Posts by Year

2023

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2022

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2021

A failed MakeValid call in SQL Server

1 minute read

We hit this strange bug in SQL Server earlier in the year. A single SQL Statement would just kill the connection. It would kill it 100% in any version of SQL...

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2020

Add a POSH ADB to your Windows Terminal

5 minute read

Windows Terminal is so close to being out of beta. It’s been my default CLI on Windows for about a year. I still don’t think in PowerShell, but I try to use ...

Bag man

less than 1 minute read

If you haven’t listened to Rachel Maddow’s “Bag Man” podcast, you are missing a great tale of corruption.

Return to FocusUF

4 minute read

A while back, I blogged about a command line hack to set the focus for a web cam. I was using a Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000 and it has the annoying habit of re...

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2019

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2018

That time I taught that dog a trick

3 minute read

Image by FiveRings [CC BY 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons Many, many years ago, I used to work with Jack*. Jack is a musician and at the time ...

Planning for Wi-Fi

4 minute read

After 20 years in our existing home, we are getting ready to move to a new home. The new house is still being built and I had CAT6 run to the places where I ...

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2017

And then my blog was defaced

5 minute read

A couple of weeks ago my blog was defaced through a security hole in WordPress. About 800,000 blogs were hit via something called the REST-API exploit. I saw...

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2016

Modifying test data for privacy

4 minute read

Sometimes I get actual live data from a client to track down a bug that only happens with their data.  That data will contain student records and we don’t li...

Thoughts on One Trick Ponies

1 minute read

When your company is a one trick pony (Apple), that pony (the iPhone) better be a compelling trick.  ZDNet’s Ed Bott just wrote an article that shows where A...

Get AMPed for faster page loading on mobile

1 minute read

I just updated this blog to use the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) plugin for WordPress.  AMP is an open source project designed to optimize page content for...

FBI vs Apple vs the Consequences

2 minute read

There has been a lot of conversations about the court order that the FBI has filed on Apple.  If you are following this story and have not yet read the court...

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2015

The first US MVP Open Days was a success

2 minute read

Last week I attended the first US MVP Open Days.  It was held at the Microsoft Technology Center in Malvern, PA.  It was a 2+ day conference for US Microsoft...

Getting a new dev machine set up, OS X Style

9 minute read

So I’m on my second Macbook. I use a Macbook Pro for iOS development and I was due for a new one.  I went from a Late 2011 MBP to a late 2014 MBP.  Except no...

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2014

Looking back on Xamarin Evolve 2014

4 minute read

Xamarin’s Evolve 2014 conference was a great experience.  I attended it last week in Atlanta and while you see a lot of the cool new features from the live s...

Validating a GUID input, TryParse vs RegEx

3 minute read

Once again I’m validating some text inputs, this time I need to verify that a user has entered a GUID in a valid format.  While I can’t verify that the user ...

When the EditorPackage does not load correctly

less than 1 minute read

I had this “The ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editor.Implementation.EditorPackage’ package did not load correctly.” error message when I started up Visual Studio 2...

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2013

Just ordered our Christmas cards

less than 1 minute read

I finally got around to ordering our Christmas cards.  We’ve been using Shutterfly for the last few years.  I’ve been please with the quality, choices, and c...

Taking the Acer W3 from Preview to RTM

6 minute read

It was time to install Windows 8.1 on my Acer Iconia W3-810. I received the tablet at the Build conference. The W3 came with the 32-bit edition of Windows 8 ...

Today’s lesson in voice mail etiquette

1 minute read

I just had a fun adventure in returning a wrong number voice mail. I arrived into work late today and I had a voice mail message time stamped at 10:00am. The...

Certified Xamarin Mobile Developer

1 minute read

I just received the email notification from Xamarin that I successfully passed their Mobile Developer certification exam. I was given a free pass for the exa...

I git it now

3 minute read

Sharing code across OS X and Windows was a bit more challenging than what I had expected. We have our own TFS servers, but Xamarin Studio on the Mac really c...

Getting Hyper-V to work on a HP Envy23

5 minute read

I finally got Hyper-V working on our HP Envy 23.  For Christmas, I had bought a new PC for our family.  We have a shared PC in a our family room that everyon...

A quick photobook order on Shutterfly

less than 1 minute read

A $20 coupon code from Shutterfly showed up in my inbox a week or so ago.  I could spend it any which I wanted on Shutterfly, that was pretty decent of them....

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2012

Taking Office 365 for a spin

less than 1 minute read

As the leader of the Tech Valley .NET Users Group (TVUG), I have the opportunity to use Office 365 for a year.  I’ve become gypsy like in my use of PC’s for ...

Thinking about Windows Phone 8

1 minute read

I watched Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 Summit on Monday and I came away impressed.  My phone contract is up and I have been holding off on getting a new phone...

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2011

Replacing GetHostByName with GetHostAddresses

less than 1 minute read

I’m working on some C# code that needs to send some data over a socket connection.  The user can specify the destination by name or by IP address.  I was usi...

An odd way to post

1 minute read

This short little post was composed with the Blogger iPhone app. It’s running on my iPad and I’m using the BlueTooth keyboard that HP made for the ill-fated ...

Binding an Enum to a DataSource

2 minute read

I had some code for an ASP.Net Webforms app where I need to present to the user a list of options that were define as Enum.  I want to populate a combobox wi...

One week with FiOS TV

8 minute read

It’s been a week since I switched from Time Warner Cable to Verizon FiOS TV.  After years of having only one choice in my town for cable TV, Verizon just sta...

Initial impressions of the Netgear WNDR3700

4 minute read

I recently upgraded my home network with a new router.  I have Linksys WRT54GS router, running a custom firmware called DD-WRT.  DD-WRT provides a lot of ext...

A Random Vegas Observation

2 minute read

I like walking the strip in Vegas at night, it makes for great entertainment.  I just love watching everything going on.  I’m not into gambling, so I just wa...

