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...