Parenting and Razors
Parenting and Razors
I really should NOT find this as funny as I do. I'm sure if Emmitt had hurt himself I wouldn't have posted the video or mentioned to ANYONE. But here's what can happen when you get wrapped up filming and stop paying close attention to your kids. Luckily Anja noticed what was in Emmitt's right hand after the fourth lap. Whew. (fyi, he's holding on of my disposable razors, on the fourth lap he even holds it up to the camera and I still didn't notice.)
My TODO List Is Too Big!
I have these sites to build out:
Http://eightyproofsolutions.com
Now all I need is the invention of the 48 hour day.
:wq!
Back in the day, circa 1997, my title was Unix Administrator for Robert Half International headquarters, although most of my time was spent crankin out Visual Basic code on an asset management application and some search tools.
As a "unix" guy I bought some reference books, one was an O'Reilly pocket reference for vi. I have some other sites that I want to work on for fun and other reasons hosted at dreamshost. They are all linux all the time. I needed to create a new file on the server and frickin drew a blank. I didn't think I had still had but I looked, and KABLAM, I totally still had the pocket reference. Anywho, apparently "vi filename.ext" gets you into vi, and "esc + :wq!" will save your shiz and exit. Man it's been awhile. I need to work on my vi-fu.
Pantera + Boobs
Prior to a few days ago, if i was asked the question, "What's better than Pantera?", i would answer Killswitch Engage, but jokingly, because let's face it, Pantera is the greatest band ever; RIP Dimebag :(
However.I have become aware of a band named In This Moment and I am amazed! They fuckin rock. And I am going to see them next monday. WOO HOO!
Watch them do a pantera cover. brilliant.
Your Shit Broke
Yes, this is my code...
FIX: Windows Explorer Missing Address Bar
After installing something within the last month, I noticed that all of my Windows Explorer windows look like this:
Note that there is no address bar or anything.
This morning I finally did a quick search to see if this is a problem and sure enough it is, here's the fix(requires deleting a reg key): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555130.
After following those steps here's what my Windows Explorer looks like now:
My MacBook Pro - If I Were to Buy One
I configured the best lappie I could buy on Apple's site and here's what I got:
Here's why I don't have a mac(yet). Macs don't seem to drop in price very much, at least not at the same rate as their non-Mac rivals. And no, I don't think the price of a Thinkpad is going to drop 650 bucks a month. However, I'm confident(today) that I can always buy better non-Mac hardware for fewer bucks.
I priced similar components I picked for the Mac for a Lenovo Thinkpad:
See what I mean? Same components, almost 1000 bucks cheaper. And actually, that machine is almost worth buying. Three things would keep from buying that machine. 1)It doesn't have 3+ ghz processor, and for some reason I'm fixated on requiring that number; 2)It has to come with Vista 64, I don't do Vista(I'm waiting on Windows 7); and 3)I don't have an extra 2400 bucks right now :)
Ps. If it was a supported option, I would consider putting the Mac OS X on that thinkpad...until Windows 7 comes out anyway.
C# Future...Is There One?
After watching the C# Futures presentation by Anders at the 2008 PDC I got REALLY excited about what's in the future for C#. The dynamic keyword? Wicked cool. But I got to thinkin about all that really cool stuff.
How many "regular joes" actually use all the new cool stuff that C# packs? How 'bout LINQ? When looking at sorting a collection of objects does the "regular joe" automatically pick LINQ to do the heavy lifting or does he or she hit google to ask how to sort a collection of objects by one or more properties?
I'm a geek. Seeing the dynamic keyword and watching the video makes me salivate and wish that this stuff was shipping by Christmas(2008). I know it's not, but it's amazing stuff - IF you're into that kind of stuff. I am into that stuff but I think I'm in the minority.
My canundrum of the day. Is using advanced software/language constructs that ultimately make software better by making the framework do more, hurting our industry because it's harder to maintain by the "regular joe" or is it helping our industry?
C'mon Lenovo! Cheaper Cheaper Cheaper
I go to Lenovo's site about once a week to configure my dream machine and see what the price looks. Here's what it was a while back:
And here's the one I priced today:
Huh, so without looking at the first one which I built on October 23, I picked almost the same components, the only difference that I can spot is that today I picked a 200 gig secondary drive compared to the 160 gig drive I picked last month.
