Eric Duncan

Power Naps for Everyone

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:28:35 GMT

You may think you know how to take a nap. Lie down, close eyes, and whenever you wake up that's it. As it turns out, anything beyond 30 minutes puts you into danger of biting your work colleagues heads off when they interrupt you at 40 or 50 minutes into your nap.

I find myself constantly giving this advice to my work colleagues and family members. So, here's a blog post on what works very well for me.

There was a British study I read some 6 or so years ago that concluded a simple formula for power napping. And ever since I started to use this formula, it has worked wonders for my afternoon concentration.

Preparation

First and foremost, caffeine is your enemy here. If you are a 2+ cups of coffee drinker a day, "because I need it to get going", then you may have to look elsewhere to prepare. There's nothing you can do when you crash in the afternoon but to drink more caffeine.

One idea would be to switch to Japanese Green Tea (not the cheap store-brands, but actual shredded green leafs that you control the dosage with). It is said that the caffeine in Japanese Green Tea absorbs at a much slower pace than coffee, which is less of a shock to your body (and lasts longer). This could allow you to come down from that high more easily, and allow a power nap.

I actually went caffeine-free for about 6 solid years. It completely changes your sleep habits (for the good). The only caffeine I take now is a cup of imported Japanese Green Tea in the morning (but no later than 12 noon), and a piece of chocolate here and there once a week or so.

1. Remove all distractions.

Turn off the computer, all distractions, close the office door, put up a sign in your cubical for Do Not Disturb - whatever it takes to remove all distractions. Also, silence any phones in your area (no txt, next chess move alerts, etc).

The problem with New York City when I moved here is I have yet to work in an office with dedicated offices, or even a cubical! Everyone is squeezed into tight open work areas, and demanded to be at full attention at all hours of the day. This is a horrible working environment and goes against our basic evolutional bodily functions. You are yawning at 2pm? Yeah, no wonder. All I have to say here is to bring a set of very large headphones, and set a workplace policy that when you have your headphones on, you are to not be disturbed. Works most of the time actually (even if head laying on the desk).

2. Set an alarm for no longer than 30 minutes.

You do not want to sleep past 30 minutes, no matter how tired you are. When the alarm goes off, you must get up - no exceptions. This is because your body will start to go into REM Stage I sleep at 35 to 40 minutes, and your body will be expecting to go through all 3 stages of REM - over the next 3 to 4 hours. Your body will start to release the chemicals needed for deep sleep at Stage I, and you don't want any of that. If your REM cycle is interrupted during any of these stages, well, that's when Mr. Groggy comes out and is introduced to your co-workers.

Tip: the use of a smartphone in your workplace is perfect here. Set some relaxing meditation music on your phone as well as an alarm on the phone for no longer than 30 minutes. Just turn off the ringer and text message sounds first.

3. Set the proper conditions.

If it is not possible to set a dark area, bring a sleep mask with you to work. Also, increase the temp if possible or put on a jacket - even if you are a bit warm already (your body lowers its temp during sleep cycles). If you cannot use a sleep mask or dim the lights, just lie your forehead on your arms on your desk.

4. Remove all thoughts of stress.

Do not think about anything related to work, no matter how fun it is. Think nothing of deadlines or tasks - that only begets an elevated heart rate. Think of the next vacation for the family instead, or your kids next birthday wish, or that hot rod car project: whatever makes you happy.

If interrupted from slumber…

There are a few rules to follow if you are interrupted by the kids, or co-workers.

Get up immediately.
Do not attempt to go back to the nap for the next 2 to 3 hours. Anything earlier than that does not work.

This is why it is important to set the policy that once you are resting, you are at rest.

Power Naps are not a replacement for the lack of sleep.

One bad night of sleep? Fine. Two or more of consecutive bad nights of sleep? Power naps aren't going to help much.

Tell the boss you are just thinking.

The British study (if I could find it, I would - Binging British Power Nap Studies has an endless supply of links) also concluded that power napping makes you more focused in the 2 to 3 hours after the power nap. Additional research on the study yielded that people tend to have their best ideas just before and just after Stage I REM.

So the next time your boss asks if you are sleeping on the job, say no and you just are thinking.

.NET 4.0, HTML, and A potentially dangerous Request.Form value

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:51:41 GMT

I ran across a breaking change tonight in the .NET 4.0 CLR's version of ASP.NET. The 4.0 version of the CLR binds to any HTTP request data to validate against.

The entire error you may see is:

A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client

This is because 4.0 now inspects all request data. Rather that being the cookies, urls, headers, etc. A very nice security upgrade, I might say. This will prevent a hacker from submitting malicious code through cookies or other means that you may be parsing.

WYSIWYG and/or HTML Editors with .NET 4.0's CLR

One common issue that immediately creeps up with this new security is when you want to use a rich-text editor or even a textbox that you want to submit HTML data through. This seems to be now impossible with .NET 4.0's CLR's default validation because you cannot override this behavior, if you remain in 4.0's validation.

And no, there is no way to selectively disable which items to validate.

ASP.NET MVC's ValidateInput attribute does not work

You, like me, most likely just slapped a big ol' fat [ValidateInput] attribute on your MVC controller's action method and thought you were done. But behold, the error still remains!

This is because your MVC website is running on the .NET 4.0 CLR and therefore continues to be validated.

The Fix: HttpRuntime requestValidationMode

The work-around is to place this into your web.config's <system.web> node:


<httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" />

What this does is it forces the CLR to only check the Page's html fields, which you can now overwrite with the [ValidateInput] attribute in MVC controllers, or the <%@ Page validateRequest="false" %>, or any other normal means.

Sadly though, this also disables all of those other checks for the request data. Obviously, this is not a preferred work-around and even though VS 2010 is due for release on April 12th (just around the corner!), I do not see any notations of this being changed anytime soon.

If someone knows a work around for 4.0, please let me know. This is a great new feature, but sadly we must disable it for just about any website we develop on.

Unless we move to MarkDown that is (which I am a big fan of, clients not so much…).

You can find out more information about this over at MSDN

Create a Bootable USB Drive with Windows

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:21:25 GMT

I find myself Bing-ing this every few months to make sure I included each and every step. So often, that I can't believe I still Bing it. So below is a manual for anyone (mostly me) to follow in the future.

USB Boot Linux, Windows or any other operating system

You will be creating a bootable usb drive with Windows 7 or Vista's diskpart utility. Even though you are using Windows to create the bootable device, the source disk should not matter as long as the os supports booting from fat32. You can have a Linux iso mounted as the source, and the usb stick will end up being a Linux bootable usb.

Without further ado, on with the steps.

Creating a bootable USB device

In Windows 7 or Vista, open a command prompt. A shortcut is to press WINDOWS-KEY + R and then type CMD, press ENTER.

C:\Users\eduncan911\> diskpart

DISKPART> list disk

Inspect the list and note which one is the USB drive. Tip: It's most likely the last one.

DISKPART> select disk 1

Where 1 is the disk number from the list disk command above.

DISKPART> detail disk

The detail disk step above lists the details of the selected disk. Make sure the correct one is listed. If not, go back to list disk and start over.

DISKPART> clean

DISKPART> create partition primary

DISKPART> select partition 1

DISKPART> active

DISKPART> format fs=fat32 quick

DISKPART> assign

DISKPART> detail disk

Note the drive letter listed in the column labeled LTR.

DISKPART> exit

C:\Users\eduncan911> xcopy d:\*.* g:\ /E /F

Where d:\ is your mounted ISO or DVD you want to copy from, and g:\ is the USB device to copy to.

C:\Users\eduncan911> exit

And that's it. Go stick it in something and boot it.

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) - Microsoft's Official Inversion of Control Container

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:50:00 GMT

This new Microsoft feature in .NET Framework 4 is a programming model for reusing components, very similar to those Inversion of Control container frameworks out there that we all know and love (Castle Windsor, Structured Map, their own Unity from the Patterns and Practices team and etc). Now, they have built their own to address the pain points of these frameworks called the Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF for short.

I was pleasantly surprised this weekend when reading the February 02010's issue of MSDN Magazine. Getting up-to-speed on some new features in .NET Framework 4, I saw the headline "Building Composable Apps in .NET 4 with the Managed Extensibility Framework" by Glenn Block. Yeah, it just rolls off your tongue eh? So I decided I had a few minutes while waiting for the water to boil and scanned the article. I am glad I did.

In this post, I will try to give a very brief overview on how to use MEF coming from a background of using other Inversion of Control (IoC) containers, including some of the gotchas that you must be aware of during the switch. Yeah, you will want to make the switch - the switch away from those other bulky frameworks. I, for one, am officially announcing my abandonment of Castle and Unity for all future projects. Because once you add-in .NET 4's new data annotations for seriously improved validation, mixed with MEF, the only other 3rd party component I am left with is Castle's Logger abstraction - which I am hoping I can find a replacement for with .NET 4's new features.

MEF Terminology

First and fore-most for those of you already using an IoC container, it's time for a quick review on what MEF calls a few things and concepts. Below is a table I whipped up to help compare the two terminologies (the MEF portions largely taken from Glenn's excellent article).

Below is an image from Glenn's article that helps visualize the concepts above of MEF.

You can see that the overall concept is called Composition. A 'part' is the type or service you want to export. The part (or parts) is marked for Export via Contracts (which are automatic). And other parts that want to ask for another part can do so by Importing.

Managed Extensibility Framework - Why they built it

Glenn mentions in the article that they needed a way to compose of reusable types or components in the up coming Visual Studio 2010, Oslo, Acropolis and I am sure many more. What is important to note is why they created one themselves, instead of using Unity or alike. Glenn mentions some key points:

Third-party Extensibility (allowing vendors to generate plug-ins for Visual Studio, or your own application, with minimal work on your part now)
Other frameworks were too heavyweight for a simple programming model.
Or other frameworks required too much effort on the part of either the host or the extension developer.

Those last two is what struck a cord with me, and got my attention. Try to sit back and think about how you would allow your applications to be extended with Castle, StructureMap or even Unity. That's a lot of work, a lot of 3rd party assemblies to wire up and configure properly. Especially if you want runtime changes, which MEF supports out of the box with no configuration.

That last point is particularly interesting. All too often I see a released developer framework or contrib project by a group of inspired individuals. This is great and all, but those projects quickly grow to be a large project requiring documentation, support, and even refactorings for performance.

It got me thinking a lot about what I see wrong with Castle - only two things, it's learning curve and size. While Unity was very well documented, it comes with some significant bloat and only what I can refer to as hoop-jumping. The earlier versions of Unity violated Dependency Injection pricipals and concepts (no ctor injection!). Perfect example of refactoring.

MEF really strives to resolve all of these issues, with some extremely simple programming models that I will show you below.

MEF Programming Models - Straight Attributed Declarations

Another rip from Glenn's article. But he did it so well.

Developers consume MEF through a programming model. A programming model provides a means to declare components as MEF parts. Out of the box, MEF provides an attributed programming model, which will be the main focus of this article. That model is just one of many possible programming models that MEF enables. MEF's core API is completely agnostic to attributes.

Yep, you heard that right. MEF supports Attributes - for out-of-the-box functionality. No configuration, no setup, nothing. This is so much easier than you are even thinking. So much so, I feel guilty by writing all of this text. Let's just show you how it's done now.

The Blog "Hello World" Snippets

As what seems to be an invasion, the common Hello World for websites these days are blogs. So without further delay, here's some code snippets.

The post object


public partial class Post
{
	public Int32 PostId { get; set; }
	public String Title { get; set; }
	public String Description { get; set; }
	public String Body { get; set; }
	public Guid AuthorId { get; set; }
}

And the PostService that will service the post.


[Export(typeof(IPostService))]
public class PostService : IPostService
{
	[Import]
	public IPostRepository PostRepository { get; set; }

	public Post FetchById(Int32 postId)
	{
		return
			(from p in PostRepository.GetAll()
			 where p.PostId == postId
			 select p as Post).FirstOrDefault();
	}
}

Please note that the above code is not production-code. You should always provide proper cache, concurrency and disposable patterns. This code has been cleaned up for easier reading.

Notice that the PostService has been marked to be exportable, using a specific contract type for IPostService. Now, you do not have to specify the contract type or name. You can simply use [Export]. But remember, we do want to allow for simply extensibility in the future by plugging in different components to be served during composition. How to do that? Easy, just specify the interface type as the contract. Now how easy was that?

Also, notice that we have a dependency on IPostRepository. This is marked with the simple [Import] attribute. It does exactly as you think. MEF composes the first part that matches the contract for IPostRepository and supplies it

Now, some will cry fowl here since I am not directly injecting IPostRepository, or not demanding it in the constructor. Yes, MEF fully supports constructor injection. But, there is a few gotchas you have to be aware of with MEF and constructor composition that I get into a little further down. There's also a new pattern I am designing, when mixed with .NET 4 and some nifty T4 templates I'm tinkering with. That's another article I'll write though. Check the comments, or leave a comment for more information on, "Managing BDD Contexts and Mocks Automatically with .NET 4, MEF, and T4 Templates." Nice. I just named my next blog post.

Constructor Dependency Injection - MEF Gotcha

As mentioned above, constructor injection is a bit tricky with MEF. There are some rules to follow:

MEF assumes all parameters are imports, making the import attribute unnecessary. I leave it up to the reader to figure out how to get around this.
Recomposition is not supported on constructor parameters.

That last one is almost a deal breaker for me. Recomposition is a feature of MEF that allows parts to automatically have their imports updated as new matching exports appear in the system. Given, this isn't the case with most websites out there. It's an issue for websites and applications that want to support dynamic (e.g. downloadable) plugins. The plugins would overwrite, at runtime, certain contracts and therefore allow the parts to automatically be updated with the new plugin versions - all without an application restart!

So with that said (and you will never be developing plugins right?), you can use constructor injection with MEF as follows.


[Export(typeof(IPostService))]
public class PostService : IPostService
{
	private IPostRepository _postRepo;
	private IUserRepository _userRepo

	[ImportingConstructor]
	public PostService(IPostRepository postRepo, IUserRepository userRepo)
	{
		_postRepo = postRepo;
		_userRepo = userRepo;
	}

	public Post FetchById(Int32 postId)
	{
		return
			(from p in _postRepo.GetAll()
			 where p.PostId == postId
			 select p as Post).FirstOrDefault();
	}
}

Don't fret too much though about the all-or-nothing constructor. You have a Factory option later on in this post.

Bootstrapping MEF for Application Startup

Glenn nailed it right on the head when he called this procedure "bootstrapping." I've always struggled with the proper terminology for this composition process with other Inversion of Control containers. Bootstrapping. Yep, just like my hacked MP3 players have.

To get things up and running, you will need to to insert some bootstrapping code for your application. This code is required with any type of IoC container, and with MEF as well.

Below is a small code snippet from a typical ASP.NET MVC 2 global.asax file. Notice I added the two using blocks at the end of the Application_Start(). This process would be the same for any type of application you have.


using System.ComponentModel.Composition;
using System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting;

protected void Application_Start()
{
	AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();

	RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);

	using (var catalog = new DirectoryCatalog(@".\"))
	{
		using (var container = new CompositionContainer(catalog))
		{
			container.ComposeParts(this);
		}
	}
}

Now, this code is running from with the website assembly. If you, like me, create a seperate assembly to hold your Domain and Repository models, then you simply reference the assembly by replacing the 'this' keyword with Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(MyProject.Domain)). And yes, you can reference multiple catalogs and assemblies and build up your list as well.

Note that I included the namespaces here. This is important as normally this bootstrapping code is in the Hosting namespace. What they don't tell you is there is an extension in the namespace one higher for CompositionContainer, that enables the ComposeParts() extension method in the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace.

There are tons of options here with the composition containers. Please refer to the .NET 4 documentation on MEF, as well as Glenn's article for a few more tips. You can specify an assembly to reference for the catalog. You can have aggregated catalogs for grouping/namespacing purposes. And yet, you can still have that aged-old configuration file if you really really really want to manually register (export) each type.

All Parts are Singletons, out of the box

Yep. All of your part's instances are composed and referenced throughout all of your code as singletons (or "statics"). This is a great solution for that stubborn developer you may have working in your group that just won't let go of static managers. Make it instance based, and slap an [Export] on it. Done, now use [Import] wherever you like.

This is important to note because Castle and StructuredMap both default to transient composition (Unity uses whatever you configured the container to use as default). So, make sure you are coding to be thread-safe if you are making the switch over to MEF.

But do not fret, it's easy to specify the lifestyle within the contract definitions. There are three possible configurations you can set with the [PartCreationPolicy()] attribute:

CreationPolicy.Shared (singleton, default)
CreationPolicy.NonShared (transient)
CreationPolicy.Any

The "Any" option is interesting as it leaves it up to the context configuration of the host and/or the configuration of the [Import] contract to specify. You can use RequiredCreationPolicy on the [Import] contract definition to specify the preference.


[PartCreationPolicy(CreationPolicy.Any)]
[Export(typeof(IUserAccountService))]
public class UserAccountService : IUserAccountService
{
	...
}

public class Post
{
	public Int32 PostId { get; set; }
	public String Title { get; set; }
	...

	[Import(RequiredCreationPolicy=CreationPolicy.NonShared]
	public IUserService UserService { get; set; }
}

There is a problem with this concept though. With a current project we are working on at the moment, we identified the need to have a security context around our services to ensure the current WebRequest has the correct security credentials. With this, we elected to use Castle's WebRequest lifestyle feature. Sadly, this is not possible (yet) with the PartCreationPolicy. So it is left up to the implementer to handle custom composition on their own with a Factory pattern (see below).

Lazy Loading within Entities

Those of you that are wanting Lazy Loading within your entities, but are struggling with a solution that is compatible with Inversion of Control, fear not! The answer is now possible with MEF.


public partial class Post
{
	[Range(0, Int32.MaxValue)]
	public Int32 PostId { get; set; }
	
	[Required, StringLength(64, MinimumLength = 5)]
	public String Title { get; set; }

	[Required, StringLength(1024, MinimumLength = 5)]
	public String Description { get; set; }

	[Required, StringLength(Int32.MaxValue, MinimumLength = 5)]
	public String Body { get; set; }

	[Required]
	public Guid AuthorId { get; set; }

	[Import]
	public IUserService UserService { get; set; }

	private User _user;
	public User Author
	{
		get
		{
			if (_user == null)
				_user = UserService.FetchById(this.AuthorId);
			return _user;
		}
	}
}

With our updated Post entity, notice we now have a dependency on IUserService marked with the [Import] attribute. Yep, MEF composes that for you, and you have the UserService to access your lazy objects as needed.

Using MEF as a Static Wrapper

Time and time again I find myself writing wrapper classes around static members of a 3rd party component, just so I can unit test my code without having to rely on that static class. Using MEF, if you haven't guesses already, is just as easy as you might think.


public class Loggerpart
{
	[Export]
	public ILogger Logger
	{
		get
		{
			return LogManager.GetLogger("LoggerInstance", "config");
		}
	}
}

This pattern allows you to make a wrapper around any 3rd party or legacy code.

MEF Composition with a Factory Pattern

Here's another one not in Glenn's article. How to use MEF with a factory pattern to initiate a complex type.


public class UserService : IUserService
{
	public UserService(ISecurityContext securityContext)
	{
		...
	}
}

public class UserServiceFactory
{
	[Export(typeof(IUserService))]
	[PartCreationPolicy(CreationPolicy.Shared)]
	public IUserService Instance
	{
		get
		{
			var context = HttpContext.Current;
			var securityContext = 
				SecurityContextProvider.Setup(context)
			return new UserService(securityContext);
		}
	}
}

Notice how the UserService is not exported? Instead, we designate a property member of UserServiceFactory called Instance as the Export composition location.

Remember, you are only Exporting for Composition at runtime. Nothing gets composed during your unit tests, as you are mocking them. So anywhere you use [Import] will be still be mockable for any of your unit tests with this pattern.

Exporting with Multiple Contracts

Here's a nice trick, you can specify multiple Export contracts for multiple types. Why would you do this? If you are a big DDD follower, you may be using IUserService and IAccountService combined to give you an UserAccountService part.


[Export(typeof(IUserService))]
[Export(typeof(IAccountService))]
public class UserAccountService : IUserService, IAccountService
{
	...
}

MEF Does Not Blow Up on Rejection

This one is going to take some getting used to. As Glenn mentions, MEF does not throw exceptions if a part cannot be satisfied. It simply will not exist in the object graph for MEF to return - you'll get a null, and will most likely see a NullReferenceException in your containing code that is trying to use the part you wanted to import.

MEF will simply reject the request for the Import of a part for a number of reasons. For example, if there is no part defined as the correct Export contract type. Say you wanted to import IUserService, but only exported UserService with [Export] and no contract type of IUserService was defined. That was the typical one I found myself forgetting to do. As recommended above, always include the Contract Type when designated a part as Export with [Export(typeof(IUserService))].

I agree that MEF's Rejection policy is a power feature because it stabilizes the code and allows debugging. Glenn links to a good article on why to ensure application stability: http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2009/08/02/stable-composition-in-mef-preview-6.aspx

But in short, if you get Rejection happening quite often, check your Export contract definition on your part.

In Summary

As you can see, it is dead simple to use MEF. The Export functionality is what was missing with Unity, and completely with all other IoC containers. And, it's what gives MEF such great, simplistic power. I highly recommend reading through Glenn's complete article, as he covers a few other concepts such as using the new Lazy<T> for importing lazy exports and metadata.

Some additional things Glenn covers is the very strong support for debugging and tracing, things you want to be aware of if you use MEF even moderately. He also hints at the up-n-coming support for MEF with IronRuby. He also covers some external links, which I will list here (for my own archiving purposes):

Customizing Container Behavior Part 2 of N - Defaults for Facilities
MEF Analysis Tool (mefx) for .NET 4.0 for debugging those contracts in large projects
A Crash Course on the MEF Primitives for the underlying "quantum universe of MEF, its über extensibility points" as Glenn says

Once concept I am tinkering with is utilizing the [Import] attribute in the attributed programming model of MEF to define the complete contexts of my BDD tests for me with all dependencies already mocked up and ready, with T4 templates largely driving that effort.

MEF wacked me upside the head. It does everything right, and even allowed me to step back and realized, "Dang. I was bloating my code." Yes, they have done it right. So right that the next project I am starting this week will be on Visual Studio 2010 RC - not even released yet.

Registering MSpec runners for TestDriven.NET on Windows x64

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:59:00 GMT

EDIT: MSpec v0.3 now supports TestDriven.Net's v2.24 XCopy Deployable Test Runners. So this blog post is legacy information at this time.

Machine.Specifications (MSpec) is my preferred Behavior-Driven Design (BDD) framework for Microsoft.NET. Aaron Jensen, the author of MSpec, released support for TestDriven.NET, xUnit, nUnit, and Gallio. And with the latest release of v0.3, it adds official support for ReSharper's Unit Tests and and Selenium integration testing. Very cool stuff indeed, and a very active project!

What has bugged me a bit is getting TestDriven.NET to see my MSpec specifications, on my Windows 7 x64 platform. Aaron so kindly includes a InstallTDNetRunner.bat file to register MSpec with TestDrive.NET; but, it only works on x86 systems.

So why does it not work with x64 systems? It is because the installer for TestDriven.NET registers the runners in a different registry location.

