Author Archives: illiniguy

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 2:43 pm on July 9, 2008
Tags: iis, windowsxp   

Hiding Windows Components in Windows XP

Something that could really come in handy for those involved in setting up PCs.  I was working on a laptop here and noticed the list of Windows Components on the Add/Remove Components menu was missing every component except the basic networking ones.  I was looking in particular for IIS, as I need to install it for some ASP.NET work.

Sure enough, there’s a ‘config’ file that controls which options are available in the Add/Remove window.  See the file c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf (note that ‘inf’ is a hidden Windows folder).  Credit to this forum post.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 7:16 pm on July 5, 2008  

Font Issue – Firefox 3 on Mac OS X

Just upgraded the wife’s Mac to Firefox 3, seemed to be painless and straightforward.  Until she went to use it the first time herself and some sites would show garbled text, what looked like squished fractions for certain text on web pages.  Only certain sites, only certain text.  Wikipedia is one that is usually affected.

Unfortunately not much information can be found on MozillaZine or most support forums.  Mainly because it’s kind of hard to describe or find the right search terms for.  But I did find a support post finally that pointed me to the true fix: disable the Helvetica Fractions font in Font Book.

Hope this helps save an hour of someone else’s time 😉

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 8:03 pm on January 12, 2008  

VB.NET 2.0: Option Strict in code-behind files

Being a C#-leaning programmer in a VB.NET world most of the time, I find myself cringing a little when I find out most architects or developers on my projects are not enabling the Option Strict option in their projects. Option Strict causes a developer to be cognizant of the implicit casts they are putting into their code, adding another layer of protection against data loss and runtime errors. With just a little extra work, you can spend less time testing or tracking down such errors.

Anyway, enough rhetoric, there’s plenty of information online on what Option Strict provides for you. The reason I’m here today is to share a tip on how to enable Option Strict in your code-behind files in a VB.NET web application (or web site). You can enable this option of course in each page/code file, but I recommend making it a global project setting.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft KB article that addresses this doesn’t work. Those web.config settings do not work. However, after some Google-ing I found an ASP.NET forum post addressing this issue. Here’s what you need to add to your web.config:

<system.codedom>
    <compilers>
      <compiler compilerOptions ="/optionexplicit+ /optionstrict+" language="vb;vbs;visualbasic;vbscript" extension=".vb" type="Microsoft.VisualBasic.VBCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
    </compilers>
  </system.codedom>
Unknown's avatar illiniguy 1:15 pm on October 16, 2007  

Napster 4.0 released

Wish they could have given us some update via their messageboards, especially as we were clamoring for any hint of an update. I luckily found out from downloadsquad.

Once again the ‘check for update’ tool inside of the Napster client does not detect there is an upgrade. Goto Napster’s homepage and log in. It’ll start synching up with your music collection, to now make it available online, and then prompt you to download the new client.

Ooooo, I can’t wait to use…

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 8:56 pm on September 17, 2007  

Viewing large text files

Needed to look at a 8GB log file tonight.  Don’t ask why it was that big, it shouldn’t have been 😉  Only a brave soul tries to open that with Notepad or any old text pad application.

Once again, Google is your friend, as I found Large Text File Viewer.  It opened that file and only took 2MB of RAM to do it.  Coop sweet!

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 1:29 pm on September 12, 2007  

Bloglines beta

A few weeks ago (I believe) Bloglines unveiled a separate, beta version of an upgrade to their online newsreader. It is available here, just login with your existing user information.

I’ve been testing/switching back and forth between this beta and Google Reader. I gotta say I like love this new beta! It’s much quicker to load than Reader in every browser I’ve tried and the appearance is more appealing to me (always had an issue with Google’s choice of colors/fonts, even using Greasemonkey hacks). Plus you can now reorder your feed list via drag-drop, and it has a 3-pane view that I’ve found myself using for almost all feeds.

Only drawbacks so far: I’d like to use the Quick View for reading feed items, but unfortunately I haven’t found a way to collapse a news item once it’s opened, making for more scrolling than I like. And I’d still like to see them do pinning similar to Starred Items in Google, so they don’t clutter up my viewing of new items within a feed.

But they have been releasing new features and migrating old ones as time has gone on. In just a couple of weeks they’ve updated the default theme to use more bold fonts and added back in pinning, to name a couple. And watch what happens when you hit the ~ key on your keyboard. Who knows where that is going 🙂

So expect to see more happen as the beta progresses.

Now I’m no power RSS user, so I can’t critique much beyond that, but especially if you’re a non-power-user like me, I’d highly recommend giving it a try.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 12:37 pm on August 24, 2007  

Napster scrobbler

Someone in the last.fm forums has written a scrobbler for Napster…sweet!

For those uninitiated, a scrobbler is used to submit song information to last.fm, where you can view my Recently Played Tracks, my top albums, trends in listening, etc. The scrobbler is a little program that I run and sits in my taskbar, monitoring my music player (in this case, Napster), submitting the information to last.fm’s servers.

last.fm offers widgets I can embed on my site so you could see what I’m listening to, which I’m trying to do on this blog, the code is actually there, but it doesn’t show up over to the right…oh well, I’ll keep plugging away…hopefully it’s not a limitation of the fact I use wordpress.com for hosting.

In the meantime, you can check my last.fm profile page.

EDIT: turns out the code wasn’t there. Apparently WordPress.com filters out certain tags, part of the last.fm widget. No biggie, added the RSS feed there instead. Sorry, you’ll have to settle for that until WordPress.com adds the (much-requested) last.fm widget.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 11:04 pm on September 29, 2006  

HttpCompileException on ASP.NET 2.0 Precompiled Site

Hmmm, just ran across something interesting.  Twas trying to publish a precompiled site to a 3rd-party host for the first time, and kept getting: ‘Cannot convert type ‘ASP.login_aspx’ to ‘System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login”  At first I thought perhaps it was a permissions thing, I mean it’s worked fine at my day job when deploying on our networks.

As usual, Google is your friend.  Basically don’t name your pages (or perhaps just your Page classes) the same as controls in (at least) the System.Web namespace(s).  Read there for more info.  Renamed my Login.aspx to XXLogin.aspx and presto!

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 1:36 pm on August 29, 2006  

Worst guitar solo ever!

Check out Audioslave’s new song ‘Original Fire’.  The first AudioSlave song I’ve actually liked, it’s upbeat and rockin’.  All of a sudden the guitar solo kicks in and it’s obvious Tom Morello has no idea how to write a solo, he must be rhythm-deprived.  To be honest, I’ve never been impressed with his guitar skills outside of how he played with RATM, cuz that music fit his skills and type of playing well.  But this song’s solo is just so bad (and actually listening to some of his playing during the verses as well, that’s not the greatest match either); me and a friend were driving back from Michigan, twas the first time he’d heard the song, thought it was pretty good, then the solo kicked in. He looked at me and shook his head in agreement.