Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?   - Steven Wright This is kind of an interesting little exercise that came from our eggheadcafe.com forums and I thought I’d write it up for posterity: User has some sort of logging program (not a service) that depends on SQL Server being up and running in order to do it’s work. Problem is, the little proggie is starting to work before the SQL Server service does on bootup. So the user is asking how you can delay the start of the proggie. Being my helpful self, I advised him to write a .NET console app, have the app sleep the main thread for the specified time, and then use Process.Start to execute the real program. User responds that he doesn’t know what Sleep means; if only there was a way to do this with a batch file. Well, not to be daunted, I went out and did a bit of research. Turns out that there isn’t any native DOS command to “sleep” a batch file. The only way you could do it is to use something from one of the Window...

"Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy!" -- Andy Devine Recently I started playing with some ideas on using RPC Ping endpoints to help promote one of my websites, ittyUrl.net . For those who aren't familiar, it is customary to ping RPC servers with the title and url of a new blog post. Most Blog hosting software already has this built in. But - it also works for websites with articles, forum posts, or that display custom search results, like mine does. The idea is that these RPC servers will be prompted to go out and request your post and they'll index it, and many sites (some not so noble) will pick up the links and essentially you have gotten yourself some free backlinks (of course, backlinks with a low or no PageRank can actually do you harm from an SEO perf standpoint, but that's a separate issue). One example site that more or less picks up everything for you is weblogs.com . They have a "rolling" display of all the ping updates they've gotten, and ...