Windows Vista/7 x64 (64-bit) MSpec runner TestDriven.NET registry file

Below, I have created a bat file you can copy and paste into your own InstallTDNetRunner-x64.bat if you are on Windows x64. Or, you can download it from here:

http://eduncan911.com/blog/binary/legacy/InstallTDNetRunner-x64.zip



@echo off & if not "%ECHO%"=="" echo %ECHO%

setlocal
set LOCALDIR=%~dp0

echo Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 > MSpecTDNet.reg
echo [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MutantDesign\TestDriven.NET\TestRunners\MSpec] >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "Application"="" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "AssemblyPath"="%LOCALDIR:\=\\%Machine.Specifications.TDNetRunner.dll" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "TargetFrameworkAssemblyName"="Machine.Specifications" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "TypeName"="Machine.Specifications.TDNetRunner.SpecificationRunner" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo @="5" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo. >> MSpecTDNet.reg

echo [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MutantDesign\TestDriven.NET\TestRunners\MSpec] >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "Application"="" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "AssemblyPath"="%LOCALDIR:\=\\%Machine.Specifications.TDNetRunner.dll" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "TargetFrameworkAssemblyName"="Machine.Specifications" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "TypeName"="Machine.Specifications.TDNetRunner.SpecificationRunner" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo @="5" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo. >> MSpecTDNet.reg

echo [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\MutantDesign\TestDriven.NET\TestRunners\MSpec] >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "Application"="" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "AssemblyPath"="%LOCALDIR:\=\\%Machine.Specifications.TDNetRunner.dll" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "TargetFrameworkAssemblyName"="Machine.Specifications" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo "TypeName"="Machine.Specifications.TDNetRunner.SpecificationRunner" >> MSpecTDNet.reg
echo @="5" >> MSpecTDNet.reg

regedit MSpecTDNet.reg

del MSpecTDNet.reg

Setup TestDriven.NET and MSpec

Still a bit confused, getting TestDriven.NET and MSpec setup for the first time? Here's the steps to follow:

Go ahead and install TestDriven.NET. It can be installed and upgraded at any time.
Next, grab the latest release of MSpec and extract the zip to a semi-permanent location. This is because things such as ReSharper and TestDriven.NET will need to know a common location for the mspec assemblies. I recommend C:\Program Files (x86)\MSpec\.
- Included with the MSpec zip is an InstallTDNetRunner.bat, but it only works on 32-bit Windows. For 64-bit Windows, you want to copy my registry code above into a new file called InstallTDNetRunner-x64.bat.
- Make sure to place this InstallTDNetRunner-x64.bat file in the same directory as your semi-permanent MSpec location above.
Finally, you want to double-click and execute the InstallTDNetRunner or InstallTDNetRunner-x64 from within this semi-permanent location. This will insert the registry values for a new runner called MSpec for TestDriven.NET to detect and execute.

From this point further, you can right-click within different places to execute your specifications within your MSpec. Some tips on locations you can right-click and execute the specs:

The project file: will execute all specs detected within that project.
The Namespace: will execute all specs detected within that namespace throughout the project.
Within the Establish context or Because of : Will execute all specs within that one class/scenario.
Within the It spec - Will execute just that one test.

Something to note is Aaron is currently upgrading MSpec (version 0.4, not released yet) to support TestDriven.NET's new 2.24 feature of version independent runners. I haven't looked completely into that myself, but should make registring TDNet runners in the future a bit easier.

Windows Azure SDK for Microsoft Visual Studio November 2009

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:38:00 GMT

Over this past weekend, Microsoft released an updated Windows Azure SDK dated November 2009 for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 Beta 2. It is great to hear this since my tinkering with with the old CTP release was a bit buggy (had to download a few hot-fixes).

Officially this SDK is known as version 20091111.1401, and released on November 13th, 2009. You can go straight to the SDK download here.

I have compiled a list of improvements and details about this release. For those new to Windows Azure, the SDK add-on for Visual Studio 2008/2010 includes the following:

C# and VB Project creation support for creating a Windows Azure Cloud Service solution with multiple roles.
Tools to add and remove roles from the Cloud Service.
Tools to configure each Role.
Integrated local development via the Development Fabric and Development Storage services.
Running and Debugging a Cloud Service in the Development Fabric.
Building and packaging of Cloud Service Packages.
Browsing to the Windows Azure Developer Portal.

This updated includes a large number of enhancements and compatibility updates. The overview reads:

Windows Azure Service Runtime managed library: The latest version of the Service Hosting Runtime API includes support for enhanced communication between roles and for runtime notification of service configuration changes. Direct communication between role instances enables new application development scenarios, including applications that distribute state across role instances. Service configuration changes include an increase or decrease in the number of request role instances and changes to the values of configuration settings.
Windows Azure Diagnostics managed library: The new Diagnostics API enables logging using standard .NET APIs. The Diagnostics API provides built-in support for collecting standard logs and diagnostic information, including the Windows Azure logs, IIS 7.0 logs, Failed Request logs, crash dumps, Windows Event logs, performance counters, and custom logs.
Certificate Management: Enhanced support for SSL certificates in Windows Azure and in the Windows Azure SDK enables the secure automated deployment of certificates to services hosted on Windows Azure.
Variable-size Virtual Machines : Developers may now specify the size of the virtual machine to which they wish to deploy a role instance, based on the role's resource requirements. The size of the VM determines the number of CPU cores, the memory capacity, and the local file system size allocated to a running instance.
External endpoints for worker roles. A worker role may now define any number of external endpoints for HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP, and specify the desired port number for any external endpoint.
Persistent local resource storage: Developers can now choose to persist data written to a local storage resource at runtime when the role is recycled.
Windows Azure Storage Client managed library: The Storage Client library provides a .NET API for accessing the Windows Azure storage services.
Improved Development Storage: Development storage provides a high-fidelity simulation of the Windows Azure storage services in the cloud. Tables can now be created dynamically in the development storage Table service and are no longer required to be generated in advance.
Updated samples: The samples included with the Windows Azure SDK have been updated to demonstrate new features. The samples now include both C# and Visual Basic versions.

The actual technical updates are listed below. Some interesting parts such as ASP.NET MVC 2 support are now included.

Service Model UI: A redesigned and significantly more complete interface for manipulating Role configuration information. To access, double-click on a role node in the Solution Explorer.
Additional role templates: Support for ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010 only), F# worker roles (2010 only), and WCF Service Application web roles.
VS2010 Beta2 Support: Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and VWD Express 2010 Beta 2.
Support for dynamically creating tables: The Create Tables functionality is now performed automatically; there is no longer a need to right-click and select Create Tables… on the project after your table definitions have changed.
Full support for and installation of the November Windows Azure SDK release (in short, similar to the above list):

The sample storage client has been replaced by a new production quality library.
New Diagnostics library enables logging using .NET APIs and enables the collection of diagnostic information from the service.
Service Runtime library updated to support inter-role communication and notification of configuration changes .
Support for input endpoints on Worker Roles.
Higher fidelity simulation of Development Storage: supports all current cloud storage features, including dynamically creating tables.
Ability to choose the size of the VM for a role instance.
Ability to persist data in local storage even after the role is recycled.
Ability to manage certificates to install to the role VMs.

Support Ticket Severity vs Priority

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:16:00 GMT

All too often, I get involved with ticketing systems that have these set incorrectly. Or, they utilize them in a different manner than what they were intended for. Tonight, I am setting up another system and thought I would document the differences here for future references (and for my buddies that could tweak their systems).

I understand there is a movement to get away from setting both of these. I myself like a system without the severity part, as it is much faster just to run down the priority list. But, I feel that the more formal the QA process is (e.g. you have a dedicated QA member or team or outsourced group), the more you need to separate the two. This post should help with that.

Definitions of Severity and Priority

The definitions, in terms of a ticketing system are as follows:

Severity : The level of impact the defect has on the system, overall. Basically, how serious the bug is.

Priority : The developers order in which to attack, address, or fix the tickets. Ranked usually from Highest to Lowest.

Before going any further, let’s setup the Severity to match what Microsoft uses (sourced from this article, with my spin on it).

1 - Exception or Crash : A system crash or anything that loses persistent data. Often times referred to as Show Stoppers. Most of the time your overall exceptions that users see (or get the generic “and error has occurred” page) would fall into this category. Unless related to a new feature being QA’d (see #2 below).

2 - New Feature Incomplete : A new feature that does not work at all or has exceptions. The word new being import there, as broken new feature bugs do not belong in #1 above.

3 - Release Feature Bug : A completed feature that can be released, but has some rough edges to iron out further.

4 - Cosmetic (UI) : Purely cosmetic, css, html, and spelling issues.

I usually take it a little further by adding a 5th option.

5 - Feature Request : Usually a placeholder for feature notes and feature development / feedback to the reporter. Some organizations prefer to keep a separate list of these. I find they are too often forgotten about.

It is easier to think of severities as categories of the defect itself. Also if you notice, I prefixed the severities with numbers. This has a two effects by giving users an instant “what level is this bug” resolve, as well as a trick to get several ticket systems to order the DropDownList by the number (yeah, lame, but works!).

Who sets Severity and Priority?

This is a good one. A few employees at my last company nearly went to war over who gets to set these. But, the answer is simple:

It’s the tester/bug reporter’s job to set the severity.

The person in charge of QAing the system knows the severity of the bug they are reporting. They know how it impacts the users on the other end. But, this person should not be given the power to set the priority. Else, everything would be set to High Priority (usually the case).

Priority should be set by the project manager or dispatcher.

During the weekly standup, the project manager decides on what order the tickets are addressed in and this, in turn, dictates the priority of the tickets. This is done by examining the severity of the bug reported (yep, there it is - examine the severity here!). After reviewing the severity, the PM estimates the time to resolve the bug for the next milestone or release and decides if it is acceptable. If so, a priority is set on the ticket and it is moved to the appropriate milestone.

Severity and Priority Examples

Let’s take an example of an css issue in which the overflow property is not set correctly, and the text the user sees is being obscured by this issue. But, this css issue is part of a new feature that is going out in the next build. What do you set it to? Is it #2, a feature incomplete? Or #3, a feature bug because the user cannot set the text of this “new” feature? Or, #4, an UI issue?

Personally, this is to each his own. I would examine the context of the text being hidden. If this text is the balance of your bank account being hidden, then that is a #2. If it is part of the help text, then #3 and can be released to be tweaked later. If it is just a few words not needed for any operation or description of the page’s purpose, then, it’s #4 and can wait for more sever issues to be addressed.

Basically, the severity dictates rather that bug must be completed before release. I usually set the rule that the release does not go out with any #1 and #2s in the list. Or, I may release some #2s if I can quickly follow-up with a patch within a day or two.

Number 3s and 4s often time get pushed back until the next release, unless the priority has been bumped (i.e. how old a ticket is). The #3s and #4s are great gap fillers for those "let's run through the tickets and attack as many as we can" days.

If you need more examples, feel free to hit me up or leave a comment.

Summary

Hopefully you have a better idea of severity and how it fits into your project management. Again, I have to stress that smaller projects may never use severity. But, if you have any type of format QA process, it makes sense to stick it in there to have the extra level of communications.

In case you are wondering, I personally use Unfuddle at my companies and personal projects. You can’t beat the web version of diffmerge in the browser! GitHub is very good as well for those diffmerges. GitHub is best suited for public projects and very small teams, and is only for Git. Where Unfuddle supports both Git and SVN, and is more privatized.

Html.RenderAction for ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:04:00 GMT

The ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Futures assembly (that is not included with ASP.NET MVC 1.0) has a powerful HtmlHelper extension method called RenderAction(). It sounds similar to the Html extension method called RenderPartial() for a good reason. RenderAction() executes an action on a controller, allowing you to move your logic out of the views.

The problem with Html.RenderPartial()

There is no direct problem with this. It is just that developers are left with only the ability to render a Partial View. What if you want that partial view to act on model properties you pass into that partial view? What if you need to access the ambient values in the Routes collection to render some specifics? Unfortunately, developers are only left with RenderPartial() which only gives you access to a partial view. If you really need this logic, you have no choice but to put it into the partial view. Or, to put it into your controller’s action method that calls the view that calls the partialviews. Needless to say, that’s a bit hokey.

What Html.RenderAction<TController>() Resolves

It gives you the power of moving that complex View and Partial View logic to a Controller’s Action, where it belongs! Think of it as a “Render Partial Action” method of where you can call back into a controller to render some logic. This gives you the ability to clean up your partial views now by removing that logic and placing it on a controller’s action, that renders the partial view when done. The syntax looks like:

<% Html.RenderAction<ProductController>(c => c.RenderProductResults()); %>
<!-- Or... //-->
<%= Html.RenderAction("RenderPartialResults", "Product"); %>

Put simply, this renders an action on a controller directly in your view. You may be thinking “big deal”, but I assure you this is a big deal in large complex MVC sites. Having the power to abstract or breakup your controller’s actions into multiple partial-actions and multiple views is very powerful. Instead of relying on the 1 controller' action to wire up all of the data for all of the views, partial views, and logic for the views. Now, you can just focus on that one section - and abstract the rest into reusable parts.

You may be wondering where this extension method is with your ASP.NET MVC project. As mentioned above, it is part of the Futures extension of the ASP.NET MVC project at codeplex.

ASP.NET MVC Sidebar Widget Example

The current pattern suggests you use Html.RenderPartial to render those partial views as your sidebar widgets. What if you want those widgets to be more complex? What if you want those widgets to act on the the current Route? Well, you are left with little options with RenderPartial. Instead, you want to use RenderAction to call an action on a controller to handle that logic.

Assume we are viewing a blog post entry and on the right, we want a sidebar widget for related posts. To do this, first create an action on a controller called RelatedPosts().

public ActionResult RelatedPosts(Int32 postID)
{       
  // some complex logic, or simple logic, can go here now…
  //
  
  if (postID < 1)
    return PartialView(“NoRelatedPosts”);
  var relatedPosts =
    _postService.FetchRelatedPosts(postID);
  
  if (relatedPosts.Count > 0)
   return PartialView("RelatedPosts", relatedPosts);
  else
    return PartialView(“NoRelatedPosts”);
}

Notice how the logic here accounts for empty or no results, and returns an a different partial view? Using RenderPartial(), this is logic could only be reflected with inline IF ELSE brackets within your PartialView - and ugly spaghetti mess. Also, how would you even retrieve the related posts collection? You have no choice but to obtain that collection back on the post entry view action - which should not be concerned about our little sidebar widget. All it should do is wire up the post. But, that is not the case with RenderPartial() - you have to wire up all of your data ahead of time in one large ViewModel with multiple entities dangling off of it.

No no. Let’s do it with RenderAction() and instead put this logic into the Controller (where it belongs, so we can test for it); and then, we can call it with the RenderAction() extension. We can do this now with a simple call within our larger post view like so:

<% Html.RenderAction<PostController>(c => c.RelatedPosts(Model.PostID)); %>

We instead kind of render a partial action by calling an action on a controller that handles the logic that we would otherwise have to put in the view. Now, our main post view action doesn’t have to be concerned about wiring up our sidebar partial view. We can just call RenderAction() in the view.

ASP.NET MVC AJAX Example using RenderAction

Taking an example from the book Profressional ASP.NET MVC 1.0, we’ll use the submitting a Form Using Ajax example to replace the limited RenderPartial() function with a richer RenderAction() from a Controller’s action to process the results more finely.

In the ProductController, you would add a new method with the signature RenderProductResults(IList<Product> products):

public ActionResult RenderProductResults(IList<Product> products)
{
    // insert some custom logic here, maybe even switch partial views, etc
    //
    if (products.Count > 0)
        return PartialView("ProductSearchResults", products);
    else
        return EmptyResult();
}

Now, you can update their ajax example to render this new action instead of the RenderPartial() from their example:

<h1>Product Search - jQuery</h1>
<form action="<%= Url.Action("ProductSearch") %>" method="post" id="jform">

  <%= Html.TextBox("query", null, new { size=40 }) %>
  <input type="submit" id="jsubmit" value="go" /> 

</form>

<div id="results2">
  <% Html.RenderAction<ProductController>(c => c.RenderProductResults(Model.Results)); %>
</div>

<script src="http://eduncan911.com/Scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js" type="text/javascript"> </script>
<script src="http://eduncan911.com/Scripts/jquery-form.js" type="text/javascript"> </script>
<script> 
  $(function() { 
    $('#jform').submit(function(){ 
      $('#jform').ajaxSubmit({ target: '#results2' }); 
      return false; 
    }); 
  });
</script>

Look for the Html.RenderAction line above. What this does is instead of rendering a partial view in the id=”results2” location, you can now render a “partial Action” with the Html.RenderAction() call. Notice that how we are also passing strongly typed parameters directly into the method? Yep, fully supported.

By using the RenderAction instead of RenderPartial, you have much more control over what happens with that rendering of the partial (now, rendering of the action). This gives you an excellent opportunity to remove that complex view logic you may have, and place it in an Action where it belongs!

Custom ViewEngines and Extensions

Now, you can also resolve this logic issue by creating custom ViewEngines, or extensions that expand upon the ViewEngine, HtmlHelper, or UrlHelper. But, I see those methods as more application-wide common logic (like pagers and server controls for display name). I do not see that as a solution for your one-off partial view for the ajax response to something. Think of how bloated your ViewEngine would get, or how many different ViewEngines you’d have to choose from. No, ViewEngine extensions have a place which I will post about as well.

Summary

When your views start getting complex and messy, it may be time to switch to a RenderAction to handle that logic. I know I have cleaned up quite a lot using it. Also, custom view engines have a place in their own right to abstract more global/common logic across the entire site.

Microsoft announces WebsiteSpark

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:31:00 GMT

For the first time, Microsoft is licensing a number of software and servers to startups, small businesses, and actual independent web developers - for free. And, it lasts for three years. Scott Guthrie tweeted today about the new WebsiteSpark Program, which is what this program is called. Why not call it WebSpark? I dunno.

I was shocked to see it comes with a 3rd party tool called DotNetPanel, a great Server Control Panel for hosting websites. But, I am guessing the free version - not the upgraded ones. ;)

Microsoft WebsiteSpark Features

Now, don’t get too excited. Here’s the list so far:

3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
2 licenses of Expression Web 3
4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

Some may say, “It doesn’t come with Enterprise editions?!? Blah!” Don’t be discouraged at the power being given away here. This is targeting two key business groups:

Independent contractors building websites for others.
Small companies of 10 employees or less building websites for others.

Being in one of these two categories means you really do not have a need for Enterprise editions. If your website(s) actually do need that level of licensing to run on larger hardware, then Microsoft sees that you can afford the $25/mo licensing fee for Standard or $119/mo for Enterprise because of the traffic, of volume of sites you have running.

I kind of agree. Why do startups need to setup these large and expensive 4 webserver, 2 SQL DBs in a high-end failover environment with massive hardware - for the 6 month to 1 year it will take to develop the software? Scale back, let your developers develop it. And 30 days before you launch, then get your massive setup and migrate over to it. You reap the benefits of saving the costs during that time. If you application(s) are too embedded to be migrated quickly to another set of servers, find a new architect or developer.

Microsoft and Open-Source

I actually have a history with these start-up programs. It was back in 2006 when I worked on a new Microsoft site called www.microsoftstartupzone.com at Telligent. It was going to be a new low-cost initiative to compete with the free open-source market (LAMP).

One of the first programs to come out of this site was the BizSpark program that we all know and love. We got BizSpark at GlobalGrind, and I helped setup BizSpark at my former gig as well. It really is a powerful and inexpensive way to get a company up and going.

And now, we have this WebsiteSpark to get things kicked off. Excellent.

Type Safety with ASP.NET MVC Futures

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:02:29 GMT

In this post, I will show you how to strongly type some parts of MVC to get rid of those “magic strings.” I will also publish a few extension methods that expand upon this concept later on. So, this is a continuation of my Mvc series that you can subscribe to.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Futures

You can download ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM from codeplex. You can even download the source code and step through what the framework is doing. What a lot of people overlook is an additional assembly available for download at these locations called ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Futures. You can download it from Codeplex from below:

Download ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Futures from CodePlex

This is a darling of an assembly using the namespace Microsoft.Web.Mvc. Usually these Microsoft “Futures” releases are developer code that did not get approved for RTM release. This assembly is no exception and includes a plethora of strongly typed extensions. The reason some of this code did not get approved was because some of it did not conform to Medium Trust requirements for the 1.0 release. So if you have a strict medium trust application, you may not be able to use the some of the code contained within the assembly.

I am not going to cover all of the extensions within this assembly. You can do that on your own with .NET Reflector. Instead, I am going to cover just a couple that you will be using on a daily basis.

To get started, go ahead and added a reference to the Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly to your project. In addition, to make things a lot easier, go ahead and add a few namespaces to your web.config.

<namespaces>
  <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc"/>  
  <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax"/>
  <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html"/>
  <add namespace="System.Web.Routing"/>
  <add namespace="System.Linq"/>
  <add namespace="System.Collections.Generic"/> 

  <add namespace="AspNetMvcTypeSafety.Controllers"/>
  <add namespace="AspNetMvcTypeSafety.Models"/>
  <add namespace="Microsoft.Web.Mvc"/> <!-- Add this assembly -->  
</namespaces>

Hit CTRL-SHIFT-B to do a quick compile of your code (so the assembly is copied to your /bin). ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Futures is now available for your project. You’ll also note that I add my controllers and models’ namespaces. This is because you want them available from your views and controllers.

Strong Typed Html ActionLink<TController>

If you are already coding in ASP.NET MVC, you are using strings to reference controllers, actions, and views. An example to access to the MostRecent() action on a PostController would be something like:

<%-- // Old way--%> 
<%= Html.ActionLink(Model.DisplayName, "MostRecent", new { Controller="Post" }) %>

You have to create an anonymous type and reference a controller with “Post”, for the action method “MostRecent”. Using the Futures assembly, you’ll see a few new extension overloads for Html.ActionLink:

Html.ActionLink<TController>(
    Expression<Action<TController>> action, String linkText)
Html.ActionLink<TController>(
    Expression<Action<TController>> action, String linkText, object attributes)

So, now you can re-write the first example to get the MostRecent() action like so:

<%-- // New way --%>
<%= Html.ActionLink<PostController>(c => c.MostRecent(), Model.DisplayName)%>

Isn’t that much tidier? To break it down, TController is the controller you want to access an action method for. With it assigned as the generic type, now you have intellisense for your controller as the image below demonstrates.

This pattern even supports the parameters on your controller’s actions! For example, say you want to pass in a username property for a PostController action with the signature of MyPosts(String username). Using the old method, you have to pass it an anonymous type like so (again, using strings):

<%-- // Old way --%>
<%= Html.ActionLink(Model.DisplayName, "MyPosts", new { Controller="Post", id=Model.Username }) %>

With the Futures assembly, it’s a simple as this:

<%-- // New way --%>
<%= Html.ActionLink<PostController>(c => c.MyPosts(Model.Username), Model.DisplayName)%>

Notice that you pass the Model.Username parameter directly into the method c.MyPosts(), instead as an anonymous type like the old way. You even get the intellisense as well, as shown below:

Html RenderAction<TController>

This new function works exactly like the ActionLink<TController> above. No surprises.

<%-- // new way %>
<% Html.RenderAction<PostController>(c => c.MyPosts(Model.Username));%>

Strong Typed Html BeginForm<TController>

Again, using the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, this is already done for you. This one is a bit tricky though. You want to pass your values within the form’s scope, not the BeginForm method itself. But, if you leave the parameters blank for your method, the view will not render and you will be an exception. Intelliense actually gives you a hint by the red underline.

To get by this, you have to trick it and pass in some default values like so:

Yes, you can still pass a direct value into the method. And just like normal, if a route’s parameter does not match the name, it will be tacked on as a querystring.

Summary

That’s it for now. There are more to capitalize on within the Futures assembly such as the FileCollectionModelBinder for multiple files, the CookieTempDataProvider for setting a temp cookie only for the next request, or even the HtmlHelper extensions for Mailto() that wraps those ever daunting subject, body, multiple emails, etc all into a neat HtmlHelper.

For my next project, I will be developing heavy in Mvc across multiple sites. At that point, I am sure I will have more strongly typed extensions for things like RedirectToAction() at the controller level. I will post them as I run across them.

ASP.NET MVC

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:02:13 GMT

I am starting a new series that will be focusing on ASP.NET MVC design patterns. What I will be focusing on is enterprise-ready patterns and practices that scales across cloud computing, coding with type safety, and abstractions of WebForms-like server controls – using the MVC pattern. Steve Sanders and Phil Haack have about a year head start on everything-mvc, so I highly recommend reading up on their blogs for the basics and advanced solutions.

