Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Recently I posted about how the Bluetooth connectivity to the new Windows Vista Device Center had been disabled by Microsoft in response to security concerns by corporate customers. That was partially inaccurate. You can connect your SmartPhone to Windows Vista with Bluetooth (assuming of course you have a Bluetooth radio USB dongle on your desktop PC). The process is a bit weird, but hopefully this explanation will help: 1) First you have to enable Bluetooth on your device and make it "Discoverable". 2) On your desktop machine, in Control Panel, in "Bluetooth Devices" you need to add your device. The following pics show a successful add: Now all you need to do is go into the Device Center main screen, click on your device, and it will say "Waiting for device to connect". You may also need to go into the BlueTooth setup on your device and make it connect. A passkey is recommended, and once you fill that in on your device, you should see "Connected...

"At 6:10 a.m., the trapdoor swung open. He seemed to fall a good distance, but he died swiftly. After just a minute, he was not moving. His eyes still were open but he was dead. His body stayed hanging on the rope for another nine minutes as those in attendance broke out in prayer, praising the Prophet, at the death of a dictator." There are surely two schools of belief system about the above: 1) America toppled the Dictator and empowered his people to regain their destiny, and the Iraqi people did what they consider proper justice at their own will. 2) It was the Americans' fault, America has no business in Iraq; It was America that executed Saddam. You will often also find the number 2 people in the cadre of folks who have something in their radical, left-wing psyches that leads them to believe that the U.S. Government was somehow involved in the 9/11 disaster, in some evil conspiratorial way. So, now it's over. Like Hitler, Tojo, Stalin. Good vs Evil. At any rate,...

The Library 3.0 Beta is out at Codeplex.   Also in the Community Extensions , there  are a number of cool add-ons and extensions that users have authored. Even if you do not use the full EntLib in your work, this is really good "best practices" code to study, and I highly recommend it. It's a good way to get into Patterns and building blocks OOP coding. About 2007... 2007 starts with MONDAY and also ends on MONDAY... 2007 Has No PUBLIC HOLIDAYS on SUNDAYS... 2007 has the highest number of SUNDAYS and SATURDAYS... So enjoy the least working year in your life!

(Subtitle: "Reality.sys not found. Universe halted.") I saw a video on OpenId by Simon Williston, and checked out the main site , and I did manage to find an implementation of server and client for ".NET", but - it was ported from something for MONO, there was no source code, and the original was written in BOO for .NET. There seems to be a lot of activity around OpenId, one could possibly make the case that this represents what Microsoft hoped to do with Passport (oh, wait, I think it's "LiveID" now), or at least what everybody else hoped to do with it. The concept is pretty simple, you get a URI that exclusively identifies you and is difficult to spoof, and it allows you to do single sign-on (or at least use the same credentials mechanism) at multiple sites. I have no particular problem with BOO, I could use SharpDevelop, which supports it, but my real question is why isn't this authored in an industry - standard certified CLI language such as C#...

If you live within an hour or so of the Kennedy Space Center, this unmistakeable loud double-boom will really wake you up. I think geeks who live in Central Florida are just so much more tuned in to NASA, space exploration, and what technology is all about. I completely forgot about the Shuttle trip - I've been so engrossed in my work. But that unmistakeable sound blast woke me, and within a half a second, I knew that they were coming home. Flipped on the TV and watched a perfect landing, and also noted that my stress level, even though perhaps subliminal, just went down a notch for not having to worry about the space program - at least for now. Think about it. We are sending people up into space to do science and follow our human destiny, and meanwhile back here on earth, brother is killing brother in a mindless universe of hatred. If this doesn't represent the two most polarized opposites of the human species, I don't know what does.

My latest creation, IttyUrl.net , takes the "Short Url" concept farther, and is oriented toward developers. 1) Turns long Urls into "Ittified" short Urls just like the dozens of similar sites do. 2) Automatically spiders the target page, returning the url type (Feed or Page), Title, and up to 200 TAGWORDS on the page, along with any custom tagwords you provide, and indexes all. 3) Easy "bookmarklet" you can drag to the Toolbar or add to Favorites enables you to "Ittify" any page while viewing it. 4) RSS Feeds of your IttyUrls, or most recent site-wide IttyUrls. 5) Search by tags or Title keywords. 6) Tag Cloud feature. 7) Complete WebService API 8) Neat little script you can put on any page of your blog or web site (neutered here, remove the + signs): Everything on the site is free! Comments, suggestions and criticism are welcome! Try it! http://www.ittyurl.net