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2010

One final migration from Vista to Windows 7

6 minute read

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I upgraded our last Vista PC to Windows 7. We have a family PC, that we all share.  It’s nothing too fancy, a three year old Dell ...

How TweeVo survived the OAuthcalypse

4 minute read

Last month, I spent a few evenings adding OAuth support to Brian Peek’s TweeVo application.  TweeVo is a little WPF based application that runs in the backgr...

Care and feeding of your wireless router

6 minute read

This morning I went to check my email from my iPad and had a unpleasant surprise.  No Internet.  I have the Wi-Fi only version of the iPad and it usually has...

All about “F# and You”

1 minute read

Last night at our monthly Tech Valley .NET User Group (TVUG) meeting, we had Rick Minerich come in and do a presentation on F#.  It was a very good presentat...

A change at TVUG

less than 1 minute read

For the last couple of years, Griff Townsend has been the President of the Tech Valley .NET Users Group (TVUG), here in Albany NY.  Griff has put in many hou...

You should have WinPatrol on your system

2 minute read

You really should have WinPatrol installed on your system.  It’s a service type of application that monitors changes to your system.  For example, if an app ...

Notes on installing FinalBuilder 7

4 minute read

VSoft Technologies just released a new version of their build automation tool, FinalBuilder.  Version 7 gets a new look to their IDE and you can finally have...

Wifi password cracking in the clouds

3 minute read

Bruce Schneier posted an article on his blog about wpacracker.com, a service for cracking WPA and other passwords.  Basically, you send them a dump of networ...

The Delmar Kid Chaser

2 minute read

I’ve been following the story of the Delmar Kid Chaser.  If you had not been following this one, it made the local news a few days ago.  Four teenagers raise...

Enjoy some Bar-B-Que for a good cause

1 minute read

There’s a flyer floating around in the office and it’s worth sharing the details with the rest of the world (the part of the world that lives near Latham, NY...

Suppressing a repeated column value in SQL

2 minute read

I was asked by one of my co-workers for some SQL help. He needed a SQL statement that would suppress repeated column values for the result set. Basically the...

Twitter? Time Warner Cable gets it

7 minute read

I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter.  Some days, I think it’s greatest time waste since they invented the meeting.  Other days, it’s an endless sour...

What do you mean the computer wont turn on?

5 minute read

Last Monday, I came home from work and went to check my email on my home PC.  I went into my home office and sat down at the PC.  I turned on the monitors (I...

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2009

I’m now a MCP

7 minute read

A couple of weeks ago I went away to a “boot camp” to prep for a set of Microsoft certification exams.  After a few years of plugging away at .NET programmin...

When HTML encoding can bite you

2 minute read

I’ve been using TweetDeck to follow Twitter.  It’s a great app, but it has some quirks.  Like it’s ginormous memory usage.   Another is how it renders the te...

Fess up when you made a mistake

2 minute read

I was working on a installer project for a new tool that we will be releasing this fall when I hit the most odd error.  Right after the installer started up,...

Wireshark work around for Windows 7

1 minute read

I do a fair amount of programming at the socket level and Wireshark is one the tools that I use to test the data going over the wire.  Wireshark is a free ap...

Looking forward to Delphi 2010

2 minute read

I just got the email from Embarcadero with the access code to get my copy of RAD Studio 2010.  Almost all of our products that are Delphi based are compiled ...

Tag your junk mail before it gets sent to you.

less than 1 minute read

Even though we live in the world of tomorrow, we still get junk mail.  The old fashioned kind made of out paper and stuff like that.  Junk email annoys me, b...

Remembering Alivia Lovell

less than 1 minute read

Last October, our company constructed 8 playhouses that were donated to some patients at the Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders at Albany Medica...

Natasha Richardson

1 minute read

I was shocked when I first heard about the tragic accident that took the life of Natasha Richardson.  I am finding it hard to accept that a small fall could ...

What to do before your camera is stolen

1 minute read

I just read about a guy in Poland who bought a camera on an on-line auction and it came with a memory card with someone’s travel pictures. He figured that th...

Resetting the mouse cursor

1 minute read

Some app on my XP development PC left the mouse cursor stuck in the “move” state.  The mouse was behaving correctly, but it was stuck in move image, the one ...

Sorry it didn’t work out

1 minute read

My work email inbox had a lot of spam this morning.  The messages were very similar in content with subtle variations in the sender and subject fields.  Noth...

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2008

Some odd TiVo issues

1 minute read

I have  couple a couple of Series2 TiVo DVRs and they just received the TiVo Fall 2008 Service Update for 9.3.2.  It’s basically a few tweaks to the UI, but ...

DevTrack woes with build 1833 of mfc80.dll

1 minute read

We use TechExcel’s DevTrack tool to track our defects and project modifications.  A few weeks ago, one of our QA specialists installed SQL Server 2008 Expres...

Installation is not configuration

3 minute read

Christopher Painter has a good post about the problems inherent with with having installers run SQL scripts.  Having an installer communicate with a database...

Restoring missing Build Events in Delphi 2007

less than 1 minute read

If you have a Delphi 2007 project that was ported from Delphi 2006, then you may be missing the build event project options.  The .dproj file that Delphi 200...

Old School modeming

2 minute read

The always entertaining DadHacker has a great post on how he used to write code in the old days at 300 baud.   When he was in school, he had to submit course...

Using Delphi in a team

4 minute read

I was just reading Marshall Fryman’s post about getting Delphi set up in a uniform way in a team or group setting.  He’s looking for a tool to manage the 3rd...

How to log the TIDSmtp component

1 minute read

I have some Delphi code that needs to send a quick mail message so I was using the Indy 10 TIdSmtp component.  The code was working just fine for a few month...

Delphi Win32 gets a TStringBuilder class

less than 1 minute read

The next version of Delphi, code named “Tiburon”, is getting some cool new features.  One of these will be the TStringBuilder class and Andreano Lanusse (a C...

Playing with a new toy, a GPS device

4 minute read

While on vacation in Hyannis, I got annoyed with the one way streets odd layouts so I went out and bought a GPS unit.  I had wanted one for a while, and this...