I will keep updating this post with each post for future references. So, bookmark it or you can subscribe to the series here.

You can also follow me on Twitter via eduncan911, if you can weed out my random thoughts from these postings.

HiPE’s voice-operated Drive-N car PC w/Vista

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:55:00 GMT

This old Engadget post reminds me of my Dell mini-pc I hacked up to fit in a block of foam and fans to run my XP on 12V with 80GB of MP3s and videos, with wireless (to sync from outside in the car). Too bad I never finished the project; but, I did sell it on eBay for a few hundred bucks. That guy wrote some flash interface for it. Nice.

“The units, ranging in price from $799 for a barebones Via C7 in an amp-style chassis up to $2199 for a tricked-out double-DIN touchscreen monster, all run Windows Vista MCE with the One Voice command system, and can be outfitted with GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, XM, and even a rearview camera. The machines can also interface with your car's OBD II unit to let you monitor vehicle diagnostics, as well as clear out some of those annoying error messages you usually have to let the dealer handle.”

The ODB-II connection is nice. But still, $2k?

8 Steps to SEO Quickly

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:11:00 GMT

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimizations. It is a term used to reference a website’s HTML source code and related metadata and url for search engine rankings. I recently was involved with interviewing and working with a number of SEO firms here in New York City and picked up a number of quick tips that anyone fimilar with html and css can knock out.

I prefix this post that my own weblog can’t follow these rules 100% because of limitations with CommunityServer and how it bakes-in a number of HTML rendering elements that I have no control over – without editing the source code and deploying new assemblies – more than I care to do at this time. But, I have gotten it almost there. This is why I love ASP.NET MVC - full control over all markup even if it requires more UI work.

H1 SEO

These have the most impact on your blog’s ranking (at this time). The words you chose to insert into these, their repetition throughout the site (and what H* they fall into), and their correlation to your metadata on the page, and their position on your site all weigh heavily for ranking your site.

Several of these tips below center around the H1 and other H* tags and how to optimize them.

1. The first rule about SEO Club is you talk about SEO Club, with H1 being first.

Here’s a quick test. Open an article or weblog post on your site and go to File –> Print Preview (or just print it). What is the first “text” you see at the very top? Is it the title of your post? If not, you fall down the list of rankings. Now, do the same here on my blog. Go to File –> Print Preview and see what it looks like. You will notice it is the title of this page (8 steps to SEO Quickly), and then content after that. Nice and neat. Now, did you notice the header and navbar links are the very bottom?

This “print view” is pretty much what the search engine sees when it is trying to determine what text to index. If you have a large and complicated header, well your content – and H1 – get pushed way down the page.

To accomplish this takes a bit of CSS magic. First, wrap your header html in a div.

<div id=”header”>…</div>

The next step is to wrap your content in another dedicated div.

<div id=”content”>…</div>

Now, move the entire header div down below your content div. The final step is to use CSS to render a large “space” for your content div, allowing room for the header to be “positioned” to the top of the page. It should look something like this (using inline style definitions for easier reading).

<html>
<header>
  <title>My SEO post</title>
  <style type=”text/css”>
    #content 
    { 
      margin-top: 100px;
    }
    #header 
    {
      position: absolute;
      top: 0; 
      left: 0;
    }
  </style>
</header>
<body>
  <div id=”content”>
    <h1>My SEO post</h1>
    <p>Search engines should love me now!</p>
  </div>
  <div id=”header”>
    <a href=”/”>Home</a> <a href=”/about”>About</a>
  </div>
</body>
</html>

Notice how the content html comes before the header html? And did you notice that the CSS styles will “push down” the content 100px, while absolute positioning the header above the content? This is the magic that is needed to “make the H1 the first text the search engine sees.”

2. The second rule about SEO Club is you talk about SEO Club, with H1 being first.

There is more to just moving the H1 up higher in your page. It must be the first text the engine sees! Some clients had difficulty with this because their H1 is buried down deep in a number of divs and sub-titles, tooltips, javascript inline, etc.

The general rule is, refactor your code so that the <h1> is immediately after the <body>. I know, this is near impossible. Especially with ASP.NET Forms’ inline javascript and script references just after the <form> tag. Also, you may want some “Recent Posts” or something above the <h1> location.

It basically boils down to, refactor your code to push the H1 as the first text. If you cannot, your fall down in rankings. Something so trivial, I know. But every SEO provider we looked into was hard pressed about this priority. So, I am stressing it here with you.

3. Use all H1 through H6, on every page.

Search engines love these “header” tags. They are perfect for pointing them to your relevant content. So, you should encapsulate as much text as possible with H tags. Just one sticky point, generally you should use all tags, but do not use the H1 tag more than once. Google will even give you errors for pages that use the same H1 title – it must be unique for each page of your entire site.

This is a bit difficult for me to follow in designing blogs. But, it can be done. Let me point you to a few ways you can use all H1 tags on your blog:

H1 for the Title of your blog post
H2 for post headers/highlights. Like I am doing in this post, in bold.
H3 for each Tag for your blog post
H4 for sub-titles or sub-topics
H5 for related posts
H6 for each navbar element (i.e., mine are additional tags or group tags)

Yeah, a lot to break down for each post. But, every time you do will score higher with search engines.

4. Concentrate on what content goes into those H tags.

Now this is when you concentrate on what “term” you want to brand for your website. You really get only one shot at this, per search engine crawl. You can change it for the next time, but it will change your rankings.

Now is the time to pause and go use some of these SEO tools to find what phrase you can target. Look for something with a ranking that you can break into. Obviously, “Top Blog” is going to be out of touch for your small site, with 10,000+ links to some of the worlds top blogs. Instead, focus on something more tangible. Like, “Atlanta Bakery” or “NYC Wireless Cafe”.

The H1 on your homepage is the most important text on your entire site. Higher than metadata, higher than its content, and so on. This is your chance to focus on a word or phrase you want your users to search, and find you! So, insert your phrase you want to focus on for your site here in the H1, without variation, as is. You can also use little tricks with CSS to pull over something more meaningful to your users, while getting the H1 hit.

<h1 class=”nolinebreak”>NYC Wireless Cafe</h1><span class=”h1-like”>s in NoHo</span>

Let’s take my blog for example. I want to focus on “Eric Duncan” and I want people to search on that, and find me. Right now, I am battling an AAA baseball player for rankings on my name. Since Google ranks pages higher on links and ESPN and 100s of sites link to this baseball player, I am down to like 6 or 7. But on Bing, that looks at the actual content, I am number 2. Woot!

Now, technically you are to pick that one phrase, and implement it throughout your site with other H tags. For example, if I was hardcore I would want to update my tags to be H3 and worded something like:

Personal Duncan
Duncan’s Automotive
Eric on Geek Stuff

Or, going back to the wireless cafe above:

Cafe Drinks
NYC Favorites
Wireless Hours

Notice how I am working in parts of the target H1 in each tag? This is what gets ranked very very well. Before, the cafe would have had “Drinks – Favorites – Hours” as tags or navbar elements. But, by adding in parts of the target phrase for the H1 on the homepage, and making each navbar element an H tag, you now have much more ranking power.

Say if you have “Best” in your homepage H1, such as “Best NYC Cafe”, you would want to use “Best” in just about every H2 on your site going forward. “Best Dinners”, “Best Drinks”, “Best Menu”, etc.

5. H1 –> Title –> Metadata –> H2-H6 –> url text

That is the secret formula, that about 3/5ths of seo firms agreed on. Several of them gave variations. But more or less, that is what they say.

So, by those rankings, you should now focus on your <title> tag in the header. The rule is, the H1 should exactly match your Title. So, on your blog post page, your <h1> is the title of your post. Well, your <title> should exactly match that as well. It should NOT be prefixed with your site name. This is the mistake people tend to miss. “I want the site name in every <title>, so when it is bookmarked…” Well, that is the problem. If the H1 is different than your Title, then it isn’t a match.

Now some said you can suffix the title with your site’s short-name (just a little text). But there was debates to rather even this was acceptable. I would change my site here for it, but CS is limited in that regard.

Next is the Metadata. Yep, that thing that we were all taught back in the 90s was the “key” to searching. Well, it still is to a point. It can’t contain more than 10 keywords (or might get ignored completely).

6. Friendly Urls or SEO Urls

This is what a lot of people think gets ranked high. “Converting my post.aspx?PostID=523 to /archive/2009/09/20/my-cool-post/ is the best thing you can do!” Well, no. That is why it is #6. It is of a lower priority than the rest above, because as mentioned in #5, it goes H1 –> Title –> Metadata –> H2-H6. And THEN it gets to Url.

And for those that don’t know, “SEO Friendly Urls” does not mean removing the querystring. Search engines are smart enough to analyze the querystrings and follow them. Google even found the ?p= and logged it as a “Page Index” variable on my site.

No, SEO Friend Urls mean removing the integer from the PostID= and making it something legible, and indexable. Like, the post title.

This works well for Wordpress blogs that want an SEO url, but does not have access to mod_rewrite. Just change the url to be http://domain.com/?p=%postname% and you should be SEO friendly going forward, without mod_rewrite.

7. XHTML Compliancy

It may seem frivolous, but search engines really are just computer programs with 100s of rules to follow when reading your page. One of those is it attempt to select these H* tags from your page and process them. If you have some funky text, broken html tags, and just general messy html, several of their rules will fail – and you fail to rank higher.

Go hit-up a validator to see how your site does: http://validator.w3.org/

8. Off-page SEO

Everything else above covers what we call “on-page” SEO, which is the SEO you can control from your site’s markup. Off-page SEO is what Google’s entire ranking system is based on – how many websites link to your website. So, commission a dozen college students to go out and talk about your site on a few hundred websites to get those “off-page seo” links. Yeah, this is shady and is what causes those, “Oh man, cool post! Check out similar similar here at…” comments and forum posts you see. This is generating off-page SEO for those websites with spam comments. But, it’s what they do – and Google rewards them for it.

Summary

To sum things up, SEO is more than just a pretty url. It is about changing your markup and thinking before you do things.

Also, this is what the rules are as of 2009. In 1999, it was all about metadata. Who knows what it will be in 2019. Maybe it will be what images are being shown and how often you should images in each post (I get an image in each one for me).

Good luck!

The truth about 802.11n, 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:10:00 GMT

The odds are that your brand new 802.11n Draft N wireless router may get the same or worse signal than your previous "G" or even "B" setup. The odds are you are not getting a 5Ghz device, even though you see “Dual Band” and 802.11N plastered all over the box. So let me take a few minutes to explain the truth behind all of this Wireless 802.11n buzz and why most consumers are not exactly getting what they paid for; but, with a little careful planning ahead of time and some special configurations you can make the most out of the hardware you acquired. I apologize for sitting on this knowledge for years and not blogging about it earlier, so let me make the wait worth while.

802.11n Dual Radio

For those that want and answer right away, you will want to invest $200 into a “Dual Radio” 802.11n router and not a “Dual Band”. Dual Radio means your router can operate up, away from the interference, in the 5.8Ghz frequency. There are dozens of “dual band” 802.11n routers out there, but only a select few of dual radio.

What is the truth behind 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz, besides radio bands?

To quickly sum up, this 802.11b/g 2.4Ghz frequency is flooded from all sorts of cordless device. From microwaves to cordless phones. But note that 802.11a over 5.8ghz was golden from day one without any of this fuss. Now that I have teased you with the interference and bands, let us drive into why all of this matters with 802.11n.

With the mass proliferation of consumer electronics (cordless phones, remote control devices, etc), the FCC approved the radio frequency of 2.4Ghz for up to 1000Mbps to be opened up to consumer-grade electronics in the 90s, across a wide range of bandwidths. I followed the HomeRF Working Group talks (now disbanded though) when they were creating the specifications for home networking across a local area network (LAN), wirelessly, in the 90s. Their standard basically outlined a "Frequency Hopping" protocol that would allow a device to operate on multiple channels, similar to how cordless phones work and how they can "change channels" when there is interference. They were responsible for your 802.11b (2.4Ghz) and 802.11a (5Ghz) standards.

In September 2000 the FCC ruled to approve HomeRF requests to increase the bandwidth of 802.11b devices over the 2.4Ghz RF band spectrum to 5Mhz, but with a very limited number of 15 channels and only a maximum of 11Mbps. I believe the FCC did this because of Bluetooth's (and many other company's) arguments that allowing 802.11b devices to utilize a higher bandwidth would cause massive interference amongst other consumer devices.

802.11a/b/g/n differences

Here is a quick summery of the history of the IEEE 802.11 standards we have had available at this point.

802.11b - Rated at 11mbps over a 2.4Ghz frequency for the 1Mhz and 5Mhz spectrums, it was the first widely adopted standard.
802.11a - The need for more speed drove the 802.11a standard at the much higher 5.8Ghz frequency.
802.11g - The one we mostly know these days operating in the 2.4Ghz frequency with additional channels over 802.11b.
802.11n - Operates at both 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz. The new Draft 2.0 forced operation at 2.4Ghz by 'default'. More on this later.

Note that there an 802.11y specification floating around which operates at 3.7Ghz. The advantage of this specification is its massive range - over 5000 Meters (about 3 miles!). You may hear more about this later on in the news.

Why you should care about 802.11-whatever and their differences.

You see, we have had the technology for 802.11n for a while with 802.11a. Why did it not succeed? The 802.11b devices at 2.4Ghz were massively produced, and were cheap. 802.11a devices, while about the same price, operated only at 5.8Ghz and came to the market too late because everyone else had 802.11b in their laptops, homes, and offices. If you had an "A", you couldn't connect to "B". And vice versa. This is why "A" died out, even though it was a better technology.

The 802.11g 2.4Ghz standard in 2003 fixed the interference issues with more channels, hoping to get out of the range of other consumer electronics while staying in the cheaper-to-produce-products 2.4Ghz range. But sadly this is not the case any longer since 1000s of wireless devices now use this “wide open” 2.4Ghz frequency and 1 Mhz and 5 Mhz spectrums.

The 802.11n specification had a great opportunity to fix this interference by going up to 5.8Ghz, once and for all. All the while allowing for backwards compatibility, which is important for products to succeed. In a way they did, but for double the cost.

The reason you get low signals with "G" and now "N" these days.

Note that if you live out in open rural or large lands, you will not see the problems. But the vast majority of us have a neighbor within 100 feet of our home (or dozens in an urban environment).

With population comes more wifi devices. Since there are only 11 channels available in “G”, and there are dozens of wifi devices near you, how much will you bet that there will be a high level of interferance? A lot as it turns out.

I myself had to deal with this recently with our loft in downtown Dallas. Opening a wifi scanner, I saw 31 wireless networks, and I could hardly ever use 802.11g in my open home. Asking the neighbors, they all had issues “getting a router that works, they are all junk.” Well, it wasn’t the router. But instead, just the large number of wireless networks near by.

Once I upgraded to the Linksys WRT600N (with dual radios), I was solid!

Dual Radios vs Dual Channel vs Dual Mode vs Dual Band vs MIMO (The Marketing buzz-words)

Finally, the nit-n-gritty of this post. I will say it loud and clear:

Stay away from dual channel devices and only get a two radio device!

What is dual-two-huh? It is simple: To operate a device at a frequency of, say, 2.4Ghz, you need a RF radio to broadcast and receive at that frequency. To operate at 5.8Ghz, you need a RF radio as well. To operate at both frequencies (sometimes called Dual Channel or Dual Mode), your radio switches from 2.4Ghz to 5Ghz. But the limiting factor here is a RF radio can only operate in one mode or the other. Not both at the same time. These dual channel/dual mode devices have a history of “cutting out” when mixed G and N devices are connected. It is better to operate them at 2.4Ghz at all times.

How do you operate at both channels? Simple, you have two radios: one at 2.4Ghz and the other at 5.8Ghz.

The biggest buzz is that 802.11n specifications allow it to operate at either 2.4Ghz or 5.8Ghz. This allows you to run at 2.4Ghz and connect all of your 802.11g devices as well as 802.11n devices.

Why do I need to operate at both channels or even 2.4Ghz? Can't I just use 5.8Ghz?

Good question and this is where a little preparation of selecting the right devices comes into play. If your home has all 802.11n devices (laptops, Xbox/PS3 wifi adapters, desktop, friends and family visiting over Christmas, etc), then yes you can get one of the cheaper 802.11n routers with "Dual Channels" and setup your 802.11n network for strict 5.8Ghz mode.

Unfortunately, most homes will need 802.11g backwards compatibility. Your son's friend might stop by with his 802.11g laptop. Xbox only has an 802.11g wifi adapter (that I know of). And 100s of other reasons of why you still need 802.11g backwards compatibility.

These cheap "dual mode" or "dual channel" 802.11n devices is what will hurt you. You will be forced to operate at only the 2.4Ghz band for 802.11n to allow other 802.11g devices to connect, which opens you up to interference from all other consumer electronics on your area.

And now why you want to pay the extra $80 for a dual radio 802.11n device.

It allows you to connect your laptops and other devices at 802.11a/n over one radio configured at 5.8Ghz, while supplying the 802.11g/n channel over the more interference-prone 2.4Ghz radio. That is it. It simply isolates you at one radio. This allows your visitors to connect at 2.4Ghz, given not a stable connection in urban America but better than nothing.

The downside to 5.8Ghz, objects.

There is always a catch, right? The 5.8Ghz range of 802.11a and 802.11n are more susceptible to solid devices (i.e. walls, floors, etc). Even though the 802.11a/n standard allows for further range, the 5.8Ghz frequency is quickly blocked by solid objects, severely cutting down your range.

As a comparison, take a loud car stereo. The bass blasting from a neighbor’s car stereo next door, or in the car next to you. How come you hear the thump thump thump of the subwoofer, but you do not hear the 500W he is pushing to his vocals through your windows or walls (or, they are severely muffled)? Simple, the sound waves of low frequencies are much longer/further apart and usually carry more power. This allows for the sound wave to move through solid devices, where higher frequencies are blocked because of the very short and quick sound waves and lower power. Same applies to the 5.8Ghz range of 802.11a and 802.11n devices.

If you have a 3 level home (like we do), placing the 5.8Ghz device on the middle floor is usually best. But, could still cause problems just a short distance away, on another floor. This is where 2.4Ghz might actually be your best bet in your house.

Optimizing your 802.11n Router

For those that remain with the dual-band router, or decide that 2.4 Ghz is the best choice due to interference of objects, or want to tweak that 2.4 Ghz channel, you can make sure to optimize the settings to get the most out of the router - as most router's defaults are "fail safe", and not optimum.

802.11n includes a protocol for "Wide" channels. The default freq and speed for 802.11n is 20 Mhz and 130 Mbps. While a major increase over the previous 54 Mbps cap of 802.11g, it's only half of what the router can actually do. Switching to "40 Mhz", otherwise known as "Wide Channel", you double your speeds up to around 270 Mbps.

There's a catch though. Bluetooth devices usually operate in the 40 Mhz range of the 2.4 Ghz channel as it really is an unlicensed data range - this is why a lot of devices clash when you get "out of spec."

So, in short, if you don't have any bluetooth devices, then set it to 40 Mhz and be happy. Your older 802.11g devices should still work as well. But, to each his own - it may take testing that Xbox or other wifi devices to make sure they can still connect at the older 20 Mhz freq when you have set 40 Mhz (the protocol allows for backwards compatibility).

802.11n 5.8 Ghz Summary

In closing, the FCC did a bad thing when it opened 2.4Ghz 1Mhz and 5Mhz spectrums to consumer devices – besides just routers. This has caused great interference and frustration of thousands of people world wide (cause most of the world adopted the same standards). So our beloved 802.11g routers are now being lost in the noise, literally!

So, look for those 802.11a/n/g dual-radio devices, and not a dual-band, dual-channel, dual-mode.

Personally, I run my 2.4 Ghz and 5.8 Ghz radios at 40 Mhz and with different SSIDs (the wifi "name" or identifier), so I know which one I am connected to. I also have a separate 802.11g device to power those older wifi devices on a 3rd SSID (good ol' Linksys WRT54G running the Tomato firmware) .

Please leave feedback about any issues or questions.

Thirty posts in thirty days

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:07:00 GMT

Happy one year anniversary! As Chris Hammond pointed out this week, it has been exactly one year since I last made a post to my blog – this blog!

It is not for a lack of content. I have well over 100 of “should have, will do, todos, blog this” of bookmarks, code snippets, and more. It didn’t ring a bell until christoc actually pinged me this week to tell me.

So, today I start a new goal: Thirty posts in thirty days. Now, there may be several posts in one day in succession, and other empty days. But, there will be at least 30. :)

Google Chrome popups gets jiggy with it

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

There are dozens of reviews for Google Chrome out there. So I will not bore you with any (except I am really liking the isolated tabs, besides the alpha issues). But, as I am doing Google Chrome testing today I noticed something interesting on how Google Chrome handles popups. Check out the video I recorded today.

Interesting how Google does not block the popup. But instead, they animate the window by moving it down and across the bottom of the screen!

I have not isolated the exact reason to why as Chrome does not move other window.open popups such as Facebook's Share on YouTube. But the one fact I have found is the Facebook Connect uses XSS (cross-site scripting) which we have had to configure to allow them to run scripts. If someone wants to test it on other sites that are using XSS, please let me know your results. The Facebook development team was also able to reproduce it, which removes my machine as a possible source (or virus).

View Video
Format: wmv
Duration: --:--

(direct download, right-click and save-as - 3 MB)

Getting GoDaddy SSLs working in Firefox on IIS

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:15:00 GMT

Upon installing your SSL certificate purchased through GoDaddy, and your Firefox users get prompted with a certificate warning of "Unauthorized Authority", read on for a fix using Windows 2003 Server (and R2). This also works for any other authority that is not authorized by default in any browser. In this article, I provide links to GoDaddy's Intermediate Certificates. If you obtained your SSL certificate through another party, ask them for their "Intermediate Certificates" to download for IIS.

Overview

SSL certificates are commonly known to secure a channel of communications, such as the web and email. The problem when installing GoDaddy SSL certificates on a server is Firefox may prompt you stating that the certificate is from an "Unauthorized Authority".

Why is GoDaddy an unauthorized authority on SSL certificates? Bloggit has a good definition over on his blog, as well as a resolution for stunnel and apache systems. But, we are using IIS so things change a bit for us. The bottom-line is a simple quote from his blog post:

In practice, while Opera and Internet Explorer come [installed] knowing about GoDaddy [as an authorized authority], Firefox and Thunderbird do not. And therefore presumably several other devices also don't. They gripe that GoDaddy is an "Unknown Authority"... rather than silently accepting it.

To better describe what is happening, think of how an SSL certificate gets authorized by your browser. I am going to take a stab on how I think it works (feel free to correct me in the comments). The browser receives the header information for the SSL certificate upon the first communication to the web server. Within the header of this request is the complete information and public key of the SSL certificate information. But also included in the SSL certificate header information is the reference chain of the issuer, which is GoDaddy (or whomever issued your SSL certificate). If the client's browser does not have GoDaddy listed as a known and authorized issuer of SSL certificates (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird do not, but IE7 does), the browser will prompt the user of the Unknown Authority. So the fix is to add a known issuer of SSL certificates that is "linked" to GoDaddy's (better known as Intermediate Certificates) at the server level.

Resolution

The fix is to get GoDaddy added to the list of companies that are authorized to issue SSL certificate. And, this is performed on the web server serving up your custom SSL certificate. We will need to add the GoDaddy company to the reference chain of authorized issuers of SSL certificates.

Basically we want to say, "GoDaddy is known as a child of the bigger company Starfield". Starfield is GoDaddy's parent company and is in Firefox and Thunderbird's list of authorized authorities.

And just like SSL certificates that must be issued by GoDaddy to be authorized, Starfield must issue a similar certificate that describes GoDaddy as a known authorized authority of SSL certificates.

I am going to list the steps first outlined by Doug Hughes, with some modifications and pictures. Below are the set of instructions to get your new GoDaddy SSL certificate installed first. We will tackle the Starfield GoDaddy Intermediate Certificate later.

