Ajax.Net Pro and Atlas Together

I’ve been using AJAX with ASP.NET 2.0 for over a year now, mostly using Ajax.Net Professional. Now that Atlas is version 1.0 I’ve been playing around with it a bit. I ran into an issue having Ajax.Net Pro & Atlas running in the same web.config. I had a generic httpHandlers set for Ajax.Net Pro that was interfering with the Atlas setting. The fix was adding more meta data to the Ajax.Net Pro httpHandler.

Written by Tim on February 27th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Remote Desktop Authentication Issue on Vista

I kept getting this annoying authentication method when trying to remote desktop from Vista into a Windows 2003 server machine at work today. By navigating to the “Advanced” tab I could change the Authetication option to : “Always connect, even if authentication fails”, but Scott Forsyth has a registry edit that works perfectly:

Add a DWORD registry entry called AuthenticationLevelOverride in the \\HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\ and set it to 0.

Written by Tim on February 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
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Installing Visual Studio 2005 on Vista

I ran into a big pain trying to install Visual Studio on Vista. First, don’t try to install VS over a network share, it hung for several minutes and never could get started at installation. So I copied it down to my local system and tried to install from there. No luck, at the opening screen it would hang at “loading installation components”. I tried running setup as administrator (even though I was already in that local group), no luck. I tired installing msxml6 separately, no luck. I tried installing DExplore, no luck. I read about people having problems if USB thumb drives installed, I take mine out, still no luck. Then I read an old issue of Visual Studio where having your network card enabled can cause problems. I disable my card and what do you know, it install fine. This isn’t a Vista issue but a Visual Studio bug.

Written by Tim on February 19th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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Alex does patty cake

My wife called yesterday while at work and said Alex did patty cake for the first time. I didn’t believe until I got home, sure enough he was. I got this on video today:

Video: Alex does patty cake

Written by Tim on February 17th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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Going to Vista

I’ve had vista as a dual boot since the day it went gold, but to be honest I’ve refrain from moving to it because I had a big project I was working on and wanted to make sure my OS didn’t slow my productivity. But today I decree Vista will be my new OS going forward, well kinda, from now I will boot to Vista and only go to XP if I have really have to. My plan is 4 weeks with Vista and then I’m blowing away XP and starting over with only Vista. More to come on this.

Written by Tim on February 16th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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Krugle - It won’t survive

Revised: Krugle - It might survive
Revised: Krugle - It will survive, their people in power get it

After reading Robert Scoble post on Krugle I ran over to krugle.com to see what type of advertising I could get (we write software development tools so it should be a nice fit), this is there business model right? Some red flags went off when it became a chore to find advertising info. Finally I came to their “Contact Us” page where I found Bill Daniher VP Finance & Corporate Development as the contact for advertising. More red flags - Why is a VP of Finance handling advertising? Maybe their VP actually do work, so I send him an email. He responds back that Krugle doesn’t have an automated way to do this yet, but he can manually add an ad to the site for a selection of keywords. I’m thinking this is going to be ugly to deal with, but still worth a try. I give him the word we want to proceed, what are the next steps? His response? Well, there is no response. So your a start up and someone wants to buy your service and you don’t respond? Not good. My email probably slipped thru the cracks, but that is why a VP shouldn’t be handling this. Then I read today that they partnered with Yahoo! to do their developer code search. I sure hope Yahoo! is paying them enough to survive, otherwise it won’t.

This is a big reason a lot of .com companies don’t survive. They put more stock into partnerships and VC funding then doing what they need to do—earn revenue and become profitable.

Written by Tim on February 15th, 2007 with 4 comments.
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Congrats to US Bank and their Web Engineers

As much grieve as I give banks and credit card companies today I experienced the easiest online system ever, bar none. I have my mortgage and my checking account with US Bank. They’ve been my mortgage company for ~6 months now and I always went into a local branch to make my payment (i.e. transfer from checking) because I was told by my closer that she had US Bank and they charge $15 for an online payment, sorry but on principal alone I wasn’t paying an extra $15. Anyways today I log into my banking and notice a “make payment” button under my mortgage. I click it, it “knows” I have a checking account and prompts to enter any additional payment amount. I click submit, it then wants a confirmation submit button clicked. BAM, I’m done. 3 clicks to make a payment. I didn’t have to create a new account, verify my account number, add my checking account as a payee account or any of the other crap that some banks make you do (Remember banks make money when your late with payments, it’s in their best interest to make the online experience a bad one). This is how it is suppose to be done. Somehow the engineers at US Bank figured out how to integrate a checking system with a mortgage system, something I know Bank of America has no clue how to do.

Written by Tim on February 15th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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Passport Headaches

So my wife and I are going to Puerto Aventuras on April 15 for a much needed 6 night all inclusive vacation away from the kids. We are staying at the Catalina Riveria Maya. Anyways because of the new passport regulations we have to have one or we blow our money. The trip is 8 weeks and 3 days away as of yesterday when I go to get our passports. I’m told by the clerk of courts in Clermont County that it’ll take 6-8 weeks to get our passports, talk about cutting it close. You can have it expedited but I decline. I ended up sending an email to the Department of State making sure I’ll get it on time. The response I get is below:

Applications are normally completed within six to eight weeks. Due to the high volume of applications this may take longer. If you need your passport sooner and did not expedite at the time of application, please call the toll free number listed below. The additional fee is $60 and can be paid by credit card over the phone.
Please re-submit periodically for a status check by completing the status form at our website at http://travel.state.gov/passport/about/npic/npic_896.html

Now I’m worried, I’m going to wait until March 7 to get it expedited.

I’m totally for homeland security and such but this thing is going to hit my wallet:

1. $97 x 2 for regular passport
2. $60 x 2 for expediting
3. = $314.00 to be able to leave my country and return.

For a taxpaying citizen like myself shouldn’t this be included?

And exactly what does a Passport tell us? An official birth certificate (which in some states anyone can obtain for anyone) has the same name of a drivers license. I sure hope the department of State has other measures of verifying other data on the application.

Written by Tim on February 14th, 2007 with 10 comments.
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A Wiki For Life?

I’m a big fan of using wikis in the workplace (In fact I was part of a team that got Proctor and Gamble to start using Wiki’s for their Metamucil team back in 2003 when no one had heard of Wikis). Mike Wilson pushed wikis on me back then and I have never looked back. Our IT team uses one with a passion. Today while I was going over my “to do” list I realized that a personal wiki for everything me, would be perfect. I know Scott Hanselman pimped TiddlyWiki so I am giving it a try. I have three sections - MyIT, MyMarketing, MyLife (I believe Tiddly uses camel case, which is old school wiki style I love). It’s set as my default page on my browser. I’ll report back on if this works out.

Written by Tim on February 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Now Using Bloglines

For almost a two years I had been using RSS Popper. It integrated very nicely into Outlook, but recently I ran into some performace issues with Outlook and it turns out RSS Popper was the cause. I gave Google Reader a shot but it turned out to be way to slow. On the advice of The Nix Guy I turned to Bloglines. I’m loving it. It’s interface is very simple, the reader is fast and the way the post are rendered makes it for easy reading. My only wish would be some way to read internal blogs at work with it. Those blogs are behind the firewall so it would have to be some type of Grease Monkey script or Firefox Extension that plugged in.

Written by Tim on February 6th, 2007 with no comments.
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