Bonus TVUG presentation by John Papa

1 minute read

On Tuesday, July 22nd, we will be having a bonus Tech Valley User Group meeting.  We usually skip the summer months, but John Papa is going to be in town and...

Google is making Ratproxy freely available

2 minute read

Google has just released the source code to one of their internal testing tools.  Ratproxy is a web proxy that is designed to scan for and log potential prob...

Where are the Kibos of yesteryear?

1 minute read

To paraphrase an old Yossarian quote, where are the Kibos of yesteryear?  The other day I read a question that Jeff Atwood had tweeted about Kibo, a name I h...

I see the Cylons found Twitter

less than 1 minute read

Maybe they can fix it?  You can get the list of Cylons and associated BSG characters from the Hybrid’s Friends list.

Sign the "danah boyd proper case" petition

1 minute read

Jeff Atwood is on a righteous crusade against those who insist on using only lower case for their names.  He has a petition and he wants you to sign it.  It’...

Migrating Delphi versions with DevExpress

3 minute read

I usually run on the latest version of Delphi while the other Delphi developers in our department run a version or two back.  I’m the pretty much the sole De...

Proof by lack of evidence

4 minute read

CNET’s Matt Asay wrote an article for CNET’s News.com that was just so bad, it gets the “Epic Fail” tag.  You can get the gist of how bad it is by the first ...

Tim Russert, 1950-2008

less than 1 minute read

I was shocked to hear about the passing of Tim Russert.  I always enjoyed watching “Meet the Press” and I should have watched it more.  I’ve been kicking mys...

Unblocking attachments with Outlook

1 minute read

Today, one of the other programmers needed to send me some odd registry entries that were on his machine.  So I asked him to export the registry settings to ...

Backing up your Blogger hosted posts

1 minute read

This blog is hosted on Google’s Blogger platform.  It has it’s own domain name, but it’s still on Blogger.  While I have faith in our Google Overlords, I sti...

Does knowing C make you a better programmer?

3 minute read

Joel and Jeff had a conversation about the merits of knowing how to program in C.  Joel’s take was knowing how to program in C makes you a better program.  I...

IPv6 and Vista

4 minute read

The other day, I read a post that Carl Franklin had made on his blog about a new Vista laptop that he had to buy on short notice.  The gist of his post that ...

Showing installed app versions with BgInfo

1 minute read

I love it when you can use one cool tool to enhance another cool tool.  Duncan Epping posted an English translation of a Arne Fokkema post about how to use B...

Uninstall IE8 Beta before installing XP SP3

1 minute read

If you running the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) under Windows XP, the word is to uninstall IE8 before installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3)...

System Restore and Vista

2 minute read

After reading the comments posted to my blog entries for USB issues caused by KB938371, I can’t over emphasis how valuable it is to have System Restore enabl...

Looking forward to stackoverflow

1 minute read

Not an actual stack overflow, but the new site, stackoverflow.com, run by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.  Their aim is to provide some sort of programming Q&a...

Handy tip for debugging a Windows Service

1 minute read

Debugging a Windows Service is always a pain. You can’t run a service like a regular application, you have to run it from Windows Service Control Manager (SC...

Know your SQL Server version

1 minute read

There are times where you need to know what version of SQL Server is installed.  Usually you want to know which version and which service pack has been appli...

KB 938371 woes continue

1 minute read

I still haven’t been able to fix the problem that I reported yesterday.  After blogging about how Vista update KB 938371 disabled the mouse on my PC, I have ...

Vista update KB938371 disabled my mouse

2 minute read

Windows Update just pushed down an update, KB938371 on to my main home PC, as a prerequisite for Vista Service Pack 1.  After that update was installed and V...

Fun with CoInitialize

1 minute read

I was tracking down a error in one of the command line apps that I use to save web.config settings over upgrades.  It was a strange error, If I stepped throu...

Saving application settings over installs

4 minute read

We have been using Windows Installer (WI) based setups for all of our newer applications.  I used to use Wise, but I have migrated our installers to InstallA...

Playing with Firefox 3 Beta 4

2 minute read

I’ve pretty much standardized on Firefox as my default browser (but not the default Windows browser).  I had been an Opera bigot for years, but the tipping p...

Miss Bimbo is not welcome in my house

2 minute read

There have been a few articles posted on the Internet about a web site called www.missbimbo.com.  It’s supposed to be fashion game for young girls, but it so...

Enabling users with ESX 3.5.0

1 minute read

I’ve been playing admin on our shiny new ESX server and it’s been a struggle trying to get the user accounts configured.  I wanted to give our QA staff enoug...

Link rot and the ascendance of Wikipedia

1 minute read

As usual, Steve Tibbets hits the nail directly on the head with his post about link rot and Wikipedia.  I would have to say that the domain that I link to th...

The Lost Art of TSR Programming

3 minute read

Scott Allen had a amusing post, “Talks You Won’t See At the Local Code Camp”, on his blog.  One of the talks was “The Lost Art of TSR Programming”.   That sh...

I like having a build box

2 minute read

This morning I came across a blog by Landon Dyer called Dadhacker.  He got linked by BoingBoing for a entertaining post that he wrote about working on the Do...

I hate spam that comes in under my own name

3 minute read

For the last few weeks, I’ve been getting spam email addressed to my work account with the “from:” field set to my work address.  That allows it past our com...

Using Wix for my Live Writer Plug-in

4 minute read

I finally have version 1 of my Smugmug gallery plug-in completed. The next step is to do the installer. To get a plug-in up on the Windows Live Gallery, it m...

What’s the deal with this .rbf file?

2 minute read

I was updating the installer to one of our applications and every time I ran it, it wanted to reboot at the end of the install.  This installer was installin...

NPR broke the podcasting machinery

1 minute read

I like listening to podcasts on my Zen Vision:M player.  The Zen comes with a decent enough podcast tool called Zencast.  Zencast has an option to convert au...

