Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution." -Bertrand Russell. I try to be patient, really I do. But the "poor little me" pattern just keeps coming up in all these newsgroup posts and forum messages. Let me explain; basically it works like this: 1) Post to a forum or newsgroup. Typical Subject, "Need help, SelectedIndexChanged Event of a combo box". 2) User posts some sample code. First thing you see is that they haven't a clue whats going wrong or where it may be happening. It doesn't look like they've even tried. (Sometimes they don't even post any sample code; they expect you to be telepathic - I just reply asking them for Jon Skeet's quintessential "Short But Complete" code sample.). I'm a big fan of fellow MVP Skeet's work, he is pedantic to a fault, but that serves a valuable purpose for clarity, and I commend him for it. 3) User usually says something l...

This is a particularly nasty mass-mailing worm that not only disables certain antivirus and antimalware software (the very software you would need to delete it) but it also does some VERY NASTY masquerading as Windows System files! The text below is from a Brazilian poster on a French BBS - the only guy I found who got it right! I've edited and numbered it to make it easier to read in English. Hello, I live in Brazil and I was having the same problem described above, and I found a solution (I´m sorry for posting in english, I can´t write in French, had to use Babelfish do translate your messages above). This was the sequence of actions I used to get rid of these damn files: 1) Check the processes of Windows Task Manager for .exe files with numbers followed by "exmodula" plus a letter, for example: 46exmodulag.exe As above, this name varies, in my computer I had several different files, some using "exmodulaf" and "exmodulag". End the process. 2) Next, ...

Now that 64-bit OS versions and machines to run them are widely available, developers are seeing that the biggest benefit of using the 64-bit platform is its ability to break through the memory addressability limitations of 32-bit platforms and allow applications to utilize much more memory. This can be particularly important for the performance of servers that potentially serve thousands of concurrent users and manipulate large amounts of data and/or potentially cacheable files on disk. This includes database applications (such as SQL Server), mail servers such as Exchange, terminal-server based Windows applications, and with . NET 2.0 64-bit , middle tier . NET applications that can cache or otherwise need to manipulate large amounts of data in-memory on the middle tier, including ASP.NET Apps. 32-bit computing platforms treat physical memory addresses as 32-bit integers. A byte-addressable 32-bit computer can address 4 gigabytes of RAM directly. It’s possible to put more than 4 giga...

I guess I'm just a sucker for BETA software. At work, I installed the latest "offishul" Interenet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and it seems to work fine. I especially like the RSS stuff and the tabbed browsing. So when I got home last night, I said "OK, they finally have a real 64-bit version so let's have fun". Bad decision! At least on my AMD machine running Windows Server 2003 x64 edition, this puppy is an absolute "NO GO". Just trying to set Toolbar settings and common properties, the windows would freeze up and refuse to close, and I'd have to kill the sucker out of Task Manager. It didn't take me more than about 20 minutes of wasted time to realize I had made a big mistake, and it was "bye - bye, IE 7". I'm not even going to take the time to put in bug reports on something this bad - I got work to do. You know, I understand this is BETA software. But at a minimum, there is a certain presumption of basic functionality before you e...

"Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning." -- George Carlin Mind you, I like Digg. The whole concept makes a lot of sense - let the popularity of a submitted news item determine it's rank on the news site. I've put stuff in there and its gotten Digged. Or should that be, It got Dugg? Anyway, I can Digg it. The site itself has a lot of good features (some of the comments on items are hilarious) but it also represents its own "UnDigging" if you will. The problem is, you have a lot of 20 - something hot -shot script kiddies putting up junk that really isn't newsworthy at all. Here's an example (very recent): GOOGLE EARTH + USB FLASH + GPS = SPY GADGET Artist's family asks Google to take down Thursday's `painted' logo 5 Truths About Code Optimization Boot Faster with Parallel Starting Services picotux - the smallest Linux Computer in the World Why Microsoft could benefit f...

At this writing, Crude at $71-plus is breaking into new all-time high ground, and you can see it reflected at the gas pump. This is only the beginning - as summer approaches, and demand increases, we could see $4.00 gasoline here in the U.S. One little conflict in the Middle East, and it could get a lot worse than that -- literally overnight . So think about these facts as you pull up to the gas pump, getting ready to spend $80 or more to fill up that gas-guzzling, atmosphere-polluting SUV that you just love to drive so much. Your "SUV Habit" does double damage: It sucks up twice as much gasoline as you need to get from point A to point B, putting even more pressure on the demand side of the energy equation. If you car pool and actually have 4 riders in that ugly fat "thing" I could say, "Bully for you" - but 95% of the time all I see in there is you and you alone driving to work in it. It pumps out twice as much emissions, further polluting the atmospher...

