After about 10 years my garage door quit working. After a couple of turns of the screw driver I see that the innerds are full of gear dust. My drive gear is stripped!

To fix or replace? That is the question. I quickly discover that a new gear is only $12 on ebay and that includes grease and free shipping. Done.

When it arrives I come to a step in the instructions that simply says “remove roll pin from under the drive gear”.

Hmm. That seems to be a problem. As it turns out you need a Roll Punch to remove a Roll Pin.  A tool which I do not own. Home Depot, no. Lowes, no.  Sears, scoreboard! $20 bucks.

My garage door opener is now in full repair.  I could probably return the set but I’ll probably need it in another 10 years.

Drive Gear Stripped

Some things you might not know about Scott Guthrie

1. When Scott Guthrie throws exceptions, it’s across the room.
2. All arrays Scott Guthrie declares are of infinite size, because Scott Guthrie knows no bounds.
3. Scott Guthrie doesn’t have disk latency because the hard drive knows to hurry up.
4. Scott Guthrie writes code that optimizes itself.
5. Scott Guthrie can’t test for equality because he has no equal.
6. Scott Guthrie doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick().
7. Scott Guthrie’s first program was kill -9.
8. Scott Guthrie burst the dot com bubble.
9. All browsers support the hex definitions #scott and #guthrie for the colors black and blue.
10. MySpace actually isn’t your space, it’s Scott’s (he just lets you use it).
11. Scott Guthrie can write infinite recursion functions … and have them return.
12. Scott Guthrie can solve the Towers of Hanoi in one move.
13. The only pattern Scott Guthrie knows is God Object.
14. Scott Guthrie finished World of Warcraft.
15. Project managers never ask Scott Guthrie for estimations … ever.
16. Scott Guthrie doesn’t use web standards as the web will conform to him.
17. “It works on my machine” always holds true for Scott Guthrie.
18. Whiteboards are white because Scott Guthrie scared them that way.
19. Scott Guthrie doesn’t do Burn Down charts, he does Smack Down charts.
20. Scott Guthrie can delete the Recycling Bin.
21. Scott Guthrie’s red polo shirt can type 140 wpm.
22. Scott Guthrie can unit test entire applications with a single assert.
23. Scott Guthrie doesn’t bug hunt as that signifies a probability of failure, he goes bug killing.
24. Scott Guthrie’s keyboard doesn’t have a Ctrl key because nothing controls Scott Guthrie.
25. When Scott Guthrie is web surfing, websites get the message “Warning: Internet Explorer has deemed this user to be malicious or dangerous. Proceed?”.

10%+  of the population is still unemployed in my state so if you are in a similar situation here is what I have learned:

1.) Get as many interviews as possible. Each interview is valuable experience and practice. If you mess up learn from it and fix it next time.  An introvert like me needs lots of practice. Take any one you can get even if you know you don’t want that particular job.

2.) Sell yourself! The first half of the interview is usually them explaining the job and selling it to you. If you want the job you need to explain how your skills make you a good fit. It sounds simple and obvious but if you want the job ask for it. Enthusiasm is a good thing. Act like your selling the Sham-Wow.

3.) DO NOT B.S. If they ask you a question and you don’t know the answer, say so.  If you answer wrong it’s over in their mind. I fudged some answers in an interview once and there was an email rejection letter in my in-box by the time I got home. Some interviewers suck at interviewing and rely on technical questions. That’s probably a red flag but still don’t B.S.

4.) Wear a suit and get a hair cut. Hopefully this goes without saying but you never know. You need to look like a professional. The company is about to invest a lot of money in you. You need to look like you have it together.

5.) Be early. Get there 15 minutes early. The interview is probably your first impression. Don’t blow it. Mapquest the route the night before, get a Garmin, what ever. Take extra copies of your resume and have references printed up and ready.

