Techie

MSDN Low Bandwidth View

Richard Rousseau — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:00:02 GMT

Jon Galloway posted an article describing a way to view low bandwidth optimized MSDN pages by modifying the URL.

Try it out...

Simply take the URL - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx

And add "(loband)" just before the ".aspx" - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

The "loband" page provides a link near the top you can use to switch back to full fat version.

Also check Jon's site for a bookmarklet he wrote which you can use to switch this functionality on or off at any time.

This option will be very useful when my laptop's cellular connection has a bad signal (like when on the train). I imagine this will also be helpful to all those smart phone browsers out there. Any smart phone owners care to try it out?

Check out his comments section. The Product Unit Manager for MSDN responded with some insight into what they're doing. It sounds like they might change the way the "loband" option is specified. I was wondering why they didn't just make it a query string item, but I'll bet they've already got some serious url rewriting going on.

Subversion Powershell Shortcuts...

Richard Rousseau — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:39:00 GMT

Some quick functions I created to reduce my time at the subversion command line. The trick here is that I couldn't just alias the commands, I needed to create some small functions for each...

function st {Invoke-Expression "svn status"}
function sup {Invoke-Expression "svn update"}
function sci {Invoke-Expression "svn ci"} --I use the %SVN_EDITOR% env var for my checkin message editing
function sin {Invoke-Expression "svn info"}

You could easily modify these to accept parameters...

function srv ([string]$filename){Invoke-Expression "svn revert $filename"}

I imagine I'll want these to be more flexible in the future, but for now they're saving me a lot of typing!

Trackback Madness...

Richard Rousseau — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:08:39 GMT

I want to turn this blog into a respectable place for my technical thoughts. Step 1 of that initiative - Get rid of all the trackback spam.

A "clean" sampling of my trackbacks.

Almost all of my old posts have a few hundred spam trackback links. It's absolutely ridiculous. Dasblog has a referral blacklist feature that I'm looking into. Unfortunately, their documentation is a little out of date. It refers to an older blacklisting feature called "Moveable Type Blacklist". I believe 1.7 was the last version this feature was available (I'm running 1.9).

Some light googling gave me some direction on how to enable and configure it. It's a keyword based filter that will send 404's if a site that matches one of your specified keywords tries to refer back to you. Making up the keyword list should be fun.

Omar Shahine's WebLog

In the meantime, I created a PowerShell script to remove all trackbacks from my content files. I'll post that when I get home tonight. But until I get the blacklist feature figured out, I'll be leaving trackbacks turned off.

My lunch break take on Silverlight...

Richard Rousseau — Thu, 03 May 2007 23:56:44 GMT

I didn't go to MIX, but I did read a few blog posts of people who did. Definately need to dive deeper this weekend. Here is my quick overview of what was announced/released...

DLR

Dynamic Language Runtime
Lets your .net code iteract with dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, Javascript
Lets those languages interact with your .net code! Neat!

CLR on a Mac

A browser plug-in that will run .net 3.x apps
OSX Only
Intel based Macs only?
Safari, Firefox, IE
Subset of the BCL
Rewritten CLR

Silverlight

Lots of classes to make working with media easier.
720p

Some links for further review...
http://www.silverlight.net/
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

Wanna try it?
Get the plug-in. - Quick install. No need to restart computer, but you will have to restart the browser. Definately works in FireFox.
Go to http://silverlight.net/fox/

Virtual PC 2004 Issue...

Richard Rousseau — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 04:34:41 GMT

I use virtual envionrments fairly regularly at work. I mainly use them for app debugging in a clean environment, permissions testing, and automated deployment testing.

I have a Virtual PC 2004 setup with my base OS installed on it's own virtual hard drive. I create a new differencing vhd on top of that when I need a fresh environment to work in. This has worked very well for me until today.

I created a new differencing vhd and booted into it. Everything was fine until I tried to login. I received the following message box...

Windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found. Please try again later.

At first I thought that my domain wouldn't let me logon because I had a bunch of updates to install. After letting the vm run for 20 minutes I restarted it, installing all the updates it downloaded. (On a side note, I didn't know windows would download updates even when you're not logged in.). Even after that, no luck.

Google to the rescue...An old newsgroup post hinted that it might be because my (virtual) computer already existed on the domain. The solution, login as the local admin, take the computer off the domain and put it back on. Success!

I'm posting this in hopes the answer will be more accessible to future generations of googlers.

Months without a post and all I get is a stupid link?

Richard Rousseau — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:29:36 GMT

"Hello World" Programs

A compilation of how people in various areas and stages of their development careers might write the well known "Hello World" program. Very funny stuff. I love how "Enterprisy" the Master Programmer and Seasoned Professional are...

http://www.infiltec.com/j-h-wrld.htm (via Netorama)

DateAdd() Insanity...

Richard Rousseau — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:30:04 GMT

Not all DateAdd()s are created equal.

Example:

VBScript
    DateAdd("m", -1, CDate("01/01/2006"))
       Expected Result: 12/01/2005
       Actual Result:     12/01/2006 - WTF?

TSQL
    DateAdd(m, -1, '20060101')
       Expected Result: 12/01/2005
       Actual Result:     12/01/2005

Moral of the story, not all functions behave like you expect them to. Test, test and retest.