith and DJ better programmers than I am.

About four months later, another department snatched me.  Windows DNA, VB COM components, etc.  It was quite fun.  It was also the beginning of my current career as a web developer.

In the years since then, I've developed internal web sites, external web sites, and some desktop apps.  I'm currently a self-employed programmer.  Still, when big companies are nice enough to let me beta test software for them, I get to exercise my testing skills.

OK, so maybe I'm not really a tester at heart.  Maybe I'm just critical and irritable.  I've already said once on this blog that when I judge myself, I lack objectivity.  This would be another one of those times.

Being critical is a curious thing.  It's often regarded as innately bad.  Critical, judgmental, negative, etc.  How many people jump for joy at being criticized or judged?  Right, almost nobody.  Or do they?

I can take a critical look at a thing and in so doing state its good points.  When I say that a thing is good or that I like a thing, I'm also judging it.  Objectivity.  I think the negative connotation of those words comes from a lack of objectivity (that or low self-esteem).

While I'm on the subject, and I'm sure I'll get back to it again, Outlook 2003's rules wizard makes me cranky.  I suppose I should say that I allow it to make me cranky, since I choose how I respond to things, don't I?

I love Outlook's rules. (That was a judgment call!)  I've have 42 of them right now.  Here's the problem I have.

1. Right click on an email and select Create Rule...
2. On the dialog that appears, click the box by the text From (email address of sender).
3. Click Advanced Options
4. Click Next
5. Click the box by “move it to the ”
6. Down below, specify the folder to move it to
7. Notice that after you select the folder, a new rule has appeared: “and on this machine only”

There you have it.  Outlook, just to annoy you, has added a condition.  To remove it, you have to click back and uncheck the “and on this machine only” condition.  If I'd only created one or two rules, I'd probably not be too bothered by this.  Since I have so many, I see this bug quite often.  It spoils my Outlook experience.

I don't know where I stand on the RSS vs. ATOM debate, but I know that requiring aggregators to support both is annoying.  Yep, annoying, I say!

A few days ago, I got an ATOM feed for a blog I wanted to read only to discover that SharpReader isn't an ATOM supporter.  Ugh.

I Google'd a bit and found a nice XSLT for ATOM to RSS conversion.  It works fabulously.  Thanks Mark Gardner.  I can now read the feed I want to read.

Longhorn, longhorn, longhorn!  I'm very excited about the next version of Windows.  I've seen many of sessions from the latest PDC.  I've played with the 4051 bits.  However, I think I'll add my voice to a few others I've heard lately.  Why don't we spend a little more time looking at what we can do now (or 12 months from now) rather than on what we can't do for at least 24 months?

When .NET was announced at PDC 2000, I was ecstatic.  The beta 1 bits were released that fall.  By February 2001, I was writing my first professional application using them.  All was abuzz in the land of Microsoft about .NET.  I didn't consider this a bad thing, because, even at beta 1, the platform was widely available and stable enough to code against.  You could write your projects on it, and upgrade the code to b2, RC, or RTM without too much effort.

Longhorn, though, is a whole different story.  Microsoft won't even give a firm release date for it.  Many think it won't be ready until late '05 / early '06.  What good is it for the developer community at large to focus on Longhorn, WinFX, Orcas (.NET Framework 3.0) now?  I think it isn't too useful.

Whidby (.NET Framework 2.0) will be released, it seems, within the next 12 months.  SQL Server Yukon (SQL Server v.Next), will be released in the same time frame.  Why don't they get the attention the deserve?  Why don't we focus on what will be in Whidby in 2004, and focus on Longhorn, Office 12, and Orcas in 2005?  Doesn't this make a bit more sense?

I happen to have the PDC bits for Longhorn and Whidby, but many developers don't have them.  How annoying do you (Mr. Microsoft) think it is to have Longhorn dangling in front of your nose all the time, when you can't even play with it?

In the latest .NET Show, Robert Hess said:

With this episode, we're gonna take and start embarking on a fully new direction and that is focusing on a new operating system that inherently involves .NET under the covers. That's the new operating system coming out of Microsoft called Longhorn. We released it first at the PDC a couple months ago. In the last episode we talked briefly about it; in this episode we're gonna focus on an overview of what Longhorn is. Talk about individual pillars, WinFS, Avalon, Indigo, fundamentals, showing you some application code of what it looks like to write a Longhorn application. Then in the follow up episodes following this one in the next several months, we're gonna focus on the individual technologies of Longhorn, whether that's the Windows Identity System, security, Click Once, writing code in XAML, and other further technologies like that. But in this episode, it's gonna be a primer to allow you to understand what Longhorn is so you can understand it from the ground up and seeing how it might take and affect your applications that you are gonna need to be developing when Longhorn comes out.

I find it very interesting that the .NET show, for the most part, ignores .NET Framework 2.0 and skips right on to 3.0 and WinFX.  Maybe Microsoft simply forgot to reveal the details of Whidby and Yukon in 2002.  Perhaps they were supposed to be the focus of 2003, but someone forgot to talk about them all last year.

OK, I feel a bit foolish now.  I spent a good few minutes thinking about how bothersome it was that dasBlog wouldn't let me obfuscate my own email address in the footer (since removed entirely) of my blog pages.  What I'd forgotten was that I placed a non-obfuscated email address in the footer of every other page on lparky.com (this is my domain, by the way).

The issue now, though, is what to do about it.  I had a good reason for putting a real email address in the footer of lparky.com.  It's meant to be a somewhat professional look at my company, LEP Consulting.  I didn't want to hinder anyone from reaching me.  On the blog, however, I figure it's very easy to reach me by leaving comments.