6.)  Don’t rely on monster. If you see a posting on Monster or dice use it as a lead.  Try to figure out the  company’s website based on their  email domain.  Go to their website, look up the HR director and call them . Ask to speak with the hiring manager.  Get on that phone.

7.) Craig’s list is your friend. I was surprised to find out how many good jobs were posted on Craig’s list. It makes sense though I guess. Craig’s list is free. Monster costs hundreds of dollars. I found my job though Craig’s list.

8.)LinkedIn. Recruiters are now starting to use LinkedIn to find people. Make sure your on it. Get some references out there.

9.) Get good at the cover letter. Download as many examples as you can find. Study them and master the cover letter. It’s just as important as your resume. This, for me, was why job hunting was a full time job. Each resume sent should have a custom written cover  letter explaining how you are a good fit for the posting.

10.) Have an answer. When you are asked a question in an interview, answer it in specifics. For example “what kind of environment are you looking for?”. “Any kind” is a bad answer. This is where doing your home work comes in.  If it’s a big shop you don’t want to say you are looking for something small. But it’s more about confidence than anything.

11.) Be ready for rejection. It’s bound to happen so don’t let it get you down. Interviewing is hard on both sides.  Just do the best you can, be confident, be positive. Try to learn from every failure. It’s not enought to say the guy interviewing you was an idiot. You have to develop an idiot strategy for the next time you come across one.No matter how well you do, you could have none better. More eye contact, less mono-tone, firmer handshake, act less nervous, something…

12.) There is such a thing as over-qualified. When things get really bleak you may find yourself looking at jobs you are over qualified for. I would try to avoid that. They are likely to reject you. It defies logic! I got rejected for every single job I was overqualified for. Many times I was more qualified that the hiring manager. If you  are  trying to downgrade your job and settle for something you may want to alter your resume.  Leave off the Master’s degree if you applying for a level-one help desk job. There’s nothing wrong with getting a little desperate when money is tight but it led to a lot of disappointment for me.

Well that’s it. I hope nobody needs any of this. If you do, Best of luck!

This same snipit can be put on any page as is and forces certain pages to be https. The nice thing about it is that the user can not edit the url back to http on a page that has this. All I did was put it on the login page and payment page.

On page load the server examines the Request.IsSecureConnection flag and redirects if not secure. It’s that simple. To make it a re-useble snipit I get the page name dynamically.

Be sure not to include the slash after your top level domain.

If Not Page.IsPostBack Then

If Not Request.IsSecureConnection Then

Response.Redirect(“https://www.yourhostname.com” & Request.Url.PathAndQuery.ToString)

End If

End If

To center a table is easy. You just set align=”center”. But what about when using the new way?

When you want to center a div in the middle of the page use either a style or a css class to set the following attibutes:

width: a fixed width;
margin-right:auto;
margin-left:auto;

Note this tip is only for horizontal alignment. Centering vertically will be discussed in a future post.

example:

<div style=”width:600px; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;”>

Hello Middle.

</div>

On a windows server running IIS flash . swf files that play .flv videos need to have a setting configured in IIS.

You must set MIME type to associate the .flv extention with video.

Specifically you set .flv=video/x-flv

So how do you do it?

For these instructions you need access to the server’s desktop to implement this tweek. A savy IT person with the right access can do this without remote desktop but I’ll keep it simple.

• Right click “My computer”
• Select “Manage” , microsoft management console will load with several snap-ins ready to go
• Expand the services and applications node
• Expand the Internet Infomation Servicess (IIS) Manager node
• Expand the Web Sites node
• Right click the web site you want to configure
• Select Properties. The site’s property sheets will appear.
• Click the HTTP Headers tab
• Click the Mime Types button
• Click the New button
• in the extention box type “flv”
• in the MIME Type box type “video/x-flv”
• Click OK, OK, OK

So what is MIME and why do we have to do this? Who cares, it works! Just kidding.  MIME types tell the browser what application to use with a certain file extention. In this case the server is telling the browser to use the flash player to handle flv files.