Copy your GoDaddy certificate into a file named domainname.cer on your web server. The name is arbitrary, but let it end in .cer for simplicity.
Click Start -> Run and type mmc and press Enter. This opens the Microsoft Management Console.
Click File -> Add Remove Snap-In.
Click Add to open the Add Standalone Snap-In Window
Scroll to find the Certificates snap-in as shown below. Select it and click Add.
In the corresponding wizard, select Computer account and click Next.
Select Local computer and click Finish.
Click Close and then Ok. Now you will see the Certificates snap-in in the MMC.
Expand the Certificates node, right-click on Trusted Root Certification Authorities and select All Tasks -> Import as shown below.
Click Next and then select the domainname.cer you created in step 1 above.
The next step in the wizard should indicate that the certificates will be placed in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities. If it does not, you will need to select it by clicking Browse... Once it looks like the below, click Next.
Click Finish on the final page. You should be prompted with a dialog that states the import was successful.
Finally, you will need to stop and restart the website that the SSL certificate belongs to for the changes to take affect.

Final Procedure to install the Intermediate Certificate authority

Unfortunately, you are not done. The above only installs the GoDaddy certificate in the root trusted root certificates. The client's browser will not authorize it just yet. To finish the process, you will need to install GoDaddy's Starfield version of their Intermediate Certificate. Here is the all important link to go download it:

https://certs.godaddy.com/Repository.go

If you obtained your SSL certificate through another party, such as the discounted VeriSign type, you will need to obtain the Intermediate Certificate from your provider. But the steps are identical to resolve.

There are a number of certificates available in the link above. So for simplicity, I downloaded the bundled package that includes all of them named Go Daddy PKCS7 Certificate Intermediates Bundle (for Windows IIS).

Note: Take a special notice that this will download a file with the extension of .p7b.

The final step is to get the bundle of certificates installed. You do this by following exactly the steps I outlined above, 1 through 13 all over again. Except on step 10, you will need to filter the Files of type drop-down as shown below.

Note: You only need to perform this process once per server, as it will be installed at the root level of all certificates for the server. So any further GoDaddy SSL certificates installed will pickup the Starfield SSL certificate as the parent company of GoDaddy.

Step 10 change:

This will now let you browse to the gd_iis_intermediates.p7b file you downloaded from GoDaddy. Follow the rest of the steps exactly.

Final thoughts

That is it. Make sure to stop and restart the web site that your new SSL is to take effect on. Or you can do an IISRESET to force an update to all websites.

Why the Inspiron is a King

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:13:00 GMT

I step away from the system, hands nearly numb, being reminded again since 4 years why PCs will always out perform the latest consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. As I finish a two hour session of Battlefield 2 with my old buddies from TCU, I can't help but to be amazed at the new found graphics tonight I have not seen before because my previous systems could not handle HDTV and full graphics.

Battlefield2, 1920x1200x32, Ultra-High Hack, ~89 FPS

Stepping back, a bit dumb-founded, I question my sanity in the PC I just built tonight. I justify it quickly when I consider the tiny investment it took to bring this desktop to be the game-crushing machine it is now. Only this time it is not my 4.2 Ghz 1200mhz FSB desktop - it's my $900 Dell Inspiron E1705 work laptop that I spent $240 upgrading.

I have been a long-time advocate for Dell machines back from my IT Administrator days in Atlanta at CASE Masters and iDealmusic. Dell laptops in particular have had an interesting reign. Back in 1998, PC Magazine started to issue the "Drop Test" against the leading laptops. Being dropped from six feet, all laptops failed to boot up except one - the Dell Latitude series which was a business-class unit. It was my first laptop I bought, and still have it. I was using it all the way up to 2005, lastly for automotive tuning.

Dell Inspiron E1705/9400 Exploded View (source: support.dell.com)

This story starts with the Dell Inspiron E1705 or also known as the 9400. Dell has done something great here, a laptop that is user-serviceable and user-upgradable. Yes it is a discontinued laptop, but if I only have know when I had it back at Telligent there would have been some serious modding going on. Tonight, I ventured into wild with a few components and upgrades not normally available. Each one has its own story to tell.

E1705, 4 GB SDRAM, nVidia FX2500 7900GTX 512MB, Arctic Silver 5

4 GB SDRAM PC2-5400 667mhz

The first thing many will cry fowl on here is, "The Inspiron E1705/9400 does not support 4GB of ram." This is untrue. While yes the bios only sees 3.25 GB available, so does the M17xx XPS systems and many desktop motherboards. There are lots of theories to this, but the truth is that your peripherals reserve that memory space and Windows allows them to over 3 GB - even if they never will use it. Basically, they are powered but never used. Using PAE causes some mobo/bios combinations to free up that address block to 4 GB, allowing for up 4.5 GB to be used. But the sad fact is there isn't much you can do right now when it's restricted at the hardware level.

Me? I figured it was a good $61 investment for my next laptop to have 4 GB as well. :)

nVidia quadro FX2500m 512MB, 7900GTX GPU, PCI-E CAD and Gaming Card

Another thing many will deny is the ability to stick an XPS or M90 "high-end" design cad and/or gaming card into the 'low-end" Inspiron business-class line. As you can see below, this is not the case either and the installation is pretty straight forward. The M90 designer-cad graphics card is the nVidia FX2500m quadro, which is a modified version of the 7900 GTX 512 MB (from my research).

The forum gurus are spending $350 to $500 on this particular card. I snagged mine from eBay for $160. The theory here was if it truly performs as well as the desktop version, then I can finally, after 4 years of planning, downgrade my PC to our Vista MCE machine in the main room and move to the laptop full-time (mobile again!). That is precisely what the PC was built for, less the water-cooling rig which actually is built to handle the heat demands for the next 5 to 7 years of CPUs. So bring 'em on!

Dell 150w PA15 Power Adapter

Most Dells these days come with an 90w. While this one sufficed for the first few hours of gaming, I did notice the unit getting much hotter than normal. Others amongst the net have mentioned that a 130w or 150w is needed because the 90w will burn out with these upgrades. So I ordered an original Dell PA15 new in box from eBay for $20. I needed a 2nd adapter anyhow. But be warned - they don't call these things a "brick" for no reason. This thing is literally the size of a brick!

Overclocking

I do not think I will be overclocking, but yes it is true. People are dramatically overclocking their Dell laptops. At this time the E1705's CPU, bus, and memory can not be overclocked (except the memory timings). But the GPU (graphics processor unit) can be if it is the nVidia series, and quite extensively too!

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste

I only mention this because the other gurus on the forums have been putting this into their systems for the CPU upgrades. I have used AS5 for many years now, and I swear by it. My 4.2 Ghz desktop machine idles @ 28C and peaks at 37C with both cores maxed. That is just amazing (plus the water cooling).

So in this venture I decided to break out the old tube from the freezer and slap a dab on the CPU. The result was more than I expected with only 15 minutes of work, and well worth it. So let us begin the photo slide show with commen[dy]tary.

I was browsing one day and wanted a temperature reader for my laptop as I was noticing the fans kicking on high and the keyboard running quite hot at times. I stumbled upon Notebook Forums and was amazed at the level of upgrades people have done to their laptops from all brands. It seems the manufacturers have finally gave up and allowed end-users the ability to upgrade their machines. You can read up on your brand there.

Reference

For the Dell E1705 upgrades, there's numerous threads:

Preface

This post is not meant to be a complete guide to installing the hardware. Instead it is more of a visual verification cue of some modifications (read cutting) that you must do. Check out Dell's support page and view/download the service manual as it has very detailed, step-by-step instructions to opening and servicing your laptop.

So now let us break this thing open...

Hinge Cover Removed

First thing the service manual says is to remove the hinge cover as shown above. It was a bit nerve racking to pry that hard on a piece of plastic, and having it pop - sounding like I was breaking each and every tab. Being the first step in the entire process, I did have a reservation. But pushed on, prying harder, knowing it would come off cause the manual said so.

This is the most difficulty step. Get past the cracking, creaking, and popping sounds and you are home free.

Tip: If you do not have a plastic scribe, you can use a small/tiny flat-head screwdriver but do not pry up as the manual says because this will scratch the white plastic. Instead, use a twisting motion to pop the panel up and loose at the location of the red arrow. Then slowly work your way around the corner, twisting and popping the rest loose. Once you can get your finger under it, pull up and don't be scared.

Keyboard Removed, ATI visible

Next comes the keyboard. Nothing special here. I just wanted to show you the first glimpse of the ATI X1400 video card to be removed.

Dell 1500 802.11n WiFi card and Antenna Leads

Skipping ahead, along the way of removing the LCD panel it says to disconnect the wireless antenna of your wireless card. Here you can see the antenna leads connected to the Dell 1500 802.11n card via the red arrows. There is some questions on the web to even having to do this step if you do not have a wifi card. The answer is yes, they are just connected to dummy terminals.

And yes, if you put things back together and have no signal on your wifi card - you forgot to connect these!

LCD Panel Removed

With the LCD removed, you've passed the point of no return (or now you are fully committed rather).

Magnetized Screwdriver Helps

This shows a little trick I have been using since I was a younglin'. I have a special set of tools that are magnetized, allowing me to remove (as shown) and install screws in very difficult places. Tools like this screwdriver pulls the screw right out, not having to flip over the system and let them drop and bounce.

It is very easy to magnetize your existing screwdrivers. Mr. Wizard showed me how when I was just a kid, and I have been doing it every since. Simply take a strong magnet and place it on the tip. Now slide it down the shaft, away from the tip in only one direction - do not twist the magnet around the shaft. This polarizes the shaft with the electrons that were resting at one end now oppositely charged at the other end of the shaft (because you moved the magnet). You can also de-magnetize by reversing precisely what you just did (place the magnet at the far end, and slide it towards the tip). This does not always work because you need to be using the same pole (North or South) of the magnet that when you started. Using the opposite pole will not have much effect.

Do not worry. Just slide the magnet down the shaft and be done. And do not magnetize all of your tools. Just two or three select screwdrivers, and keep them away from your other tools so they do not magnetize others. Note that I highly recommend the use of rare-Earth magnets as they are extremely strong.

And before you ask, yes I removed the HDD before using tools that were magnetized.

Above: nVidia quadro FX2500m, Below: ATI X1400

Here is the view of the ATI X1400 still in the system and the new nVidia FX2500m for comparison. Notice there is no heat pipe on the left side of the ATI card, only the right side.

Above: ATI X1400, Below: nVidia FX2500m

Here you can see both cards and really see what others are calling "dual heat pipes" on the nVidia 7900 GTX (below).

Modifying the case to fit the FX2500m

Now for the point of no return. To get the nVidia FX2500m to fit, you will need to modify the left-rear area of the laptop case behind the CPU's heatsink. This is because the left heatsink for the FX2500m is too wide to fit into this area. So you have to grind down or break off the two plastic sides/tabs. You can see in this photo above that I am grabbing one of the tabs to break off with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

Another option that would keep your full warranty would be to modify the FX2500m's heatsink by grinding down the two ends. I believe this would fit well with slight bending on the copper pipe to raise the heatsink about 1/8". This does not block air-flow for the cpu's heatsink, and still is vented to the rear outlet. Alas I do not have a grinder here, or I would have done it myself.

Do not worry about warranty here. If you are going this far, then you have the ability to service the laptop yourself if a component fails during your warranty period. Dell's "low cost" warranty is parts-only, and there ya go. Dell will send you the parts to replace, which you can service it yourself - under warranty. Just I would not take the chance of sending the entire laptop in for repair as they may catch the broken tabs.

Right Tab Modified

Left Tab Modified

You can see above it does not take very much. Test fit the FX2500m a few times though to make sure you removed enough.

CPU & Northbridge Heatpipe/Heatsink Removed

While I had my system apart, I made plans to upgrade the CPU's cooling a little with a touch of Arctic Silver 5 as I noted above. You can see in this photo above the crap that Dell (and most PC makers) use on their CPUs. Mine had actually turned into a brittle paste.

Cleaned CPU and Northbridge
(CLICK FOR JPEG COMPRESSED 1.43 MB FULL-RES PICTURE FOR DETAIL/CLOSE-UP)

Before you can apply AS5, you must thoroughly clean both surfaces (the CPU and heatsink). My best experiences has always been to use rubbing alcohol with some lint-free clothes or even kitchen paper towels. AS5 works smaller than you can see, filling the microscopic gaps and imperfections of the two pieces. Above you can see how the CPU's surface is now mirror-like, reflecting the white water-bottle cap.

The copper heatpipe was another story though. It was extremely rough and the paste was near-impossible to remove. Sorry I forgot to snap a photo of my work, because of the time involved I was just in a hurry to get it polished down. But I ended up using 400grit sandpaper, than 1000grit, and 2000grit to get a near-polished surface. You do not have to do any of this to your heatpipe though. Just get it cleaned off.

I went this route of applying AS5 and polishing my heatpipe because I did not like my CPU's temps under normal conditions just idling and/or working. I wanted to cool down the 62C idle of my CPU! I am proud to say that using AS5 did the trick. My idle temps are down to 37C with ambient about 74F. For comparison, my 4.2 Ghz desktop noted above idles at 28C but that's not fair given the custom cooling I did with it. But, it's close!

CPU heatpipe and new (used) FX2500m all installed

Here is a shot of everything re-installed and tightened down. Note in comparison to a photo above of the ATI X1400 in the system.

Air gaps from Dell's stock setup of heatsinks
(CLICK FOR JPEG COMPRESSED 1.32 MB FULL-RES PICTURE FOR DETAIL/CLOSE-UP)

Now this was something I was not happy about. There is a large gap from the left fan (fan 1) to the CPU's heatsink from before. Then there was now a gap between the CPU and GPU's heatsinks. You can see in the picture above the screwdriver that is clearly visible (click the image for the full-res version).

In my history of custom cooling back in the 80s and 90s, there is one thing I learned that always remains constant: airflow is key. So my task would be to modify the airflow to force all air through the heatsinks by not allowing any to escape the airflow path through any gaps.

Aluminum Foil Shrouds

I accomplished this by using a few pieces of kitchen aluminum foil, scotch-tape, and additional AS5. There are multiple reasons for this. First for safety I evaluated the entire area and found no electrical components or circuit boards anywhere near this area. You do not want a piece coming loose and short-circuiting things!

Second is having aluminum foil allows the heat to transfer from one copper pipe to the other (just a tad though, too thin really to do a massive amount). That may not have been the best idea at first because CPUs usually run cooler than GPUs from my overclocking experience. But considering how freakin' high my CPU temps were before I even began, I could only see this as helping to offload some heat to the GPU's heatpipe - even if just a tad amount, anything had to help.

I also closed down the air escaping on the left side of fan's outlet to the CPU's heatsink, as well as the gaps between the two heatsinks. Now all air is forced by the fan trough the CPU heatsink, and then through the GPU's heatsink where it than only has room to exit the back vent.

CPU idle at 36C using Arctic Silver 5, down from 62C when OEM

It is very well worth it, even if I did not upgrade the GPU, because now my CPU temps are a steady 37C with fans set to low. With no fans, it creeps up to 47C. Compare that to the 62C idle before with fans on high, and I think I came out ahead.

CPU cores pegged reaches 72C after 30 minutes of stress-testing, down from much much higher

And for you guys into max CPU heat testing, using an instance of Prime95 on each core yields a max temp of 72C with 74F ambient after about 30 minutes. Much better than before! I will admit I did not pay a lot of attention to the max temp before the AS5 was applied. Let us just say I did not stress it for very long once it climbed to 85C.

While gaming the GPU hovered around 63 to 65C tonight after about two hours, and peaked at 70C just for an instant. I would have applied AS5 to the GPU's heatsink but I did not have a torx-bit small enough (it was missing from my collection) and I wanted to get my laptop running again after spending that time sanding down the CPU's heatpipe.

In conclusion, I feel this was very much worth the effort. A few hours of research over a few days time, finding a great deal on the video card, and planning/preparation before hand, and it all took about 3 hours from start to end (including the sanding of the CPU's heatpipe).

Not a bad system for under $1,200 with BF2 averaging in Fraps at 85 FPS and BF2142 around 78 FPS steady. Why someone would pay for an XPS system is beyond me. Just get an Inspiron for a good price, hunt around after a few months find a deal on the upgrade parts.

Now, if I can get my hands on one of those newer 1720/1730s with dual HDD bays...

HP Blackbird 002 vs Dell XPS 700 Series

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 04:13:00 GMT

After Morgan Webb pitched me over to the Blackbird's Wikia's site about a month ago, I've been keeping an eye out for the specs. Now that I see HP has launched a site about the HP Blackbird 002 (love the bassy intro), I am able to compare the HP monster to what I consider it's #1 rival, the Dell XPS 700 series gaming desktops. Morgan and I have very similar views on many fronts, such as the advertising in PC games, so we dive into latest from HP.

First off, I can not do a direct hardware-to-hardware comparison. Sorry. I don't work for Tom's Hardware nor have I received a version of these PCs to review (if Dell/HP is reading this, hollar!). And I simply can't afford to buy both for a personal review. But I do consider myself an ubber elite PC enthusiast since the mid 80s (hey, I was 11 then) hacking the teacher's Apple for better grades. I will try to apply my knowledge to the posted information about each system to more accurately help you make your decision with minimal jargon-talk.

A little background info
HP was not the first to the "buy our name-brand performance-PC that you can mod" market. You could be technical and go way back to IBM I owned that was an 4mhz 8086 and boasted as "user upgradable" by allowing for memory chips to be purchased to upgrade it from 512kb to 640kb of total ram. But the dual 5.25" floppy-sized 10 MB HDD was a bit more complicated though. Tip: Use the DOS debug tool as it gave me another 1.20 MB of space by removing the extra space reserved for "bad sector marking". Woot! Ok, too much jargon.

By my recollection, Dell was the first to design, build, and release a fully customizable desktop with gamers and hardcore enthusiasts in mind allowing end-users to modify and upgrade it on their own, if only by their own kits. Heck, they even have special motherboard upgrade instructional videos and a dedicated website for just the upgrade. Obviously, this Dell PC I'm talking about is called the XPS 700 we are looking into here.

What I really like about Dell as a company is that their engineers have released videos and podcasts about this product (and most other products) right at the same time that Dell released their new Direct-2-Dell weblog and videoblog back in March 2007. The Direct2Dell site allows engineers to post thoughts, product descriptions, videos, and even customer service responses for just about anything Dell - and receive feedback directly from you on the subject matter. This is a first for an industry that seems to hide behind technical support to filter feedback to customer service and engineers, if it even gets that far.

Anyhoot, no I am not sponsored by Dell. Nor am I affiliated in any way with Dell, for the most part. My previous employer and I built the Direct2Dell blog site, so I am a little partial to Dell in that regard as I haven't seen any similar manufacturers doing the same. That, and I thought it was pretty freakin' cool of them.

The Dell XPS 700
Getting back to the topic at hand, the Dell XPS 700 series comes in two flavors: The XPS 700 and XPS 700H2O (water cooled). The 720 series now available includes support for quad-core processors as noted on ExtremeTech and is also available as a "Motherboard Upgrade" kit for earlier 700 series consumers. Yes, I'm plugging another larger community site I did wanting the recognition for our new web design and consulting company, Colorburn, specializing in CommunityServer large communities. Ok, no more plugs - I promise.

The XPS 700 series is pretty sleek. Instead of trying to define or describe this unit, I believe Dell's videoblog does the best job without me having to interpret their information here and here (the first video really shows it's size!), amongst the dozens of other posts from their engineers here, that yes you can provide direct feedback to. It's quite a beast, to say the least.

The one thing that struck me about the Dell XPS was how they actually encourage users to overclock, upgrade, and interchange parts. As time went on, I see the parts are mostly sold in "Upgrade Kits" from Dell such as newer proprietary motherboard and CPU combos. But still you can go throw in any newer PCIe 16x video card and CPU, and have a Core2 Duo system running over 1400mhz bus in no time.

HP Blackbird 002
No, I don't consider the Blackbird with it's Core 2 Extreme Duo Quad Core an SR-71 Blackbird (ah yes, a nice D.A.R.Y.L. flashback). It really is a serious machine. But in the world of videoblogging, I find myself scanning for text to read more and viewing a photo gallery. Eh, Dell has spoiled me.

Reading about the motherboard and their "Voodoo process of elimination", it seems they are going to be selling a rig with a custom mobo that's not interchangeable - just like the Dell. You can supply as many PCI and PCIe slots as you want to. These days, most things are built onto the motherboards now which you just end up swapping out every few years any ways. But given both the HP and Dell's mobos seem to be proprietary, maybe having these extra slots is a good thing so you can install the next-generation sound card when it's invented (since Creative's last effort, the X-Fi, didn't take off as they hoped it would).

I was impressed with the Blackbird with its built-in RAID5 for storage. Any storage junkie knows that RAID5 provides more throughput then a single HDD, and a RAID1 setup is dirt-slow. Dell's XPS only comes in RAID1 or RAID0 flavors (RAID0 being the fastest, yes, but not redundant). My only issue is there is no cache memory for the raid system (that I can see listed). As with the cache on CPUs, this makes all the difference in RAID setups and it's why I would stick to my Areca PCIe setup for a RAID solution.

Only time will tell (when released) if the Blackbird is truly an upgradable piece. If they offer "Motherboard Kits" such as the ones from Dell to keep their end-users happy by upgrading to the latest mobo/cpu combinations, then it really will give Dell a run for their money (serious money that is).

Taking the plunge
Both Dell and HP have developed amazing systems that can be bumped to some pretty high FSB and memory speeds with very little work. But what both will require instead is a decent credit score to be able to afford it. Yes that's right folks, these "user serviceable" PCs are not cheap. But on the flip side, they aren't overly expensive either such as the recent AlienWare units these days. Now I love AlienWare so don't flame me, but over the recent years they have moved to more of a "pay for our designer brand (cases)" instead of worrying about end-user affordability of super high-end PCs like they were in the past. My preferred HP Blackbird setup looks to be around $6500, while the matching Dell is $6100. But when pricing a comparable AlienWare, it came to $7100 - which is amazing if you consider that AlienWare is now owned by Dell.

Maybe it's similar to a Cadillac Escalade vs a Chevy Tahoe: one's decked out a lot more when compared to Dell's base desktops. But Dell now has the XPS 700 systems that directly competes with AlienWare's recent offerings. Maybe the XPS 700s are using the same base perhaps? But I don't see AlienWare boasting "Motherboard Upgrade" kits, so I'd have to say no to that theory and sway more towards the XPS systems that allows you to upgrade.

Water cooling
I'm not going into the whole liquid-cooling debate and trying to sell you on it, but just wanted to note a few advantages. Water is one of the best heat conductors, exchanging heat quite quickly and efficiently. With this idea in mind, the PC overclocking world developed into an industry requiring a good heat exchanger while keeping the volume down on the fans. Any chemistry expert can reaffirm you that by blasting water onto a water block made of copper or silver allows the heat to transfer to the water quite efficiently and away from the water block. Then all you have to do is move the water to a radiator to remove the heat.

In my rig which was my first H2O experiment (I know, late to the party), it turned out to be quite amazing. It's near-silent operation at 1200mhz FSB with my theory of "bigger is better" is achieved by simply using an extremely large and oversized radiator (oversized as it's just for the CPU and FSB), with three large (and quiet) fans spinning at the slowest speed possible (@ 4.4v). Most watercooling gurus use a small radiator just the size of a single fan, which usually requires the fan to run at full 12v speed. That's just too loud for me.

I mention watercooling as Dell's XPS 700 series actually has it as an option, where the HP Blackbird comes with a sealed unit from the get-go. HP is actually claiming they are the "first performance-PC manufacturer to effectively implement liquid-cooling". I find this hard to swallow looking at AlienWare (considered a manufacturer as of 2005 when they got away from off-the-shelve mobos), and even Dell earlier this year with their XPS 700H2O series. Now I will give HP mucho props for making it sealed and never needing service. That is what they should have focused on in their claims.