Zero! In!

3 minute read

While at DevConnections, I ran into a former co-worker, Dave Esposito.  Late one evening, we tossing back a few beverages and it turned out that 20+ years ag...

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2007

How can you give away a eight year old?

less than 1 minute read

I came across a news article about the Dutch couple who gave up their eight year old daughter, who they had adopted as a baby from South Korea.  They claimed...

Converting Delphi enumerated values to strings

less than 1 minute read

It’s pretty easy to converted Delphi enumerated types to string and vice versa, but I can never remember the syntax.  The good thing about having your own bl...

Little Bobby Tables

1 minute read

Not too long ago, the online comic xkcd ran a strip that just killed me.

I used to use Yahoo…

1 minute read

Steve Trefethen’s posting about Yahoo is pretty dead on.  I used to use the various Yahoo apps and services, but I have slowly replaced them with the various...

What happened after I emailed Sears

2 minute read

Earlier today, I posted about what I went through with ordering a vacuum cleaner from Sears.com.  My first inclination was to just call the store.   But I wa...

How not to handle Black Friday: Sears.com

7 minute read

On Saturday I was vacuuming when I noticed a burning smell coming from the vacuum cleaner.  It wasn’t the burning rubber smell you get when the belt gets cau...

Digital versus paper books

3 minute read

Charles Petzold has a good point about the digital versus paper books debate.  Digital books are great when you first get them, but how are you going to read...

Technical Support: Verizon FiOS vs McAfee

5 minute read

It all started this morning when my wife went to check her email. She said that it wasn’t working, so I took a quick look. She uses Thunderbird to check her ...

Allowing Comments on Blogs

1 minute read

I came across a posting by Dave Winer (via Joel) about blog comments.  Dave doesn’t easily allow commenting because he thinks it takes away from message that...

REST vs SOAP

1 minute read

In the weekly newsletter from TheServerSide.NET, there was a link to an article titled “REST versus SOAP – the REST story” by William Brogden.  It’s a few mo...

Blast from the past: Forth

1 minute read

I came across a link an online version to Leo Brodie’s Forth tutorial, “Starting Forth” today.  I used to have a copy of that book eons ago.  I learned how t...

I gots my favicon back

less than 1 minute read

A while back, this blog was updated to the new Blogger and I was the custom icon that was displayed with my blog.  And of course, I forgot where I had hosted...

When other people host your data….

less than 1 minute read

You are at the mercy of your hosts when they hold your data.  Using an online feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader means that someone else is backing ...

The $51 server.

2 minute read

It’s been 6 months since I installed FreeNAS and it really has been like an appliance.  I back up my machine and my wife’s machine with just a few batch file...

User specific connection strings

less than 1 minute read

Steve Harmon has a good tip on how to use ASP.NET 2.0’s configSource to store connection strings in a file outside of the web.config.  You keep the user spec...

TestDriven.NET and Visual Studio Express

3 minute read

There’s been a lot of blog postings about Jamie Cansdale’s legal issues with Microsoft in the last few days.  Jamie has a product called TestDriven.NET that ...

Time to get a new PC

3 minute read

My home PC died last Friday and I’m waiting for it’s replacement to show up. I’ve had the machine for years and it’s been running 24/7, something was bound t...

Is Microsoft Dead?

3 minute read

I was reading Mike Gunderloy’s new blog, A Fresh Cup, and I came across a link to an article titled “Microsoft is Dead”, by Paul Graham.  Paul’s view is that...

Jeremy Clarkson does more than laugh at rice

less than 1 minute read

I really wish I could get “Top Gear” here.  I can just watch that show for hours.  The only way I get to see any episodes is through YouTube.   I just came a...

Ed Dague’s blog has a new home

less than 1 minute read

This is old news, but still worth mentioning.  Ed Dague’s blog has moved from Blogspot to a new location hosted by the Albany Times Union.  If you want to le...

Domain name change

1 minute read

As of today, the address of this blog is now http://anotherlab.rajapet.net/.  The old name, http://anotherlab.blogspot.com, still works but you’ll see the ne...

SQL UPDATE from another row in the same table

less than 1 minute read

My SQL skills are getting rusty.  I have some code where I needed to quickly copy a field from one row in a table to another row in the same table.  Basciall...

Understanding SQL Server error 18456

2 minute read

I came across an odd problem with SQL Server Express.  We have a test server with various versions of SQL Server installed for QA to use.   Of the QA techs w...

Aero Glass on my ancient GX400

1 minute read

My latest video card arrived this morning and installing it was a much better experience than what I went through with the Diamond card. I have a Dell Optipl...

Notes on installing Delphi 2007

2 minute read

I got the email yesterday from CodeGear. It was a link to download the newly released Delphi 2007. I will be getting the DVD from CodeGear as part of the Sof...

John Backus, RIP

less than 1 minute read

*--------------------------------------------------------------* Program BACKUSJW** This program notes the passage of the creater of the* Fortran Language* ...

Why I’m looking forward to "Orcas"

1 minute read

I have stayed away from the Visual Studio betas (I beta test enough stuff already, thank you), but the more I hear about the next version of Visual Studio (c...

Julie Lerman’s coming to town

less than 1 minute read

On Tuesday, Julie Lerman is coming in from Vermont to do a presentation about ADO.NET Orcas at the TVUG meeting.  This will be the first meeting held at our ...

Thinking about WAIS, Gopher, and ExecPC

3 minute read

I was reading a post by Brad Abrams, where he was wondering why WAIS and FTP had died out.  While I disagreed with the idea that FTP has died out, WAIS is on...

Where is puterSoft.com?

2 minute read

Don’t you hate it when a software component vendor disappears without warning?  In some of our applications, we use a custom datetime edit control named TPSC...

FinalBuilder to the rescue (again)

1 minute read

One of our applications has an installer that is created with Wise InstallBuilder 9.  The application is built from our shiny buildbox under the control of F...