If you have an interest in both using and extending the existing ASP.NET 2.0 Provider model as I do, then you'll be pleased to find out that the full source code for the ASP.NET built-in providers has been released in a nice Visual Studio.NET buildable solution here . In addition, Jeff Prosise has some 130 pages of whitepaper info on all this stuff here . Up until now, there was some spotty information on blogs and gotdotnet.com sample submissions, but this is the first time I've seen everything nicely packaged up "under one roof". I particularly enjoyed writing custom SQLite Membership and Role Providers , as well as some current work I'm doing on a searchable Profile Provider (e.g., give me all the members who have X, Y and Z). So this is a welcome addition. This is one part of ASP.NET 2.0 that they got right IMHO. For reference purposes, here is a link to Scott's original blog post : Safe Method Versions Do you ever have some coding issue or requirement t...

Of all the Microsoft Tech Gurus whose blogs and articles I regularly read (and there are dozens at this counting) , David Wang is one of my favorites. David's focus is 100% Internet Information Services. He has a succinct way of describing a scenario and providing a detailed response that is both enlightening and refreshing to read. He provides information. He debunks myths. And - he teaches you a lot about IIS that you absolutely cannot find elsewhere. According to David, MS is planning on doing integration with Visual Studio to provide wizards and code project templates to allow developers to write modules to extend IIS functionality. This includes native code (ISAPI, Global Modules, and Handlers) as well as managed code (Managed Modules and Handlers). He expects this to establish IIS as a legitimate target for developers to enrich web server functionality. And as Wang explains, it gets better. Not only will you get Visual Studio integration to easily start a project and code ...

Have you ever noticed that drug dealers and software developers both refer to their clients as "users".... What do NASCAR and cached DataSets have in common? According to old friend Chris Falter, it's a predilection for race conditions. Or, to use the NASCAR analogy, as the number of cars on the race track increase, the probability of wrecks increases dramatically. And now, the Office Live Debut . . . http://officelive.microsoft.com/ I got an invite so I went on and looked around. Looks pretty interesting. Just snagged a domain name for free and started playing around with the web site designer. This could be useful for small businesses, Developers could use it as a tool to get in the door if Microsoft supports it right. We'll see what happens. The BETA includes: A company domain name» A hosted Web site with 30 MB of storage Five free e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage each Basic Web analysis tools The Basics package is really just a website deal, indistinguishab...

MS just put out Virtual Server 2005 R2 as a free download (right, its free, you don't even need a product key, and it doesn't expire, and hey-- they don't even have that absolutely NASTY "Genuine Windows Some BS" thing on the download page!) So I got a copy -- its only 25MB - about the same size as the .NET platform FX. Then I downloaded MONOPPIX - that's the KNOPPIX Live Linux CS with MONO pre-installed (Won't catch me messin' around with those nasty RPM's d00d). Virtual Server 2005 R2 is very nice. You can boot off an ISO image (as above) on the hard drive, all you have to do is enter it's path. KNOPPIX booted up perfectly the first try, and everything works great. The Viewer will remind you of the VNC Client JAVA viewer - it even runs nicely in IE7. All is fine, except for one thing, and I doubt it has anything to do with Virtual Server - MonoDevelop, their IDE for MONO, comes up with all the text "unreadable" as if the screen r...

In a paper being presented in an American Physiological Society session at Experimental Biology 2006, Lee S. Berk of Loma Linda University, reports that not only is there real science and psychophysiology, but just the anticipation of the "mirthful laughter" involved in watching your favorite funny movie has some very surprising and significant neuroendocrine/hormone effects. You can read the release here. Bottom line is, a good belly-laugh improves your overall health and your immune system. It also reduces stress. At work, I've always been a big proponent of "having at least one good laugh" every day. Seems like good preventative medicine to me. Think about your work environment -- Do your people laugh every day, or is it like boring and miserable, with miserable people? If you aren't happy, you can change it if you want to. If you're having trouble, perhaps this old ASCII quote from a 90's era BBS will help: ...