But given my research in the past, no "H2O kit" can hold a candle (heat - phun intended) to your own custom made setup. The effort required though, is a whole other story. Refer to www.ocforums.com if you want to take that path of the dark side (by far the best site for information on H2O I found years ago).

Conclusion
The Dell XPS with it's Core 2 Extreme QX68xx 8MB overclocked quad core available is close to the same cost as the HP Blackbird when it comes down to it with dual nVidia 8800 SLIs and LCD.

But I have to lean towards Dell with their Direct2Dell videoblog and engineer's playground of fishing for feedback to their products, where I feel I can be influential. Where is HP's Direct2HP website so I can provide my comments to their engineers? Is that what the blackbird.wikia.com website is for? This website doesn't seem to be geared towards feedback for HP's newest player to the market and looks more like an open blog.

I really want to get away from what Ms. Webb describes as "spending hours and hours with the same old issues" by building, maintaining, and upgrading my own hardware. I have to look at the cost I would spend to get a comparable PC from HP/Dell that I could build one for. So it comes down to, is your time worth a few grand to spend on saving you the time of building these PCs and upgrading? I can argue both sides of the equation, but only you can answer it for yourself. Hardcore builders will not be swayed by the Blackbird, nor Dell, and will continue to build for less. Much less.

But then again looking back at the time and effort it took to get my rig up to snuff, I really could have used those several months for something else to make up the cost for one of these XPS 700s or Blackbirds. Humm, I do need a new PC soon...

PostIcon CS Bug Fix

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 18:59:00 GMT

With the previous release of The MiXX Collection, it was updated to work with CS 2007. Well there is a bug in CS 2007's CSModule that no longer allows updating the ExtendedAttributes after a post is created.

In other words, the bug in the PostIcon that was introduced with 1.0 release caused a 0.jpg PostIcon to be saved at times and not propertly updating the WeblogPost object.

Download: As always, you can download the latest version and source from the file gallery.

This release, version 1.1, resolves this issue with a performance penalty work-around. But due to the changes and protection in the CSModules, there isn't any other way. The work-around is during a CreatePost event, we don't write the ExtendedAttributes on the PrePost CSModule event (since we do not have the PostID any longer). Instead, I hook into the AfterPost event that fires, after the post has been created, to obtain the PostID. This fires off an UpdatePost method to write the entire post to the DB - again.

Don't worry, this is only during the first initial CreatePost event. If you go back and Update a post, it fires normally - that is only 1 time because we now have a PostID during the PrePost event to write to the ExtendedAttributes.

I'm open to suggestions if someone else has a cleaner solution. It all comes down to not being able to update/write to the ExtendedAttributes during the AfterPost (PostPost) CSModule event. I've mentioned it for years, there should be a method to save the ExtendedAttributes without having to update the entire object.

And as always, bookmark this link for updates: http://eduncan911.com/archive/tags/The+MiXX+Collection/default.aspx You can also access the RSS option in there to subscribe via RSS as well.

Living with Subversion (Part 4)

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:14:00 GMT

In the forth and final part of my series, Living with Subversion, I cover a number of performance tips and some Dos and Don'ts.

Improving performance of TortoiseSVN

The performance improvement aspect of this article targets those mainly on laptops that want to save battery life and/or slower HDD machines, or simply have just too many projects (>50) within repositories. It is quite simple really, TortoiseSVN's folder icon overlays are very cool as a quick visual indication of what has changed recently. The problem with the icon overlays is TortoiseSVN constantly updates the status of these, especially if you are using Windows Explorer to view the folder tree no matter if you are playing a game, surfing the web, etc.

Still not on par with what I am explaining? Check out TortoiseSVN's Optimize Performance page. But they have left out one key improvement: Disable the Status Cache (icon overlays).

Icon Overlays Dialog

Icon Overlays
I set mine Status Cache overlays to "none". This effectively disables the Status Cache all together. Just like SGV Client, you'll have to perform an Update before starting your work everyday as this will pull down the latest copy to start with. If you like the red X effect, you'll want to leave this on Default. I personally don't want my HDD going in insane (like it did with the dozen+ repositories and icon overlays). So I disable mine, period.

Also be sure to uncheck "Show overlays only in explorer". This will keep the icons out of the standard Windows dialog popups, and only show them in the Windows Explorer. Again if you want to see when something is out-of-sync immediately, you'll want to skip this part but sacrifice performance.

Our final performance increase greatly effects Windows' users. Setting the include paths text box. As described in the Optimize Performance page by TortoiseSVN, you will want to specify the directory of where your projects are stored. This keeps TortoiseSVN from snooping around your Windows directory for hidden svn folders - constantly snooping.

Common TortoiseSVN mistakes

As mentioned above, TortoiseSVN uses hidden directories to store the Subversion versioning information for that directory and files. So a mistake several of us have made is while working with an existing repository is we use Windows Explorer to copy an existing directory to a new directory (i.e. Theme copying). The problem with this logic is that the hidden svn directories are still there. This causes versioning whoas and most likely will force your updates into the previous version of that directory (or an Update will override your changes without a merge). This is because TortoiseSVN is using the path information stored within the hidden svn folders.

Simple fix really but you have to use your head to remember: Always right-click the new directory after copying, click Search and search for the .svn or _svn directories and delete them. Then the next time you go to check in, the directories will appear to be new to TortoiseSVN and allow you to add them.

An easier fix would be to just use the Rep-browser to perform the action(s), and do an Update when done on your local machine. This will copy/pull down everything properly.

Another common task is if you need to move a directory, as with SGV Client, you will have to move it within the Repo-browser or suffer similar issues noted above.

Bottom-line: use the Repo-browser for most of your copy and/or moving of folders.

And that concludes this four-part series. Lot of reading for just a few options, eh?

Living with Subversion (Part 3)

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:13:00 GMT

In part three of Living with Subversion, we cover one of the biggest reason of this series: Using a different Merge Tool.

Merging conflicts using SourceGear Vault Client's DiffMerge

Now onto one of the most useful tidbits of this article, using the trusty SGDM tool that is included with SourceGear Vault Client installation. I have been using SourceGear Vault Client 3.1.9 for a while now, so I am writing using that version. I know 3.5.x and 4.0 has been released, but our last version of SGV was 3.1.x so that's what I am used to.

Once installed, you do not have to do anything to the client. Instead, it's all about setting up Tortoise to use it as the merge tool.

Note: TortoiseSVN does come with its own DiffMerge tool. Maybe it is me too busy coding, or not spending enough time resolving conflicts, but I just cannot stand TortoiseSVN's version. Hence this topic. I am very use to SGV's robust version.

Diff Viewer Dialog

First, click the Diff Viewer on the left and select the "External" option. Next find/note the location of your Vault Client directory. There should be a sgdm.exe file here. Change the Diff Viewer (you will want to keep the quotation marks too) location to:

"C:\Program Files\SourceGear\Vault Client\sgdm.exe" %mine %base

Making sure the path matches obviously. This will put your local copy in the left panel and the repository's version in the right panel.

Merge Tool Dialog

Next click the Merge Tool on thee left and select External once again. Using the same location of the sgdm.exe as above, paste it in. But this time, the command-line arguments are a good bit longer:

"C:\Program Files\SourceGear\Vault Client\sgdm.exe" /result:%merged /title1:%yname /title2:%mname /title3:%tname %mine %merged %theirs

This will put your working version on the left panel, the repository's version in the right panel, and the TortoiseSVN's merged version in the center.

The trick is that now you can use SGV's DiffMerge tool, easy color coding and replace options that you are used to, overriding the TortoiseSVN's merged (and often broken) result area highlighted in bright yellow as shown below.

SGV Client's SDMG.exe opened by TortoiseSVN after a conflict

The Unified Diff Viewer is a viewer for CVS patch files. By default on Windows, TortoiseSVN uses Notepad. Tip: Upgrade to Notepad2 for you local notepad.exe in windows.

Continue to Part 4

Living with Subversion (Part 2)

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:09:00 GMT

This is part duex in the series Living with Subversion, starting to get into the nit-n-gritty.

Configure your software

After you install TortoiseSVN and SGV's Client, you will want to configure TortoiseSVN for a number of things. You will access this by right-clicking on your empty desktop, going to TortoiseSVN, and then to Settings.

TortoiseSVN's Context Menu for Settings

Exclude files you do not want to check-in
These includes directories to ignore such as /bin, /obj, /_sgbak, and files such as *.suo, *.pdb, *.bak and so on. Basically, you do not want to check-in these types of files.

Go to the TortoiseSVN's Settings dialog and click Edit.

TortoiseSVN's Settings Dialog

This should open a Notepad window displaying a lot of options. Around line 71, replace the line for # global-ignores with the following:

global-ignores = bin Bin obj cache storage _sgbak *.suo *.pdb *.bak *.user *.db

And make sure to remove the "# " at the beginning. Save it and it should take effect immediately. The "cache" and "storage" folders are there because of working with CommunityServer. With CommunityServer, the cache and storage sub-folders are used for images and attachments for most applications. We don't want to check in those images, attachments, nor the thumbnails.

Using underscores to prefix the hidden directories
TortoiseSVN stores the versioning information of a directory and files in a hidden svn folder, usually prefixed with a dot ".". This can reek havok on a few developer applications. So I check Use "_svn" instead of ".svn" directories on the same dialog shown above. Visual Studio 6.0's Interdev did not like files starting with a dot ".", and I've seen some funkiness with VS 2003. VS 2005 may be ok, but it is just a force of habit to use underscores instead of periods for the hidden directories.

Continue to Part 3

Living with Subversion (Part 1)

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:02:00 GMT

Friends of mine ask a lot about my custom settings for TortoiseSVN. To make it play nicer with Visual Studio, easier (or should I say dumb-proofing) the auto-merging, performance tweaks especially on laptops, and overall tips to ensure you don't duplicate the mistakes my friends and I at Telligent have found through trial-n-error. I occasionally forget these myself and have to dig around a previous machine or image snapshot to find the settings. So here is a post to archive it all off for my records as well as for you to use for your reference.

Introduction

This four-part series targets the Microsoft .NET developer looking for a clean and stress-free environment utilizing Subversion for the first time, or even seasoned veterans by tweaking their installs and usability. It especially targets those with SourceGear Vault experience and want that clean and easy experience with Subversion.

So with that in mind, we will be covering a number of applications to install. Each with custom settings documented here that will help you get the most out of each, especially those with laptops.

A few definitions and what we will be using

First on this agenda targets those new to Subversion and its tools. I'm not going to bore you with the details of the history of Subversion and CVS definitions or even how to use SubVersion. All of that information is available in the docs for these. Instead this is just a quick overview to help those moving to Subversion and what parts make it work that is out of the norm.

Subversion is an open-source product as you may already know. A quick misnomer to those looking to switch is that you do not have to download and install Subversion itself. Yes it is a client and server package that does it all, but it is not needed for your client (developer) machine since you are connecting remotely. Why? It's all command-line based. Those server admins looking for tips and tricks - I'll cover ya'll in another post.

What you want instead is an Subversion-compatible GUI client and there are a few out there. Telligent's IT guru immediately adopted TortoiseSVN as the client for all when they switched to Subversion (i.e. only one they will support). I've used a few others like RapidSVN and will have to agree that Tortoise, while being a Windows Shell Extension (yes, cringe), is the most feature-full version so far. But feel free to write your own and drop me a line to beta test. RapidSVN is coming along nicely and I continue to keep my eye on it. Think RapidSVN = SourceGear Vault for Subversion, a stand-alone application that doesn't integrate with Windows Explorer. But for now, we'll stick to TortoiseSVN until RapidSVN matures a bit more.

SourceGear's Vault (SGV) is a very robust code repository system which can be configured for CVS or VSS. Most of us developers have fallen in love with SGV, but I have come to recognize its inability to scale with a large number of repositories, check-ins, and branching within a single MSSQL install.

The SGV Client is what I install to use as my TortoiseSVN merge and diff tool. The SGV Client includes a nifty tool called SGDM.exe (SourceGear DiffMerge) that can be command-line driven. So I have been cheating by installing the SGV Client 3.1.9 (I have not used a newer version yet), linking only to sgdm.exe, and ignoring the rest of the install. And before you ask, yes the EULA for the Vault Client states a license is required to connect to a SGV repository. We are not connecting to a repository, just using a tool which I could not find anything the EULA preventing that or by running it in a stand-alone environment.

Interestingly enough SourceGear has released a DiffMerge tool that is available for free, but I do not like this version. I noticed the command-line arguments are much different. I have installed it and tested a few merges, but the color-coding I did not like as much as the client's version of this tool. So for now, I am sticking to the SGV Client 3.1.9's DiffMerge tool as it is tried and true.

Continue to Part 2

My First Breaking News Report

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:13:00 GMT

Breaking news! At 11:05 AM today, two suspects were apprehended for allegedly stealing a traffic pole that was to be erected at a corner near Elm and N. Good Latimer Expressway. I was first on the scene as it was kind of hard to ignore the police sirens and helicopter flying overhead. The suspects stopped right in front of my building, so it was quiet easy to snap these photos. With guns drawn, they ordered the male and female out of the truck. The rest is history obviously.

Lol. Thought I'd log my first breaking news post! Now, who can I sell these photos to?

(click pictures for larger view)

MiXX Collection and PostIcon Updated for CS 2007

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:19:00 GMT

This past weekend, someone gave me a swift kick in the butt to get my MiXX Collection updated for CS 2007. I didn't realize it was under such high demand. Nice. Anyhoot during this upgrade I went ahead and refactored the source to match my other code I've been working with for other clients which lays the groundwork for me to just releasing more addons built into this collection.

The update for CommunityServer 2007 wasn't so much as code edits (there was one line that needed updating). But more so that you must run under Full trust. So I've updated the documentation to detail these steps, as well as giving pointers to those in need of accessing the Post object in the site-wide's BlogPostList repeater (not an individual BlogPostList repeater, that's easy).

Subscribe to The MiXX Collection RSS feed for updates and bug fixes: http://eduncan911.com/archive/tags/The+MiXX+Collection/default.aspx

Here's the change log:

2007-06-02
- Updated to support CommunityServer 2007.
- Now requires you to specify Full trust level due to CS 2k7 change.

2007-04-18
- Re-factored into new MiXX.Core schema shared with other projects.
- Updated to cast content as WeblogPost or IndexedPost, so PostIcon
   can be shown in search results for Blog posts.
- Fixed some error logging.
- Fixed a small bug where the ImageUrl stored in the EA had a double
  "//" in the url. Not a big bug, so there's no need to go back and
  re-process your old posts. Most browsers will render it properly.

2007-02-05
- Fixed the inline <img> parsing bug when using the new ImageQuality
attribute for saving in a higher quality (a bug that was
introduced with backend non-released versions for testing).

(install only)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/2611/download.aspx

(source code-must compile)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/5894/download.aspx

Enjoy and post a comment to your siteurl that is using it!

Guitar Hero 2 - Halo 2 Theme

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:44:00 GMT

Thanks to my buddy over at forgetfoo (<- NWS), I now have a reason to get an Xbox 360.

Well, after someone hacks the 360 version that is...

Don't ever cross Pearl

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:16:00 GMT

Larry (my friend who is a landlord), this is for you!

PLAY! A Video Game Symphony

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:13:00 GMT

Oh, what a flashback. Check the video below for Mario!

This is PLAY! A Video Game Symphony. And they will be in Fort Worth in Jan 2008. Here's the website:

http://www.play-symphony.com/

Dynamic Instance Names of TextFields - A work around

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:08:00 GMT

As I am starting to get back into heavy Flash development after my 5+ year hiatus, I see that Macromedia has added quite a lot of interesting concepts to the newer versions of ActionScript.

But the purpose of this post is to outline that Macromedia (err now Adobe) still has a lot of work to do on their ActionScript engine, specifically with Dynamic Instance naming conventions (and new-object intellisense would really be nice by now, after all of these years). I am assuming you know flash, a little bit. At least to the level of knowing that you need set an InstanceName of a Symbol, in order to be able to edit its properties at runtime.

I just spent too much time today trying to figure out why my code wasn't working. I am creating numerous dynamic TextFields, but I need to be able to access them for updates in code. And to complicate things, the TextFields will be loaded from different XML files - meaning they will have different InstanceNames.

You usually can create a dynamic instance name by using the old-school method of hardCodedName[variable] or the even older eval("hardCodedName" + variable) method. For example, say I want to create a new movie into a dynamic variable made up of an integer I have in a for i++ loop:

for (int i = 0; i < total; i++)
{
  loadMovie( "myMovie" + i + ".swf", _root.myMovie[ i ] );
}

Or...

for (int i = 0; i < total; i++)
{
  loadMovie( "myMovie" + i + ".swf", _root.eval("myMovie" + i) );
}

Both of these examples should result in loading myMovie0.swf into the dynamic variable name of /level0/myMovie0 (or _root.myMovie0 per dot-syntax).

What I found today is that when using some of the newer ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 functions, they do not honor these methods completely. I had to use a mixture of the two examples above to get it work, and actually could not use either method when creating the object! This is the craziest thing I've seen to where eval() works in referencing the object, but does not work in the creation of the object.

var _root.totalCount:Number = 0;
function CreateMenuItem(Text:String, Href:String, Title:String, Spacer:Boolean)
{
    // create the symbol at the last Y position we are tracking
    this.createTextField("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount
        , _root.totalCount, _root.textXpos, _root.lastYpos, _root.textWidth, _root.textHeight);
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).wordWrap = true;
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).multiline = true;
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).border = false;
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).type = "dynamic";
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).antiAliasType = "advanced";
    
    textFormat = new TextFormat();
    textFormat.color = 0xffffff;
    textFormat.size = 12;
    textFormat.font = "Futura Condensed";
    
    if (Spacer != true)
    {
      formatText.url = Href;
    }
    
    if (Text.length > 0)
    {
        eval("movFlyoutText" +  _root.totalCount).text = Text;
    }
    else
    {
        eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).text = " ";
    }
    
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).setTextFormat(textFormat);
    
    // reset some vars
    var tmp:Number = eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount)._height;
    _root.lastYpos = _root.lastYpos + tmp;
    
    _root.totalCount++;
}

Above is the code I wrote today, to where I can not use [] reference or the eval() reference to get the TextField created properly using the newer createTextFieldmethod. But in other methods throughout my code, using the [] reference works at the baseline. Go figure.

And as mentioned above, I can not use brackets[] when referencing the object either to set its properties! I had to use eval(). Man, how ugly is this code? I'm open to other suggestions.

Enabling HTTP Compression with ASPX

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:50:00 GMT

Here's a quick-n-easy post about enabling HTTP Compression on your server, as I've done over the weekend. But instead of reading endless blog posts about it, and MSDN articles about enabling each and every step, I've compiled it all into a single CMD script you can copy and run on your server. Easy.

First a tiny bit of background... Yeah, I am so late to this game. For a while I heard the buzz word, but only thought it was similar to Analog Modem compression (back when I worked for Hayes) to where both modems must support a common compression algorythm, which was mostly never the case. Hence the "Call these sets of numbers if you have a USR, call this number if you have a Hayes modem, etc" you may remember back in the modem days.

After reading up on HTTP Compression here this weekend, boy have I missed the boat. I've enabled it on my server over the weekend, over most dynamic file types, and it's really picking up speed now (page loads seem faster). I also found a nifty HTTP Compression Test website, that ensured me I finally got it enabled (it was a PITA for additional extensions).

Now the problem I had with HTTP Compression was the default list of extensions are very limited. And it only does asp for dynamic content? In IIE6? You'd think they would default to aspx and asp.

Note that you will need to enable HTTP Compresison first, before running the attached script. Instructions can be found here and just read the Procedures part. Don't worry about running the scripts in that article as the attachment takes care of that, and additional extensions.

The attached script enables static and dynamic compression types as listed below. They are as follows:

Dynamic Types: ASP, DLL, EXE, ASPX, ASCX, ASMX, ASHX

Static Types: HTM, HTML, TXT, PPT, XLS, XML, PDF, XSLT, DOC, XSL, HTC, JS, CSS

You'll notice a few up for debate in that list, such as ASCX and PDF. The debates ranged all over the web and saw it as an advantage more then disadvantage. So over the next few weeks, I ask those I am hosting on my server to see if any dynamic content isn't so dynamic. Kind of like a passive-monitoring approach by asking my users to see if they notice any difference.

About the PDF, some websites generate dynamic PDF content. But usually it's just encoded as a PDF MIME-TYPE, and doesn't actually have the extension of PDF. IIS6's HTTP Compression is based off of extensions, not the mime-type. So I classified it as static.

A little script support. First, this script assumes your OS is installed on C:. And it assumes you have the file adsutil.vbs located at C:\InetPub\AdminScripts\ (default location). If different locations, you can edit the script file as need be. Besides that, you must be running at least W2K3 or R2 and as mentioned above already have HTTP Compression enabled. Haven't tested this yet on IIS7 (Longhorn) yet.

Another PostIcon Site Launches - Soapinions

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:33:00 GMT

Barbie, here's a website for you.

Soapinions is a community site for discussion with the latest soap operas on daytime television. Like what the Sex of Chad's Lover is! OMG! It can't be!

They were looking for more of a "visual" appeal. Well, they got now. :)

http://soapinions.com/blogs/default.aspx

Using my MiXX.PostIcon, they are simply going back and flooding their original posts with new images. I kind of actually like the larger 100px sizes vs my 63px here on my site. I may update mine.

Interesting String.GetHashCode() issue between ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:50:00 GMT

Today a fellow co-worker, David Penton, ran into an interesting issue about a background ASP.NET thread using ASP.NET 2.0, instead of ASP.NET 1.1 when the individual website was set to run under 1.1.

First a little background. The internal staging server is Windows 2003 R2. In the past Windows 2003 would throw an exception at the web application level when two or more websites were sharing the same application pool, and they were set to different versions of ASP.NET. The R2 release seems to have resolved this issue, hence our IT Administrator running most sites under the common Default Application Pool.

We have a client that requires an ASP.NET 1.1 build of the website. So the developer was working within VS2k3. The background processes in question of the web application is to process the searching algorithm we use for an out-of-the-box CommunityServer install (nicknamed the SearchBarrel). We have an Enterprise Search addon available that uses Lucene.NET, but for this client they are using the search barrel. The SearchBarrel breaks up a post into individual words, then issues a ToLower() and then GetHashCode() on the string for each word. We store this Int32 hash in the database as number matching is faster to index than string matching.

The String.GetHashCode() method is different between .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. So when you are upgrading an application from 1.1 to 2.0, and you are storing the HashCode for strings somewhere, you'll have to generate new HashCodes in .NET 2.0.

The issue the developer ran into was very odd. The post was using a mix of English and Chinese, so we are dealing with an extended character set as well.

(The word we are trying to hash)
ps3对蓝光技术的采用也是令大家称道的原因之一

When a single word mixed English and binary characters without spaces (i.e. Chinese Simplified as above), the background SearchBarrel CSJob (the thread) would generate an ASP.NET 2.0 HashCode for the above word!

(.NET 2.0 HashCode of the word above)
-309760669

(.NET 1.1 HashCode of the word above)
1104497610

Yes, the website was set to ASP.NET 1.1. Yes, the binaries were built under .NET 1.1. But yet, we were getting an .NET 2.0 hashcode. The only thing that came to my mind was that it was using the default application pool, which was shared with many other staging websites - mostly ASP.NET 2.0 sites I'm guessing (since most of our clients have moved to ASP.NET 2.0).

It gets even odder. If the developer was to edit the post, change that one word of mixed English and Chinese characters to insert a space between the two different languages, clearing the search barrel and letting the background thread re-hash the post - it would then use ASP.NET 1.1 to generate the HashCode!

Very very odd. And we could re-produce it consistently by adding and removing that space and forcing the searchbarrel to rebuild.