Windows Home Server goes Beta 2

less than 1 minute read

Windows Home Server has reached Beta 2.  Foe those of your playing the home version of “Name That Beta”, Beta 2 means that Microsoft has is now soliciting ex...

I hate Macs

less than 1 minute read

You have to love a good rant…

Yet another rebuild (Part 2)

less than 1 minute read

I’m not installing Opera this time.  I’ve been an Opera bigot for a long time, but it’s not going on my primary work PC.  I’m using FireFox 2 instead of Oper...

Yet another rebuild (Part 1)

2 minute read

After two and half weeks, I finally got my primary development box back from our IT manager.  The delay was due to fun with RAID.  After two drive failures w...

Snap Preview Anywhere is annoying

1 minute read

Lately, I’ve been starting to see idiot popup windows on blogs that should know better.  The popups are from “Snap Preview Anywhere™”, a javascript thingie t...

What to install, what to leave out…

2 minute read

I have two machines that I do the brunt of my programming on.  One is a P4 1.8 Ghz box, circa 2002 that was my main work horse.  Last year I got a Pentium D ...

Blog Tagged

3 minute read

Andy just tagged me.  This is the geek version of tag.  I share 5 things about myself, then I tag 5 other people.  The hard is finding 5 other people who hav...

Ed Dague is more than a floating head

less than 1 minute read

I just came across Ed Dague’s blog. He’s much more than a floating head on a an obscure web site. His comments on local media and politics are both interesti...

Sybase has left the building

3 minute read

We dropped support for Sybase’s Adaptive Server Anywhere, effective 12/31/06.  It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the right choice for us.

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2006

TiVo now placing ads on the delete screen

less than 1 minute read

I finally saw TiVo‘s new advertising placements on the “Delete this recording?” screen. It was a one line blurb for Burger King that you could click into via...

Sometimes there is a free lunch

less than 1 minute read

I had a nice little surprise in my email yesterday. It was a gift certificate from VSoft Technologies for a one free license for Automise. Evidently I recei...

Surfing with Takeshi Terauchi and the Bunnys

less than 1 minute read

While skimming Boing Boing, I came across a link to some MP3s by Takeshi Terauchi. These files come courtesy of WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Takeshi Terauchi ...

THIS IS YOUR REPLACEMENT TAG

1 minute read

I’m on my third E-ZPass tag.  The battery in the first one died after about 5 years.  I have had the second one for another 5 years.  This time, the E-ZPass ...

Project Bluemoon

less than 1 minute read

Dave Zatz uploaded to YouTube a file that’s relatively hidden on TiVo’s web site which details the mysterious orgins of the TiVo device.  Tune and watch “Pro...

Leave that thread priority alone

1 minute read

During initial e-Link web service development, I played around with lowering the priority of a background processing thread.  It didn’t need to run in real t...

Stream reading in C#

2 minute read

I was banging my head against the wall with an odd stream reading problem.  I was making a web service call as straight http, no SOAP, when I hit a snag read...

Vista performance (or lack of)

2 minute read

I just installed the Beta 2 of Vista on one of my dev boxes.  It used to be my primary development box until I got a bright shiny new one last year.  About t...

Back from vacation

1 minute read

After a couple of weeks of vacation, I came back to the office to find my old development book DOA.  It was worse than a Blue Screen, it was a black screen w...

Dates are not numbers

1 minute read

One of the other developers that I work with had a question about inserting some date values into a SQL Server database.  The code in question is doing a bat...

Hidden gotcha in FreeAndNil()

2 minute read

Time to go memory leak hunting in my service. I’m using AutomatedQA‘s AQTime 4, a really cool tool. I’ve used it’s profiling features in the past, but not th...

Poor man’s guide to memory usage tracking

3 minute read

I have a service and I need to make sure that it doesn’t have a memory leak after running for a sustained length of time.  I’m doing all the good stuff in co...

Migrating to Delphi 2006

3 minute read

I’ve been working on migrating our Delphi 5 code to Delphi 2006.  For the most part it’s been pretty straight forward, the fun part has been dealing with the...

I don’t care about RocketBoom

less than 1 minute read

I have seen too many blog postings about Amanda Congdon leaving the RocketBoom vlog. There’s a he said/she said thing going on between her and the other owne...

Tomato funeral

less than 1 minute read

I saw a reference to “tomato funeral” on a .Net developer’s blog.  I had to click through the link and ended up somewhere deep in the bowels of Wil Wheaton’s...

Fun with scripted load tests

3 minute read

We are getting ready to do some load tests and it’s time to pick some tools.  The app that we want to test is a client/server app with buckets of processing ...

Self installing services in .NET

3 minute read

I have some service applications that I deploy with Wise for Windows. These particular services are .NET assemblies. The usual way of registering the .NET as...

Leaky Abstractions in Wise for Windows

1 minute read

I had just reported a bug with the Wise for Windows Installer (it can’t call the Install method on a service compiled under the .NET Framework 2.0) and I che...

Samsung bans its own product

less than 1 minute read

Samsung has a cell phone with a 8gb hard drive (form musinc playing) and they have banned it from their own premises. They don’t allow portable memory device...

DIY Mosquite Trap

less than 1 minute read

Here’s a home made misquito trap.  The translated instructions can be read here.

Delphi 2006 quirks

1 minute read

As I move over to Delphi 2006, I came across an odd new behavior.  In Delphi 7 and prior versions, it was very easy to view/edit the project (*.dpr) file.  U...

Using Cache in Your WinForms Applications

less than 1 minute read

Here’s a decent article about using ASP.NET cache (System.Web.Caching.Cache) in WinForms applications (or services).  This would be handy in service applicat...

Playing with Firefox again

less than 1 minute read

As much as I am an Opera bigot, I still roll out Firefox from time to time. This is one of those times. There are enough web sites that still do not work wit...

Tao of the Windows Installer

4 minute read

There are some really good Windows Installer guidelines up on the Windows Installer Team Blog.  Part 1 went up yesterday and Part 2 went up today.  Most the ...

