[note: this started as a comment but started getting a little long-winded. what follows is a little gentle ribbing of Paul for a recent post he wrote about being a lazy cache programmer :P] Mr. Stovell, you've officially lost your marbles :P j/k okay, just to play devil's advocate...>:) I think the asp.net cache framework fits very nicely for its purpose - what you propose seems like another abstraction on top of it, for the benefit of thinking *less* about what items you should cache to *optimize* code execution time? So, just throw everything possible at it. Cache can handle...

...and so dark in here.

I would like to know who thought it was a good idea to remove "import data..." and "export data..." from this particular flavor of the worst front end to an otherwise badass rdbms. I shouldn't have to fight with a program to get my databases in order. What a joke.[ Nothing Playing. ]

 hehe... Rather surprised by the new 'updates are ready' message from Microsoft. Hmmm. Perhaps they know just how much frustration we had on the home pc recently due to their dodgy updates. (Fixed thanks to Scott Swigart) Source: Windows Updates Make Me Nervous

I love the PostXING tool and the ability to integrate the playing music. Feature wise they are all about the same though. So it will interesting to see the evolution of the tool. One positive out of the project is that I learned a lot about Subversion and how to work with it. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! [Via It's my life... And I live it...] Well, this post has been a long time coming. What about...

Last night I got an impromtu text message saying that Ghostface Killah was playing at Warehouse live downtown. As a Wu-Tang fan, I decided to go out and see what he was all about. Pretty good show, I really dug the ODB medley they did in honor of Ol' Dirty.   As an extra added bonus, Rick Ross opened up for Ghostface. He only did like 5 tracks, but was spot on for Hustlin'. He's obviously very comfortable with the song by now and it shows in his performance. Looked like he was really having fun with it which always helps for...

Close enough. This should be fun.

Unfortunately, the rants about WGA causing a bluescreen are true. It happened a little while ago on my home PC. Thankfully, F8 booting into safemode still works, and I was able to restore my system to a daily checkpoint. Boy am I glad that was setup. Installing .net 1.1 sp1 worked fine, as did an audio driver I was missing. After having to rollback to a system restore checkpoint. Way to go, guys.

My high school principal died on Monday. This is surreal. It feels like it was just last week that I was skipping class and getting a pep talk from Mr. Holmquist in North House. Worst of all, I went to school with his daughters. Amber was in my graduating class, but she was real into sports (and I wasn't). We had a couple of classes together but I was closer to her sister Kendra, a fellow thespian. This is so confusing...I've been in the Holmquist house a couple of times, and now...we'll miss you, Mr. Holmquist. Alief is a sad...

  How do you say goodbye? One hand squeeze at a time. [Via Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger] So what do you do when a blogger you read comes up on hard times and posts his phone number to his blog? Call him, of course. The problem is that Robert is suffering through an extremely personal trial, and right as he said "hello" I started thinking of how I would feel if I were in his shoes. Probably did more harm than good, but my thoughts and prayers are still with you and yours, Robert.

 Heads: Shave the beard off entirely. Tails: just trim it down a little. The coin flips... and... Heads it is. [ Currently Playing : imagine - John Lennon - (3:04) ]

I got my ASP.NET Podcast shirt, and there's a lot of Wally to be had it seems... You can't really tell from this pic, but the image of Wally takes up nearly the entire back of the shirt... But even this looks phenomenal on yours truly :P [ Currently Playing : Last Call - Kanye West - (12:41) ]

This is in the year 2004BB (Before Beard) [ Currently Playing : Just A Memory Featuring The C - The Notorious B.I.G - (4:30) ]

CIDR        Total number    Network             Description:Notation:   of addresses:   Mask:--------------------------------------------------------------/0          4,294,967,296   0.0.0.0             Every Address/1          2,147,483,648   128.0.0.0           128 /8 nets/2          1,073,741,824   192.0.0.0           64 /8 nets/3          536,870,912     224.0.0.0           32 /8 nets/4          268,435,456   ...