I let the most recent windows updates install on Server 2003 x64 this morning, and the first thing I noticed on reboot was that familiar but despised messagebox, "One or more services failed to start, have a looky at the Event Viewer, etc.". Now, I can't be sure if it was the update, I'm just mentioning this in case other poor souls want to corroborate, in addition to the fact that I know of at least one other situation where this may have occurred. At any rate, the IIS Admin service would not start. A bit of investigation revealed that the IIS Metabase, "Metabase.xml", which resides in %windows%\system32\inetsrv\, was corrupted. If you have enabled backups on your IIS metabase, there are three ways to restore a previous backup. You can do it from IIS Admin snapin (the preferred method). However, if (as in this case) the Admin Service won't start, you are pretty much S.O.L. on that one. Another way is to do a restore of your backed - up System State, but...

The <machineKey> element in the Web.config file is used to control tamper-proofing and encryption of ViewState, forms authentication tickets, and role cookies. ViewState is signed and tamper-proof by default. You can request encryption for pages that contain sensitive items in their ViewState by using the ViewStateEncryptionMode attribute. Forms authentication and role cookies are also signed and encrypted by default. You do not need to modify the default settings under normal usage scenarios, except for a few situations that developers should be aware of: If your application is in a Web farm or if you need to share authentication tickets across applications, you need to manually generate encryption and hashing keys and specify them in the <machineKey> element, and NOT use the "autogenerate" default. If you migrate an application from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0 and use Hashed passwords, the key material used to generate your hashes WILL CHANGE. Again, the ...

(-- or "How I Learned to be a Complete Idiot and Send Out Spam Via the 'Me Too' Effect...") "A man does not exist until he is drunk." -- Ernest Hemingway From the ReallyReallyDumb Department: This one "takes the cake" for absolute stupidity! I wouldn't even know about this except for the fact that I once started work on a book for this publisher, which deal I eventually got out of, but they've never taken my email address off their "Authors" list. This afternoon about 2 PM, I get about 20 emails from the "contacts@....." address of this publisher, who shall remain unnamed, (you probably know who they are anyway). Apparently, some complete idiot set up this address to relay any mail sent to it to every author in the list (or maybe they didn't even know, which in my book still qualifies for "idiot" status), and then they decided to "Test it" - even asking other people to "Send it an email ev...

I finished up my Multisearch Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget, which allows you to choose from multiple search providers and get your RSS Search results in your Sidebar gadget, and I chose the Google Blog Search provider and searched on ASP.NET and came up with this post on Digg.com (target of post): http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/why-not-dot-net where this fellow basically trashes ASP.NET in favor of PHP. Most of his reasoning in favor of PHP is really just personal preference, the reasons given are mostly inaccurate or biased because of lack of knowledge about ASP.NET and the .NET platform. There was one comment on the Digg posting, however, that I found revealing: "You should check out Phalanger. http://www.codeplex.com/Phalanger It integrates PHP with ASP.NET, pre-compiling your PHP into MSIL, the same way eAccelerator and others pre-compile scripts. The difference is, it's done by ASP.NET, and your scripts run on IIS6. With your scripts running on ASP.NET, they...

The fiasco around System.DbNull and "null" and Databases kind of reminds me of the "Hanes Lady" commercial where she is pulling the elastic of the briefs (Now that one was Marketing 101 exemplified -- how many TV ads do you really remember like that one?). The typical forum or newsgroup post goes: "When I insert a blank value into a SQL Server database for a DateTime column, my database is inserting 1/1/1900 even if I assign Null to the variable in my application." When you are inserting data into a database, the ADO.NET data providers and your database may distinguish between a null object and an uninitialized value on a spcific data type. In this case, inserting a null into a DateTime column causes the database to seed the field with the default initialized value - 1/1/1900. What you really want is to tell the database that the field in question should remain uninitialized. To do that there is a System.DBNull class and you use the Value property of the c...

This past weekend I finished putting together my "programmers" version of the Myers-Briggs MPTI test for online consumption. Actually, the "Real" MPTI can only be administered by a licensed practitioner and it's trademarked. However, over the years, Keirsey and a number of others have refined their own well-researched versions of this test, and those are not trademarked. Consequently, with a little study, and common sense on figuring out how the test is actually scored, it is possible to put together a highly accurate version of the MPTI. So I posted this, along with a nice chart that links to the Wikipedia page for each of the 16 personality types, as well as 16 details pages with data accumulated from a number of sources, over on eggheadcafe.com on Sunday afternoon . I also submitted it to Digg , mostly because I had a "hunch" that it would fit pretty well with the Digg geek herd mentality. Well! Within 5 minutes, it already had 10 Diggs, and as of ...

