Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.   --Marshall McLuhan Now here's the thing: I'm on Twitter; I like it because I can follow anybody I want, and although there is an awful lot of moronic "noise" (e.g., "I have a hangover and my cat just threw up"), there is also some interesting stuff that lets you find out where others in your particular "groove" are going, what they are working on, what they're thinking about. You can even post a request for help and occasionally somebody that's following you will give you a helpful idea. The problem is, this is just a "teaser" of what it really could be , and it's totally disconnected from all the other "social" apps. It doesn't connect you to ...

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. --  - Bertrand Russell Vista's DEP (Data Execution Prevention) is designed to prevent unauthorized or dangerous code from executing on your system. However, sometimes legitimate programs such as Windows Media Player or even Windows Explorer may trigger DEP actions, whether legitimate or not. One example is when you have files in the Recycle Bin and you attempt to open Recycle Bin and choose "Empty the Recycle Bin". Data Execution Prevention jumps up with that ugly "Windows Explorer has stopped working" dialog.      Here's a fix that works for me: Open Control Panel, and go to  "SYSTEM". On the left side click "Advanced system settings".  Click the "Advanced" tab and under Performance, click Settings.  Now click on the "Data Execution Prevention" tab. Check the "Turn on DEP for all programs...

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. -- Saki Dear Microsoft: Well, you know the drill. Somasegar has this great post promoting VS 2008 SP1 beta, and it almost sounds like it's too good to be true, yes? I figured I'd give it a shot -- all the supposed new features sound so promising... The "Readme" is very detailed , and it outlines a whole bunch of failure scenarios, workarounds, and caveats. Just take a look at this stuff: Important This beta release is for early testing and feedback. As a beta release, we recommend you only install the service pack on test computers. Prior to installation, you should carefully review the included readme file to be aware of any known issues with this release. For example, this service pack has some known compatibility issues with previous releases, including: Expression Blend (all versions) Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 Test computers? Somasegar has this blog ...

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.    -- Friedrich von Schiller I don't know about you, but in our " Things I hate most about Windows Vista " poll, one of the most frequently ticked topics was "Folders that refuse to remember the view settings you've set".  If you set a Details View with "All Items" on a folder and then drop a couple of jpegs in there, Vista tries to "help you" by changing the view. Well, I don't WANT Vista to help me! I don't want Documents, I don't want Pictures and Videos, and I don't like Green Eggs and Ham! (In the forums they are calling it "VisDUH"). Here's a fix from the TechNet forums , converted into a batch file:   setlocal set BASE_KEY=HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell :: Delete cached folder views reg delete "%BASE_KEY%\Bags" /f reg delete "%BASE_KEY%\BagMRU" /f :: Set default folder template reg add...

The United States is in a recession --partly because of global oil prices -- and yet the only thing you hear from the candidates is hot air about things like MPG standards, a gas tax "holiday" and some vague plans about "conservation". Exactly what is it about energy independence from foreign oil that these idiots don't understand?  Energy indepence means one thing only: WE HAVE TO GET OFF OUR ADDICTION TO FOREIGN OIL. Here's the picture, over the last six years:     Look, if you want your country to be independent of foreign oil, then you either have to produce your own, or use alternative fuels. Why is this simple concept so difficult for the McCains, Clintons and Obamas to understand? President Bush understood it, but he's a lame duck who's going out of office soon, so we can't expect much there. 16 years ago, Brazil embarked on a policy of becoming 100% independent from foreign oil, and they've achieved it. Brazil is the world's ...

I started searching for how to do this and found fellow MVP Rick Strahl's post asking if anybody knew how to override Windows File Protection to "permanently" replace Windows Notepad with EditPlus. Like Rick, I've been using EditPlus since 2001. It has so many features (including the ability to view your work in the browser without leaving the product) that I won't even begin to describe them. Some developers like similar products; this post is about how to replace notepad with ANY Notepad replacement on the Windows Vista OS. In order to accomplish this little feat, we need to not only take ownership of the resource, we also need to grant ourselves ACL permissions on the file: 1. Open up an Administrator command prompt 2. Take ownership of the old notepad.exe with:  takeown /f c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe 3. Grant yourself full control with  (replace "<username>" below with your username): cacls c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe /G <use...

"There are times when the best deals are those that aren't done" -- David Garrity  (re:MSFT-->YHOO) I have some pages on my "fun" site, ittyurl.net , that generate and display blog search results and offer a custom RSS feed of same. The url to the page that generates the RSS feed must be dynamic, with a search term on the querystring.  But how can you "turn on" the Feed icon in Internet Explorer so it will show that there is a feed available for the custom results page, and which will correctly point to the generated RSS page? It's pretty simple: First, let's put the <link .. tag into the HEAD of the ASP.NET ASPX page, and mark it runat="server": <head runat="server">     <title>Untitled Page</title>     <link id="rssLink" rel="Alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="" runat="server" /> </head> Next, after we...