In January I signed up for a monthly subscription to these guys ($19.00/month): http://tekpub.com/.

TekPub is comprised of Rob Conery of SubSonic fame and JamesAvery (The Lounge, .NET, Ruby guy) with contributing guest presenters such as Steve Sanderson and Oren Eini (Ayende Rahien).

They have a bunch of great videos covering everything from Linq, Git, jQuery, NHibernate to ASP.NET MVC 2 (to mention just a few). If you’re strapped for time and need to get up to speed real quick with any of these technologies then you can’t go wrong with the TekPub content. I thoroughly recommend and their monthly subscription, it’s pretty good value for money.

Unless you’ve been living under a stone for the past few weeks then you may have heard about the BBC’s plans to axe their 6Music station. The BBC have got this horribly wrong. Mark Thomson and his sidekick Tim Davie have clearly never listened to the broadcast output of 6Music. They seem to think they can close the station and redistribute 6Music’s content across Radio 1 and Radio 2, but I can’t imagine either of these stations giving over valuable airtime minutes each week to excellent shows such as Stuart Maconies Freakzone or Craig Charles’ Funk and Soul Show. If they did we’d see these shows languishing away at crappy 2-3am slots with their broadcast minutes slowly chipped away at until their presenters give up.

It’s been suggested that the commercial sector pick up 6Music’s niche, but the problem here is that commercial stations can’t be trusted not to dumb down their content to maximise listener numbers to increase advertising revenue.

So please help prevent this act of cultural vandalism by doing your bit on these websites:

Join: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=nf&gid=278123313911

Tell the BBC what you think: http://bit.ly/srconsultation

Sign the petition: http://www.petition.fm/petitions/6musicasiannet/1000/

Support: http://www.welove6music.com/

Listen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/playlive/bbc_6music/

Today I had to modify our provisioning code to allow us to add IIS Manager Users so that customers can use the IIS Manager for Remote Administration to manage their website configurations remotely.

I took a trip over to IIS.NET to bone up on the IIS 7 administration.config configuration sections I needed to work with, and in particular the /system.webServer/management/authorization  and  /system.webServer/management/authorization/scope  sections.

Now if you scroll down to the bottom of these pages you’ll see code samples in C#, VB.NET, Javascript and VBScript, I was interested in the C# example. If you look at these examples there’s quite a few lines of code fiddling away with ConfigurationSections, ConfigurationElementCollections and all sorts of goings on.

But there’s a far simpler way to achieve the same thing and with a lot less code, the magic can be found in:

c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\Microsoft.Web.Management.dll

Add a reference to this managed DLL in your Visual Studio project and you get access to a class called ManagementAuthorization. This class has four handy static methods:

ManagementAuthorization.Grant(string username, string configurationPath, bool isRole)
ManagementAuthorization.Revoke(string username, string configurationPath)
ManagementAuthorization.RevokeConfigurationPath(string configurationPath)
ManagementAuthorization.GetAuthorizedUsers(string configurationPath, bool includeChildren, int itemIndex, int itemsPerPage)

The parameter configurationPath is the name of the site or a path within a site e.g. “/mysite.com” or “/mysite.com/myblogapp” (you need to remember to prefix the site name with a forward slash).

So to add a windows account that will be used to authorize remote administration clients you’d do this:

string username = “mymachinename\kevin”;
string configpath = “/mysite.com”;
ManagementAuthorization.Grant(username, configpath, false);

To revoke the same account:

string username = “mymachinename\kevin”;
string configpath = “/mysite.com”;
ManagementAuthorization.Revoke(username, configpath);

To get a list of all users granted remote access:

ManagementAuthorizationInfoCollection users =
                ManagementAuthorization.GetAuthorizedUsers(configPath, true, 0, Int32.MaxValue);
foreach(ManagementAuthorizationInfo user in users)
{
    Console.WriteLine(user.Name);
}

You can even have some LINQ fun to find a specific user:

ManagementAuthorizationInfo user =
    ManagementAuthorization.GetAuthorizedUsers(configPath, true, 0, Int32.MaxValue)
        .Where(u => u.Name == username)
        .SingleOrDefault();

To revoke all access to a site in one swift painless blow:

string configpath = “/mysite.com”;
ManagementAuthorization.RevokeConfigurationPath(configpath);

Now that’s a whole lot less typing than the IIS.NET examples.