Microsoft's Office OpenXML has been approved as an Ecma standard and will now also be submitted for consideration as an ISO international standard. Ecma International announced the approval of the new standard on Dec. 6 following a meeting of its general assembly. Ecma will also begin the fast track process for adoption of the Office OpenXML formats as an ISO international standard in January 2007. The technical committee, which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor,Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the U.S. Library of Congress, also boasts the membership of Intel, which recently joined. Naturally, criticism of the new OpenXML standard was quick, particularly from those who support the competing OpenDocument Format, which has already been approved as an ISO standard. For example: Bob Sutor, the vice president of Open Source and Standards at IBM, said in a blog posting that IBM "voted no today in ECMA on approv...

Er, "yippee" --the IRS is going to return money collected from our phone bills that was supposed to to pay for the Spanish-American War. The Federal Excise Tax, which was enacted in 1898, amounts to about $3 per month for the average say, $100 / month phone bill. Heavy phone users might pay $100 or more per year. Yep, this was actually to pay for the Spanish-American War, and we've all been paying for "it" since 1898. Fortunately, once this ludicrous tax started getting some legs in the press, no one could really defend it and the tax has indeed finally come to an end. We're even being offered refunds: You are to claim the refund on the 2006 tax form that you file in 2007. You can opt for a standard refund of $30 (if you have one exemption), $40 (if you have two), $50 (if you have three) or $60 (if you have more). This option requires no documentation from you. If you have (or want to go through the trouble of procuring) your telephone bill statements from ...

There is a page on MSDN that details and has links to: Visual Studio on Windows Vista FAQ Visual Studio on Windows Vista Issue List - normal permissions Visual Studio on Windows Vista Issue List - Elevated Permissions Visual Studio.Net 2003 on Windows Vista Also, you can use the Visual Studio and .NET Framework bug reporting site both to submit issues, and to look for issues already submitted, some of which may have fixes or workarounds. PC World has a "Windows Vista FAQ" they call the "Ultimate Guide". Its a bit more consumer-ish, but worth a look. And, "Windows Vista Security News" has some worthwhile stuff to look at. In Other News... Victoria's Secret, in an unusual environmentally sensitive move, announced they will be cutting down on the amount of paper used in their racy catalogs. They did not specify how this would be accomplished. Hmmm... skinnier models, maybe?

Domain names are - well, important as the lingua franca of the internet, so a quick review of some selected top level domains may be appropriate. The domain you choose has more ramifications than just search engine performance. The problem with strange TLDs is that: They can confuse visitors They are almost always more difficult to remember than .com, unless they spell something or sound like a word or phrase. They can have a tendency make your orgainzation or site appear less reputable than you actually are. Here are some choices, and my comments: .com The ubiquitous, "everything bagel", .com is the TLD you want. Assuming, of course, the one you want isn't already taken! Some of the hardest .com domains to find are "short" ones. Try to find a .com domain like "whiz". You can't. Even the .net versions are already taken! .net / .org Theese two other non-country specific TLDs are good second choices, if you can get one. But, they lack the familia...

One of the so-called "nice" new features of Windows Vista is the "rebuilt" defrag engine. Problem is, I don't like it. Why? I like to SEE what's being defragged, and I like to SEE a visual representation of what my filesystem looks like. The main reason for this is that I can choose different defrag methods (such as with O&O Defrag) and get better file ordering. Also, when I get to see what's happening, it helps me to identify files I know I don't need and I can delete them, and do a follow-up defrag. Unfortunately, O&O doesn't have anything out for Vista yet (yes I know you can Orca the MSI, but I ain't doing that!). Diskeeper isn't ready for Vista either. Frankly, I don't know what these people have been doing all this time. They knew Windows Vista was coming out, the defrag API has been readily available to them to get their products ready. What, were they waiting for Godot ? At any rate, Raxco, which makes PerfectDisk, has...

