My iGeneration

"System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Access is denied" Error message when attempting to run command line program from ASP.NET

2010-02-22T10:22:00.000-05:00

See this post for information on how to run command line programs from ASP.NET. The solution to the error message is to add NTFS read permissions for the website user to %windir%\system32\cmd.exe.

Northern Kentucky Start-Up Slam!

2010-02-11T14:27:00.000-05:00

Northern Kentucky is finally getting its own "startup weekend"-like event - details below.

Northern Kentucky Start-Up Slam!

Where:

Northern Kentucky University
Student Union
Nunn Drive
Highland Heights, KY 41099

When:

March 19, 2010
10:00AM – 3:00PM

Cost to Attend:

FREE – Seminars, Networking & Lunch!
Company formation for only $65!

Agenda:

FREE Events:

- Coffee and networking.
- Speakers offering world-class entrepreneurial advice:

“Discussion Panel with Attorneys.”
“What business are you in?”
“How do you market and sell your product?”
“How do you forecast your revenue and expenses?”
“When do you pitch to investors? “

- Free Pizza Lunch!

VALUE Events: All included for just $65! A $300 value!

- Meet with an attorney for individual and confidential consultation and advice on starting your new business.
- Create a single-member LLC by:

Filing online with the Kentucky Secretary of State
Preparing an Operating Agreement for your new LLC

- Register a domain name and email address.

SPACE IS LIMITED:

RSVP to Shari Ball and receive a free gift at the door!

Shari Ball
sball@kstc.com
(859) 246-3233

IIBA CIO Series Speaker

2010-01-14T09:25:00.000-05:00

This would be an opportunity for Business Analysts to understand the BA function from a CIO perspective. Also a chance to ask those questions you'd like to ask your CIO --- but because of their busy schedule you just couldn't...

Join the Cincinnati IIBA to hear the insights and ideas of Cincinnati area CIOs who have demonstrated a solid commitment to promoting the effective practice of Business Analysis in their organizations.

Who: Diane Orndorff, Senior VP & CIO Chris Boult, SVP IT App. Services & Deputy CIO FirstGroup America
When: Tue, January 19, 2010 6:30 – 7:00 pm – Sign in & networking reception 7:00 – 7:45 pm – Presentation 7:45 – 8:00 pm – CIO Q&A
Where: UC College of Business - Carl H. Lindner Hall (Room 109) 2925 Campus Green Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221
Recommended parking: Campus Green Garage off Martin Luther King Dr. http://www.uc.edu/architect/documents/Logistics/logisticsbw.pdf
Admission: $ 6.00 Pre-register (IIBA members) $10.00
Pre-register (non-IIBA members) $10.00
General Admission at the door: IIBA members (cash only please) $15.00
General Admission at the door: non-IIBA members (cash only please)
Pre-Register now: http://www.eventsbot.com/events/eb041297459

Make it ra1n: How to unlock the latest iPhone 3G update

2009-12-24T15:39:00.000-05:00

So your wife reloaded/recovered your unlocked iPhone 3G through iTunes and now you've got the unbreakable 05.11.07 baseband firmware on OS 3.1.2 preventing you from using your iPhone? There's a hack for that.

Using blackra1n to jailbreak and unlock your iPhone 3G

If you're stuck in recovery mode before/after doing this, try using redsn0w with iPhone IPSW 3.0 to "jailbreak" the device. You'll need an AT&T SIM card to complete the operation. 3.1.2/5.11.07 is permanent, so 3.0 will not actually reload onto your device, but using this operation will get you back to the Springboard.

LAN Party Cometh

2009-12-16T22:05:00.002-05:00

CreateSpace Now Offering Traditional Distribution Outlets

2009-12-09T10:03:00.000-05:00

December 9, 2009 - After years of offering book sales only through their own site and the Amazon marketplace, Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace has finally found a way to list their ISBNs for sale to libraries and brick-and-mortar bookstores. It is available immediately for any book upgraded to a "Pro" account. Lucky authors were able to upgrade to Pro accounts last year for free, although that promotion is no longer offered. Pro accounts offer other useful features like reduced author purchase prices. This move puts CreateSpace toe-to-toe with traditional publishers, and even other print-on-demand (POD) publishers like Ingram's Lightning Source, who already offered such a service for a much steeper fee. At the time of this post, CreateSpace Pro plans costs $39 up-front and $5/year per book while Lightning Source costs $199 up-front.

The Reach of xkcd

2009-11-25T10:00:00.001-05:00

Within nine hours of today's xkcd being posted, SkiFree became the 5th (and 16th, if you include people looking for online versions) most searched Google term for the day, three web news articles were written about the various online versions, and the original author's site went down (presumably due to the traffic spike).

That's right, it's even more popular than Wal-mart's terrible Black Friday deals!

Cincinnati/NKY Metro Tech Ranking Moves Up

2009-11-12T17:11:00.031-05:00

The Cincinnati/NKY metro ranked 12th in the nation for tech job growth between 2007 and 2008, according to a new report by the Milken Institute. Overall, however, the tech industry is less concentrated here than the US average, leaving us ranked 95th (out of the top 200 US metros). Much of this could be due to our region's lack of focus on overcoming interstate boundaries when attracting, nurturing and retaining high tech businesses.

