Jim Becher - Surfing the Web

Last week I lost my hard drive in my laptop.  The everyday laptop that I use for almost everything.  It was about 1 month old (new dell D820 laptop).   The drive in the laptop is nice a 7200 RPM (SATA) drive, but have seen some failures (Dell forums).   The drive…

I am often asked what sites do I visit.  I used to check everything via RSS and I still do, however I often find a few min just to see what is going on so I head to my trusty sites: 1. Digg.com 2. Techcrunch.com 3. lifehacker.com 4. Slashdot.org (used…

This is a great read.  A user lost his internet access from Comcast for using too much bandwidth. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2111373,00.asp How much bandwidth is too much.  In the article comcast actually responded with a great “non answer”.   Something to the effect that he was using more than 100,000 times the…

I use sql express for a lot of things.  On my development server and also on some production sites.  Some of the things that I have noticed is the lack of a backup solution or automation of a backup solution.  I found this article and script to generate a backup…

Here are some pics of the original google hardware from 98.  http://backrub.tjtech.org/May1998/hardware.htm 2 guys, an idea, and a little hard work.  They changed our search style’s, they changed the NYSE, they make a new use for the word google.  I’ll never forget the day when my Mom said that she…

As I progress with using Vista as my primary OS, I am finding some things that need to be addressed. One of the items left out of vista is an SMTP server.  In XP and older operating systems you can have this installed with IIS.  However, vista does not include…

I was reading my news feeds while waiting for my email to sync (lots of email) and could not resist sharing this post. http://consumerist.com/consumer/drm/how-i-became-a-music-pirate-245644.php This individual tried to do the right thing for the love of music.  It appears that the music industry let him down.   It seems to me…

IISreporter 2.0 is now available.  Go and download (www.iisreporter.com/download).  The free standalone version allows you to monitor the connections on your local IIS server.  You can install on as many servers / machines you would like.  A new IISreporter Command center version will be released in the next 2 weeks. …

I have an application that I wrote that uses a web service to provide data back to a central app.  I needed a windows sidebar gadget to consume the web service.  However I noticed that when using javascript to consume the service I would get errors.  I then realized that…