Spring cleaning

less than 1 minute read

While cleaning out the home office (E-Bay, here I come), I came across a souvenir from Hong Kong. It’s a shopping bag from Watsons, I have held on to it for ...

Tivo, one year later

2 minute read

It’s been a year since we started using Tivo and I wouldn’t want to watch TV without it. It’s more than the time-shifting of hour favorite shows (but that pa...

Demoed FinalBuilder at TVUG

2 minute read

Last month I demoed FinalBuilder at TVUG. That was an interesting experience. I have managed to spend my entire career without having to do a public presenta...

Enhanced version of sp_who

less than 1 minute read

I often use sp_who and sp_who2 to see who is connected to what on our development database server. When we need to restore a database, I need to make sure no...

When to use cursors

less than 1 minute read

This is cool <a href=”http://anotherlab.rajapet.net/” http: title=”Running sums, redux”>article</a> that describes a good reason for using cursor...

How to drum up consulting business

less than 1 minute read

This is an interesting article about a guy who jump started his own consulting company in a new town. It’s all about the networking.

FireFox myths

1 minute read

There’s an interest web page called “Firefox Myths” that takes some of the more common claims associated with Firefox (it’s faster, it’s more secure, it’s a ...

Is soap.tcp with WSE a singleton?

1 minute read

Ok, the title of this post is pure jargon, but it fits. This WSE 3 thing is still new to me and I’m still trying to grok some of the finer details. The abili...

Jack of all trades, master of none.

1 minute read

Jeff Atwood has a good rant about people asking for web sites that scale to devices like PDA’s or crackberry’s.  He takes the view that it would be nice if e...

How expensive are .NET exceptions?

1 minute read

With .NET, I keep hearing “Don’t use exceptions, they’re expensive” and I have always wondering how true it was.  I’ve been in the camp of using exceptions w...

Repaving an XP box

1 minute read

I’m getting ready to help repave a family member’s PC (Windows XP). Too many questionable things have been installed and some nasty thing is blocking https p...

History of the C family of languages

less than 1 minute read

Billy Hollis has a funny history of the C language. If you have been in the business for more than 10 years, you’ll appreciate it even more.

Keyboard shortcuts for Outlook

less than 1 minute read

Tragically, I live inside Outlook 2003. Anything that makes it faster for me to use, I’ll take. LifeHacker has some good stuff….

Fun with 802.11

2 minute read

I’m constantly fiddling with my home wireless setup. It’s probably because I’m easily amused. I have a Linksys WRT54GS (version 2.0 if you know what I mean).

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2005

Prototype vs. Atlas

less than 1 minute read

I came across an interesting blog posting about the Prototype Javascript package and how it compares with Atlas. It boils down to they try to do similiar thi...

Great, now they are targetting VMWare

less than 1 minute read

http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2000 A vulnerability has been discovered in vmnat.exe on Windows hosts and vmnet-natd on L...

The joy of editing the Mac OS X hosts file

2 minute read

I have a G4 iMac on my desk. You know, one of the ones that looks like a desk lamp. It competes for space with my two XP boxes. I do my development under XP,...

Jon Galloway Has Quick Consise Post On

less than 1 minute read

Jon Galloway has a quick, consise post on how to restore a SQL Server 2000 database from a backup. I have all of this encoded, plus a something things, in To...

I I Started Out With Linksys Usb

1 minute read

I’m in the market for a new 802.11g adapter for my wife’s PC.  I started out with a Linksys USB adapter, but it gets horrible reception. I ended up taking on...

Adding "Install as…" to context menu

less than 1 minute read

This comes from Michael Willers, by way of Dana Epp. This makes it easier to install .msi packages when logged in as a non-admin use. Too many home PC’s are ...

Disabling the VMWare network adapters

2 minute read

When you are not running a VMWare session, you may want to disable the VMware virtual network adapters. I have found that they can slow down network operatio...

Exceptions and Threads

1 minute read

Scott Allen has a good post about a difference in how unhandled exceptions are dealt with in .NET 2 from how they were handled in 1.1 In 1.1, if a thread has...

Saving and restoring a forms location on

less than 1 minute read

Raghavendra Prabhu has the start of some code to save/restore a form’s position.  This requires the Application Settings feature in 2.0, so this is mostly th...

I love nerd humor

less than 1 minute read

This was from a Saatchi & Saatchi ad campaign. You don’t often see CMYK humor.

"This is worse than a Star Trek convention."

less than 1 minute read

That was a comment posted on a Gothamist blog entry about making fake MTA posters. The designer types are arguing over fonts typefaces. It’s very much like t...

Cool site for sysadmins

less than 1 minute read

I just came across adminfoo.net, a site with resources for system administrators for Linux, Windows, and Mac.  It’s got a lot of cool stuff.

VMware-authd.exe slowing down my PC

1 minute read

I was doing some work on one of my PC’s and I had the processes list open in Task Manager. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that one process, VMware-au...

Keytools

1 minute read

Today our main app’s help system broke.  I hate that when it happens.  This app is built with Delphi, which supports WinHelp (*.hlp) files for context sensit...

Delphi Interview Questions

2 minute read

Nick Hodges posted a list of interview questions for Delphi programmers. While I usually like his posts, I didn’t agree with this one. I’ve been using Delphi...

Free icon sets from IconBuffet

1 minute read

Thanks to a tip posted on Forevergeek.com, I came across a site that offers free commercial quality icon sets.  IconBuffet.com sells a wide variety of icon s...

Installing SQL Server Express

less than 1 minute read

There’s a good article on MSDN for controlling the installation of SQL Server Express. If you are bundling Express with your application, you may want to han...

Counterstrings

1 minute read

I was reading some of the older postings in James Bach’s excellent blog, Training the minds of testers, when I found a little gem called “counterstrings”.

Fun with the MSDE: installing

5 minute read

Dana Epp has posted a request for information about the MSDE on his blog. He wants to install an app that that requires a named instance of the MSDE and want...