Broseph. This was the first thing that I requested from gmail, and they've taken it up a notch - instead of only deleting messages, it notifies you if there are messages in a current "conversation" that have already been deleted:   32 deleted messages in this conversation. View messages or delete forever. Nice.

Strictly filed under "As if you cared". [ Currently Playing : Audioslave / Out Of Exile - Audioslave - Out Of Exile (4:53) ]

So I got selected for the MVP award again this year. Many thanks to BenMi, who has been an awesome lead this whole time. You rock, dude. I was also awarded the (unofficial) ReverseDoS MVP award for my unending quest to tell anyone who is fed up with comment spam about it. If you're running an asp.net blogging engine (really, anything that could generate spam from automated bots that runs asp.net) you owe it to yourself to check this component out. Since installing and configuring it correctly, I have gotten exactly 1 (one) comment spam, and it was a manual entry. None that...

I wanted to install the newest version of Konfabulator to one of my computers, so I went to www.konfabulator.com and tried to install the latest version (3.0.1 earlier today, 3.0.2 this evening) but instead of getting the 11MB download that the site reports, I get a little <500KB file called widgetsus.exe. According to some forum posts, I'm not the only person having problems here. My problem was that no computers that didn't already have an earlier version of Konfabulator would actually install off of this file. So I looked thru a few more forum posts and found a url to...

Our prayers are with you, Jim. I only met Jim in real life one time, and he gave me a ride to my hotel on my first visit to Washington. He lived 5 hours away from me, but we had to go to another state to meet in person! Even though I didn't know him very well personally, it's funny the repoir you build with folks you communicate with often. Most of the Insiders I've come in contact with have just started talking as if we had seen each other just a few days ago. Jim was just like that. This...

I know I've figured out a fun song when my left hand hurts after playing. That hasn't happened for a loong time. I was playing my guitar, trying to soothe the pain that the Astros getting swept in the World Series ignited, when I came across a chord pattern that sounded familiar: Am, G, [whatever's between G and F], F, E. To check if I was right, I looked it up:  Led Zeppelin – ( BABE IM GONNA LEAVE YOU TAB ) This is going to take a while to master, but it's definitely going to be a fun ride.

Fan-freakin-tastic. w00t!

I just got back from the gas station to get some sodas before everything runs out, and this is what I saw: My little phone wasn't able to get the entire line of vehicles, but it was at least 6 deep for every pump. The parts of the Houston metro area that are closer to the coast have been issued a mandatory evacuation, with a voluntary evac for everyone else. They say it's going to be nasty. We'll just have to see I guess. [ Currently Playing : Emotion Sickness - Silverchair - The Best of: Volume 1 (6:01) ] P.S. Thanks to...

Just to let both of you know - I'm expecting some downtime this weekend for www.chrisfrazier.net . See, I live in Houston and we've got a little storm coming our way. Since I host my site on my own on-site server, that means that I've got to unplug it and put it in a room with no windows. Ya know, just in case. So now you know why my rss feed won't work this weekend. Don't you just feel all squishy inside now? As for me, I'm heading to the hill country for the weekend. Just in case, feel me? [ Currently Playing...

I took Ethan and my cousin Cody to the beach today. I got them some du-rags and ninja swords, so they could play pirates. They had a sword fight on the ferry ride to crystal beach. I was even able to get a resounding "Arr Matey!" out of Ethan When we were at the beach, we did what everyone should do at the beach every once in a while. We buried each other. We probably should have gone from biggest to smallest, but we started with Ethan.

This is definitely filed under "As if you cared". My friend Peyman had a little gathering at his new house in Austin this past weekend. I've been to quite a few parties in my day, but I can honestly say that the girl that swung balls of fire around herself was a first for me at a house party. (every time I've seen/done something similar in the past, the lit part couldn't burn you. glowsticks are good that way;) I intended to stay only one night, but circumstances dictated that I stay until Monday morning. At least I got to get...

 I noticed that I haven't gotten any comments on my blog in a while. Granted, I haven't posted in a while, either, but come on! There's gotta be at least one post I've made that's been worth comment since July, right? no? Well, I'm going to track this down anyways. Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.Weblog.EnableNewComments(WeblogPost post, User user) at CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.CommentForm.btnSubmit_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) at...