-edit on IIS7 the mimetype for flv is correct.

In this post we will create a vb Script that pings an IP address and reboots if it can’t see it. We will simply run it on a timer using the command scheduler.

Here is the script:

Option Explicit

dim strHost

‘The ip address you want to monitor
strHost=”111.222.333.444″

if Ping(strHost) = True then

‘You can do stuff here if you want.

Else

‘The next three lines reboot

dim objShell
Set objShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
objShell.Run “shutdown /r /t 000″

end if

‘the following is a subroutine called above

Function Ping(strHost)

dim objPing, objRetStatus

set objPing = GetObject(“winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}”).ExecQuery(“select * from Win32_PingStatus where address = ‘” & strHost & “‘”)

for each objRetStatus in objPing
if IsNull(objRetStatus.StatusCode) or objRetStatus.StatusCode<>0 then

Ping = False

else
Ping = True
end if
next
End Function

Just save this to a vbs file and add

cscript c:\ping.vbs

to “Scheduled tasks” every 15 minutes.

‘Till next time…

Here is what I did for remove it.

1.) Turn off system restore

Right click My Computer, choose properties, click the system restore tab, check the box “Turn off system restore”, OK

2.) Run the uninstatller.

This doesn’t really un-install the program but it does reveal the install location you’ll need later to delete it. Note it’s location

3.) Stop the proces.

Browse to the location noted above. press ctrl-alt-delete and choose task manager.
On the process tab end any program that appears in the folder noted above

4.) Delete the folder

browse to the c:\programs files folder and delete the folder noted above.

5.) Reboot

At this point a full system scan came back clean.

I’m sure there are registry entries and registered DLLs left but this is the novice’s guide to quickly getting rid of Antivirus XP 2008. If you know how to unregister Dlls and edit the registry then Google the info and do it. This pain-in-the neck has lots of web pages about removal.

The msdn documentation was a little hazy on this subject. Here it is as I understand it….

Lets start from the beginning; and adrotator will take a list of images and rotate through them every time the page loads. Some ads may need to appear more often than others. That is where the Impressions property comes in. It allows to give some ads more weight than others. Perhaps one person is paying more for the ad.

OK, so how do we use it? if every image should be weighted equally just set it to 1. Other wise you need to figure out the ratio. To figure it out you add up all the impression values in the file. Each ads ratio is it’s impression value divided by the total.

So if there were three ads in the file and they looked like this:

ad 1 imressions = 1
ad 2 impressions=2
ad 2 impressions =2

The total is 5. Ad 1 will be show 1 out of 5 times. Ad 2 will be shown 2 out of 5 times and so on.

I like to work in percentages. To do this just divy up the ads until we get to 100%.

Ad 1 impressions = 20%
Ad 2 impressions= 40%
ad 3 impressions= 40%

Just make sure they all ad up to 100 and your done.  The percentage is the number of impressions.  1, 2,2 is actually the same as 20, 40, 40 so why not base it on 100 so it’s easier to figure out?

Good Luck.

P.S. I saw a blog somewhere that wrapped an adrotator in a UpdatePanel that pdated on a timer. Interesting. Quicker than flash and more flexible than an animated gif. I’ll be filing that in the back of my mind.

Operator ‘==’ incompatible with operand types ‘Int32′ and ‘Object’

I had an good grasp on why but the stack track would not tell me where!

The issue is that a null object was being used in a where clause somewhere. Linq translated the null as “” and could not be compared the the ID field which is an int.

My solution was to simply check each key and cancel the action if there is a null value.

Since I couldn’t tell which Linq Data source was crashing I wired up on selecting events for them ALL and put the following code in:

foreach (KeyValuePair<string, object> kvp in e.WhereParameters)
{

if (kvp.Value == null){

e.Cancel = true;

return;

}

}

Problem solved.