June 2005 - Posts

• Die Spammer Die

  So, I come home today and log in to write a quick post...unfortunantly that time was taken writing a sql script to remove the 600+ spam I received today. :sigh: Could someone find the people doing this so we can go flog them? And while your at it, someone tell me how to get the newest SubText build going. Posted Jun 24 2005, 04:54 AM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• ISORecorder

  For all you 64 bit guys, here is a 64 bit version of ISORecorder. I am going to reinstall the 64 bit version of Windows 2003 Server again, so if you don't hear from me for awhile, you'll know it didn't go very well ;) Copy and Pasted Beta 2 of ISO Recorder V2 is ready. I added a missing feature - image creation, which would be welcomed by Virtual PC users. Added some stability features and some fixes. 64-bit AMD build. It supports ISO generation from a file system folder. Please send all feedback to Aelx Feinman Posted Jun 19 2005, 02:20 PM by Bob with no comments

• Google Ranks Explained?

  In my internet wanderings, I found an article that may be of interest to quite a few people. It seems a recent filing for a patent (Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005) has brought to light many of the things that affect your Google page rank. One of the first things the writer noticed was this rule How many years did you register your domain name for? If it's only one then that's a point against you in Google's eyes. I just wondered over to GoDaddy and updated my registration to 72 years. All you searches are belong to me... Anyhow, go check it out, alot of interesting stuffs.   Posted Jun 17 2005, 05:31 AM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• Dell, reloaded...

  Here is an interesting article where Michael Dell of Dell fame says, “If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers.” Too bad Apple is being all stingy and everything, OS X could definitely apply aome competitive pressure on Microsoft, get them to ramp it up a bit. It sure obvious Linux isn't the ticket... I think it would be cool to dual boot OS X and Longhorn...and I guess it is still possible if the PCs Mac ships with OS X are good machines, at an affordable price. This may even be a decent idea, the newer Macs arent all that out of whack with normal prices these days, and it seems early in their Intel release phase they will be shipping dual core Pentium M's. That would be a bad little machine if they offer it with about 2 gigs of RAM and at least an X850. I would buy that, and dual boot. Posted Jun 17 2005, 05:13 AM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• Insanity

  The definition of insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.' I thought my app was caching something today, so I killed the asp.net worker process...13 times. That wasn't the solution... Posted Jun 10 2005, 11:35 PM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• Microsoft Security Response Center

  I found an interesting read. At the Tech Ed conference, Microsoft made it a point to reassure their customers by explaining the process that is involved in creating security hotfixes, and why sometimes that would take longer than we would like. I found an interesting comment from MSRC program manager, Stephen Toulouse, where he explains why Internet Explorer hotfixes often take much longer than other hotfixes. “It's not easy to test an IE update. There are six or seven supported versions and then we're dealing with all the different languages. The whole code base is a hodge podge of crap code, but we lost the source to several of the dlls and we aren't sure what they do. There are some people in house who would like to rewrite the whole app, they got the idea from this blog thing by bob, but we are going to be dealing with them when we get back. That reminds me, there will be some openings in the IE development team posted on Monday, so check out http://microsoft.com/careers if you believe we should continue patching this IE 3 code base instead of rewriting it.” Ok, so he actually said the first two sentences, I closed the browser by mistake and just kind of ad libbed the rest, but I am pretty sure its close to accurate. And they wonder why FireFox has over 60 million downloads...granted everyone I know that is running it has downloaded it like 35 times, so I think there are only about 12 people using it... The sad thing is, I was really excited about IE 7, since I still use Internet Explorer. Now it seems that my excitement was for naught. If I had to guess at this point, I would say it is IE 6 sp2 with tabs and some touch up to the rendering engine. Of course I was absolutely wrong about the Apple thing, so hopefully I am wrong again. That can be my goal in posting, to post the opposite of what we want with the anticipation of being wrong...hmm...maybe not. I hope the MSN Toolbar implementation of tabbed browsing isn't a sign of what is to come, ever time I change tabs, the whole IE window flickers, not just the rendered html area, the titlebar, border, toolbars, everything. Hell, even Maxthon behaved better than that...I always set such high expectation in my mind for things coming from Microsoft, but it never seems to materialize. You would think after all this time I would learn. Posted Jun 10 2005, 09:36 AM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• Visual Studio 2005

  I see Visual Studio 2005 will be rolled out on November 7th, as well as SQL Server 2005. Some interesting tidbits from the article are Reporting Services will come with all flavors of SQL Server 2005 instead of the originally planned just Enterprise version(an awesome thing), and the prediction from Microsoft that new non-64 bit version machine will be hard to come by in 24 months, which is something I both agree with and look forward to... Posted Jun 08 2005, 05:01 AM by Bob with no comments

• Apple and Intel, sitting in a tree...