As a software tester, I hate inconsistency.  If the programmers can come up with a good enough reason, I'll usually concede.  Since I'm having this argument with myself, I'm afraid I don't have the same objectivity that I have when I'm not both the tester and the designer.

I just found myself in a situation I was in about 12 months ago, but I couldn't remember how I solved it then.  Piece by piece as I fixed the problem, I remembered each new issue but not its solution.  How annoying!

If anyone ever recommends running a web site, even a small departmental site, using Microsoft Access...ignore them and install MSDE.  It's just not worth the fight with Access.

I realized that I identifed a few issues with dasBlog, but that I didn't post how to fix them.  Well, I kind of did talk about how to deal with the bugs but not in a very direct manner.  Anyway, I'll address them directly now.

The “Illegal characters in path” bug (Google, please pick up on this, since nobody else seems to have addressed this that I could find) is the result of a missing file.  The problem occurs when you select the dasBlog theme for your site.  The blog engine will in the /[blog root]/themes/dasBlog directory for a file called homeTemplate.blogtemplate.  If it's missing, you'll get the error I described.  You need to copy this file (you should also probably grab copies of dayTemplate.blogtemplate and itemTemplate.blogtemplate) to the dasBlog directory.

This will eliminate the bug.  However, this won't display the real dasBlog theme.  An alternative is to remove the dasBlog theme from your themes list.

The other bug I talked about was requiring a valid email address for the site owner but not obfuscating it.  One workaround is to edit the site.config (it is found in /[blog root]/sitconfig/site.config) file by hand and edit the Contact element with an obfuscated email address.  This has the benefit of making harvesting your address more difficult.  It has the drawback (it seems) of breaking an email notifications from your site.  It seems that the notification engine uses the Contact element as the From address when sending email to the email address specified in NotificationEMailAddress.  If the From address is invalid, the email won't send.

Another option is to edit the template(s) (/[blog root]/themes/[theme name]/homeTemplate.blogtemplate) that produce your blog's UI.  You can simply remove the email link.  This makes contacting you a little more difficult, but not too difficult.  If you want folks to be able to contact you, just make sure that you use your email address, which will be obfuscated, when replying to comments.  Optionally, people can post to your commets section to contact you.

Another bug that I haven't mentioned is in the web based entry editor.  Sometimes the screen will seem to freeze.  To correct this, you need to mouse over the area where the editor text box is.  All will flicker back to life immediately.

I just visited a site with a link that would close the browser window.  When I clicked the link, IE said, “The Web page you are viewing is trying to close the window.  Do you want to close this window?”  It seems odd that IE cares more about when a window is closed than when it is opened.  The issue with popups/popunders that has caused many (including the new version of IE) to make popup/popunder blockers might have been avioded if IE had simply produced a dialog saying “The web page you are viewing is trying to open a new window.  Do you want to open a new window?”

I'm really big on consistency.  One thing about dasBlog that I don't understand is this - in the site.config file you can specify that you want email addresses to be obfuscated.  This converts them from the form

<Username>@<Domain>.<TopLevelDomain>

to the form

<Username>AT NOSPAM<Domain> dot <TopLevelDomain>.

The Human Aggregator of Geek Life has linked to me.  I figured that linking to him yesterday was a long shot to help get me on the map.  I'm stoked that it worked.

What I wonder is this - how does he have time to go through all of his referral logs.  My blog's been up for under 24 hours and already I have quite a few hits from spiders, bots, sites, etc.  I wonder what his log looks like and how he manages to post as much as he does and go through his logs.

Yeah, I think I definately prefer dasBlog's interface.  Anyone know of a way to add in the current track from Windows Media Player using dasBlog's interface?

OK, the Internet is cool.

I've had this blog up and running for under 12 hours and Robert Scoble has already found me.  I remember reading a post of his that talked of setting up a blog and having 10,000 readers by the end of the week.  Perhaps we are closer to that reality than I previously though.

I think the “candid blue” theme works best for me froma visual perspective.  Still, I love to complain.  I think I'll have to make some time to learn the dasBlog template format and work some visual magic.  I guess that means I'll have to learn some visual magic first...

One thing that bothers me is false claims.  I'm claiming to be CSS compliant (and I am now), but the default install for this theme has a CSS bug.  I had to fix it!  In the Description class, letter-spacing is set to .none.  This is an invalid value.  I changed it to 0 and now the site validates.

Last night I began shopping for .NET blog software.  I had a less than pleasant experience with .Text.  I'm sure it's a great platform, but it didn't seem to like me too much.  It kept giving me date parsing issues.  Oh well.

So, I moved on to dasBlog.  Hmm.  I was hopeful when I had it up and running locally in about five minutes.  I was less than hopeful about two minutes later, when I got an “Illegal characters in path“ error.  I was sure that http://www.lparky.com/blog/ contained no illegal characters, but dasBlog was unrelenting.

I was determined to have a blog, so I downloaded the source to dasBlog.  I set a few breakpoints and quickly discovered that my trouble was due to a missing template file.  Ugh!

So, here's part of the bug -

C:\Program Files\newtelligence AG\newtelligence DasBlog 1.4 (Source)\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web\themes\dasBlog should have a file called “homeTemplate.blogtemplate” but, it didn't.  Now it does and all is well.

The second part of the bug -

The error handling code to deal with the missing template was less than adequate.  Line 217 of Themes.cs in newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.Theme has this line:

return new StreamReader("<p>no template</p>");

I don't know about you, but I don't think that's a valid path.  System.IO didn't think it was valid either, which is why it kept telling me I had invalid characters in my path.

If anyone in the dasBlog world is listening, you can recreate this with a default install of the current 1.4 code.

All in all, I'm happy to finally be blogging.  I still believe that open source software is only free if your time is worth nothing.  This experience underscored that reality for me.