Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"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...

Back in 1994, Richard Snyder, chairman and CEO of Forgent, said, "Forgent is committed to developing all of its assets and technologies to maximize shareholder value. We believe we will prevail in this litigation, as the '672 Patent is valid, enforceable and infringed." In 2001, Forgent retained Jenkens & Gilchrist, a national law firm, to assist Forgent in protecting its intellectual property from infringement through licensing and, if necessary, litigation, including those claimed in U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 (the '672 Patent). On October 27, 2004 Forgent formally terminated its relationship with Jenkens & Gilchrest and retained Godwin Gruber to advise it in connection with the patent licensing program. Essentially what this company did was to embark on a professional extortion program with it's various patents, attempting to get revenues that way, since nothing else they were doing was making any money for the shareholders. The defendants identified in...