K’s Weblog

Technology and the Interweb for the Real World

GeoCities Retiring Today

October 26th, 2009 by Keith
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GeocitiesoriginallogoIt’s been a long time since I had an active presence on GeoCities (about 13 years by my count) but its still a site that holds a place in my heart. I got  started with website design, as did thousands of other people, by having a site on GeoCities many years ago. And within a few months of joining what was in some ways one of the earliest social networks of the web, I’d entered the “GeoCities Community Leader” program to help other people learn the technology, and learn to do more with the tools the free service provided.

no_more_geocitiesToday Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities officially. For good. It’s been 15 years since the service got its start in 1994, and 10 years since Yahoo bought the company for over $3 Billion in stock near the peak of the tech bubble in late 1999. Yahoo was fairly patient with the service leaving accounts active in one form or another until today.  It is in many ways the end of an era.

xkcd_geocities_tributeSome sites are paying tribute to the venerable property. I can’t tell if xkcd is paying tribute, or reminding those of us who are a bit sentimental just what the web looked like when GeoCities was the major force behind free web space on the internet.  Either way, have a look at the xkcd homepage today, or if you’ve missed the boat on that one, click the image in the right for a look at their 1990’s inspired design.

RIP GeoCities.

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Camping out with Windows 7

October 25th, 2009 by Keith
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Windows 7

I’ve been looking for a better way to do my Windows dev work at home for a while now.  I’ve explored a few different options including VMs and Mono, none of which suited the needs that I have.

I’m not someone who has to have the latest & greatest computers to get my stuff done. The things I use my computer for don’t require a whole lot of horsepower. Truth be told, the newest computer in the whole house is my three-year-old Macbook. So when it came to deciding which of the three machines in my house were going to get the Windows 7 treatment it wasn’t hard to decide.

Apple has said that they won’t be providing official support for Windows 7 on any of their machines for another few weeks, and when they do it’ll be on a limited subset of their Intel-based machines, and only for customers who’ve shelled out the extra $30 for Snow Leopard. Admittedly I’m not an expert in computer hardware, but I’ve been around the block enough times to know that “not officially supported” doesn’t mean “it won’t work”.

The first thing I tried to do was just clear some disk space and run the boot-camp wizard to set up a partition for Windows. Once again I ran into the problem of OS X not being able to reorganize the files on disk to create a contiguous partition. This doesn’t usually pose a problem with computers that have a disk defragmenting tool but of course OS X has some redimentary defrag technology built-in and thus the notion that “Mac’s don’t need to be defragged”. I call shenanigans.

Once I resigned myself to the fact that the only way I was getting back to the nirvana of dual booting was going to be to re-image the Macbook again, I backed up the system, procured a copy of Snow Leopard and got started with the process. Reinstalling OS X was about the same as with Leopard. A couple of new options but nothing earth shattering. The Windows 7 installation on the was also nothing special. Smooth and straightforward as we’d expect out of any modern OS, but it did move fairly quickly.

If you happen to be reading this before you do your installs there’s one useful piece of information in the 14 page document that Apple says you need to read before trying the scary installation of Windows on your Mac. That would be that the drivers for Windows are located on your Snow Leopard install disk. I spent about 3 hours trying to find drivers.

Even though Apple says Windows 7 isn’t supported, the included drivers on the Snow Leopard disk (intended for use with Vista) work just fine.  Windows also reports that some drivers fail to install properly, but in my case there’s nothing overtly wrong. Network, audio, video keyboards & mice are all working as expected with the exception of multitouch functionality on the trackpad. Since I’ll be using the Windows side of the machine most often when connected to a full desk setup (KVM) I’m not too worried about it.

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Making ASP.NET MVC work on IIS 6.0

August 25th, 2009 by Keith
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For the past couple of weeks I’ve finally gotten around to playing with the (now not so new) ASP.NET MVC Framework. This, of course, is Microsoft’s take on the MVC architecture pattern which gives developers another well supported and well documented alternative to traditional WebForms projects.