Coming soon: My interview with the directors of the NKY E-zone, and their thoughts on this problem.

Combining separate m2v and wav into a single mpg

2009-10-16T21:12:00.000-04:00

When you export MPEG2-DVD in Adobe Premiere, you might wind up with separate m2v and wav files instead of one nice tidy mpeg file that you can upload to an online video sharing site. Here's a freeware way to combine those files:

Download the latest mplayer distributable for your CPU from http://tirnanog.fate.jp/mirror/mplayer/. You'll need a heavy-duty unzip program like WinRAR to open the .7z file. Extract to the folder where your video and audio file is.
Open up a command prompt and type the following command:

mencoder source.m2v -audiofile source.wav -oac copy -ovc lavc -o output.mpg

where source.m2v is your source video file, source.wav is your source audio file, and output.mpg is what you want your new merged mpg file to be named.

You may have to fiddle with the -oac and -ovc codec options depending on how you output your video in your editor software. Useful options are:
-oac:

copy (Leave codec as is)
pcm
mp3lame (Lame mp3 encoder)
lavc (libavcodec)

-ovc:

copy (Leave codec as is)
raw (uncompressed)
nuv (nuppel)
lavc (libavcodec)
qtvideo (QuickTime)
xvid (XviD)
x264 (H.264)

Installing PEAR on Windows

2009-10-15T10:30:00.000-04:00

go-pear.bat is no longer included with the PHP Windows installer, so you have to do things manually.

Download the go-pear file locally and run from command line with "php go-pear" (or whatever you named the file).
Run the PEAR_ENV registry file generated during installation.
pear and pecl commands should work fine from command line now.

Ruby Gems Behind Proxy

2009-10-14T13:40:00.000-04:00

Command line switches for Ruby Gems don't seem to work in the latest release. Running the following before you run the gem command on Windows seems to work:

SET HTTP_PROXY=http://%USER%:%PASSWORD%@%SERVER%:%PORT%

Bebo White, America's first webmaster, to return to Rose-Hulman on Thursday

2009-09-15T17:30:00.024-04:00

Bebo White, one of the pioneers of the Wide World Web, will be making a special presentation on Thursday. Sept. 17, at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology that examines Web science as a new, multi-disciplinary research effort. The event, from 4:20-5:10 p.m. in the GM Room of Moench Hall, is free and open to the public.

Bebo is a key player in the Web Science Research Initiative, which aims to create a new interdisciplinary field called Web Science. Rose-Hulman has been a thought leader in this field, previously hosting the WWW@10 conference in 2004 (unfortunately a full year before I attended there) and founding the Web History Center.

But for its own part, Rose is not yet a pioneer in the practical side of this field. Academia as a whole has had difficulty keeping up with the fast-paced digital world and its rapidly changing technology base, and Rose is no different from the vast majority of other institutions each still focusing strictly on basic computer science and engineering concepts at the undergraduate level. Without acres of trees worth of Ph.D dissertations on web science, universities find it difficult to create the new courses and majors required to support America in the 21st century. A small group at Rose is trying to change that, and other schools in the tri-state are wasting no time building out curriculum under the banner of "informatics" (NKU, IU), but nothing fruitful will happen at any of these schools until well into the next decade. Even MIT only has labs (CSAIL, Media Lab) tangentially related to the field, not majors.

What are your takes on how academia can catch up to the current knowledge-based economy?

NYT thinks Facebook is imitating Twitter

2009-09-14T17:57:00.000-04:00

The NYT ran an article yesterday claiming that Facebook is adding "Twitter-like" features. I would argue the opposite: Facebook had micro-blogging first, the NYT just missed out on it since Facebook was restricted to the college crowd at the time. Facebook has always been about keeping your friends up to date.

Tagging has been around for quite sometime on the blogs, it was a natural extension to add it to status updates. And once again, Facebook is doing it better than Twitter, using AJAX drop-down suggestions for these new @ tags.

The new Facebook Lite site is reminiscent of the original Facebook, and appeals to people who don't like Facebook's new found robustness - like Zuckerberg himself. These updates have little to do with Twitter and more-so to do with customer demands for increased usability.

test

2009-09-12T19:54:00.001-04:00

gf5ekbnd4a

Digging Deep: Where are our GPS navigation units with built in radar detectors?

2009-09-10T00:07:00.000-04:00

Driving down I-75 in Cincinnati, you see billboards for the latest line of radar detectors featuring speed trap alerts powered by GPS. But whatever happened to GPS units with built in radar detection?

Uniden's MapTrax™ series, still sorely lacking radar detection capabilities two years later.

Months prior to CES 2008, Uniden announced their new lineup of GPS units using NAVTEQ™ maps and featuring radar detection and Bluetooth compatibility. According to the press release, four lines were set for release in 2007 with more models due out in 2008. We're now wrapping up 2009 and only two of the original lines are available, with no new models even sketched out as far as us consumers know. Unfortunately, neither available unit features radar detection or Bluetooth according to the Uniden website.