This is very cool, roll on RTM!

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Glucose/Hanselminutes-on-9-Debugging-Crash-Dumps-with-Tess-Ferrandez-and-VS2010/

If your playback is jerky when playing video from the filesystem or a network share then increase the File cache size in:

Preferences –> Input –>Access Modules –> File

I bumped mine to 2000ms, no more jerky. There’s a whole bunch of other cache tuning you can do for other sources such as FTP, HTTP, TCP etc too.

Vanished is the first book in Joe Finder’s new “Nick Heller” series of books. Nick Heller is a “private spy” who works for a private intelligence firm, he’s ex-special forces, tough and doesn’t take any shit. In this first instalment Heller becomes involved in the hunt for his missing brother, a search which sees him embroiled in the goings on of the major defence contractor his brother works for.

Vanished starts off well but I got kind of bored about two thirds of the way through, in fact I don’t really remember much of interest that happened during those middle chapters. The last few chapters picked up my interest again but the ending felt so obvious (and awkward) that I was left feeling pretty disappointed. Vanished is ok, but not a patch on earlier corporate and political romps such as Paranoia or The Moscow Club. Hopefully the next Nick Heller instalment will be better.

5/10

Atheists and scientists are apparently fascists now for defending good science in the classroom and pushing back against teaching crackpot theories such as creationism and intelligent design:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,4432,n,n

Thought I’d give this Twitter malarky another go. You can read my haiverings and waffles at:

http://twitter.com/teh_klev

Normal service to be resumed when I get done with my Windows 2008 Server build docs etc.

The other day I was implementing a page block widget using jQuery and BlockUI. The code kinda looked like this:

The trick it seems is to close empty tags with an explicit closing tag. i.e. <div id=”progressMessage”></div> and then life is good again.

Fiddler to the rescue yet again….

If you’re doing jQuery/AJAX –> web service kinda things like this:

function submitWooshTest() {
    var adslOrderID = gQs.get("orderid"); 

    $.ajax({
        type: "POST", url: "ScriptServices/WooshTester.asmx/RequestWooshTest",
        data: {
            adslOrderID: adslOrderID,
            faultType: $('#wooshFaultType').val(),
            hasWorked: $('#wooshHasWorked').is(':checked'),
            disruptive: $('#wooshDisruptive').is(':checked'),
            faultDate: $('#wooshFaultDate').val(),
            faultTime: $('#wooshFaultHour').val() + ':' + $('#wooshFaultMinute').val()
        },
        success: function(result) {
            $.unblockUI();
            $.blockUI({ message: $('#wooshResults') });
            showWooshTests();
        },
        error: function(x, s, e) {
            debug(x, s, e);
        }
    });       
}

And the web service end point looks like:

Don’t forget to configure your web services protocols in your web.config:

Otherwise when accessing your functionality from a browser that isn’t on the localhost you’ll get the following cryptic error message:

System.InvalidOperationException: Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in '/RequestWooshTest.

[InvalidOperationException: Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in '/RequestWooshTest.]
   System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebServiceHandlerFactory.CoreGetHandler(Type type, HttpContext context, HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response) +405881
   System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebServiceHandlerFactory.GetHandler(HttpContext context, String verb, String url, String filePath) +212
   System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory.GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String url, String pathTranslated) +47
   System.Web.HttpApplication.MapHttpHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, VirtualPath path, String pathTranslated, Boolean useAppConfig) +193
   System.Web.MapHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +93
   System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean&amp; completedSynchronously) +155

If you ever end up with a totally broken .NET Framework install (say, after the installer for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 falls over), then head over here and get a copy of Aaron Stebners .NET Cleanup Tool:

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/05/30/611355.aspx

This is a tool of last resort and let me tell you things were pretty grim and last-resort like last Friday night for one of our production boxes (and me). This got me out of a huge hole where both .NET 3.0 and .NET 2.0 were so badly broken, the .NET 3.5 SP1 installer fell over mid flight, that I couldn't even repair/uninstall from Add/Remove Programs and I couldn't even run the redistributable installers to do a fix/replace/repair.