There was a post on one of the groups recently by a developer who was making a number of WebRequests for various pages, claiming that one of them would strangely fail. Yet, this individual stated that if he would paste the respective URL into his browser, that page would come up just fine. There are several things that could come into play here with various sites: 1) Many sites will reject a request that doesn't match a particular one or more User Agent strings ( Here are some samples , if your memory is rusty). So you can add the UserAgent header to the WebRequest. I've even seen some wise-asses who detect Internet Exploder and give you a nasty message about how immoral you are and you should go download Firefox to become a real person and how dare you try to view my site with ..etc... (Listen, Pal: I already figured out you are a Webtard, so I'm not going to bother to fire up my copy of Firefox to see your page, which I already know is worthless. Besides, your little shen...

"Linux sucks twice as fast and 10 times more reliably, and since you have the source, it's your fault." -- from Google Codebase Search I have Vista Ultimate running on two PC's now, my notebook, and my "Main machine" where it resides on one hard drive, dual booting with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition on the other drive. I'm getting to like Vista so much that I've even changed the Outlook default .Pst file to the one from the x64 OS so that I'll have the same Outlook data whether I boot into Vista or Windows Server. At this point, I have everything pretty much set up the way I want, and I've gotten past a few of Vista's quirks with security and such to the point where I feel happy with the OS. There are some plus items I've noticed about Vista, and also a few minuses: Plus: 1) It boots FAST. Much faster than Windows Server. 2) You can put it to Sleep (like "Hibernate"). Your Computer's power light g...

Usually around major holidays I become a bit more reflective and I "Reflected" recently on my kinda / sorta "evolution as a programmer". I started programming seriously on an Apple IIe (and a bit on Commodore 64's) - at the time I was a broker with Merrill Lynch in Orlando, and I was fascinated by the Technical Analysis Department up in New York. These guys, like Bob Farrell and Phil Rettew, who've become legendary, would post their daily market calculations on the Quotron screens (for those who aren't old enough to know, the Quotron system was a hard-wired network with small monitors and keyboards for the brokers. The monitor had a screen with one glorious color - "puke green"). I started out copying down the TRIN, put/call and other indicators onto graph paper with colored pencils. It was fascinating (so fascinating that I eventually left the business when I realized I was more interested in technical analysis than sales!). While other brok...

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all announced that they’ve agreed to set a standard for sitemaps. DiggSpeak Translation: "Amazing! Top Ten Reasons to use Sitemaps" Sitemaps are those XML files that list all the pages on your Web site. Search engines like to have all the listings in one place so that a site can be indexed without anything being missed. The protocol has now been released under Creative Commons, so any search engine can pick up on it if they like. Most webmasters / developers and web site owners use sitemaps, and there is plenty of sample code to generate these dynamically. We use sitemaps on our Eggheadcafe.com site, and I believe they result in much better indexing. Plus, you can specify how often the bots should crawl, and what the priority is of each item. For more complex sites, you can have a SiteMapIndex file in your website root, which has entries that point to any number of other individual sitemap files. So for example, you might have a messageboard...

Vista RTM is out for MSDN subscribers, so I figured it would be as good a time as any this morning to install it on my second drive (the one where I had an x64 version of Windows XP that I hardly ever use.) So I booted off the DVD and asked Vista to install itself "new" (not an upgrade) on this drive. I've already had some experience with this in the betas and I figured it would be cleared up by RTM, but no joy. About 85% through the expanding files phase you get a dialog that says "Windows could not update the computer's boot configuration." and that's the end of that. Now there have been a number of so-called "Fixes" for this that involve a missing registry key, that go something like the following: "This bug happens when partition manager is missing as upper filter for disk. The following steps will fix this: 1. Open HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E 967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} using regedit. 2. Confirm that Upper...

"We need to stop problems when they are small" -- Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the Iranian nuclear effort I thought it would be interesting to post some stats from google analytics on current browser usage. This info comes from our eggheadcafe.com site, which tends to attract a larger percentage of Microsoft devotees, so your mileage may vary. First, a chart of major browser usage: As can be seen above, Internet Explorer holds 74.06% of our visitor market, with Firefox at 23.05%. The version breakdown: IE 6.0 - 76.84% IE 7.0 - 22.68% Firefox 2.0 - 46% Firefox 1.508 - 31.65% Firefox 1.507 - 13% According to OneStat, the November 6 statistics: The most popular browsers on the web are: November 2006 1. Microsoft IE 85.24% 2. Mozilla Firefox 12.15% 3. Apple Safari 1.61% 4. Opera 0.69% 5. Netscape 0.11% One of the things that irks me is that your typical Penguinista Anti-Microsoft Firefart afficionados are always pointing out that IE is full of security holes...