The test machine that I’m running is Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0. Unlike more contemporary versions of IIS, it doesn’t support MVC out of the box and leads to the rather annoying problem of 404’s on every page.

The cause of this is that IIS 6.0 expects a physical file to be available every time a URL is called. When it can’t find the files that match the nice URL routes that the MVC framework uses by default it panics and throws the 404. Thankfully there’s a quick configuration change you can make to fix this issue: enabling ASP.NET to manage wildcard URLs.

IIS6 ASP.NET ISAPI WildcardsStep-by-step Guide

  1. Open up the IIS manager
  2. Open the properties of the site you want to manage
  3. Click on the Home Directory tab, then the Configuration button
  4. Click on Insert
  5. Browse to the ASP.NET ASAPI dll, by default located at: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll
  6. Unckeck the box Verify that file exists
  7. Click the myriad OK buttons and voilà!

Now, since that was so simple you may be wondering what the catch is.  Well the catch is this: the wildcard option has IIS process every request into the server, including static files.  Since ASP.NET doesn’t process the files as efficiently as IIS does natively it will cause the application to take a performance hit.  If your applications require really high performance, or have a large user base it might be worth considering upgrading to a newer version of Windows and IIS.

This technique was shamelessly paraphrased from the article on Steve Sanderson’s blog which goes into more detail on the hows and whys behind this structure in IIS.  Steve also offers a few other options which have their own pros and cons.  If you’re making these changes to a production environment I’d recommend you give his article a thorough read.

Enjoy.

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New Podcast: Short Order Code

August 14th, 2009 by Keith
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Over the past several months I’ve mentioned occasionally that I’m working on a new software development focused podcast. The time has finally come for me to make a more official announcement about this new endeavour.

The new show called Short Order Code. The show will be a
series of audio podcasts and video screencasts focusing on a number of
areas of practical software development.

The first episode is out now, and the next few are in various stages of being produced while I put together the final bits and pieces and trying to sort out my process.  Once that’s done and the first few episodes have been put together
I’ll try to provide more information around long-term plans for the
show.

For those who may be wondering, this is not going to affect my
affiliation with the Aussie Geek Podcast (despite our . I love doing the show, and plan to continue in my co-hosting role for the foreseeable future as long as the AGP community is willing to have me. Time zone considerations will probably continue to make a mess of our schedule, but we’ll do our best to produce a great show for the community as often as we possibly can.

So keep your eyes peeled for more information, and head on over to the website at shortordercode.com and subscribe to the feed!

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Honing the Craft

August 10th, 2009 by Keith
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We were on vacation for a couple of months back staying with my wife’s family in the US.  I didn’t completely unplug during the trip, though I wasn’t checking work email, my personal accounts were down to a cursory glance once-per-day, and I’ve dialed back on the Twitter usage quite significantly.

In some of my relaxation time (while babysitting my sleeping 7-month old niece) I got the chance to do a bit of software development. My brother-in-law and I got to talking one night about a project he was hoping to get some help with. He had asked me as an adviser, and since the work was similar to things I’d done for work in the past I felt compelled to offer to help.

The project itself was simple enough: take this text file and put its contents into an Access database. The process has reminded me about why I like software development, and why I miss it.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks we went through a half-dozen iterations of the application, much in the same way that I would have worked with end-users inside our business unit at work.  It allowed me to work through a problem, understanding the true nature of the business problem that he was trying to solve, not necessarily just the problem as it was described in the initial requirements discussion.

I had the chance to pull out skills that I hadn’t exercised much in the past couple of years since my job role has changed, which was a great shift for me.  It’s given me the push I needed to get the podcast going, and to dive in to a few of my other projects with a bit more gusto.  Software is a craft, and its one that I need to continue to hone as time moves forward.  I could probably be considered little more than an apprentice right now, but with the entire Internet as my journeyman instructor I should be able to earn my ticket in the months to come.

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