General
If you would like to help me out, you can Tweet this story OR email Expedia and ask them to make things right for me and my wife. This is the story of how Expedia made my new bride cry. When Expedia followed up their failure with our honeymoon trip with a complete and total lack of acknowledgement of any responsibility for the problem and endless loops of explaining the issue over and over again - I swore that they would make it right. When they brought my new bride to tears, I got an immediate and...
Its hard to find much technical information on the Windows Hosts file, beyond what is pretty much common knowledge. Some questions I had recently that were hard to find the answers to: Q. How big can the hosts file be? A. I still haven’t found an answer to this one, but apparently pretty darn big. The MVPs.org Hosts file is over 600Kb and still growing (it is designed to block certain malware related sites). Q. How long can a single line in a hosts file be? A. It seems the answer to this question...
For some reason directions for clearing the Squid proxy cache (in Windows) seemed hard to come by on the web, so I thought I’d post them here. Hope this helps someone: Run MMC and load the services snap-in, kill the running squid process. Empty Squid’s cache folder (e.g. C:\squid\vars\cache\). Run Squid with the –z parameter to rebuild the cache folder structure (e.g. C:\squid\sbin\squid.exe –z). From the services snap-in of MMC, restart the squid service...
Just a quickie convenience tip. Some mornings it seems to take my computer a little too long to “wake up” after being hibernated overnight. This annoyed me, but as of today it annoys me no longer. This morning my computer was fresh and ready to go as soon as I sat down at my desk. These instructions are for Windows 7, however the same basic idea will work fine in Vista and XP. From Control Panel, choose Administrative Tools, and then Task Scheduler. Create a basic task. This task can be for anything...
Seemingly out of the blue, copy and paste from my local desktop to Remote Desktop stopped working. I had to resort to *gasp* FTP (ok, so it wasn’t that big a deal but it was still annoying to me). Anyway, the solution turned out to be very simple: On the remote machine, just bring up the task manager and kill and restart rdpclip.exe. Voila, problem solved
I've been extremely fortunate to work at /n software, but after more than 9 years, the time has come for me to say "goodbye". This Friday will be my last day. The people behind the amazing machine that is /n software are great, hard working people, and I'll be a fan for life. Most importantly though, I'm looking forward to new experiences and new challenges. I'll be joining an exciting new online marketing startup in Chapel Hill (more about them later!). My new work will be as a C# developer, but...
If you know of a better place to take-out of the Deep River at US1, I’d appreciate a note here. :) Yesterday, my buddy Blake and I went out on a kayak adventure on the Deep River. “Kayak”, because we took kayaks with us. “Adventure” because it was very loosely planned and we figured if we ran into any trouble we’d just figure it out and deal with it. Turned out we did run into some trouble and we did deal with it! It was a ton of fun! We knew there was a take-out spot somewhere near the US1 bridge...
Here is how to add a “Tweet” button to your ActiveForums threads, using John Resig’s (@jeresig) “Easy Retweet Button”. I added a “Tweet” button to the header of each post, right next to the existing quote/reply buttons. First, modified the default styling of John’s retweet.js so that the tweet button matches ActiveForums. I modified retweet in the following ways: Set the link_text to just “ Tweet”. I killed the click count by setting count_type to “none”. Completely deleted the “styling:”...
Go to the forum control panel, Templates. If want to modify the ForumView, click on it and insert your Adsense code after the very first [BREADCRUMB], ie: <%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="ForumJump" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTFor... <%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="Stats" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTFor... <%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="WhosOnline" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTFor... [BREADCRUMB]...
I was asked to evaluate SlickEdit 2009, so I dropped Ultra-Edit for about three weeks and used only SlickEdit 2009. Here is a little “log” of my thoughts on the switch: - SE setup asked to add to my system path – I don’t like having to add stuff to my path. What is the benefit of adding this? [SE Staff:] Many of our customers are heavy keyboard and command line users. Adding SlickEdit to the path allows you to invoke it and its related utilities using the command line. - The first thing I went to...
