Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Right, and Ted Kennedy is my next - door neighbor. Now that the Iraqis have had a real election, fortunes will turn more toward the current domestic agenda item, Social Security reform and private Social Security Investment Accounts. Now, the Progressive - Liberal pundits are using the same scare tactics today with this that they use every time some institution is ready to be changed from the status quo - first, you scare the pants off the average American, who knows very little about economics; next, you make the old people think that it will bankrupt the system and they won't get their check anymore, etc. etc. -- ad nauseum . The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of ways to skin an economic cat, and the people who understand packaging and marketing have the secret. If somebody shoves something down your economic throat, no matter how good it is for you, most people will balk and resist. It's human nature. But if you package it attractively, and take the middle ground, ...

This is the program where you can only get "Stuff" (new add-ons and Windows updates, for example) if your copy of Windows "validates" to be non-pirated. They had this on the download page for the Beta of the Anti-Spyware release (although you could decline to participate and still were allowed to download it). Even when it does become mandatory, supposedly later this year, users with copies of Windows XP that don't validate will just be prevented from downloading updates and other software. Well, my Windows Server 2003, for example, which is a completely legitimate copy of the OS, has NEVER been able to get Windows Update, and I've tried every "Fix" in the book, so how the hell is this new program going to help me? Mine doesn't pass the "Genuine Advantage" test either, even though its a completely legitimate and activated copy of the OS from my MSDN Universal subscription! So theoretically, later this year, Peter Bromberg, who is a M...

"The great thing about standards is that you get to choose a new one each year" -- Tennebaum In my travels through the blogosphere I gather some thoughts to share: If you are a developer, and your blog is on a development-oriented blogging host site, shouldn't you be blogging about development-oriented stuff? I mean, I visit Microsoft weblogs - hosted blogs, and most of them have what I am looking for - technical content about development with Microsoft technology. But some of them don't. Instead, they have lists of MP3 tracks, why your car wouldn't start, your dog had puppies, you "found religion", or whatever other non-development oriented subject. Sure, I suppose its OK to throw in a post or two on off-topic items. But if that's what you really want to do, I think you should start a personal blog somewhere else. I won't be reading it. Not because its no good -- but because that's not the kind of content I'm looking for. Have you no...

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Sometimes you have a situation (heavy duty graphics program or some other memory-hungry task) where you need to really "lean down" your machine to provide every last bit of available memory to your task. Here's an easy way to do that: 1) From a command prompt run: NET START >netstop.txt This will pipe the list of running service names to the text file. 2) Load the netstop.txt file into your favorite text editor and massage it till it looks like this: NET STOP "ASP.NET Admin Service" NET STOP "COM+ Event System" NET STOP "Computer Browser" NET STOP "Cryptographic Services" NET STOP "DefWatch" NET STOP "DHCP Client" NET STOP "DNS Client" NET STOP "Event Log" NET STOP "HTTP SSL" NET STOP "IIS Admin Service" NET STOP "Machine Debug Manager" NET STOP "Network Connections" NET STOP "Network Location Awareness (NLA)" NET STOP "Plug and ...

Yup, we are. The buzz from Redmond indicates clearly a February 2005 time frame for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2, complete with a GO LIVE license! I, for one, have been holding off, but with this new good news, I'm getting ready to put together some really good ASP.NET code with version 2.0 that ties together everything I've learned in the last 4 years with the highly successful eggheadcafe.com , plus everything I"ve learned as an MVP and from studying with the beta. However, I've also learned that I don't have a lock on all the good ideas, and to really make a site "sing" you need more than "one guy" to run it. If you are an intermediate to advanced level ASP.NET developer, and you have some ideas about a really good developer-oriented site and would like to partner, contact me and let's discuss at bbromberg-at-cfl-dot-rr-dot-com. This is the kind of stuff that takes at least two developers to run, and there's plenty of money in it if it's ...

I've always liked Michael Barnett's writing, and the happiness increased when I found out that he was working for Microsoft Research and had authored the marvelous ILMerge Utility . For example, I can combine three different assemblies into the same executable for my IE Favorites Synchronizer utility like so: c:\ILMERGE\ilmerge /target:winexe /out:FavSynchro.exe FavSynch.exe ftp.dll ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll I get FavSynchro.exe, which is 100% self - contained (except for the Runtime). Sweet! Problem is, ILMerge.exe is a console app and It only has a command line interface. Of course, the C# command line compiler, CSC.EXE, does support setting references to .NET Executable assemblies, but that too is a command - line program - yuk! I wanted to build a nice Windows Forms-based utiltiy wrapper with File dialogs and all the stuff you would expect. So, what did I do? I changed the extension on a copy of ILMerge.exe to ".dll" and Presto! Set a reference to it in the ...

If you aren't familiar, this is a very useful tool that can handle lots of different sources, even put the results into SQL Server: Download MS Log Parser

Often when working with streams, in particular when the stream does not support seek operations, we need to be able to transmit the number of bytes in the message as a "header" at the beginning of the message. In this manner, all we need to do is read the first four bytes out of the stream, convert to an integer value, and then it's a snap to read out exactly the correct number of subsequent bytes to get our entire message. Here is a sample class using the methods in the System.BitConverter class, along with a sample MemoryStream and string message, to illustrate how this can be done: using System; using System.IO; namespace BitConverterExample { class Class1 { [STAThread] static void Main( string [] args) { Console.WriteLine( "Int32 Max value: " +System.Int32.MaxValue.ToString()); int test = Int32.MaxValue ; byte [] bytInt= new byte [4]; bytInt= Int32ToBytes(test); int test2 = BytesToInt32(bytInt); Console.WriteLine( ...

How to Remove Spyware from your Computer - and the price looks good! As discussed recently, with Microsoft's acquisition of Giant Software, they have now made available the first BETA which keeps all the original features of the Giant product. Its available here. Even though my machine already has loads of Anti-spware stuff installed and I run it regularly, the new Microsoft product didn't seem to have any problem finding bad stuff that the other guys missed: BTW, the Intelligent Quick Scan found all the bad guys that the Deep Scan found, but is hugely faster. This thing is schedulable and has a number of other attractive options. But - most importantly, it found stuff that other programs could not find. I would have to give this one some high marks, especially since it's marked as a BETA. As Ann Coulter so eloquently put it, "For some people, history began ten minutes ago."

I just read a particularly silly quoted in Search Engine Journal. From a marketing perspective, this is interesting. Let's pick it apart (my comments are in brackets): Blogs Have Overtaken 8 Million Americans, 57% Are Male After being pounded in the blogging stakes by rampant female blogging last year, [What the HELL is "Rampant female blogging?" Were they in heat, or something?(don't sweat it, ladies, I'd have said the same if it was "rampant male blogging")] men have flocked back to the blogosphere in increasing numbers, safe in the knowledge that once more, the Pew Internet and American Life Project would restore what many of us already knew, that 57% of bloggers are male. [ No, I didn't know that 57% were male, I'd thnk it would be far higher. Don't trust their numbers.] Pew is back after taking a pounding with some bizarre results based on a small number of random observations on a couple of free blogging services last year with some fi...