Client vs Developer

less than 1 minute read

Client vs Developer wars. This is stuff isn’t directly applicable to our development patterns, but it has some useful information.

Grimmy weighs in on blogs

less than 1 minute read

It’s subtle, but I like it. If I was ever to write a blog posting tool, the icon for posting the entry would look like the first panel in that strip. If you ...

That Pesky Sql Server Express

less than 1 minute read

That pesky SQL Server Express. I’m going to have to support it, it’s time to start collecting tips from the veterans….

File this one under "Huh?"

less than 1 minute read

Rick Moranis has a Country Album. I’m having trouble picturing The Keymaster singing honky tonk, but that’s just me.

Building ASP.NET 2 projects

less than 1 minute read

On K. Scott Allen’s blog, you can find a really good description of how the build process for ASP.NET projects has changed from 1.0/1.1 to 2.0.

Test drive of writely.com

less than 1 minute read

This message was entered with writely.com, a web based document collaboration tool. I usually enter my blog entries with w.bloggar, but I’m game to ...

Who Was Microsoft Kidding When They

1 minute read

Who was Microsoft kidding when they promised to end “DLL Hell”? The long dark night of the SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio .NET 2005 beta produced a series of ...

Bender, Smender. I want Robbie!

2 minute read

Forbidden Planet has always been one of my favorite movies. As a kid, I always wanted my very own “Robbie the Robot”. If I start playing the lottery, I can ...

More news on Sony’s rootkit

less than 1 minute read

The story of Sony’s rootkit continues to live on. After Mark Russinovich first documented his analysis of the rootkit installed by content protected Sony aud...

China’s Little Green Book

less than 1 minute read

Thomas Friedman had an interesting column today. It’s titled “China’a Little Green Book” and he talks about how the growing conservation movement in China. C...

Sony now installs a flawed rootkit

less than 1 minute read

This is lovely. Sony is now putting a rootkit installer on their Music CD’s. Mark Russinovich discovered a root kit on his machine while testing a rootkit de...

Debugging services

1 minute read

Simon Carter has a tip on debugging services. It boils down to calling the Windows Sleep API in your service constructor code. This gives your debugger enoug...

Voices of reason in a sea of hype

1 minute read

I am so tired of the term “Web 2.0”. When ever I see that that term bandied about, I get a mental flashback to an old Verizon commercial where a consultant i...

Fun with BCP

less than 1 minute read

Here’s a quick and dirty way to export a table to a text file with SQL Server. With some minor tweaking, it should also work for views and stored procedures ...

Whither DAAB?

less than 1 minute read

If you were looking for a reason to dump DAAB, it looks like the good parts have already been folded into ADO.NET 2.0.

A blast from the past

less than 1 minute read

Back in the Amiga days, SteveX was a name every programmer knew from his VirusX, ScreenX, PointerX applications. These days, he’s in the .NET world and has a...

Deleting lots of data in batches

1 minute read

The fun part is in the “where…” bit, knowing how to set your query to only get a portion of the data is heavy lifting here. I know where I’m going to be usin...

Regular Expression Tools

less than 1 minute read

I’m still at the point where I can use stuff like **^\d{3}[- ]?\d{2}[- ]?\d{4}$** and not fully understand the pieces. So i’m alwa...

PRANGSTGRÜP

less than 1 minute read

I had tears coming out of my eyes when I played this.

Internet Health Report

less than 1 minute read

If you think that the Internets are running slow, click this link. What you will see is a chart of the Internet backbone providers and the relative speed tha...

Just say no to CLR UDTs

1 minute read

Alex Papadimoulis is pretty adamant about not using CLR UDTs in SQL Server 2005.

Spam weasels

less than 1 minute read

I finally got a spam comment. In fact, it was from another Blogger user. That’s in violation of the Blogger TOS, so forwarded his infomation to the Blogger p...

Nine reasons not to use serialization

less than 1 minute read

There’s a good article on The Code Project that explains why you shouldn’t use serialization to store data. The root problem is that the information that get...

RE:Oldest noodles unearthed in China

less than 1 minute read

Paleolithic dorm food discovered: The remains of the world’s oldest noodles have been unearthed in China. The 50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a p...

RE: Why do login dialogs have a "User" field?

less than 1 minute read

I like Jeff Atwood’s blog, but I don’t agree with his posting about removing the “User” field from the dialog box. If you pull the user out of the user/passw...

Writing sensible email messages

less than 1 minute read

Writing short and to the point messages has become a somewhat lost art. At 43 Folders, there’s a good article how how to get your message across as briefly a...

RE: Stupid Registry Tricks

less than 1 minute read

Jeff Atwood has a good set of registry tweaks to provide added functionality to Windows.

RE: Thread-safe Format

less than 1 minute read

Oh, the joy of writing multiple threaded applications. I like this little tip that will keep string formatting calls from stepping over each other.

RE: Strings are immutable

less than 1 minute read

Sahil has a good post that explains why you should use StringBuilder to concatenate strings instead of just doing “string a” + “string b”

RE: Great List of Free Windows Software

less than 1 minute read

I’ve always wanted to maintain one of these, but don’t have the time… this one looks great though. http://shsc.info/UsefulWindowsSoftware

String formatting in C#

less than 1 minute read

Here’s a handy link to formatting strings in C#, courtesy of Steve Tibbett’s blog.

Delphi Basics

less than 1 minute read

Here’s a cool site that has a lot of reference information for Delphi.

And now, a word from Phil…

less than 1 minute read

If you want a refreshing take on the current state of Google, Microsoft, Flikr, and of course, Open Source, you have to read this rant from causticTech.

RE: Skype and Port 80

less than 1 minute read

Here’s a good tip to remember if you are using Skype and doing web developement…

RE: The Observer Pattern

less than 1 minute read

Dave Burke has a pretty good description of how to use the Observer pattern. I’ll skip into the gory details, you find that on the link to his article. It de...