I took a week off from reading blogs last week (as is evidenced by my responding to week-old posts). I ended up having about 600-700 unread posts in RssBandit. The UI took care of it pretty well, since I have my opml separated by category I could zip thru most posts and decide whether or not I wanted to keep it around in the aggregate view. It got me thinking about how this would scale for a web app, tho. I don't remember how Bloglines handles this (don't you just get what's available at the time if there are unread feeds...

By the way Torsten has started an RSS Bandit new logo design contest and we'd appreciate your comments. It seems a lot of our users who use RSS Bandit from their place of work feel our current smily face icon and logo are unprofessional. I don't mind changing our application icon but would probably like to keep the smily bandit in the logo. [Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life] I can't really offer anything original per se, but here's the icon I use in ObjectDock for RssBandit: Okay, so I just...

A few weeks ago I wanted to release an update to my own blogging engine and, because there was a minor data change I thought that it would be nice to export the data before running the update, change the files and then re-import it afterwards.  As I looked into this more I decided that I really should do it in a standards-compliant manner (if possible) and so then set out to: A) talk to people about it, B) rtfm some of the existing formats and C)...

We have a couple of legacy applications here, written in C++, that have always run on windows and *nix. In order to support the *nix versions, we always have to have a Linux install hanging around (we also have a solaris, but that's already set up). So we got a Dell Precision 380 workstation with a SATA drive that had Windows XP installed on it. Since the Dell didn't come with a floppy drive, I couldn't very well just create a boot diskette. That would be useless. So based on the fact that there is a spec called "El Torito", I...

[ Currently Playing : Night Bird Flying - Jimi Hendrix - Experience Hendrix (3:50) ]

Welcome to the poor man's vblog...a link with text :) I took this video on my digital camera the other day. It's 2:41. I thought I'd post it up here so I can search on it after Ethan becomes a teenager to remember "the good ole days". It's a little dark, and Ethan is totally oblivious to what I'm doing. He actually thinks I'm getting ready to take a picture, I believe. Anyways, here it is: Ethan071705.MPG

GET-R-DONE! My favorite Top 11 Country Songs 11. If The Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know It's Me. 10. How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away 9. I Liked You Better Before I Got to Know You So Well. 8. I'm Still Missing You Baby, But My Aim's Gettin' Better. 7. I'll Marry You Tomorrow But Let's Honeymoon Tonight. 6. I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Like You're Still Here. 5. If I Had Shot You When I first Wanted To, I'd Be Out Of Prison By Now. 4. My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend And I Sure Do Miss Him. 3. She Got The Ring...

...free at last, thank God Almighty: I am free at last.

Nice! Lookin good, Don! I personally have had firewall issues with FTP (what a beast!) and have yet to find an opensource SFTP (ftp as a subset of ssh) solution, which does work on my server. One of these days I'm going to beef up my firewalling skills and let the stinkin ftp traffic thru. Anyways, glad to see you "back in the game" :) In an attempt to get back on top of my blogging, I've just installed the latest release of Christopher's PostXING, all of its plugins, and configured the FTP support. If...

Thanks to Alex, I checked out a great application of Greasemonkey - the Gmail Delete Button. Of course, I had to look at the script since it's just javascript and play with it to see if I could extend it a little bit. As with most of my "embrace and extend" forays, it was just a simple change - I use a lot of labels in gmail, so when I'm reading via the web interface, I have some organization to the 50+ email lists I'm a member of. Every screen that has conversations listed on it has a delete button, including the search...

It seems that there was a major power failure yesterday: at least a few city blocks. For those that don't know, a city block in Houston is a pretty big area. Looks like it's fixed for now, so the two of you can go about getting that there rss feed :) [ Currently Playing : Karma Police - Radiohead - OK Computer (4:21) ]

I.e. Both of you...I've changed the repository structure of PostXING on vaultpub to better facilitate branching. These crazy new ideas I've been having are so different from the current architecture of PostXING that I have to branch it just in case someone comes to me with a nasty bug they found that I just overlooked (this has happened a few times already, although not for a while). I don't like having broken software with my name on it out in the wild. Anyways, I thought I would keep tabs on my progress for this on my blog. I feel like there is...