  There are rumors afoot that Apple is going with Intel chips in their future machines. This isn't exactly the first time this has been mentioned, as many of you are already aware. Is it going to happen? Well, it was always smoke and mirrors before, and so far I don't have any reason to think it is any different this time. Is it possible? Sure, there have even been rumors of OS X running on x86 hardware in the past, you know, just in case. I personally think they aren't going to go through with it, but if they do, it will be on some proprietary chipset/MB and/or be on the IA64 platform, though the IA64 platform wouldn't agree with the rumors...but Intel has to dumb those chips on someone... Either way, we will know shortly, since they will discussing it at the Mac Dev Conference. Either way, I don't really care. I am not a Mac guy...   Posted Jun 07 2005, 02:17 AM by Bob with 5 comment(s)

• Steveb listens to me...

  You'll remember in my previous article, I all but begged Steveb to use XML as the primary Office format. QUOTE: ------------------------------- 1. More XML compliant on the back end. I understand the want to keep your data formats proprietary, but this is no longer viable. Consumers *want* to be able to use threir documents in whatever application the feel like. The 'other guys' are going to reverse engineer your formats and allow their apps to read it any how, so quit being a pain in everone's ass and just play nice. The consumer is the target audience here, and as much as most of them may not even know it, they want this feature. ------------------------------- Well, guess what? It seems he listened... QUOTE --------------------------------- On Thursday the company will announce that it plans to make XML-based file formats the default in the version of Office due to ship in the latter half of 2006. --------------------------------- And you guys thought he ignored me.... Posted Jun 07 2005, 01:31 AM by Bob with no comments

• SP6a for Windows 2000 sort of...

  It looks like instead of releasing SP5 for Windows 2000, they are going to release a Security roll up, similar to SP6a was for NT4. I find it interesting they think they are going to phase out Windows 2000 when they still have such a large base of NT4 machines that havent went away yet. I hope they call it SP4a... Look for the rollup sometime this coming week. Posted Jun 06 2005, 10:56 AM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• Never Listen to Ray

  Never listen to Ray. For *days* we argued about my desire to buy a project, Ray insisting I should buy a television. This is what I ended up with for ~$750, granted I still need to get a cable to let me do 1080i, but for now it works awesome...the dork standing in front of it for size reference came free... The picture is somewhat washed out here, it didnt seem to like the flash on the camera a whole lot. The projector is actually quite usable during the day, even with the ambient light levels in my apartment, though it does really shine at night. The picture here was taken ~4:45 in the afternoon while it is still very light outside. Posted Jun 06 2005, 07:16 AM by Bob with 9 comment(s)

• Be Prepared

  A true geek can build whatever he needs on the fly, with a tootpick and a piece of string if needed... Basically, what caused this contraption is, Time Warner installed my Road Runner service and then promptly went on Holiday for Memorial Day. The cable modem they gave me had a bum RJ45 connector so I had to make do with the usb connector, which wont connect to my Wireless router. And what is a geek without his wireless? Well, I hadnt moved any of my main machines yet, so I scrounged the parts I had packed, which happened to be a Socket A motherboard, a 256 meg stick of RAM, a Duron 800, a notebook hard drive and a 4x CDROM drive. I did happen to have a heatsink, but no CPU fan, so the Duron 800 is underclocked to 500mhz and cooled with a case fan blowing over the heatsinks fins. Fortunantly I had the converter to hook the notebook drive to a regular IDE connecter as well. Considering the hardware, to say Windows 2003 Server took while to install would be an understatement...not to mention installing SP1 for it...then set Internet Connection Sharing up to share the USB connection to the built in NIC and ran that cable to the wireless router. BAM! Wireless. All in all though, with the combination of a case fan for cooling and a notebook drive, it ended up making a really quite litte machine... And as a bonus item, I ended up being up here for 4 days on that visit instead of the intended 2 and only brought my car charger. My car has this issue where it only likes to charge when it is running, so by the second night the battery in the phone was pretty much through. With the above machine, a spliced Molex connector, the car charger and some electrical tape, I was able to build a nice charger so my phone would be up the other two days. Posted Jun 06 2005, 07:08 AM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• Site Outage Version 2

  Server had been moved, and everything is pretty much as it should be. Moving sucks. I have to catch up on my posting now ;) Posted Jun 03 2005, 12:37 PM by Bob with no comments