Jimiz.net – Jim Becher on the web

I love to see a great 404 page when things go wrong.  The twitter fail whale has become a great example of how to make a statement  on an error or 404 page.   It has become an art of both design and communication when you do something like a 404 page.

Here is a great list of interesting and great 404 error pages.

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-really-cool-and-creative-error-404-pages/

The fact that the Huffington post wrote an article on this topic means that the common non-technical person also understands what a 404 (page not found) error is. Or at least they know what it means to them

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/11/best-404-error-pages-ever_n_456767.html

Unfortunately I’m not that up on design and will have to update jimiz.net 404 error page.

Hanselman has published his most recent Ultimate Developer and power tools. I’ve been a follower of this list for a long. I realize that I have a lot of these tools. I found a few gems in here that I need to check out.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2011UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

One of my favorite tools builtwith.com was out of commission today. It was showing a 503 error Service Unavailable.
The builtwith blog mentioned that they were working on the issue. It looks like they are back and running now. I feel for the team, I’ve been there. It’s not fun. Their twitter post explained it: https://twitter.com/builtwith.

Another cool thing about builtwith.com is that it is written in C#. http://blog.builtwith.com/2011/12/15/what-is-builtwith-built-with/

I recently took a trip to Las Vegas for a conference. I took my ipad for both note taking and also to do work. It performed perfectly. I have to say that the majority of people at this conference had tablets and the clear winner in shear numbers was the iPad.

To prepare for the trip I loaded a few magazines, books, and movies on my iPad. To do this here are the top apps that I used:

1. Zinio – A e-magazine application (read my previous post on this) Great application to purchase magazines for the airplane trip.

2. VLC- Video Lan Client. I used this to watch a movie. Since I use windows media center at home. I just moved an .AVI to the VLC application and watched a movie while in the flight. (I would recommend better headphones or noise canceling)

3. Built in iBook reader : I read the last chapters of the recent james bond novel
(Close second is Kindle)

4. Business week : if you have a subscription

5. iSSH - Remote access to any of my servers while traveling

6. PPTP – Built in vpn. If you are traveling and not using a vpn be warned. You will have your packets watched or stolen. I suggest using a personal vpn if you don’t have access to one from work. Try wifi-vpn.com only $4 per week (or $9 a month)

7. Remote Desktop lite – Remote access to your desktop.

I’ve been cleaning up my work  area.  Not only my real desktop at work but also my computer desktop.  To help keep a cleanly system I decided to try Fences.

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

Nice little gem of an application.  Give it a try. It neatly organizes your icons or files on your desktop into specific areas.

I am a huge fan of the iPad, as you can see by my recent posts.  I find myself reading more and more on my iPad and iPhone.  One of the best things about the iPad is you can get magazine subscriptions using Zinio.

I can’t say enough good words about the software.  I love to get a magazine quickly and before trips it can’t be beat.    However, recently I noticed that if you purchase a magazine while on the iPad it is a bit more expensive.    I am heading out for a trip and wanted to pick up a few items for reading.  Note the price for the in app purchase of FourFourTwo ($5.99).  But if you purchase through their web site it’s only $3.99.  I did not realize the price difference.  It is interesting that in application purchases are more expensive.  I don’t mind for the convenience but I would rather know the difference between the two prices.

Every year I take the opportunity to do some winter cleaning on my computer systems.  Clean up directories, remove unused applications, and backup.   I typically choose Black Friday for this event because I can run out and get cheap storage (Hard Drives).   Last year I purchased 2 portable drives and an internal drive.

This year, I did not want to go out early.  So I spent the morning cleaning our computer systems and then headed out and purchased a few High Capacity SD cards.  I got 8, 16 and 32 gig cards.  Different manufacturers.   The 16 I intend to use in our camera so it was the higher speed.  The other 2 I plan on using for an “ON PC” backup.

I have many backup strategies for our home documents and photos, but I am adding a new one this year.   I have done this in the past at work with my personal documents but not at home.

Since we are almost exclusively laptops at our house I setup jobs to backup the home directory documents to the SD cards.  This does a sync that makes it easy to store on the SD card.   The actual directory and photos are sync’d every night to our backup server, but this is just a quick fail-safe.   I’m not sure how well it’s going to work, but the intent is to have a quick copy to pull back from of critical documents.

On my SD card I used truecrypt to create a volume and store information encrypted.  Overall it is working OK.  I will have to update this post as I progress.

While starting to  write an android application I had to re-install the Android SDK on my new system.  When I did this and tried to execute the Emulator I go the following error:

"invalid command-line parameter: Files.

Hint: use '@foo' to launch a virtual device named 'foo'. please use -help for more information"

After some google searches and some testing I finally found a fix.  The issue it appears is the referenced path that Android is using.  Since I have an x64 system, the location that the default android install is : C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk

One of the posts and install documents I read was to add that directory to your “Path” in windows.  I made that change and still had the same issue.  After some more digging I found that the issue is related to the spaces in the folder path.   To solve this issue I added the “SFN” directory location into the PATH variables.