The only thing we could guess is that .NET 1.1 choked on the English + Chinese character mix when encoding the hashcode and somehow reverted back to ASP.NET 2.0 to generate the GetHashCode() method.

The fix? Move the website to its own dedicated Application Pool.

Animaniacs released to DVD!

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 20:43:00 GMT

For those of you looking for that special gift to get me, the Animaniacs DVD collection is it. I just read where in 2007, Warner Bros. is releasing the first 50 episodes in a DVD set (there's 99 episodes total). Thank you WB! Not sure if it is out yet, but keep an eye out.

View Video
Format: aspx
Duration: 1:08

I've wondered for a long long time what happened to this blockbuster Steven Spielberg series. Think calling this a blockbuster is going a bit too far? Not so. Per the updated Wikipedia entry:

Animation fans consider Animaniacs the high point of the Warner Bros. revival of the 1990s that was inspired by the original Termite Terrace.

Animaniacs premiered on September 13, 1993. New episodes of the show were aired during the 1993 through 1998 seasons, and episodes were rerun in syndication for several years after production of new episodes ceased. One feature-length direct-to-video Animaniacs movie, Wakko's Wish, was released on VHS only (there has not yet been a DVD release) in 1999. The series was popular enough for Warner Bros. Animation to invest in additional episodes of the show past the traditional 65-episode marker for syndication; a total of 99 episodes were finally produced. One theatrical cartoon short film starring the Warner siblings, "I'm Mad," was produced and released to theaters in 1994 with the feature Thumbelina.

The show introduced the popular cartoon characters Pinky and the Brain, who were subsequently spun-off into their own TV series in 1995.

I've been a long-time fan of this series and have many sound-bites of the series. Such as Yacko's Multiplication skit (grab a piece of paper and follow).

http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/comedy/entry3948.aspx

It wasn't so a kids cartoon, but targeting more of the young-adults to early 20 year-olds. I was 17 when it first aired, and watched it religiously until I got bogged down in college. After that, I kinda of lost track of them - catching an episode here and there. And then, they were pulled from syndication in early 2000. Gone.

If you watch ads, you should get free stuff

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 18:01:00 GMT

Warning, this is a rant. A rant against the gaming industry. I'm going to bash it hard. EA, turn away as you don't want to read this.

What's got me off my rocker tonight? Advertising within games.

Morgan Webb was just on G4tv's X-Play bashing the gaming industry for pushing these Intel and Cingular ads on billboards, but the game makers still charge the full price for the game. She mentioned a few key points.

"Advertising within Halo on Xbox Live? It should be free to play then. Advertising for Cingular on a billboard as you crash your car into it at 120 mph on the bottle in a race car game? It should be $30, not $60 then to buy."

So, she got me ramped up to night to flame the gaming industry. Morgan, I completely agree!

Me? Oh, I'm the last guy they wanted to piss off. I've paid, absolutely paid for every single game I have ever played. I was that kid who blew his $20 that his mother game him all in the arcade at the mall. I was that guy who stayed up all night playing the King Quests (which I beat 2-5 btw, with no cheats). I was that kid who mowed so many lawns only to buy that game that everyone had. I'm that guy who plays games without the cheat codes as I want what I paid for. Currently in my office I have a number of boxes of the last few games I've played (counting 'em, 24). The latest? EA's Battlefield 2142.

EA Battlefield 2142 is EA's first attempt at online advertising using a company called IGA Worldwide, within the game. Ok, still haven't got the bigger picture yet? Say you are driving a car in the game. You come up onto a billboard on the side of the road. Battlefield 2142 is based into the future; the year 2142. But yet, you see an ad for Intel's Core 2 Duo plastered on the side. WTF. Or EA's current market advertising for the next game addon to be released, Battlefield 2143.

Then there was the scare that IGA was installing some type of spyware with Battlefield 2142. An EA rep recently informed the industry:

“The advertising program in Battlefield 2142 does not access any files which are not directly related to the game. It does not capture personal data such as cookies, account login detail, or surfing history.

BF 2142 delivers ads by region. The advertising system uses a player’s IP address to determine the region of the player, assisting to serve the appropriate ads by region and language. For instance, a player in Paris might be presented with ads in French. The information collected will not be repurposed for other uses.

Battlefield 2142 also tracks 'impression data' related to in-game advertisements: location of a billboard in the game, brand advertised, duration of advertisement impression, etc. This information is used to help advertisers qualify the reach of a given advertisement.”

Bandwidth. Most online gamers these days are on broadband. We all strive for the absolute lowest ping to the server. Well, these ads eat up a small chunk of internet bandwidth from your computer. While the bandwidth usually isn't the issue, it's the ping response time that is hindered.

The point Morgan and I are trying to make is if you are advertising in the game - GIVE US A FREAKIN BREAK ON THE PRICES! Don't charge full price for the game. Don't charge us for Xbox Live.

There's a flip side to this story though. Game developers are overworked and mostly underpaid for their skill level. Looking at Wikipedia's definition of in-game advertising, it looks to be quite profitable ($56 mil last year and an estimated $1.8 billion by 2010). One might think that this is a great way to drive more revenue to up the salaries of EA's developers. Yeah right. If that ever happens, you game developers let me know when your salaries double (aka come back into normal pay scales that match the rest of the industry).

Oh and Morgan, I u. ;) Hollar!

Edit: This post was originally written on December 14th, 2006.

That's it. I'm done with FireFox.

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 06:52:00 GMT

This is a major Duncan-rant.

Yes, many of you will try to respond. But only those "internet savvy" people will look down on this post. Psst, here's a thought - think about the other 99.95% of the population that doesn't know what you know about PCs. That have no clue how to manually download DLLs and install them into their Program Files directory, especially if they are not an administrator of their PC. This is an absolutely horrible solution of FireFox - and yes, it's for new installs. Read on.

New OS format. Old machine upgrades. Latest version of everything. Blah blah. I've tried. I really did try to give FF a chance for a few years. But after what I had to do tonight to get plugins working, I'm soo done with FireFox - because this is the most ridiculous method I've ever seen to get a plugin installed, for first time use!

I just spent over an hour tonight trying to track down what the hell is wrong with my FireFox plugins, specifically for Windows Media Player (WMP) and Real Player. You won't believe the fix (yes, the fix is below for those of you looking for it). It receives the worse-ever-fix award for a new application install. No normal user will know how to perform these steps, and the target audience for this one website I was looking to fix for FireFox are not Internet Savvy. Absolute horrible solution guys.

The problem?
When you view a page that has a plugin, such as Windows Media Player, Flash, or Real Player, you are displayed with "Click here to download plugin." And of course, when you click it, you get "Unknown Plugin". Then there's a button for Manual Install, which itself has so many flaws in that concept! The web designer sets the link for the Manual Install, which all of them point to some type of Download and Install - which is absolutely the wrong link to be linking to! Re-installing the software will not resolve this issue!

The fix?
Use IE7 or Safari. Oh wait, we're talking about fixing FF - I'm sorry for those of you. Ok, the fix. Download old/3^rd party specific DLLs and place them into a specific directory, as long as you are an administrator of your machine. How horrible of a fix is that? It's not even a "fix", it's what is required to get the plugin installed for the first time! No, FireFox 2.0 does not even resolve this issue ladies and gentleman.

You can read up on how to install WMP for Firefox on Mozilla's very own Plugin Install page for WMP.

Developers, this is also the proper link to put into your plugins page attribute for your <embed> tags of your object - well, if it's WMP. Other links are there for Flash and Real and such as you embed each.

If you had an older version of WMP installed (version 7.1 or earlier), you won't have this issue as those DLLs were included with that version. What does that tell me? It tells me that FireFlux needs to get their ass in gear and update their software to utilize newer versions. Period.

Absolutely the worse method I've ever seen to install a plugin guys. I'm done with FireFox. Goodbye.

Microsoft's Windows Ultimate launches with MiXX PostIcon!

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 19:27:00 GMT

+ + =

Telligent announces another great site we've done for Microsoft - Windows Ultimate Edition.

http://windowsultimate.com/

What's even cooler about this site? It uses my The MiXX Collection's PostIcon package (woot!). Dan Bartels was the developer for that portion of the project, and he slightly tweaked the code to display the post's Attachment, if it was an image, as the PostIcon as well as the normal logic.

I will roll this into the next release of the PostIcon module. Most likely between the check for the BBCode and inline image parsing (an intermediate step). Thoughts?

PostIcon Updated

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:38:00 GMT

You can download The MiXX Collection that includes the updated PostIcon AddOn from these urls:

(install only)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/2611/download.aspx

(source code-must compile)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/5894/download.aspx

Change Log:
2006-12-16 (v0.9.3.25764)
- Changed from throwing exceptions to just logging exceptions, to
   allow the rest of the page/site to load without redirecting to an
   error. To debug, look in your CSExceptions for UnknownError and
   FileNotFound errors logged.
- Added in parsing of the regex groups in the config file. This
   allows for custom regex patterns to be used, and you can
   explicitly set what group this module will parse the needed values
   for.
- Fixed a small issue to where the PostIconModule was using the last
   used AnchorPosition specified in a post as the default for the
   time the AppPool was running.

Updated previous version, and deleted old files.

The MiXX Collection for Community Server

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:30:00 GMT

Today I package up my MiXX tools into a collection of addons for Community Server. Right now, it only includes the PostIcon addon. At the end of this weekend, it should include a new MiXXVideoModule that is a major overhaul of the existing CS VideoModule.

(install only)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/2611/download.aspx

(source code-must compile)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/5894/download.aspx

This is the first of a number of major updates, finally releasing enhancements to Community Server I have sought after for many years. You can use the RSS Tag link to subscribe to the tag The MiXX Collection for the latest news of this tool.

MiXX.PostIcon released to the public

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 05:48:00 GMT

EDIT 6/05/2007: Changed links to CS 3.0 version. Subscribe to here for updates: http://eduncan911.com/archive/tags/The+MiXX+Collection/default.aspx

Some of you might have noticed my new homepage over the last month. Those of you using an RSS reader to read this, go check out my homepage for the new PostIcon module I'm talking about.

What is it?
The purpose of this Server Control and CSModule is to automatically
create a small lightweight PostIcon with little to no work on your part.
Just embed a normal image, bam, you have a PostIcon automatically.

This module creates the PostIcon for a Weblog Post during its creation
and/or update physically on disk. It will connect to your image source,
load into memory, crop, resize, compress, and save the tiny ~2 KB file
to disk. It then adds the full pathname to an ExtendedAttribute for that
post called "PostIcon", allowing for the skin to render where required.
This storage-to-disk method greatly speeds up the homepage rendering as
we do not access the photo gallery.

To use, simply create a blog post with at least one <img> embedded.
That's it. The default logic above will take the first <img> in your
post and process it to disk.

Optionally, you can specify a particular image to use as your PostIcon.
Say if you had multple embedded <img>s, or if you don't have an image at
all but wanted a PostIcon for the post.

You can use the BBCode format of:

[PostIcon Anchor = "Center"]http://domain.com/image.gif[/PostIcon]

This will allow you to specify an Anchor position, if you want to crop
in a certain region. The Anchor attribute is optional. See the
module's config file for more information on Anchor.

How does it work?
There are two parts to make this work. The backend uses the PostIconModule to download into memory, crop, resize, compress, and save the selected image to disk.

And the frontend UI uses the PostIcon server control to rendered the saved image, with smart logic.

What is the logic to determine what gets downloaded, cropped, and saved or even displayed if none is set?
There are two methods of logic. The first is which image, if any at all, is processed on the initial PostCreation process. And the other logic is in the PostIcon server control that renders, if there is no image saved from the module.

The PostIconModule determines what url gets written to the post, if any. It does this by following the order below:

Does the [PostIcon] BBCode exist? If so, parse the image specified.
Is there an <img> declaration somewhere in the post? If so, parse the first <img> and use it as the PostIcon.

If the PostIconModule fails to parse the image, no url is written. In which case, the PostIcon server control determines what gets displayed with the logic below:

Is there a DefaultImageUrl specified? If so, link directly to it.
Is the UseAnonymousAvatar set to true? If so, link directly to it.

Why are you saving to disk and writing a direct url? Isn't the Photo Gallery built for that?
Yes, it is but I wanted speed on my homepage. And loading the Weblog posts + 20 to 50 images on the homepage is a bit more processing then I care for.

So with the PostIconModule I load the image into a MemoryStream, crop the image based on the Anchor set, resize the image to what is specified in the config, compress it as a JPG (tests showed 60% quality compared to Gif 89a and PNG is smaller then all), and finally save it to disk.

The PostIcon server control loads only the direct Url that is stored for the post, therefore generating a very quick homepage load time.

Where's the source code?
With the rest of the files below.

Where do I get this wonderful tool?
Here ya go:

(install only)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/2611/download.aspx

(source code-must compile)
http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/5894/download.aspx

Future Releases
If by popular demand, I might add in rendering of the User's Avatar if multiple people are posting to a single blog. But since this is rare, I skipped it for now.

Also if by popular demand, I may add in some type of Email detection (i.e. MetaBlog API posts) and display a custom image (if the image logic fails to save one). For example, I might want to display a common PostIcon for all posts made by Blogmailr. Such as this one:

Hooray!! I saw *******

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 05:01:00 GMT

Telligent and IMG World joined forces to develop I think one of the best designed Community Server sites to date.

Today IMG launches the Insultatorium - Laugh Factory's Community site. Their welcome message says it all:

"An uncensored place to share videos, photos, and jokes with comedy enthusiasts around the world."

http://cs.laughfactory.com/

I very much praise sites that make it a point to be uncensored. Too many censor, and for such BS these days, that I hardly visit any forums any longer. I'm sure the admins of those previous sites don't miss me at all, but the users do miss my knowledge <- No that was not bragging. I'm a Ford ASSET graduate and have a lot of knowledge to give and help others. But I be censored? I no go to that site.

Anyhoot, check out the site above. I was commissioned to wrap up phase 1 development with Deryl Dorsett But a warning, it's NWS. But that makes it more fun don't it? :)

Phase two will be kick ass (current site x100), but under wraps at this time so shhh. First rule of Fight Club is no one talks about Fight Club.

Where did this post come from

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:16:00 GMT

Can someone tell me? It's suppose to be a secret, but a small easter egg is somewhere. It's killing me.

Published with blogmailr

Microsoft to discount consumer products

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:22:00 GMT

While checking out the new (and big shock to the design) packing that Vista and Office 2007 are going to have, I couldn't help but noticing on the Windows Vista Blog there's a new version coming out: Office Home and Student 2007.

Does this mean that Microsoft is finally giving us home users a discount in pricing to match the Student Edition pricing? No more "have to be a student to get it at this price"?

That would be very nice. Nice indeed!

Secret website

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:55:00 GMT

Shhh, secret domain. Don't tell anyone. blogmailr.com

1st rule of Fight Club is no one talks about Fight Club

2nd rule of Fight Club is no one talks about Fight Club

Jim Allchin launches WindowsVistaBlog.com

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:38:00 GMT

The Windows Vista Team launched a makeover to their blog site, now using Community Server. They partnered with Telligent to overhaul the the Windows Vista Team Blog, and I'm quite impressed with the layout. Jim Allchin talks about their updated launch here.

WindowsVistaBlog.com

Using some nice transparent PNGs (and some IE6 hacks to get around the non-PNG support), it's a very clean site.

Like the IEBlog I've started to read, from the Internet Explorer team, I've really liked the direction that companies are taking by opening up their engineers and development teams to the public eye. Letting you talk one on one with them. Microsoft and Dell are the two leading ones that I know of at this time.

So, go add Windows Vista Blog to your RSS reader and stay up to date on it's latest news.

South Park wins the Peabody Award

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 06:26:00 GMT

Congrats to the creators of South Park for the aware earlier this year (yeah I just found out). John Stewart here was the person who presented it to the creators, Trey Park and Matt Stone. If this doesn't open people's eyes to the humor they try to portray in today's media events, then I suppose it never will.

South Park was praised as a show that "pushes all the buttons, turns up the heat and shatters every taboo," Peabody Awards Director Horace Newcomb said. "Through that process of offending it reminds us of the need for being tolerant."

Constantly while talking to several people, one out of every two seem to despise South Park for one thing or another. People still don't get the underlying humor. You can read in an earlier post about my stance on South Park of where I go into more detail.

Until they start doing "You'd might be a redneck if..."-type jokes (as one Jeff Foxworthy mentioned has made me a redneck, lol), and one must hit home with me, I welcome their humor. And even if they do hit home, oh well. :)

Microsoft to build its own CPUs

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:51:00 GMT

Microsoft tried Intel in the Xbox Gen 1. Microsoft tried IBM in the Xbox 360.

Now Microsoft has decided to just make their own microprocessor for the next generation Xbox. As quoted from Engadget:

"According to a report in yesterday's Gray Lady, Microsoft will be starting its own chip design division, with the ultra-creative name: "The Computer Architecture Group," and will be split between Redmond, Washington and Mountain View, California. The venerable NYT adds that Microsoft will use the lab to beef up chips in the next-generation Xbox (the Xbox 720?), and will be headed by Charles P. Thacker. He's formerly of the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he helped work on the original Alto and the invention of Ethernet."

Blogging is Liable

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 19:53:00 GMT

It seems we are loosing our rights to free speech, more and more these days. Some may remember a previous post about SouthPark being sensored in showing the Profit Mohamed last season. That was justified as it was a corporation that owned the cable channel, therefore sensoring anything they want.

Recently USAToday reported a story showing bloggers are liable for what they say online.

Come on! When is this sh*t going to end?

I guess you need to make sure what you post is true, therefore never liable. But if the Government does not given all the facts, nor does anyone who tells a story of their one-sided issue they have with another party - are you never given all the facts. So speculation almost ensures being libel. This is just BS.

Why not to bet at work

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 15:19:00 GMT

This is why you should never bet at work.

Telligent's Tom Edwards loosing a bet in the OU vs UT football game this past weekend.

Me? I'm an UT fan - University of Tennessee, Knoxville that is. And they kicked ass this past weekend as well.

IE7 is going RTM in October

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 18:43:00 GMT

What's interesting here is the team will be forcing IE7 installs out through normal Automatic Updates - overwriting your IE6 overnight.

That's both impressive, and a bit scary at the same time.

You can read more about the IE Team's launch here at their blog.

I for one am all for this! I've been using IE7 since Beta 2 (beta 1 was aweful buggy), and now been designing most client projects at Telligent under IE7 (which renders fine under FF). But IE6 has had some issues.

So I for one welcome this update.

Make Love Not Warcraft

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:52:00 GMT

7 weeks 5 days 13 hours 20 minutes - That's how long the boys from Southpark must play WoW, allowing 3 hours a night for sleep, in order to level up with their combined forces to have a 90% mortality rate against the ultimate super-player online.

I think what I just said about made some kind of sense to WoW players.

What had me rolling on the floor tonight, laughing my butt off? SouthPark. The 10th season premier was just on, and it had a huge spoof on the World of Warcraft online playing.

Basically, this one player has been online since WoW came out 18 months ago playing it almost 24/7. He's leveled up so high, that he's been killing players without having to accept his challenge - even killing admins off.

The show continues to spoof the "over the average" online player by showing the deterioration of health users go through if they do nothing but sit in front of the computer, 21 hours a day (3 hours to sleep) playing WoW.

Kind of reminds me about the 16 year old boy in Australia that recently was on the news playing WoW, almost 18 hours a day. He's punched holes in the walls, thrown pc components around the room, and more.

Anyhoot, any decent WoW fan (or SouthPark fan) needs to check out this episode titled Make Love not Warcraft.

Setup a CS site, home works, but links give 404?

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:54:00 GMT

This Duncan Nugget is in reference to 404 errors you may get after successfully installing Community Server on a new server. New, as you haven't had any other ASP.NET websites that use Url Rewriting installed that would show the issue with Url Rewriting INOP.

Issue
After installing Community Server on a new server you go to the homepage. CS comes up just fine, and you login as the Administrator. You click Blogs, Forums, Photos, etc and each application's homepage comes up normally.

But when you start clicking on links such as the sample items (a sample forum post, a sample forum, the same blog post, the sample photo upload, etc) you get a general IIS 404 - File Not Found error message.

Resolution
IIS is configured to check that the file physically exist on the HDD before parsing it through the assigned Application Extension. In this case, the ASP.NET Web Application. When this happens, IIS fails to parse the requested Url properly and never passes it to the ASP.NET Web Application. IIS also throws an exception because the file was not found, and matches it to the appropriate error code/page - finally presenting the 404 - File Not Found.

To resolve, open Internet Information Services Manager.

Right-click on the website or virtual directory that is running your web application and goto Properties.
Click on the Home Directory tab.
Under Application Settings, click the Configuration button.
In this new Application Configuration window, on the Mappings tab, scroll down and find the .aspx Extension.
Click the .aspx extension once, and then click Edit. This opens the Add/Edit Application Extension Mapping dialog.
Uncheck Verify that file exists and click OK, OK, Apply, OK to exit.

This should take effect immediately, but you may want to restart the Application Pool just in case.

More Information
Url Rewriting is becoming very common with ASP.NET programmers to cleanup the URLs the browser and users link to. Also search engines likes these hard links better then complicated querystrings. Community Server almost exclusively uses Url Rewriting for all of links.

Url Rewriting takes the requested URL and parses it through a Regular Expression pattern in CS (see SiteUrls.config) to match a specific pattern, and then requests the physical file with a new format behind the scenes.

For the most part, this IIS setting above is disabled by default. But oddly enough, occasionally we've seen some servers that have had it checked. Following the resolution above should resolve it from happening in the future by not checking if the file exists.

Thanks to Kevin Cunningham for the tip.

Use MSN Messenger to control your MCE remotely

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 18:49:00 GMT

This is an interesting idea for using an MSN Messenger bot to remotely control your MCE machine. Like recording that show at the last second.

I thought this would be right up Ken's alley.

Tracking a hacker (in reference to recent FairUse4WM posts)

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:39:00 GMT

During the recent FairUse4WM lawsuits that Microsoft is heading up recently, I've started to learn more and more about thePlaysForSure DRM answer that Microsoft has created to try to satisfy the DMCA bitches (think BMI, Universal - anything DVD of CD Audio related).

What I found interesting is the age-old techniques I've used to track down hackers (and prosecute them in court, via companies that have hired me in the past) has become so commonly understood these days that they explain it in their recent lawsuit against Viodentia - and people understand exactly the process.

See, back in the day (late 80s, early 90s) no one had a clue how to track down a hacker. I made some side cash tracking down these guys so long ago cause no one knew the technology enough. Now someone makes a post, and it amazes me how common-knowledge it has become.

Now don't get me wrong. I've done my fair-share of cracks and hacks, and knew enough about re-writing the tcp stack to hide my tracks. So don't get pissed if it was me that testified against you way back then. Did I do it against the underground pirate groups? No. It was for those guys that would hack into computers of friends of mine to do nothing more then destroy their networks.

Aren't the best Security Experts the best hackers? Was always my sales pitch in the past for such jobs. :)

Err, off the point. The post above clearly outlines one of the most common methods for tracking a hacker.

ISPs will not talk to you unless you have a court order. So create a suit (as MS did above), then talk to the ISPs. They will gladly hand over any and all records. Which most of the time you can track to a single IP and MAC address at that time of the email/file submission/port connectivity/logs/etc. MACs on broadband are linked to a physical address on file for that user that is being billed, which will be handed over via the ISP. Either have the feds ask for the warrant, or contact the local courts for the area to obtain one - and have the local PD/fbi unit conduct the search/arrest.

Rest is normal process.

There are dozens of way to get around the above, that most hackers don't even attempt. Like accessing a computer has been hacked, then a remote hacker would piggy back everything they do off of that machine. That's just one of many ways.

Now in this case, Viodentia claims to live outside of the United States. That's good and bad, depending on his country. This adds an extra (and extra thick) layer of law process, as you now must go through federal courts to obtain an extradition. Now this I have never been involved with, so I'll leave that part up to the lawyers.