Taiwan start-up Rayee Technology Ltd. has also apparently created a GPS with radar detection capabilities, as caught at Computex 2009 (Taiwan's version of CES).

The Blinder GPS+Radar+Navigation, not yet for consumer sale. Expected to cost around $367 USD.

The Blinder is built on WinCE (really? why?) and can have up to two navigation databases installed at once. The radar detector is detachable and communicates to the GPS via RF, with the GPS saving the radar locations for future alerts. It's likely to only come with Asian maps at launch, so you'll have to download and install your own US maps.

PaPaGo, formerly known as KingMap, is likely to ship with the device. And this graphic was from the US version!

There are numerous reasons for merging the two devices most commonly found on car dashes or mounted to car windshields - safety, convenience, utility, you name it. But for now, it looks like we'll all still be buying our GPS and radar detectors separately. If you find a GPS with built in radar detector actually for sale, please post a comment!

Google Traffic Maps Now Nationwide

2009-08-28T08:00:00.013-04:00

Move over CinciNavigator, Google Maps has expanded its real-time traffic coverage nationwide thanks to cell phones running Google Maps with My Location. When the Maps application is open, it will send anonymous data back to Google about how fast you're moving and then combine it with others in the area to create color codings for traffic backups. More info available on the Official Google Blog.

Steam Security Holes Persist

2009-08-01T02:01:00.000-04:00

Last year, you may remember the TF2 exploit that allowed unauthorized users to take control of your Steam account. Well the hackers are at it again, this time using Valve's runaway hit Left 4 Dead. I would encourage anyone with information on the exploit to post it - let's hope Valve gets around to fixing it sometime soon.

Fuser, TweetMyJobs Down

2009-07-25T20:39:00.000-04:00

It's almost like when one goes down, they all go down. Tonight Fuser is sporting a HTTP Error 503 Service Unavailable error while TweetMyJobs's job posting links are not working. No custom error pages here...the TweetMyJobs site even says "If you're the administrator of this website, then please read the log file "production.log" to find out what went wrong."

Photrade Shuts Down

2009-07-14T09:49:00.000-04:00

It was announced today that Cincinnati-based photo sharing website Photrade has been acquired by MyPhotoAlbum.com/dotPhoto.com after losing its seed funding in 2008. Anyone who followed the company blog knew that very few employees stuck around after the funding dried up. Photrade tried doing something different by paying photographers for the use of their flickr-like uploads when used on blogs and other sites. The PHP-powered site employed protection in the form of custom watermarking, size limits, link find and block, and a patent-pending "ad block" (where ads were used to protect your photos off the site and at the same time makes you money) to prevent illegal use. MyPhotoAlbum.com is planning on integrating some of these features into their system.

Facebook Mobile Carrier Not Supported

2009-06-18T12:48:00.000-04:00

So if I can text 32665 from my mobile phone AND receive a message back from Facebook saying that my carrier is not supported, why is my carrier not supported? Obviously they can send SMS to my carrier just fine...

Google Entering the People Search Arena

2009-06-08T14:36:00.000-04:00

Google is now directly competing with people search niche sites like Spock, Wink, and PeekYou by offering you control of your online "profile." Instead of linking it to their social network Orkut, they're taking the same approach as the existing people search sites by linking results to existing (third-party) social networking sites. It will be interesting to see how the existing people search sites will react to Google's actions...will they continue to survive?

Double Whammy! Both Technorati and SourceForge Down at Same Time

2009-06-06T16:46:00.000-04:00

Technorati has also went down today. Their maintenance page says that they are "currently experiencing backend issues."

SourceForge is Down Today

2009-06-06T16:15:00.002-04:00

Has anyone else noticed that Source Forge is down at the moment?

B.Net Fail

2009-05-16T00:16:00.000-04:00

The URL shows success, but the page shows "Oops!"

Geni Hack: Prevent the people you invite to your tree from receiving too much Geni-related email

2009-05-09T19:36:00.000-04:00

From Geni regular Shmuel Kam: If you DO want to invite people to join the tree, then I have learned (the hard way) that most people are driven away by the many daily emails [Geni] sends. The following is an important technical tip on how to reduce this "spam" in advance. AFTER you have filled in their email address, and pressed the Invite button, go to the URL bar of your browser, and substitute everything to the left of the long number (their profile ID) with the following text, and press Return: http://www.geni.com/account_settings/notifications/ This will take you to THEIR account settings, regarding email notifications. I recommend disabling all of the **daily** emails ONLY (the middle block), and leaving everything else as is. If you disable the lower block, then you pretty much prevent people from being able to use this site to communicate with each other (because they won't be notified about diddly). Do NOT forget to press the Save Button. Once they accepted your invitation and joined, only they will be able to change these settings (via Settings on the top-right of any page). But this might be a bit much for the technically challenged or the elderly.