May 2007
You are currently browsing the articles from TechToolBlog written in the month of May 2007.
I’ve been tagged for this 5 things you didn’t know about me. Here goes.
1) I play pickup basketball at 5 A.M. on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at the local YMCA. Been doing it for almost a year. I feel so much better after playing in the mornings. It’s really cool that we can get a pickup game of 8-14 people so early in the morning.
2) I played basketball against Kobe Bryant in a high school summer league basketball tournament. He was good…great, but I had no real idea who he was. How things have changed, today high school athletes are famous by their sophomore year - See O.J. Mayo.
3) I despise cell phones. There is something to be said for not being reachable. I didn’t get my first cell until 2 years ago. I was forced by my wife.
4) Paul O’Neill was my neighbor for a time. He had a batting cage & automatic pitch thrower set up and numerous professional baseball players came over to hang out. I was 9 years at the time, it was unbelievable cool.
5) I’ve sent over 10 million emails in my life. I did a ton of email marketing for P&G a few years ago. They have huge lists, all opt in of course, so I’m not worried about the spam cops.
Written by Tim on May 31st, 2007 with 2 comments.
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So I have a site - we’ll call www.site1.com that sets a client side cookie named CookieName1 and I need a subdomain test.site1.com to be able to read that value. Using php’s standard setcookie() method I set the cookie on www by using:
setcookie( “CookieName1″, $CookieName1Value, $CookieExpDate, “/”, “.site1.com” );
This works, no problem. Now test.site1.com uses .NET to read in the value and do something. Pretty standard stuff here:
If Request.Cookies(“CookieName1″) IsNot Nothing Then
”DO SOMETHING
End If
Build > Debug, set a breakpoint on the if block, skips right over it. Huh? I make sure IE has the cookie, try again. Nope, Request.Cookies(”CookieName1″) is Nothing. Can’t be an IE thing can it? Run same scenerio in FireFox - same result. Then it dawns on me, I’m not running this under test.site1.com, I’m running this under localhost. Everything was working as expected, cookies can only be read by *.site1.com. So how am I going to test this thing on my local machine? I do have a sandbox, test1sandbox.site1.com, but what if I didn’t? A simple solution is to change the host file found at %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ with:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 test1.site1.com
Run another Debug, change the http://localhost to http://test1.site1.com and now I’m able to read cookies from *.site1.com. Nifty.
Written by Tim on May 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on asp.net and php and web 2.0 ish.
Remember when Microsoft use to put client type of software on their server OS (Paint, Games, etc…). Windows Server 2000 had all kinds of things already installed that it shouldn’t have. The Microsoft people got smart and locked things down in Windows 2003 Server. This is a good thing. Your server OS has no need for these things, especially installed by default. Apple needs to do the same. I vnc into my OS X Server today and discover OS X Software Updates wants me to install a iTunes Phone Driver update. iTunes on my web server? Ahhhh no thanks.
Can you image if Windows Update next week included a Zune update for Windows 2003 Server? Kinda of hypocritical of their new Mac commercial with the Windows guys comes out bloated, dontcha think?
Written by Tim on May 16th, 2007 with 6 comments.
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I’m huge sports fan, so much that I’m thinking of spinning off a new blog about sports since the TechToolBlog is not the right spot for these rants, but this 1st post is going up here.
Last night I watched the Chicago Bulls vs Detriot Pistons. I’m a Bulls fan (I grew up in Jordan’s hay day) so I have a rooting interest till this day in the Bulls. Watching the second half, three things became painfully clear for what Chicago needs to do to overtake the Pistons in the Eastern Conference.
- Chicago needs a big man who can score….bad. Ben Wallace is a great defender but doesn’t come into the conversation when offense is involved. P.J. Brown is a stop gap and isn’t close to an answer. Scott Sciles needs to play Tyrus Thomas a lot more, he is the closet thing they have and they need to find out if he is the answer. Personally he reminds me more of Shawn Marion (not a big man) then Amare Stoudemire (a big man). So the need for the off season is clear, a big man. Problem is, none are free agents, that leads to my second point.
2. Loul Deng will not be a first team all league player, ever. Don’t get me wrong, Deng is a nice player, but it shows that he didn’t pick up basketball until later in his life. He is not a fluid player and has horrible, horrible hands. For me he is the trade bait the Bulls need to use to get a big man. Tyrus Thomas takes his place as a number 3. Deng stock is high and I believe you could get Kevin Garnett for him and next year’s #1 (2008). Garrnett is from Chicago and would redo his contract to be on a winner.
3. I really like Ben Gordon, but he can’t be your number 1 scoring threat. I like him coming off the bench as an instant offense player. Plus his height can hurt in matchups. Jerry Stackhouse is a free agent and could be bigger guard who can score.
PG - Kirk Hinrich
SG - Jerry Stackhouse
SF - Tyrus Thomas
PF - Kevin Garnett
C - Ben Wallace
Bench: Ben Gordon, Andreas Nocioni, Chris Duhon, Thabo Sefolosha, Michael Sweetney, PJ Brown, Malik Allen
Written by Tim on May 11th, 2007 with no comments.
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So I’ve been using Vista as my main OS for almost 2 months now. Time to give a short run down on the Good, Bad, and Ugly.
Good
- Areo Glass Theme. Sorry OS X but Areo Glass is so much prettier then you.
- Changing Themes Color. Right now I’m digging green.
- Ready Boost. I got a 4 gig USB card helping free the hard drive of tedious task and extending my laptop’s battery.
- Stable. This should be a given but no blue screen, freezes, or spinning beach balls. I would say this is the most stable OS I have ever used.
- Sleep Mode. This never worked 100% of the time with XP. No problems so far in Vista.
- Search. Being able to search from the Windows start menu is almost enough to make me get rid of SlickRun, almost.
- Snipping Tool. Finally Windows ships with a much better screen capturing tool.
- No more “My Documents” or ”My Pictures”. They have renamed them to “Documents” & “Pictures”, finally.
- New Movie Maker. A nice upgrade over it’s predecessor.
- DreamScene. This is really, really cool, having a movie play as your background. It does draw a on resources though, that is why I don’t have it on 100% of the time.
Bad
- Remote Desktop. Until my fellow Network IT guys upgrade Terminal Services on ALL of the servers, I have to type in my password twice OR type it in something once so I get the Windows login prompt. Come on guys, backward compatibility is a good thing.
Ugly
- Cancel or Allow. This feature works if you are a web surfer/emailer but no way for a power user like myself. This is the first thing I turned off.
So far I have not ran into any driver problems or devices not working properly. I’ll keep you updated.
Written by Tim on May 10th, 2007 with 5 comments.
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