This is the book that the cult of Scientology seem to have managed to pull from sale on Amazon, Waterstones etc using their usual dodgy legal intimidation tactics. The book itself doesn't cover much more than you'll find on Operation Clambake other than a more personal story of one man's 22 year stint with the cult. I quite enjoyed it and read it cover to cover in a single sitting.

You can still order the book from Eason books in Ireland at http://www.eason.ie/look/9781903582848/Complex/John-Duignan.

7/10

Somehow just about every order I placed that was eligible for Amazon Prime arrived later than if I'd stuck to the 2-3 day free delivery. At the moment I'm waiting on a couple of books I'd normally order from Computer Manuals (they're always delivered next day). The books in question were dispatched from Amazon's fulfillment centre in Glasgow and have somehow got lost between there and the local City Link depot in Glenrothes. How hard can it be to send a box from one side of Scotland to the other?

Utterly useless.

Add to that I find that the royal mail have been saving up packages sent by first class letter post and delivering when it was more convenient to the postman.

Amazon Prime is a nice idea but so dependant on the vagaries of our postal service. I cancelled and I got my money back.

More like nothing happening, not even acting. M. Night Shyamalan seems to have some kinda hold over Hollywood but to be honest his films are pretty average to below par. The Happening is just a total waste of time and money. Walberg's acting was appalling and the rest of the cast were a joke.

Utter rubbish: 0/10

Sometime back in July or August Microsoft slipped out a driver for PHP 5 on windows. It uses the SQL Native Client which means that it also supports automatic transparent client redirect. Change this connection info array from:

$connectionInfo = array("Database"=>"AdventureWorks",
                            "UID"=>"sa",
                            "PWD"=>"foobar23$");

to

$connectionInfo = array("Database"=>"AdventureWorks",
                            "UID"=>"sa",
                            "PWD"=>"foobar23$",
                            "Failover_Partner"=>"mirror.sql.local");

and you've now got automatic failover capability. You need to be running a witness for this magic to happen. If you're running on a Linux box this capability is not available but you can always try something like:

http://www.evolt.org/failover-database-connection-with-php-mysql

Despite what SQL Books Online tell you about being able to use IP addresses to specify the failover partner and witness servers, this appears to be not quite true in practice.

I spent almost a day and a half configuring a HA mirroring rig using certificates for authentication (the servers are standalone and not in a domain) and was buggered if I could get the mirror and the witness to connect. Without this there'd be no automatic failover. Manual failover worked just fine, but our project requires Automatic Failover. It all seemed like an exercise in futility.

I even had the FQ domain names of all the machines participating in the Principal, Mirror and Witness rig in their respective HOSTS files, but still no dice.

Eventually I tried setting the PARTNER and WITNESS using the FQ machine names as they appear in the HOSTS files. Suddenly it all started working. Querying sys.database_mirroring on both principal and mirror at last showed the witness as connected.

I caved and bought a Mac Mini 2ghz a couple of days back. I quite like OS X and it has quite a good out of box experience. My only complaint so far is that arty farty aluminium keyboard and the one button mighty mouse. For a developer they both suck in terms of usability and ergonomics. I ended up buying an older A1048 wireless keyboard with proper keys and a proper two button Logitech LX6 mouse to replace them both.

Anyway it's been a long time since I got quite so excited about a new computer. I'm looking forward to honing my Python and Ruby skills in an environment that doesn't have my usual MS crutches like VS.

This quite a handy wee tool from MS -

Bumff:

XML Notepad 2007 Home

Download from:

XML Notepad 2007 Download

Attempting to use aerosol furniture polish as an air freshener in your linoleum floored kitchen...my back hurts...nuff said.

Update: Cats none too pleased either.

This film is so bad that after 20 minutes of watching it my eyes fell out.

Absolutely no redeeming features, not even funny in it's badness. I'm surprised Dan O'Bannon continues to allow himself to be involved in this franchise.

A 'my eyes, my ears!' - 0/10