I've been doing just that on my blogs - way back to when this one was hosted on dotnetweblogs.com. Geez, I was such a dork...okay, maybe I'm still a dork. But that's a maybe. I admit nothing.

I use Azureus as my bittorrent client. It has this nifty feature that is similar to the Updater Application Block that will automatically check for and download updates on startup of the application. The only downside for me is that since I was running JRE 1.4, and after a little battle with my wireless router, I could contact trackers okay, but not peers. Balls. So I look around the program to see what I can see. Oh look! There's an irc client that is loaded as a plugin! I haven't been on an irc channel since like '98 or '99, but...

I want to second Jason's nomination (below in bold). This morning I was trying to figure out how to port Sql Express data to Sql Server 2000, and Wally was a big help in getting me there. I got it done, btw.:) So, thank you Sir Wally! Download this podcastTopics discussed: So today's that "420" thing in the mainland, huh? Real-time argument with my co-worker if today is Bob Marley's birthday I'm back on the King Car Iced Tea You want to hear me open a drink?  What the hell is wrong with you people? Thanks to new friends for setting me straight on...

I went to go visit with my little (2 1/2 mos) nephew Tony tonight. Here's a couple of pics I snapped on my phone:  

Well, I woke up this morning and found myself back in Roswell, GA. It seems that the Google trip must have been a dream. Don't you just love April Fools Day Wally? But thanks for the congratulations from a few friends and bloggers (thanks Josh). I appreciate your thought that it might have been possible! [Via The CoverYourASP.NET Blog ] I got got. Good one, James. And yes, I thought it was possible, too - Dozing Dogs is a pretty good CMS.

This is a message that my boss recently sent to a customer that had an issue with one of our software packages (I don't own it :) Brian, in the finest tradition of Microsoft, VDB's engineers have returned an error message  that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem at hand.   Time Steps should be in the range of 1 to 10.  Instead, of limiting the input (1 to 10). VDB's fine engineers, it seems, prefer to give a worthless message, then plow on with  a 10 millisecond ...

So, mainly because of my comment problems with dottext 0.95, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge. Here's how I got CS installed in less than an hour: Used the web installer. This was pretty useful as I'm very prone to error with just the sql scripts ;) . Just set  bool INSTALLER_ENABLED = true; in the default.aspx of the /installer folder and got the base community up and running. Thanks Dan for your walk thru that outlined basically the same thing. Ran Kevin Harder's DotText-CS-Converter....

I'm going to be installing community server here today. There's going to be a little downtime because of that. As if you cared.

I totally geeked out tonight. I was searching for something else and happened upon a tutorial for tunneling VNC on windows, which led me to another article that was inspiration for the first article I found. Here was the problem with both: the webserver that I wanted to get to is behind an OpenBSD firewall. So, first things first: I added a rule to pf.conf that allowed ssh to be redirected to the private address of my webserver using rdr syntax:rdr pass on $ext_if from any to $public_address port ssh \ -> $private_address This rule passes ssh calls bound for the external address...

 |}34|2 M|2. Scoble, 1 H4v3 K1|}n4pp3|} y0U|2 p|23C10U5 "CH4nn3L 9 6Uy". 1f j00 3v4|2 w4n7 70 533 H1M 4L1v3 4641n, My |}3M4n|}5 MU57 83 M37 1n fULL. My |}3M4n|}5 4|23 45 f0LL0w5: 1) 0n3 M1LL10n |}0LL4|25. 2) M1C|2050f7 MU57 0p3n-50U|2C3 w1n|}0w5 50 17 C4n 83 53CU|23 L1K3 L1nUx. j00 H4v3 48 H0U|25 70 C0MpLy. Y0U w1LL f1n|} 7H47 1 4M v3|2y 53|210U5 1n 7H15 M4773|2. 516n3|}, 31337 |-|4><0|2z