RC Planes and VR Goggles

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:09:00 GMT

Back when I was into RC planes, I could never have imaged the combination of putting a camera into the cockpit and connecting a pair of VR goggles to create the ultimate viewpoint and flying control.

On google videos is where I saw this.

This is amazing. Yeah, call me a nerd for being into RC back in the day. But wow! Just look at the dives and fly-bys he does. Ok, I want one in a helo.

A blast from the past - Nintendo R.O.B.

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 03:21:00 GMT

I can't believe it. When I saw a picture of the Nintendo ROB, it instantly brought back fond memories from my Nintendo era (1985), oh so long forgotten. The game was to get one of the two disks spinning by having ROB pick it up, turn to his far left, place it on a spinner to spin up, and then placing it on the Red or Blue button - depending on which one needed to be hit.

Appearently this guy recently got his Lunix box to talk to it, making the news today.

Sourced form engadget.

Say this tongue twister, or else!

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:33:00 GMT

Who has perfect speech?

None of these guys do.

Doh! (and groan)

Speechless

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:53:00 GMT

I'm just speechless about this site.

Can someone explain it to me?

Kind cool, but I have no idea what it's about.

Blogs complicated?

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:53:00 GMT

I'm going to touch on a few applications and concepts to help my friends and family that are just learning blogs get started. If you need any help, just email me.

Writing Blog Posts
This is my first post using Windows Live Writer, a remote Blogging tool. Woot! This should really ease your ability to blog - you just need a blog setup somewhere first. It's an application that you download and run. Click Publish, and it's online!

Reading Everyone's Blogs
It's been years - years that I have searched for a lightweight, easy-to-read and manage, RSS reader. I've tried them all, but nothing was just seamless enough. Until I played with Vista Beta2, where I got to use the underlying Windows RSS Platform built-into Vista and Internet Explorer 7. Very nice! Even better in IE7 RC1 is that has the finalized version of the Windows RSS Platform to allow developers to finally get busy with tools using this platform.

IE7 has a great RSS reader built-in. And finally, a clean XSL stylesheet applied to the output! So I now browse my friend's and family RSS Feeds in IE7 at all times, as shown below.

So to my friends and family that are just now learning blogging, this is a great method of staying up-to-date on the blogs (MySpace or alike) you want to read. Like, uh, mine. :) Just look for a button or link that says RSS on the blog you want to sync. If you need more help, ping me.

This is just too damn easy, sweet, and seamless. Download IE7 and be done.

Keeping your PC sync'd - NewsGator
Now why would I mention NewsGator with IE7 and RSS when I am talking about using IE7 for all of my RSS reading? Well, Nick Harris at NewsGator published a nice synchronizing tool to sync the underlying Windows RSS Platform with your NewsGator account.

This is perfect because anything that uses the Windows RSS Platform (i.e. Internet Explorer 7) automatically gets sync'd!

I don't know how many times I've had to setup RSS feeds, re-setup, format a laptop - setup again, format desktop, setup again - over and over. So troublesome and I know I've forgotten a few I tried to add.

Well, no more! NewsGator holds all of my RSS Feeds. And now with the sync tool, I keep my desktop and laptop sync'd.

Now only if someone would take the time and write a sync tool for the RSS Platform for Community Server. Humm.

Finally.

HowTo: Move a File to another FileGallery

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 23:04:00 GMT

I'm going to start posting a lot of my old Duncan Nuggets (as Dave Burke likes to call them) here for others to start reading. This is the first of a lot to come.

How to move a file from one FileGallery to another

NOTE: This script was written for Community Server 2.1 RTM.

This method uses a stored procedure to move a single file (aka Post) to another File Gallery (aka Section). Attached is an SQL script file named move_file_to_filegallery.zip that when executed, will create a stored procedure named _move_file_to_filegallery in your database.

After the sproc is created, you can execute it by running the following command:

EXEC _move_file_to_filegallery @PostID, @toSectionID, @ClearTags

You need two bits of information beforing executing:

@PostID - This is the PostID of the file you want to move.
- You can find this in the URL by viewing the file in CS' normal File view. For example, if we look up the SDK for CS 2.1 the link is: http://communityserver.org/files/folders/communityserver/entry543125.aspx. So the PostID of this file is 543125.
@toSectionID - This is the SectionID of the File Gallery you want to move the file to.
- You can find this in the URL by going into the Control Panel, Files, and selecting that File Gallery to manage. For example, the URL for managing the CommunityServer Current Releases folder is: http://communityserver.org/controlpanel/files/default.aspx?sectionid=234. So this SectionID that I want to move the file to is 234.

Following the examples above now that we have the two required integers, we can now execute the sproc to move the file. The line would read:

EXEC _move_file_to_filegallery @PostID = 234, @toSectionID = 543125, @ClearTags = 1

NOTE: It is recommended to always clear the Tags, since they only exist in the previous FileGallery and not the new one. So leave it @ClearTags = 1.

There is also error checking built in, so view the Messages for any errors that may have occurred.

USB Rechargable AA batteries!

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 15:16:00 GMT

In continuing my RSS feeds of Engadget (almost too much to stay on top of!), some very cool stuff pops up on here.

This has to be one of the best ideas for USB in a long time. USB rechargable AA batteries!

Ion PC Cooling

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:42:00 GMT

Forget my Shotgun Watercooling rig I have. Forget A/C Chillers and Pelters. This is it!

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/18/the-ion-cooled-pc-and-smog-generator/

325cfm, with 0.0 db of noise (meaning, none!)

Manlaws

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:05:00 GMT

Christoc was kind enough to post the link to the website for Manlaws.

http://www.manlaws.com

I've been wanting to go read/view these, but haven't actually gone out looking for them.

Thanks man!

Track Stephen Jr.

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 03:56:00 GMT

How many of you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? *raises hand*

How many of you watch one of the former news anchors on The Daily Show, Stephen Cobert's Corbert Report (pronouced Corbear Repor - no "t"s)? *raises hand*

Ok. A few months ago he adopted a Bald Eagle (it was at the Institute for Wildlife Studies being nursed back to health). Over time, it has healed and sored out into the wild - free. It was named, Stephen Jr. They placed a tracker on this eagle to track it's path.

Tonight, they had a special to where they checked on the bird's location. A funny skit, as Stephen Jr. ended up in Canada (Stephen hate's Canada). So I just had to check. Did they really track it?

http://www.iws.org/ (click on Interactive and then "Track an Eagle") Stephen's eagle is A-46.

Hehe, the site was pretty much crashed when I went to it - no doubt others trying to view the site as well.

But I was shocked - they are actually tracking Stephen Jr.! So, in a few more months, or a year or two, you'll know where you can go to check the flight path of Stephen Jr..

Well, that's if you really wanted to. That's just how I think. I'll check back in a year or so, just because. Just because. To know.

Yeah, I'm Goofy. Live with it.

Animator vs. Animation

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:09:00 GMT

Oh, this is great. The animation that fights back against the animator!

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/34244097/

Make sure to turn up the speakers.

Mad Passing @ Deal's Gap

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 23:36:00 GMT

As I start the process of encoding the rest of my footage of Deal's Gap, I went out to see what other videos were out there.

Here's a video called Mad Passing at Deal's Gap, as it's exactly that.

Why post this? Because it makes me feel better about posting my videos. It's gotten to the point that in my next release, I will post a disclaimer about how I could safely see far enough ahead to make the turn. The videos only show a telescoped image, not the entire view of our viewpoint while driving.

Biloxi Detour

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:09:00 GMT

On Hwy US 90 that runs along the coast of the Gulf, the Biloxi Bay Bridge is still out from Katrina over a year ago.

I'll admit, I crossed way past the "no drive" zone to get this shot. But hey, the car barely screeched through the no-drive barriers. It's a MINI after all.

Along the detour, I also ran into some fisherman getting ready to put to sea.

Next stop, Biloxi Mississippi

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 16:00:00 GMT

Ok, I haven't updated my blog in a bit. Been too busy enjoying my vacation. So the next few posts are a bit out of order. So, Biloxi...

I've always had an aching to stay in Biloxi. Close to Long Beach, the casinos, and just the history I studied when in school about this beautiful little city.

Also continuing my "Off the Beaten Path" adventures of the South East, starting in Mobile, AL I will be taking US-90 and riding the coastline during the sunset tonight. Should make for some amazing pictures.

Georgia Aquarium

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:19:00 GMT

Todd and I checked out the Georgia Aquarium yesterday, and might I say I am impressed. Even topping Chattanooga's Aquarium.

I've uploaded the pics from this adventure and you can view them below.

http://eduncan911.com/photos/travel/tags/Atlanta_2700_s+Aquarium/default.aspx

More info on the aquarium: http://www.georgiaaquarium.org/

Don't visit mini2.com (heavy censorship)

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 22:40:00 GMT

Well, I tried posting my teaser on mini2.com. Here's what I got:

Hello,

Your following post has been deleted ...
Quote: Originally Posted by eduncan911 (original)
Ok, I have a few hours of footage of this awesome road.

But here's a quick teaser of what to expect. My god, there's no other better road in the US! Over 300 turns in a short 11 mile stretch. All out racing for ~20 minutes at a time.

http://eduncan911.com/archive/2006/0...ser_2900_.aspx

And no, I am not shy to open up my brand new MINI S. I ran down Porsches and bikes, and got the video to prove it.

MINI2 does not condone threads discussing street racing or dangerous driving.

Oh well. I'll never be visiting there again. Does anyone have a link to any MINI decent forum out there?

I hear there's one in Dallas but haven't looked for it yet. I don't want to start up another forum if there's already a decent one established. Already got my hands full with the other forums I run for almost 8 years now.

[video] A teaser for Tail of the Dragon

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 05:38:00 GMT

This is a video of a couple of short clips we took while riding the Tail of the Dragon at Deal's Gap in the mountains of Tennessee.

I have hours of footage to organize and put online. So give me a few weeks for that.

Until then, this video is a nice teaser to what's to come.

View Video
Format: aspx
Duration: --:--

Direct link to download: http://eduncan911.com/files/folders/automotive/entry1371.aspx

Destination Memphis

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 16:36:00 GMT

Memphis was great. Got to hit Beale St., Sun Studios and had to hit Tops BBQ. The story of the night was the Pimp-n-Hoes party, where Papa E. Jazz (that's me) was in the house!

Click here for other pics

Next destination in my road trip: Nashville by taking Exit 163 - US48 through Dickson, TN to US49 through Charlotte, TN.

First major road trip (and what a doozy!)

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 23:59:00 GMT

Wow, where do I begin. This is the first post of many on my adventures I'm taking in my new car. MINI is engaging in their first cross-country road trip - "MINI Takes the States" road trip, starting in Monterey, CA and ending up in Lakeville, CT. Along there way, there's entertainment, partying, and music they are throwing.

So I've signed up for two of the legs. Dallas, TX to Memphis, TN. And then from Memphis, TN to Nashville, TN. The events are listed at the end of this post.

My schedule is listed below. The stuff listed in Green should be an interesting time.

Friday, Aug 25th - Dallas, TX
Gipsy Tea Room partying

Saturday, Aug 26th - Dallas to Memphis
I plan on taking the "Off the Beaten Path" map the MINIs have drawn on their map. Looks about 87 miles of Twisties Y0! I plan on snapping a few 'rare' pics of the MINI on Beale St, if I can convince the cops with my new camera about being a "Magazine Writer". Will be staying with a car buddy of mine, and apparently they are throwing a big Pimps-n-Hoes party. So I need a costume - even though some say I don't need any costume at all. Hehe.

Sunday, Aug 27th - Memphis to Nashville
I know the route from about Exit 163 through the back roads. Even though the MINI owners aren't planning an off-road adventure in this area, I will be taking it! Will try to recruit a few to join me. Very fun Tennessee Hills driving. This is where the MINIs and I part and they head up North to KY. Layover over in Nashville from Sunday through Wednesday. Various friends (hey Riley and Randall!).

Wednesday, Aug 30th - Nashville to Chattanooga
I've taken some of this Hwy 41 that snakes around I-24 all the way from Nashville to Chattanooga from time to time. It's time to take it the whole way. There are many small towns, such as Hale Town that is just beautiful tucked up into the mountains and little shops. Main reason for little ol' Chattatown? Family! My entire beloved family is in Chattanooga. Going to spend some time with them and a few friends.

Friday, Sept 1st - Chattanooga to Knoxville
One of my good childhood friends (and old neighbor) lives up in Knoxville now with his girlfriend and new baby. I'm traveling there to spend a day with them, and at the same time we are going to hit the Tail of the Dragon at Deals Gap! Man, that is going to be surreal. As many as 318 turns, in just 11 miles!

Saturday, Sept 2nd - Knoxville to Atlanta, GA
I plan on stating on the interstate for the most part on this one, to make it to Atlanta to see one of my best friends - Todd! Dude, it's Todd! Who knows what trouble we'll get into there. Will lay over until sometime in the week as the rest of the trip I'll be playing by ear.

Wednesday, Sept 6th - Atlanta to New Orleans, LA (and in between)
What could be better then a snapshot of the MINI on Beale St in Memphis? A snapshot on Bourbon St in New Orleans of course! This part of the trip, it's pure all-me-ness. Going to stay in a hotel, walk around here and there. See what I can do to help. I've been hearing some reports on NPR lately. It's amazing the lifestyle these people have and still go on partying and living it up.

The rest of the trip I'll play by ear. I have to drive through Alabama and Mississippi to get to LA. So I'm sure I can find a few small towns to stop off in - as I have 5 days left on vacation.

Mucho pictures to come!

Here are two planned events you'll find me at:

Friday, August 25 - Dallas, TX
The power combo of Rolling Stone magazine and Men's Journal have partnered with MINI USA to throw a Texas style party (that's BIG!). Motor on to The Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas where 900 of your closest MINI family and friends will enjoy an evening of laughs, music and more. The evening with be hosted by comedian Jay Davis. The event begins at 8:00 pm. Seating and parking are limited so early arrival is recommended. Snacks provided courtesy of Rolling Stone magazine and Men's Journal with a cash bar. Comedians Jay Davis and Rusty Dooley, along with the musical entertainment of Patrick Ryan Clark, will make this a must for all registered MINI Takes the States motorists.

The Gypsy Tea Room is located at 2548 Elm Street, Deep Ellum, Dallas, TX. Complimentary valet parking available for as many as 700 MINIs.

Sunday, August 27 - Nashville, TN
MINI Music Festival: Make sure you pack your lawn chairs and blankets for the 'MINI Music Festival' at Centennial Park adjacent to the Parthenon in the heart of Nashville. Join over 1,000 MINI motorists and their guest for spectacular festival featuring street fair style booths, Southern culinary food and drink as well a dynamic musical line-up to include John Haitt, Tift Merrit, Jimmy Hall, Chris Janson, Thad Cockrell & Rodney Crowell - all brought to you courtesy of Spin magazine!

Famous designer Shepard Fairey will create a special custom designed limited edition poster for MINI Takes the States. It's a must have, one of kind offering which will be distributed to registered MINI Takes the States participants at all four regional events and arrival points along the route courtesy of Swindle Magazine.

Holding out for what you want

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 00:44:00 GMT

Just had to blog about waiting for something you want, but don't need.

Over the years I've used my friend's Canon Digital Rebel cameras. This is quite an impressive camera. I've used the earlier one, the updated one, etc. And the 8 MP XT has been out for a little while.

Well I never had a good camera - or even a camera at all. I did buy a used digital one from a friend of mine that was ok (couldn't take night or fast-motion shots), but it stopped working reliably shortly after that.

Next week I'll be taking a long road trip, and I didn't want to miss out on anything. So I did it. I dipped into the funds, and purchased a good SLR - finally.

A new Canon Digital Rebel XT 8MP - for $579! I think the eBayer thought it was the older 6.3 MP version.

Anyhoot, first picture under the "custom" settings is above. And many more to come!

Old Robin Williams skit

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:16:00 GMT

This video is always too funny. Now that I have a bit more time to devote to my personal sites again. I am going to start pushing a lot of my videos up, since Google and YouTube seem to be censoring my videos more and more.

So here's the first of many to come - Robin Williams on The Scottish and Golf.

NWS - Has language.

View Video
Format: aspx
Duration: --:--

Microsoft Error Reporting - Share your pain with MS!

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:07:00 GMT

Sourced from: http://ettf.net/archives/2330

You know those "A system error has occurred. Send this error to Microsoft" dialog boxes that pop up when an application/service crashes?

Well, here's proof that they actually help Microsoft employees - in the most direct method possible. lol

Dell gets down One2One with you

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 14:23:00 GMT

Dell and Telligent has recently launched a new blogging site for Dell's engineers to interact with the public - announcing new designs, thoughts behind techniques, and more. It's heavy in video blogging and is staged to have great interaction with end-users

one2one.dell.com

After reviewing the initial site after launch, something caught my eye. There was this video showing a silver and red box. At first I thought, "What is this thing?" Then I read the description of the blog post, talking about the XPS 700. Then I thought, "Wait, the XPS line has always been Dell's high-end workstations. But that doesn't look like a PC."

http://one2one.dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/07/05/84.aspx

Boy, have I been outta the loop. My head burried in the sand @ work, I need to get up-to-date on the latest tech.

Take a look at that thing! And check out the video there, and another video in another post at the site. Quad graphics cards anyone?

Where did MP4 come from?

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 19:18:00 GMT

Over the last few months, I've been seeing an increase of clients attempting to use MP4 files on their websites for videos. It's actually become an alarming amount, as the client may not be aware of the technical limitations in using this format.

I wanted to announce to everyone how Microsoft and Telligent handles this format.

First I know that MP4 is a good format is attempting to copyright your material. It's just that it hasn't caught on enough to be widely supported.

Microsoft and MP4

First, a snippet from Microsoft on how they will not support the MP4 format in Windows Media Player or alike.

Source KB: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q316992

============

MPEG-4 (.mp4)

loadTOCNode(3, 'summary'); MPEG-4 is an International Standards Organization (ISO) specification that covers many aspects of multimedia presentation including compression, authoring and delivery. Although video compression and file container definition are two separate and independent entities of the MPEG-4 specification, many people incorrectly believe that the two are interchangeable. You can implement only portions of the MPEG-4 specification and remain compliant with the standard.

The MPEG-4 file format, as defined by the MPEG-4 specification, contains MPEG-4 encoded video and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC)-encoded audio content. It typically uses the .mp4 extension. Windows Media Player does not support the playback of the .mp4 file format. You can play back .mp4 media files in Windows Media Player when you install DirectShow-compatible MPEG-4 decoder packs. DirectShow-compatible MPEG-4 decoder packs include the Ligos LSX-MPEG Player and the EnvivioTV.

For more information about the Ligos LSX-MPEG Player, visit the following Ligos Web site:

http://www.ligos.com (http://www.ligos.com)

For more information about EnvivioTV , visit the following Envivio Web site:

http://www.envivio.com/products/ (http://www.envivio.com/products)

Microsoft has chosen to implement the video compression portion of the MPEG-4 standard. Microsoft has currently produced the following MPEG-4-based video codecs:

•	Microsoft MPEG-4 v1
•	Microsoft MPEG-4 v2
•	Microsoft MPEG-4 v3
•	ISO MPEG-4 v1

MPEG-4 video content can be encoded and stored in an .asf file container by using Windows Media Tools and Windows Media Encoder. You can then play these files in Windows Media Player. For more information about Microsoft and MPEG-4 support, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/WM7/mpeg4.aspx

============

Telligent and MP4

And what does Telligent do for our clients? We'll easily support it, but it requires an server-side IIS change as well as their End-Users to know how to install the proper encoder. So if you are setting a client, and they will be using MP4, please ensure to setup the server to support raw MP4 file downloads.

By default, MP4 files are not even recognized by Microsoft IIS. So you'll have to enable it.

It is called a "MIME Extension" to add to the IIS website for the .MP4 extension. In addition, you'll have to know the ContentType to associate to it.

Now the only ContentType I found most reliable with most 3rd party plug-in decoders out on the web is:

ContentType: video/mp4

But again, being how it isn't mixed support some clients may require specific overrides of this.

I wanted to rehash on why this may not be the best idea for your clients. It's because the end user will require to install a 3rd party decoder to view it. Can you say DivX all over again? I still don't use DivX.

Consider using a more widely support format, such as MPEG v2 or v3 or a compressable AVI. No, these are not the most efficient. But you will be able to view them on any platform with just about any type of player.

Bill Gates Stepping Down

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:49:00 GMT

Bill Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft effective July 2008 to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and will continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects. Ray Ozzie assumes the title of chief software architect and will begin working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities, while Craig Mundie takes the new title of chief research and strategy officer and will work closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company’s research and incubation efforts.

Sourced from: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/default.mspx

------------------

This kind of reminds me of Hayes Corporation when I was working there. David Hayes stepped down from Chairman to get more involved in the day-to-day workings of the company to get it back on track.

Well, I remember the headlines: "Hayes fires Hayes" David Hayes was let go/left from the Hayes Corporation, the company that he built.

But, MS didn't file for bankruptcy twice. So I doubt that would happen here.

Show your Work

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:30:00 GMT

A friend of mine is pulling the motor out of his 240z he's going to be road racing.

He sent over a link today, that had a video of him "Prepping" for the pull. It shows a time-elapse segment of an entire day - from his garage.

http://sccaforums.com/blogs/christoc/archive/2006/06/10/Motor_Pull_Preperation_240Z.aspx

Kudos to Chris. Nice music from Cake too.

What a great idea! A cheap webcam, even wireless, computer in the house - record it all and post it on the net (insert: Automatically).

Does everyone know about Microsoft's PowerToys? There's one specifically for this called "Webshot Timer" I think. You can configure it to take a snapshot from your Webcam every X number of minutes, and it will even upload it to an FTP account for you. Think of it as a "Live Webcam, with X minute delay" as most people use it to overwrite a single image constantly.

You could take all of these, write them to a directory automatically. And at the end of the day, compile them into a video. :)

Wow, the possibilities are endless.

[Fixed] Click to activate and use this control

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 31 May 2006 03:11:00 GMT

Update 2006-08-25: In the comments below I mentioned a 2nd method that loops through all objects on the page and "re-injects" them. This actually works very well and lets you use the <object> tags normally without worrying about the javascript below (if placed in the correct location in CS). It works with Windows Media Player, Flash, and any other <object> tag. Here's the link:

http://www.mix-fx.com/flash-prompt.htm

The downside is it is only supported in newer browsers that support the document.getElementsByTagName - which most do these days. But I like to code for old 4.0 and above browsers (my JS is all 4.0+, including Netscape 4.08). I might modify his code to do this when I get back from vacation.

You can continue read the history of this issue below.

--------------------

So with a recent Internal Explorer patch (automatic update), you might start noticing that you have to click a Flash, Quicktime, Realplayer, or WMV in order to "use" the control. Annoying right?

The mouse-over presents the text, "Click to activate and use this control".

This is due to a recent court battle that MS lost in the way IE deals with <object> and <embed> tags.

The Fix
Recently I am working on my building's website at www.2220cantonlofts.com. Now the new page isn't online yet, give me until the end of June to complete it. And yes I know what is currently there sucks ass. That's why I am overhauling it. Anyhoot... I'm using two flash movies and noticed this problem - and it ticking me off.

To fix this it took some playing with the HTML and object tags. Basically I found that if you render the HTML after the page has rendered (i.e. InsertHtml), it does not require you to click to activate.

Appearently Macromedia found out about this and posted an "IE" fix. But I believe it needs a little tweaking because most of use querystrings and have multiple flash versions on our site.

I'll sum it up for you in full.

The fix is insert the <object/embed> text while the page is rendering/being interpreted by the browser. So long as it doesn't exist in the source/html file. It must be rendered outside of the source file.