I’ve always wished I could customize the skin on my blog at GeeksWithBlogs.Net. GeeksWithBlogs is built on SubText, and of course its just a skin, but since GWB is hosting my blog and I don’t have control over the skin files myself I am limited to what I can do with it. Well, today I finally did it, after some inspiration from John Resig (@jeresig) and his “Easy Retweet Button”. I added a “Tweet This!” button to the footer of each post. First, I modified the default styling of John’s retweet.js so...
I got the email below yesterday from the folks at "All About Beer" magazine - those that host the yearly Beer Festival in Raleigh and Durham. I don't know about you - but I don't want to my favorite small micro-breweries knocked out of business due to unfair taxation. We're already paying enough taxes on beer and wine. If you are a citizen of North Carolina, I would ask that you take a minute to do the two quick things suggested in the email. Thanks! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~...
I have been free of my monstrous cable tv bill for many months now, and I love it! Woooo! A while back I posted about how I want to get revenge on Cable companies by helping as many people as I can kill their cable service in favor of free HD tv over the air and over the Internet. There are other “free TV” guides on the Internet – but they suck because they are too generic, too technical, or not technical enough. Hopefully this one doesn’t suck. Let me know if you have any questions – if you tell...
I’ll be a guest on the extremely informative PowerScripting Podcast this Thursday evening (4/2/09). I’ll talk about some of the PowerShell-related products I am working on at /n software like NetCmdlets, RSSBus, PowerShell Server, as well as join in on some general PowerShell geek fun. Also I’ll give a sneak peak of some new freebie PowerShell toys coming out for PowerShell enthusiasts. Join in on the live UStream at 9pm EST Thursday and say “hi” – or download the podcast later from the PowerScripting...
I have been a long time user of FeedDemon, which I think is an excellent product. Unfortunately I do not feel the same way about NewsGator’s online reader, and its sync with FeedDemon on my desktop leaves much to be desired. In an effort to be able to read my subscriptions from anywhere, I’ve decided to make the switch to Google Reader. I tried GR a long time ago, when it first came out, and I didn’t like the interface, but they have cleaned that up. Thankfully. :) Also, I do plan to keep FeedDemon...
Good news from Pandora yesterday – The Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 was passed in the House, enabling Internet radio to exist without paying ridiculous per listener fees. Here’s the email from Pandora: Hi, it's Tim from Pandora; Today, thanks to the extraordinary support of many Pandora listeners, we took a giant step forward when the House of Representatives supported Pandora and Internet radio and passed the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008. Now we need your help so that the Senate will pass...
Its easy to forget about the –debug parameter, but a lot of times it can be very helpful, especially with NetCmdlets where in many cases –debug will output the protocol interface (the “PITrail” as we call it at /n software) of the connection. The PITrail includes a trail of communication between the cmdlet and the remote host it is talking to. Rob emailed me to ask for help diagnosing a 425 error he was getting when using the NetCmdlets get-ftp cmdlet. As I described to Rob, in a nutshell the 425...
The FAQ at freeas2.com is funny. :) I love it when software companies put on this sort of laid back front. Q: Spyware! You have some sort of spyware that accompanies your install. You're harvesting information about me, aren't you? No, &Registry.find_name;, we don't install anything else on your machine. Technorati Tags: AS2, EDI...
If you’re an RSSBus user who is using my Google Calendar –> Twitter or Flickr –> Twitter services, you might notice a minor change to both. I changed Twitterminder so that tweets resulting from Google Calendar entries are prepended with “GCal: “. I did the same thing with the Flickr->Twitter script, it will now prepend “Flickr: “. Related: How to call these services from your own applications. Related: How I converted TwitterMinder into Flickr->Twitter by changing 4 lines of code...
This is cool – FriendFeed created the SUP protocol (format) for web services that produce multiple feeds. In order to reduce tons of frequent feed polling, services can offer one “SUP feed” that indicates what feeds on the service have been updated. It works very simply. Each RSS/Atom feed includes a link tag with that feeds SUP-ID (so each feed has its own SUP-ID) and the URL of the SUP feed. The SUP feed contains a list of all the SUP-ID’s of feeds that have been updated...
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