Well, thanks to Steven's post .Text's MetaWeblog API - Edit Post Error... I am now just a couple of revisions behind the latest incarnation of .Text over here. This has been a serious pain to get migrated from v0.94 (all because I need to edit my posts w/ the metablog api - go figure!) but a lot of it has been due to errors on my part. When you try to add content, you've gotta keep those Identity fields intact or you end up with "Server returned a fault exception" when adding a new post. Yuck. Update2: Continuing my battle with this engine:...

 euiyun's Xanga Site - 2/8/2005 9:41:55 PM Always good to see a bunch of Asians "go crazy". (ahahahahah!) Bonus: It looks like it was filmed in good ol' H-Town - part of it at the Williams Trace (once Transco) Tower! w00t! And Wal-Mart. Gotta love Wal-Mart.

They're fun anyways.  Which File Extension are You?

<snip>Q: You mean you didnt kill 200K people or change the tilt of the Earth's axis? a: not yet </snip>[Via brains-N-brawn.com] Classic. I rather enjoyed the article, and think that a lot of people are missing the point. Not that my opinion matters anyways, but I thought it was kind of a neat POC.

I am not an expert in this area. Not even close. Wouldn't even call myself an amateur. But I had to stop reading the letter when he says "It's the most secure OS the world has ever seen..." A quick hop over to the link provided for solaris shows how proud they are...of thier new logo. Call me crazy, but if you were to make the claim that you are releasing the "most secure OS the world has ever seen", wouldn't that be what was highlighted on the front page of the site you are pointing to? Right, different audiences, different priorities,...

I've been playing Halo 2 recently, and I got to a part that reminded me why I lost interest in the first one. Once you get to a certain part of the game (either one), it gets so difficult to advance that it's not fun anymore. Now, granted, I've never been close to being the Wizard, but gimme a break already. I guess it's back to Prince of Persia (again, either one) for me. UbiSoft gets it. Make a game that I'll want to play over and over. </rant type="As If You Cared">

I am: Not nerdy, but definitely not hip.

I just found out that I got the nod for Microsoft MVP again for 2005. I was hoping that would be the case, because I really enjoyed going to the MVP Summit last year, and was looking forward to going again in 2005. [Via Jonathan Goodyear / angryCoder] So, er, me too ;) except I hope to make this year's my first MVP summit.Congrats, John!

Paul is trying to find out what effect blogs have on google juice. He's decided to coin the term 'consummate asshole' "because it has very little competition on the google world (and it's funny)." So, being the helpful person that I am, I decided to give him a (very!) little boost by adding the following phrase and link to a couple of my blogs:  Paul D Murphy is the consummate asshole Good Luck, Paul, you consummate asshole, you.

South Park Me: (which is not too far away from) Real Me: No, I don't work for Microsoft, but I am wearing this shirt today. I need a shave, don't I? (this picture was taken from my Motorola V400.) update: Just to be fair, here's another shirt that I wear sometimes:

Damn. That's right, I said Damn. It looks and feels so much like the first one (which I beat about 6 or 7 times without getting tired of it) but UbiSoft did a good job of extending the story; even making the Prince look and even move like he's older. It's the little details that I'm talking about - the fact that it takes him a little more effort to swing on poles and things of that nature. I didn't seem to get very far in the game; since you go back and forth thru time you're really in the same area just...

It took nearly two years, but it looks like I've posted something interesting enough to show up on the Daily Grind. It's linked over there as opposed to here, tho, which makes me that much happier that I can syndicate identical content to more than one place, one of said places getting a tremendously larger amount of traffic than the others. [ Currently Playing : Sideways - Citizen Cope - Shaman (4:41) ]

It looks like I created (or rather raised an awareness to) a little snafu on ProjectDistributor :/ The latest release of PostXING didn't upload properly, so I'm putting a temporary download on my server: PostXINGv1.0.4335.1.zip update - it's fixed! I also rolled back the release to the last one that worked as a download over at ProjectDistributor.net. I'll be taking both down as soon as Darren lets me know things are well again. Sorry to both of you that care. [ Currently Playing : Star 69 - Fatboy Slim - Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars(5:42) ]