Instructions to install:

Download the attachment to this blog post, place it somewhere on your website.
Insert this text into your <head> portion (it's a check to ensure the file loaded, this prevents JS errors if the file doesn't load)
- <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">AC_FL_RunContent = 0;</script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="AC_RunActiveContent.js" language="javascript"></script>
The last would be to replace your entire <object></object> text with the following script:
- <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
  if (AC_FL_RunContent == 0) {
  alert("This page requires AC_RunActiveContent.js");
  } else {
  AC_FL_RunContent(
     'codebase',
      'https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0',
  'width', '745',
      'height', '171',
  'src', 'menu.swf',
  'quality', 'high',
  'pluginspage',
  'https://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer',
  'align', 'middle',
  'play', 'true',
      'loop', 'false',
  'scale', 'noscale',
  'wmode', 'window',
  'devicefont', 'false',
  'id', 'flash-animations',
  'name', 'menu',
  'menu', 'false',
  'allowScriptAccess','sameDomain',
  'movie', 'menu.swf?page=<%= HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString["page"] %>',
  'salign', ''
  );
  }
  </script><noscript></noscript>

That's it.

Now the attached JS is slightly modified then the version you can download from Macromedia. I simply had too many .swf files with querystring as attributes. The script at Macromedia's site requires you to remove the .swf - it's annoying to remove that from all of my code. So I edited their code.

Check out www.2220cantonlofts.com to see it working.

Accurate Project Workflow

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 19 May 2006 20:15:00 GMT

Finally, someone was able to grasp the entire concept of a project's workflow, most accurately.

Google Condones Spamming?

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 07 May 2006 05:02:00 GMT

Precursor: BlogSpot (owned and operated by Google, Inc ) is spamming.

"There, I said it.", quoting David Spade as it's what I'm saying now.

Ever since I upgraded to CS 2.0 from a previous version, I have been getting flooded with a large number of spam comments to my blog posts, about 20 to 30 a day. Where they come from seems to be related to online poker and porn sites.

Now I've set CS 2.0 to allow anonymous comments, but they will be Disapproved when posted here - until I go in and approve them.

But somehow these spambots get past this restriction in CS 2.0, and flood my blog comments. I have this logged as a bug in CS 2.0, to be resolved in CS 2.1. But for now, we must fight this.

One way is to enable the Spam CSModule that now comes with CS 2.0. Have it look for more then 5 links in a comment, then automatically disapprove or even delete the post.

I went a more drastic approach and started to find the source of these boneheads.

I found them - BlogSpot.com is the home to all of this Poker spamming. I found them by looking at my Urchin web stats and started comparing these odd Referral urls below to the time entries of the recent spamming comments. Here are but a few of the DNS names that are spamming the comments:

3.	party-poker-i.blogspot.com/	43	0.87%
4.	online-poker-the.blogspot.com/	41	0.83%
5.	poker-a.blogspot.com/	35	0.71%
6.	casino-there.blogspot.com/	32	0.65%

8.	online-poker-those.blogspot.com/	26	0.53%
9.	online-poker-that.blogspot.com/	25	0.51%
10.	online-casinos-i.blogspot.com/	22	0.44%

11.	online-casino-i.blogspot.com/	22	0.44%
12.	casino-this.blogspot.com/	21	0.42%

14.	online-casino-the.blogspot.com/	19	0.38%
15.	online-casinos-there.blogspot.com/	18	0.36%

17.	poker-this.blogspot.com/	18	0.36%

19.	online-casinos-that.blogspot.com/	16	0.32%
20.	poker-the.blogspot.com/	16	0.32%

And this was just over the last 48 hours.

As you can see, blogspot is using Google resources (Google's own DNS servers) to generate these valid DNS names/servers to almost legit the spam to you. One thing I noticed is they all point to the same IP address, that is hitting my server.

I dug a little deeper and it doesn't seem they have any MX, TXT or PTR records (much less SPF) for any of these domains, or even blogspot.com. Just the parent domain of blogger.com:

Server: ns1.google.com
Address: 216.239.32.10
blogger.com     MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.blogger.com
blogger.com     nameserver = ns1.google.com
blogger.com     nameserver = ns2.google.com
blogger.com     nameserver = ns3.google.com
blogger.com     nameserver = ns4.google.com
mail.blogger.com        internet address = 66.102.15.85
ns1.google.com internet address = 216.239.32.10
ns2.google.com internet address = 216.239.34.10
ns3.google.com internet address = 216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com internet address = 216.239.38.10

So today, I blocked their IPs from being able to access my server at all. I even blocked their parent company (blogger.com) as it was just one IP address lower from the same thing.

Here are the IP addresses I blocked and I highly suggest you do the same:

66.102.15.100 (blogger.com - parent company web address)
66.102.15.101 (where all of my spam comments are sourced from)

I will start investigating my Junk Mail now to see if any of the Poker-related junk is from the mail records above. If so, I may start to block those IPs as well.

Here is the Whois record for BlogSpot, owned and operated by Google, Inc:

Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-345046)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA
94043
US

    Domain Name: blogspot.com

Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

    Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA
94043
US
dns-admin@google.com
+1.6502530000
Fax- +1.6506188571
    Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA
94043
US
dns-admin@google.com
+1.6502530000
Fax- +1.6506188571

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.GOOGLE.COM
NS2.GOOGLE.COM
NS3.GOOGLE.COM
NS4.GOOGLE.COM

I hate spammers. And now Google allows it?

So who do we yell at? Who would be the authority on this? Who do we report this to?

This is the same as if President Bush decided that Homeland Security is our safest bet for inter-department communications, but then allows oil companies to spam you by allowing the oil companies access to all of Homeland Security resources to use for the task.

Am I the only one saying, "What the ****?"

Perhaps Mr Anti-Google was right in creating Google-Watch.org. Maybe someone does need to take a good hard look at Google and what they are doing.

For now, let's give Google Inc. the benefit of the doubt and say they re-sold some resources (such as DNS Server usage) to some 3rd party. And it's that 3rd party that is responsible for the spamming. I'll attempt to contact Google via the registry info above to see if that is the case.

XBOX 360's start to blog, by themselves!

Eric A. Duncan — Sun, 07 May 2006 01:56:00 GMT

Reading Christoc's blog, I found out about that Xbox 360s are starting to come alive all by themselves and start blogging.

This is Chris' Xbox crying out for help - http://www.360voice.com/blog.asp?tag=christoc

I'm going to setup our company Xboxes to do this at Telligent. Should make for a nice treat.

I am not an Aggressive Driver

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 15:58:00 GMT

17.8 MPG vs 24.1 MPG. Read on...

I am not an aggressive driver.

I can not count the number of driving schools I've been to that got me out of a speeding ticket. I know I had 7 in Davidson Co. in Nashville alone, and I only lived there 6 years. Not to mention the countless counties I have received driving citations in across the country, and have driven back only to go to court and plea for driving school - which I get 19/20 times it seems.

I always learn something new with these schools too. I don't just sit back and wing it. I actually do read, as I learn some new habit all the time. Recently, it was the new way the government wants you to place your hands. No longer at 10 and 2, but at 8 and 4. This lowers the chances of you breaking your arms in an airbag going off, where at 10 and 2, you have a high chance of injury to your arms in rollovers and side impact collisions with your left arm being strung out the window.

I find myself quite proud to have an extremely thick "Driving Citations" folder in my filing cabinet at home, of which I always went to court and plead. Didn't matter if it was in KY, GA, or even a bonsai run all the way to Florida for court, sign the driving school plea, and drive back to TN at the time.

Why? My driving record has been clean for almost 8 years now and when you start to total up how much each one of those tickets would have cost me in my "Good Driver" discount at my insurance, not to mention running the risk of getting my license suspended, it makes sense of why I did that.

I am not an aggressive driver.

I cruise along the Dallas North Tollway at around 75 to 85 MPH - speed limit 55mph. Travel distance is about 34 miles on the Tollway every day to and from work. Mostly try to stay in the center, but people just don't get over.

Do I tailgate? Very seldom, if not at all. Within these driving school courses I read and answer the side-bar quizzes like "Are you an aggressive driver?" - I answer no to tailgating often.

There's also a question like, "Do you have to pass every car on the road?" I try to answer seldom, but I think back to my college days of where I was proud to count each car I pass, and how many passed me from my weekly commutes from Chattanooga to Nashville. I think the record was 180 something cars I passed - 1 passed me. The Nashville to Atlanta sprints are even more horrendous at 300+ cars passed, if I could keep count with booking at 130+ MPH quite often. Zero cars passing me.

When moving to Dallas, TX I slowed down a bit. Cruising at 80 MPH or so. If a car comes up behind me with plenty of warning, sure I'll move over and let ya pass. If a car comes out of no where and tailgates my ass, I won't slow down or speed up. I'll just wait until I have room to get over, and will then move over.

I follow the Good Driver rules such as scanning your mirrors ever 10 seconds (especially the rearview) and be absolutely mindful of your entire surroundings, knowing where each car is in each lane next to you within 20'. This is just good driving habits and has saved me from countless near-collisions from someone being a jerk or an ass. Nothing should be taking you from concentrating on this, and it's what I do every second in the car. Cell phones? I hate my friends talking to me while driving. I do it with an ear piece, but I hate it when I do and usually try to pull over.

I am not an aggressive driver.

Road Rage. Who here hasn't had Road Rage? Me? Only once ever in my life, and I still don't know how I pissed off that guy. I had cruise on at 65mph into 55, in the right lane, was passing an 18 wheeler on the right and this guy drove through the right-emergency lane and threw a beer bottle into my convertible - an open beer bottle! Hitting my friend in the head, and spilling beer all over me. Short outcome, I let it go after 10 minutes of rage. Punk. I was 21 then.

All other times drivers have gotten pissed at me for going a bit too fast? Never. I find it actually humorous that they can't control their rage. I'll play the traffic smart, inching over one lane, passing a car slowly. And trapping them in traffic - which makes them even more mad. I've had a few yell at me and threaten me. I give them the "Hello. Have a nice day." smile and look, and exit the next ramp, to where they can't follow. Next.

I am not an aggressive driver.

I could keep going on about my habits, but I do consider myself a fairly safe driver - to others. If I am driving at 95mph, it is with no other vehicles around me. If I come up onto a car in the right lane, I slow to 80 or so, so not to scare them too much.

I know about being courteous, and try to as often as I can. Finding myself giving the right-away to far too many jerks here in Dallas. But yet, I just sit back and ease back up to 80 or so on the Tollway. I'll let them get the ticket.

I've noticed Dallas drivers have a bad habit of what I like to call Pacing Syndrome. Doesn't bother me, but it pisses the guy off that's tailing-gating me because he can not get ahead. What is Pacing Syndrome? It's when two cars are pacing each other, in two different lanes, blocking others from passing. This is not intentional as it's usually this way far up the road ahead, with two cars all by themselves within a car length of each other. The one on the left just isn't aware enough of their surroundings at all. Nor are they aware that it's courteous to move over to the right, where you won't loose any speed, and pace the car in front of you. Instead, they are side by side. Sometimes even 3 wide.

This becomes an issue with I'm cruising at 80 MPH, and slow smoothly down to 60 or so to where they are pacing - now I have a number of cars behind me beeping and flashing their lights. What am I suppose to do? I get over (I usually do!), and bam - now they move up to tailgate the car in the left lane - which sometimes pisses off the left-lane guy even more. And I've seen Road Rage ensure from this here in Dallas.

Just be mindful of your surroundings, and please move over!

I am not an aggressive driver.

There's another driving school lesson that I learned a long time ago, and 99% of people on the road need to learn. Road Rage is not only getting mad, but it's causing the others to get mad as well. Even though I found it funny when they got mad, I was myself entising even more rage from them.

A common example of this are the pricks that speed up to block someone from getting over. That, you all have to agree, is the single worse habit a driver could have. How many times have you been stuck by someone goofball speeding up, closing their gap for the car in front of you, to block you from getting over?

Now I am not talking those small 2-car length areas they close quickly. I'm talking to where you have your blinker on, in hopes they see you and let you over. Instead, they speed up. Entising Road Rage I'll admit, I usually just move on over anyhow. I need a new paint job of them rear-ending me if they do - but they will not.

Me? I never close the gap. Even if it's a *** darting in and out of traffic. "Why not?" you ask? Because it is not worth it. Now if they do slip in one of those small 2 car-length spaces I've left open (traffic), I do retaliate a bit. Oops. I keep the exact same distance they got when they squeezed in. I rationalize this by thinking, "Ok, if you think you had enough room to squeeze in, 6' from my bumper - I'll leave you 6' of room until you move back over up the road somewhere."

Yes, that's tailgating. But they thought they had enough room when then squeezed in right? So I leave them what they thought was adiquate.

I am not an aggressive driver.

Finally, two Mondays ago after hearing all about gas prices increasing I start to wonder if I should slow down - drive like Granny in the hot rod Lincoln. I go to fill up and, WTF, $55? I look on the ground for a hole for gas to be leaking, but realize that Premium was $3.29.

I shake my head and decide then, to pull the chip and drive like granny last week.

Best gas mileage I got in the hot rod Lincoln driving like I was before was around 17.8 MPG. I never could break 18 MPG.

This morning I filled up today, and noticed I've gone for well over a week without filling - a first here in Dallas.

How about 24.1 MPG? Now this did not come easy. I have been driving like Granny with an Instant MPG digital readout on the dash. And let me tell you, it's very hard to drive to where that sucker says 20 MPG or higher at all times. VERY hard.

Try keeping your speed at 55 to 60 MPH on the Tollway, with all of the dips and going up the dips? Not possible. Try accelerating from a red light. I have to keep the RPMs under 1500 RPMs. Not easy to do in a hot rod Lincoln that loves hole-shots with the 3000 Stall, HiPo transmission, and custom tune. And God forbid that a light that is red and I'm slowing down for turns green - the Instant MPG drops to 5 MPG. Doh!

The moral of this post? To where I thought I wasn't an aggressive driver, after all of the schools, tickets, citations, running from the cops (oops, didn't mean that), peeling out, barking 2nd gear, smoking 4th in the Cobra, etc over the last decade... Nothing was as much clear to me to when I found out about the gas I have been wasting over the years.

Damn. I actually was an aggressive driver. But not any more. :)

Clerks 2 - Coming soon!

Eric A. Duncan — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 02:01:00 GMT

First I've heard of it. Read it on Christoc's blog.

Note that it isn't work-safe. ;)

http://www.clerks2film.com/trailer/large.html

So I wonder waht Jay and Silent Bob have been up since they finished out the last set of the series.

Battling Laptop Theft

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:06:00 GMT

My friend Todd Major sent me this cute video.

http://news.com.com/1606-2-6060109.html

No, can't do video blogging of it here because it is flash. So you'll have to click on it there.

Now all you need is a LoJack.

Apple opens new store in NYC

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 15:17:00 GMT

This cube-shaped building under construction is the top floor entrance of what is rumored to be a 25,000-square-foot, 24-7 Apple Computer store. The building is located on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th streets in Midtown Manhattan. This photo was taken Friday. The store is expected to open at the end of May, according to blog reports.

Credit: Corinne Schulze, CNET

Easter Bunny was Apprehended Today

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 15:02:00 GMT

The Easter Bunny was found running a muck today, suspected intoxicated from his long day yesterday of defacing eggs with bright colors, later planting the eggs in hidden cubby holes, and giving candy baskets to underage kids and tots.

The world is a safer place today.

Death to Free Speech: Prophet Mohamed removed from South Park

Eric A. Duncan — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:17:00 GMT

Comedy Central joins an ever growing list of TV and Newspapers censoring the image of the Prophet Mohamed.

Last week South Park started a two-part episode spoofing the Family Guy sitcom (read previous post) titled First Amendment. It was making fun of Fox refusing to show the Prophet. Within the first episode, the SouthPark creators dared Comedy Central to allow SP to allow the Prophet Mohamed to be shown in Episode Two this week. I'm sure there was a lot of talk around the conference rooms there.

In Episode two, aired Wednesday at 10 PM EST, they attempted to show the Prophet. But they cut the footage, saying "Comedy Central has refused to show the Prophet". But yet, they still had the "Voice" on there.

South Park has crossed a number of ethnic and racial lines, but there's always a moral the creators try to convey which seems to get lost by most (of not all) anti-South Park people.

The one for this episode was that if we are forced to use censorship, then the terrorist have won. As where does censorship stop? Free Speech entitles oneself a free voice. Given Comedy Central is FCC monitored, the FCC has not banned the image of Prophet Mohamed. It was Comedy Central itself that refused to show it (scarred?).

Eric Cartman: "If you hate a TV show, all you have to do is to get an episode pulled. Pretty soon the show is compromised and it goes off the air. ...so my plan is to use this whole Mohamed thing as a way to scare the network into pulling tonight's show [of Family Guy].

I'm going to use fear to get them to do what I want."

Bart Simpson's spoofed character: "Isn't that like Terrorism?"

Eric Cartman: "No. It isn't like Terrorism. It IS Terrorism."

We all are given the right to Free Speech by the constitution of the United States of America. Giving-in to Terrorist threatening violence is the same as giving into demands when they kidnap hostages: it lets the terrorist know they can get their way.

Would I censor image from my website if you posted the cartoon in a comment? No. But I myself respect other religions and beliefs: which I know showing the image would be greatly disrespectful. If I wanted to thwart the powers-at-be and go against the “man” to make a crude statement (like I would have in my teens), I would have posted it here.

I have been a big South Park fan since episode one due to their true-to-Earth viewpoints, cunning storylines and willing to say the things we are thinking, on the tube – daring all others. And I will remain a South Park fan.

People I have met that are against South Park tell me what offended them. When talking to these people, out of the 10 seasons (yes, 10!), all of these complaints and boycotts of South Park all have one thing in common: The focus on the graphic, grotesque nature of the cartoons and speech.

If you walk up to me and say, “Eric, I can’t believe you are a South Park fan.” Then I would state the obvious, “You didn't like the movie Fight Club, Secret Window, and other movies with an alternative plot behind the obvious storyline, did you?” South Park on the surface can look highly offensive (to those offended). But there’s always an underlining moral if you look close enough. Over the last two weeks, it was Censorship and how the Prophet Mohamed cartoon issue has taken away our right to Free Speech in America. Or at least, scarred network tv into censorship.

So I say no to censorship. Show the image if you wish. And I will not judge you any differently.

Walmart Savings and Loan

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:50:00 GMT

The FDIC is currently reviewing Walmart's application to get into the Banking business.

The want to, "Save money by getting around the costs of Credit Card processes by creating their own."

They said they don't want to open a Retail, like a Bank of Walmart. They just want to get around all of the transaction fees credit cards charge with going through banks.

Some people testifying in favor of Walmart is the Salvation Army.

More info (and full story) is at NPR

Southpark - Profit Mohamed?

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 04:31:00 GMT

SouthPark is doing a spoof of the Family Guy saying they were censored to show the Profit Mohamed. It's a two part episode daring Comedy Central to allow SouthPark to show the questionable cartoon of the Profit next week in episode 2.

"Or will Comedy Central wuss out?"

Burn!!!

Google Desktop (again)

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:15:00 GMT

It's been a while since I installed this gem. I had it on my previous desktop, but haven't gotten around to installing on my laptop yet.

I've been using the inadequate built-in Find for searching for my emails on the Exchange and remote IMAP and local Personal Folder files.

Yesterday, I got fed up when I couldn't find an email for work. So when I got home late, I installed the Google Desktop, fired up Outlook and connected to the Exchange server, and let the laptop site on all night - Indexing.

I woke up and before hopping into the shower, decided to test my newly installed Google desktop to see if I could find that one email.

Within the first search, the 2nd result was what I was looking for.

I may try MSN Desktop Search next.

01:02:03 04/05/06

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 14:32:00 GMT

Interesting... Happens tonight.

Same thing as the 05/05/05 last year, and all 9 planets in our solar system aligned on that very day. Spooky.

What's even more spooky is this year, there will be a 6/06/06 6:06:06.

Makes you think eh?

IP Addresses you should NOT scan (think Gov)

Eric A. Duncan — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:32:00 GMT

I saw this list on theSpoke. Thanks to Jacky for making the post. Whoa.

(see attachment)

Deemed Too Hot for TV

Eric A. Duncan — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:32:00 GMT

So the commercials were 'ok' this year. The Bud Light ones the best overall for me.

Google posted all of them online to watch, including the ones that the Superbowl Commitee did not allow (*cough* Janet Jackson *cough* *cough* GoDaddy *cough*).

Deemed "Too Hot for TV". Come on!

Enjoy!

Leeroy's Troops get it in the End

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:27:00 GMT

This is funny. Not sure what game it is, but this is funny.

They plan an attack, go in and get... well, watch.

http://www.break.com/articles/leeroy.html

CommunityServer AddOn Modules - Free!

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 14:59:00 GMT

This past weekend, Telligent held a contest with internal developers to see who could generate the best CSModule. There were about 20 submissions - none from me. I was too busy working all weekend. Next time though, I'll win the Gold. :)

http://developer.communityserver.org/default.aspx/CS.FirstCSModuleContent

You can access the files and source code here:

http://communityserver.org/files/40/csmodules/entry511330.aspx

This is also a great example of how easy it is to write your own CSModules by following these examples.

Windows Live Mail

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 13:43:00 GMT

Ok, my first post since I relocated to Dallas. Mom, I promise to get more updates to here soon. Just been swamped with the emergencies from a current client. :)

Anyhoot, Windows Live Mail. So this morning I awoke to have a message in my MSN mailbox asking if I wanted to try Windows Live Mail. So i clicked yes, why not.

Looks like a simplified Outlook 2003 layout. I like it. Following a Google-like approach to removing the big ads, graphics, colors, etc.

Now whenever they decide to start "Threading" the email messages, I'll completely switch to MSN. But until then, I'm addicted to my Google Threading and Aliasing features that I can't live without.

The Aliasing is soo cool...

Why do we pay for Texting?

Eric A. Duncan — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 23:16:00 GMT

SMS, aka "Texting", aka "Text Messaging" on cell phones. Why do we pay for this?

Europeans have been texting for years now, with an extremely lost cost. Hell, even Singapore allows several hundred text messages a month before charging.

I went out and did a little research. To sum up this article, I agree that the U.S. has other advantages such as free phone-to-phone calling such as these Family plans and PCS-to-PCS. They talk about the usage of texting in several counties. The US, very low.

In 2001, Europe got smart and started discouraging cell-to-cell calls by allowing for several hundred text messages a month, free - you didn't even have to ask for it. You got it.

Here in the states, it's considered somewhat in-expensive with text messages ranging from $0.05 to $0.10 each. And many providers, such as Sprint, include a certain amount for free (with the higher end packages such as Vision). A little math will tell you that the $5.00/mo you are paying for 100 text messages comes out to $0.05/mo, you are paying, if you use them or not.

But why do we pay for these?

Let's look at this another way. Voice calls are the cell companies Achilles Heel as such as they must have X number of free lines to carry the bandwidth of these calls, where ever they provide service. Given voice calls are now Digital instead of the old Analog days, so the compression is much higher and clearer.

According to the article above, text messages max out around 140 Bytes. That's Bytes people. The average SprintPCS digital call is 244 Kbps (if I recall from reading on the spec, my memory is old). That's about 30 KiloBytes a second.

Compare 30 KBps vs. 140 bytes for a single text message, that 218 Text messages you can send PER SECOND to match the bandwidth (and effort) of the cell phone companies must use for their Voice lines.

218 Text messages at $0.05 each = $10.90 PER SECOND we are ALL charged to match the same bandwidth we would use with a single Voice line PER SECOND.

That math just doesn't add up. Actually, yes it does. To the Cell Phone companies making a butt-load of mula from us texting.

So why do we pay for 20, 50, or even 100 messages?

Sprint just started offering 500 messages for $8 instead of $5 last month. That's a cost of almost two pennies per message, if you send 500 text messages.

I don't see why we must pay for these. It unloads the cell networks by not utilizing 30 KBps bandwidth, SAVING the cell companies money.

Just my two cents. No, wait. My $0.05 worth. And if we were to total number of bytes from this Blog Post and charge $0.05 per 140 Bytes (160 characters), it's actually my $0.79 cents worth of information to you - for free (cable modem service).