RE: Speed Surfer? Get a ‘Local’ Homepage

less than 1 minute read

This is a clever idea, I think I’m going to do this on the home PC’s. I’ll add links to email and of course, Amazon. I’m always curious about the status of t...

The Polaroid-o-nizer™

less than 1 minute read

The picture to left is a snapshot of the girls after it’s been run through the Polaroid-o-nizer™. This is a free site that will take an online image (you ca...

WSE SOAP tracing

less than 1 minute read

This looks cool, a “WSE tracing tool written in WSE. I’m not sure if I would ever use it, I like using Etheral because it’s not limited to SOAP or WSE. I wou...

King King Trailer online

less than 1 minute read

Over the weekend, my Tivo suggested that I record the trailer for King Kong. Being easily persuaded by cheeky gadgets, I let it record it. Come on, it’s got ...

Lemmings in DHTML

less than 1 minute read

They’re back! Just when you thought the 80’s were finally over, somebody has ported Lemmings to the browser.

Uncrippling Windows XP’s IIS 5.1

less than 1 minute read

Testing an ASP.NET application on an XP box can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes (Ok, most of the time). It’s version of IIS is the idiot brother of the ...

RE: Why is the DOS path character "\"?

less than 1 minute read

It all stems from Microsoft’s relationship with IBM.  For DOS 1.0, DOS only supported floppy disks. Many of the DOS utilities (except for command.com)...

Autoruns, a must have utility

less than 1 minute read

One of the best sources of free Windows system utilities is Sysinternals. Their Autoruns utility shows everything that gets auto-started when you machine boo...

Why I use Delphi

less than 1 minute read

Because it’s so easy to get under the hood and make the UI work the way you want it to. Here’s a tip from Deepak Shenoy on how to set the default button for ...

Upsert

less than 1 minute read

I must have been sleeping under a rock, but when did “Upsert” become a word? It refers to the combination of insert and update statements for a RDBMS. What i...

Slip ‘N’ Slide

1 minute read

It was pretty hot Sunday afternoon. While Laura was napping, Kathryn and I went down to ToysRUs and pciked up some backyard toys. We grabbed a Wham-O Slip ‘N...

Hot .Net Tip: This will save you a lot of time

less than 1 minute read

Hot .Net Tip: This will save you a lot of time Here’s a quick tip for adding the “View code” and “View designer” buttons to the main toolbar. That way, they...

MooreIsLess’s Law

less than 1 minute read

MooreIsLess’s Law. Which, given Moore’s Law, holds that the time taken to boot a Microsoft Operating System is constant.

Event Log RSS Feed Generator

less than 1 minute read

This looks like a cool project. It’s an ASP.NET 1.1 project that allows you to access the event logs from a system as a RSS feed. I usually make good use of ...

More fun with threading

less than 1 minute read

Here’s an interesting post from benwu. After executing Thread1 and Thread2, what are the possible values for “i”?

In New York, no one can hear you scream

less than 1 minute read

Alien Loves Predator by Bernie Hou just kills me. It takes a sureal pup to take two of cinema’s biggest Sci-Fi villians and and have them share a NYC appartm...

The Human Journey

less than 1 minute read

The National Geographic Society has running a project called the “Genographic Project” that is traces the geographic roots of our ancestors. By tracing DNA m...

The Poor Man’s Steadicam

less than 1 minute read

Here’s a cool article on how to build your own SteadyCam for about $14 in common objects. I would build one, but I think I would feel a little wierd using on...

One Albany Aqua Ducks Entering Into

less than 1 minute read

One the Albany Aqua Ducks entering into the Hudson river. Anne’s 3rd grade class got to go on a free field trip on one of the Albany Aqua Ducks. I tagged al...

RSS and Atom

less than 1 minute read

This blog offers newsreader syndication using Atom. There’s a button labeled “ATOM MYBLOG” on this page that provides the contents in XML format using the At...

Cliff Yablonski hates you

less than 1 minute read

my name is Cliff Yablonski. I have never met you before, but I hate you regardless. if I met you in public, I’d still hate you. I probably wouldn’t hate y...

What’s wrong with large values of zero?

1 minute read

We are about to roll out an update to one of our applications and we made some schema changes to the database. A couple of floating point fields were changed...

Performance of Nullable types

less than 1 minute read

I saw a interesting post by David Kean about the performance of the nullable types in .NET 2.0. The new int? type is about 50% slower than int and the bool? ...

Hit me with your rhythm stick

less than 1 minute read

__ In the deserts of Sudan and the gardens of Japan, From Milan to Yucatan, ev’ry woman, ev’ry man. Hit me your rhythm stick, hit me, hit me Je t’adore, ich...

Acrobat Reader 7 phoning home

less than 1 minute read

Remote Approach is a company that has designed a way to track PDF files using Javascript. Each time a person reads these special designed PDF files, a connec...

Build numbers

1 minute read

I can never figure out the naming scheme for version numbers. Is it Major, Minor, Build, Release? Or is it Major, Minor, Release, Build? Borland calls the la...

FBI show how to crack a WLAN in 3 minutes.

less than 1 minute read

At a recent ISSA meeting, a team of FBI agents demonstated how to crack the 128 bit WEP encryption used by wireless routers. They used freely available tools...

Bookpool: Discount Computer Books.

less than 1 minute read

I saw a mention of Bookpool.com on Roman Rehak’s blog. It looks like it’s a bit cheaper than Amazon, always good to have an alternative.

DoubleListBox – NinthArray

less than 1 minute read

I just starting playing with this and it’s pretty cool. This is a ASP.NET version of a dual list control, great for selecting a list of things from another l...

PodGuides

less than 1 minute read

“What’s a PodGuide?. A PodGuide is a very simple thing. It’s the combination of a map (PDF) of a certain place and a series of audio tracks (mp3) which you c...

What’s on your USB?

less than 1 minute read

As one of the duties that come with being the computer geek in the family, I get asked to check out the pc’s of friends and family. I usually bring a CD load...

My first entry

less than 1 minute read

Here’s my blog. More to come later…

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