August 2006 Blog Posts
ICANN has been releasing new top level domain names for the last five years. So why are they treated with such distrust from web and mail apps alike?
Case in point, last summer, several registrants of .coop domains got in touch saying that all of a sudden their emails were being rejected as spam. It turns out that the latest update for their spam filter included a rule stating that all email addresses ending in .coop were invalid and should therefore be classed as spam and not released to the net. Initial attempts to phone the makers of said spam filter...
ASP.NET 2.0 Tips, Tricks, Recipes and Gotchas [Scott Guthrie]
XHTML Compliant Symbols/Extended Characters [Jason Gaylord]
Fixing Headers in Large HTML Tables [Karin Huber on CodeProject]
Stored Procedures vs Dynamic SQL [Andres Aguiar]
About The Fonts Folder [Michael Kaplan]
IIS Performance Tuning, Pt.1 and Pt.2 [hsshin]
10 Common ASP.NET Pitfalls [MSDN Magazine]
XslCompiledTransform slower than XslTransform [Anton Lapunov]
Scheduled Automatic Defrag of your Hard Drive...
Tim O'Reilly states that the C# book market is up 78%, ASP.NET up 61% and Javascript 171% thanks to AJAX. SQL Server books have also boosted sales recently thanks to the release of Yukon. While this is undeniably good and indicates that development budgets are stretching a bit further these days, I wonder exactly how sales still compare to the heyday of mid 2000. For those unaware of it, this is when the dotCom bubble burst, book sales halved in three months and companies like Apress and Wrox were forced to either shelter under the cover of a new owner or go...
As a tech-jackdaw (ooh shiny), I tend to install lots of new software and see if it can help me. Here's a list of the dev tools that do at the moment.
Full products
Visual Studio 2005 Pro - I could have installed a Team Suite variant, but where's the need if I don't use Team Foundation Server and open source test-driven tools are easily up to the challenge of what I'll push at them. They'll get fixed quicker too if I find a bug.
Office \ OneNote 2007 - Well Outlook,Word and OneNote anyway. The ribbon takes...
Classic cover of 'In The Summertime' by Billy Idol, Slash and friends over on YouTube.
Outlook 2007 and IE7 have this nice ability to sync subscribed RSS feeds with each other. Subscribe in one and it appears in another. Lovely. Outlook also has the fastest OPML parser I've come across thus far. Feed it the OPML file for blogs.msdn.com (3000+ feeds and counting) and ten seconds later there's a rather impressive list of feed to start pruning. IE7 also has a lovely nice, clean look for raw RSS feeds as well. But there are still some large kinks in the system and as I'm just a public tester with no way to log a bug...
Another lackluster set of summer blockbusters is only halfway through its run and the cause of the stench emanating from Hollywood is already up and running. William H Macy sums it up nicely in this AICN interview:
"[T.V.] certainly is the place to be, it's the place everyone's going."
With audiences leaving the cinemas in favour of a beer and a DVD in their own home, FilmFour seems to have timed it perfectly to become the UK's first-to-be-free digital film channel, launching last Saturday (July 29) with Lost In Translation - a fitting tombstone epitaph for blockbusters in the decade of the...
Dear X,
Am writing this on my last fast lap around Silverstone. You think writing a letter on a train is difficult? Try it cornering at 120mph in the passenger seat of a Lotus Elise with a view to overtaking an F355 on the Hangar Straight. Not something I ever expected to do save in my sleep but made possible by the transition into my fourth decade and the resourcefulness of Janey in grabbing one of the last slots they had this year.
Common wisdom has it that mid-life crises begin with the purchase of a completely unnecessary sportscar much like this...