The other difference is that the one I priced today looks like it'll ship within 9 business days, and the first one would ship in over 4 weeks. Whew, thankfully I didn't purchase last month. But following the current trend, I figure if the price keeps falling at the current rate of about 656 bucks a month, in only 3 short months I might be able to afford it cuz it'll be down to about 2400 :)
Windows 7 Flickr Search
Mr. Zheng over on istartedsomething.com as always has revealed yet another cool ass thing coming with Windows 7: Search Connectors. I downloaded his Flickr Search Connectr for the Windows Search Federation and it prompted me to record what it does check it out here.
Note: This is running a vmware image (on this machine) and as of now the super cool ass visual effects of Windows 7 are not visible(at least until I build a dedicated machine for Windows 7 or vmware figures out DirectX 10 support). But the performance is VERY good on the vm.
XElement, huh
I'm watching Anders' PDC 2008 presentation on the future of C# and right around minute 37 I noticed something cool. He uses XElement to create a little xml fragment for the thing he was demonstrating. Just to test it out I wrote this code:
IDictionary members =
new Dictionary(){
{ "Chris", 38 },
{ "Anja", 37 },
{ "Riley", 4 },
{ "Emmitt", 2 }
};
XElement element = new XElement("Family",
from m in members select new XElement(m.Key, m.Value));
Console.WriteLine(element.ToString());
|
|
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
|
Which outputs this:
Kinda cool, I've never used XElement before today but it's nice to know you can generate xml very easy using this(without having to create a dom).
More WPF Fun Finding Out What's Running On Your Machine
Tobin had a good idea in his comment on my last post on my little scratch app What is That?
DataMining: Losing the WebBrowser Control
Tobin mentioned mining the data rather than having the WPF WebBrowser control. I set out with the goal of picking pages off of that site but quickly realized that the one i was using only gave some results so I switched to this one:http://www.processlibrary.com/, which gave me results every time; knowing how many hits that site may take I added a little file caching dealio, more on that later.
XPath Queries Against HTML with HtmlAgilityPack
I wanted to be able to execute XPath queries against an html document. I don't like to waste time mucking around with the .NET built in stuff that will break as soon as I find out a page is not well formed, so I grabbed my always trusty friend, HTMLAgilityPack that allows me to do XPath queries against a non well-formed xml document.
Wow, I Have Alot Of Shit Running on My Machine
I quickly realized that hitting that web page for each or the 128 processes, that apparently were running on my machine, on startup was a bad idea, at least doing synchronous calls in the Window Loaded event. The screen doesn't draw, and depending on what time you run this thing, it could talke a few seconds or a minute or two.
It seems that while investigating WPF things I usually end up at Pavon Podia's ealier blog here and his current blog here. This time was no different, based on this post I worked up my bomb ass progress bar implementation.
Feelin Guilty
While testing my app the performance of making all of the web requests got to me, but not as much as the guilty feeling I was getting at hammering that website with the same requests over and over. So I implemented a caching strategy. This app saves every page that is requested to a directory on your C drive named WhatIsThis. If a local file exists, it is read from disk, otherwise it's requested from the site and saved locally to disk.
Conclusion
There's really not much to this practice app so if you're looking for uber brilliant code, you've come to the wrong place, that kind of code exists here, here, and here. This code is just me playing around with WPF. Download the code here.
WPF Application: What is That?
I'm playing around with some different WPF controls and WPF in general and wrote a little app to help me find out what processes are running on my machine. I used http://searchtasks.answersthatwork.com/index.html to find out details about processes by name. Here's a screen shot of the app(click to enlarge):
Here's the code(it assumes you have VS2008 SP1 installed): WhatIsThat.zip
Dinner at Chili's! Seriously?
I've been getting many of these lately, the restaurant and/or deal is usually changed up but the email is identical.
I'm curious how many people actually click through to "participate" in these things.
Plenty of Fish Architecture and Microsoft
I hardly ever see stories about how people have chosen the Microsoft stack to build high traffic websites but apparently Plenty of Fish created one using running ASP.NET, IIS, and a 64 bit Windows Server 2003. One man shop too, read up on the Plenty of Fish architecture on highscalability.com.
RichText Builder
RishText Builder is a cool library for creating RTF formatted strings; but what's REALLY cool is the ascii art found in the source :)