Short File name is sometimes called 8.3 file name.   Because it envokes a limit on the filename and extension length (wikipedia)

Since x64 machines place files that are 32bit into a different Program files directory the install location is : C:\Program Files (x86)\android\android-sdk

SO THE FIX IS:

Add the location sfn name into the path.  My 8.3 file location for the sdk is:

C:\PROGRA~2\android\android-sdk

This will remove the spaces from the path.  To add a folder location in your path on windows 7 you need to:

• go to control panel
• 
• System | Edit the System Environment Variables
• Click the Environment Variables button
• 
• Scroll Down under “system Variables” until you find path
• 
• Place a “;” before you add the path to the sdk folder (C:\PROGRA~2\android\android-sdk)
• 

I just had to re-install windows phone 7 sdk.  I wanted the features for Mango 7.5.  However to get the install I had to uninstall the previous version (beta) I had.

Now 3 reboots later  I’m ready to role.

I often find myself following a link from a twitter post or some other blog.  Not having the time to read it immediatly I either add it to Readitlater or I email myself.  I normally don’t add any comments just the link.   What often happens is a few weeks / days / months later I get to reading these links I sent myself.  Sometimes, I get to them right away but most of the time I find a neat little article or site of interest a few days later and don’t remember the context of why I sent myself this link.

I decided that I should just include a few here for everyone’s enjoyment (the comments in front is where I think I got the link):

Person I follow on G+: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/are-your-co-workers-killing-you/

Twitter: http://geekli.st

Blog Post (aspx) https://github.com/robconery/Manatee

twitter: http://knockoutjs.com

As you can see this is just a random mix. But there are some goodies involved.  A mvvm js tool kit, an asp.net deployment tool, and a geek site.

Enjoy.

There is a great post from Scott Hanselman regarding  node iis. It is the implementation of node on iis.  Node is basically a serverside javascript.   It is very interesting to me how this could be used.  I wonder if the performance of this would allow you to skip the overhead of a .net page load, similar to a handler.

Here is the article:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/InstallingAndRunningNodejsApplicationsWithinIISOnWindowsAreYouMad.aspx

I plan on testing this next week and will report back with any thoughts or issues.

For years I have used EveryDns.net.     They were recently acquired by dyndns.org another service I use.  The issue is that the full Managed dns that I have used from everydns will not be free or donation any more.    DynDns.org wants to charge a per-domain fee.

I’m not opposed to paying for this service, but for ease of use I have a lot of domains managed there.  I know I could use Godaddy for this, but not all the domains are at Godaddy.

I have recently moved everything over to dns.he.net

Great service

I love to use a good pen.  I recently lost my good Cross pen that I always have carried.   In the spirit of being frugal I decided to see what I could find on a budget.  I came across a quick post on lifehacker discussing a Mont Blanc Pen for $15 bucks.   Being a person who likes a good pen, I decided to give this little project a try.

The steps are pretty easy.

1. Get a G2 pen (pro or regular)  I did both.

2. Purchase Mont Blanc refills – I got 15158

3. Trim the plastic end of the refill – I used a utility knife

4. Re-assemble and enjoy.

I chose the G2 pro for the more executive look, but realized I like the clear regular G2 becuase you can see the Mont Blanc and it reminds me that I am using a nice writing utensil.

Lifehacker article: http://lifehacker.com/186819/convert-a-3-pen-into-a-200-pen

Read the entire how-to at indistructuables : http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-%24200-in-2-minutes-and-have-the-worlds-best-wr/#step1

The current application I’m working on requires me to publish an MVC 3 Razor web application.  I’m using sFTP as the protocol to my hosting provider.  After the first publish I was unable to run the application.   It kept throwing errors that I was missing assemblies.    The first error I got was that the application was missing the Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure.dll.   I added that DLL into the references and set it to copy local.  Knowing that the copy local would allow me to publish the dll into the applications Bin directory.

This worked for only that DLL.  I then got anther error of another missing dll: System.Web.Mvc.dll.   After this I did a few searches to see what the issue was.  I noticed a few posts mentioning these issues when the hosting provider did not MVC installed.    To get around this there are a few suggestions.    I read Hanselman’s post regarding bin publishing.

At first I added a folder in the bin directory called _bin_assemblies.  I added the following DLL’s. (you can get them as a zip file here)

• System.Web.Mvc
• Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure
• System.Web.Razor
• System.Web.WebPages
• System.Web.WebPages.Razor

I’m in the middle of writing a Windows Phone 7 application.  In the JSON call and collection I’m using.  I wanted to use a datacontract.  For a bit I could not get my class to recognize [DataContract] and [DataMember] .  I even had a direct reference in the class : using System.Runtime.Serialization;

I’m not sure of the reason but after troubleshooting it for a  bit I ended adding a project reference to System.Runtime.Serialization.    It is interesting that a direct reference did not take inside the class.

I’m not sure if it’s related, but I’ve noticed that in writing for windows phone 7 there are some areas that seem to be difficult to get past these small items