Like myself, many developers found migrating Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to the new Web site model in Visual Studio 2005 impractical, especially because precompiling (publishing) a Visual Studio 2005 Web site creates multiple assemblies. Lots of other complaints surfaced; they are too numerous to mention, but the good news is that "Mr. ASP.NET" (Scott Guthrie) and his team responded with the new Web Application Project add-in and it's vastly improved, even over the original VS.NET 2003 model. This was all in response to developer feedback (or screams of bloody murder, if you prefer) and the final came out about May of this year, just months after the initial release of Visual Studio 2005. However, I see from forum and newsgroup posts that a significant number of developers have obviously either not yet found the Web Application Project add-in, or they aren't yet convinced of its benefits. The new Web Application Project model is uniquely suitable when: You n...

If you have worked with Microsoft products to any degree (I have, I was actually a beta tester for Microsoft's BASIC COMPILER back in 1985 - before some current script kiddies were even born) - then you know that Microsoft (and, to be fair, many other vendors) has developed a finely - honed penchant for buzzwords and name-changing. A big ingredient of this seems to be the year (hopefully) that the software was introduced. I think "Windows 95" was the first one, but I could be mistaken. Followed of course, by Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Office 97, Office 2000, Office 2003, and now - (gasp!) - Office 2007. Frankly, with all the issues in the last few years, I wish they'd just learn to drop the year off the names and come out with it WHEN IT'S READY. I speak with great trepidation, since the RTM is downloading from my MSDN Subscription as I write this. It's taken a long time to get used to some of the nice features of say, Excel 2003 - features...

How many times have you heard this one? Or it might have been stated "It works in my Browser". It doesn't matter. Wannabe Code Monkeys do this all the time. When you are developing code on your machine, you have certain settings and an environment that may have certain attributes or settings that will not always be the same in the target environment - the user's machine, or a webserver. One of the newest offenses is where developers create web sites using the WebSite project model in Visual Studio 2005, using the built-in Development Web Server. There are minor inconsistencies in behavior between this ASP.NET webserver and the real IIS. In fact, if you develop on IIS in Windows XP, I bet you use an IIS application ( a VRoot that is below the actual root of the site - since Windows XP IIS only offers "one" web site), even though you are developing a full site that will usually be at the web root of an IP address on the target production server. Again, the b...

I love the concept of open source software. I've contributed to it, I use it, everybody is getting hip to it, even big folks like Microsoft, IBM, Novell, are helping. But the one thing that gets my goat is those licenses. Good God! For something that's supposed to be free, have you ever seen so much legalese in your life? Not only that, but it seems every Joe Developer and his brother have to come up with a new one - "Common" this, GPL that. Here's my take: The CPL (Cool Public License): Cool Public License This software is yours. Do whatever you want with it, call it whatever you want, use it anyway you want. I/we have no blame for anything that happens, and you can't sue me/us. Thanks you, and G'Bye! Now, isn't that refreshing?

This probably should come under the Third Base: "I dunno" category. Recently I've been playing with various kinds of content "generators" and Wikipedia came into the crosshairs. Wikipedia has a policy that you can reproduce their content, and a substantial portion of their content is actually very very good and well-researched. There are over 130 listed sites that reproduce Wikipedia content in one form or another, some giving proper attribution, and many not even bothering. Answers.com is one of the biggest, and they do a nice job of it. The problem is, if you do a Wikipedia title search and get the results back as xml (which they offer) it has a content node filled with that God-awful Mediawiki markup. At that point you have to find a way to convert it to displayable HTML, or it's not going to look very pretty. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has written a "Wiki2HTML" parser in C#. So, in keeping with my smart developer philosophy of "do...

One *Extremely* common newsgroup and forum post I've seen recently revolves around "double compilation" of stuff that was left in the APP_CODE folder when a project is migrated from WebSite mode to Web Application Project. For starters, I'll quote directly from "Mr. ASP.NET" Scott Guthrie's blog tutorial: "VERY, VERY IMPORTANT: Because ASP.NET 2.0 tries to dynamically compile any classes it finds under the /App_Code directory of an application at runtime, you explictly *DO NOT* want to store classes that you compile as part of your VS 2005 Web Application Project under an "app_code" folder. If you do this, then the class will get compiled twice -- once as part of the VS 2005 Web Application Project assembly, and then again at runtime by ASP.NET. The result will most likely be a "could not load type" runtime exception -- caused because you have duplicate type names in your application. Instead, you should store your class files in...