By the way, Scoble, I do read your blog...I just can't remember everything that gets posted there! Don't you remember posting 60 - 70 items in one night before? Thanks btw for pointing out my misinformed previous post. Hope you enjoyed your turkey-day :)

Ouch. Looks like I should find out if a picture I post to my blog is authentic or not before posting :$  Robert Scoble This is a well-known hoax. I guess you don't read my blog. I got sucked into this one too.  Dean Harding http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp  

My son, Ethan, has started pretending to be a pirate sometimes on the weekends that he visits me. This past weekend, he got a sticker from Kroger's and proceeded to put it over his eye - "aaah matey! wokka pank! (dat means tro u ovabord)" Ethan sure knows how to make his Daddy proud! (I think it's hilarious) [ Currently Playing : Have It All - Foo Fighters - One by One (04:58) ]

From 1954 Popular Mechanics: [ Currently Playing : Low - Foo Fighters - One by One (04:28) ]

 http://bringbackklol.com/index.php   http://www.rock101.info/speakout/ Did you wake up to Spanish music? Clear Channel has decided to make a format change at Houston expense. Rock 101 KLOL is no longer and we have another Spanish channel to go along with Houston's other 16 Spanish channels. We need to show Clear Channel that we will not just stand by while a 32-year-old station is removed from the air. I was devistated. I was listening to Walton and Johnson in the morning, and all of a sudden in the afternoon I'm hearing spanish music. If...

I'm 24 today :)

Sorry - sometimes it's necessary, tho :)

I could have sworn I saw this on someone else's blog recently, but I just encountered a pretty dumb error from a hiccup on this very server. I've recently added a new server to our network that will ultimately be a DC (did I mention I hate network administration?) so I decided to make this server "headless" - only admining it from VNC or RDP. Well, when a reboot was necessary, I found a nice little message on bootup (by plugging the KVM back into this server) that said "Error - Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue or DEL to...

whut?

:: how jedi are you? ::

Well, it looks like Gino's enjoying his day... Glad to hear that - you deserve it you old bastard ;) Oh, and btw, I found this out b/c bloglines has a subscribe to xanga member's weblog feature...that's awesome! (( What I'm listening to: No Woman, No Cry - The Fugees - The Score (4:33) ))

Short answer: working. Longer answer: I've been learning so much lately that my brain hasn't had the rest period required to post faithfully to this here blog. Sorry about that. So what have I been learning? I've been learning about lerp (linear interpolation) bilerp(bilinear interpolation) and slerp (shperical interpolation). I'm dipping my foot into the waters of 3d imaging, and it's not an easy thing to learn. Not always, anyways. I've also picked up a (gasp) BSD firewall project (using OpenBSD) that has me learning not only pf rules, but also the *nix environment. Working without a gui is very Tao. Thanks cd...

So I had the first weekend alone with my son, Ethan, this past weekend. It was awesome! What a perfect father's day gift - being able to actually spend (at least) some of it with my son. He even "got me a card". See, he's 2 1/2 so it was my mom that really got the card, but she helped him sign it and he drew some circles in it for me. :) There were a couple of times that he cried for his mother, but we got thru those and it was only when he was expecting something out of...

Am I the last one to notice a certain Microsoft Blogger's mug at the top of www.weblogs.com ?

I've needed this link ( http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=11 ) a few times, so I thought I'd give it a little google juice so I could find it easier next time. The link is to a widget written by Nikhil Kothari, I'm using it in one of my apps currently, and it's really great. Included with a little agility ( .NET Html Agility Pack: How to use malformed HTML just like it was well-formed XML... ), this is a tight little package for editing html in Windows Forms.

I thought this may be useful in the future... :)

Tina and I just finished moving the last of our stuff from the old apartment to the new one. We've almost got everything unpacked - I like it here. Thankfully we got most everything moved last night, so today was just a few things we carried by hand. Yeah, we moved about 50 yards. The people in the apartment above the last place had a washer leak, and we bore most of the consequenses. Half of the walls in our bedroom (the washer & dryer connections are in the closet) were brown from the leak. So, rather than force us to...