February 2005 Entries

Call-center hold audio

I hate this soooo much, I can't even describe... Thanks to This Is Broken for understanding my pain.

posted @ Wednesday, February 23, 2005 4:50 AM | Feedback (34)

How to Integrate .Text and FreeTextBox 3.0

Brendan Tompkins has written up some instructions on how to modify your .Text 0.95 to use FreeTextBox 3.0. I'll have to check it out and see how it differs from my implementation (which probably isn't the greatest).

posted @ Wednesday, February 23, 2005 4:48 AM | Feedback (23)

Coding Guidelines

Brad Abrams has given us a taste of Microsoft by showing us their internal coding guidelines. There are some interesting things, and overall it answers a lot of questions that new developers my face. For the record here are my personal coding habits, which by default are my companies coding standards. namespace Company.Product.Component {    public class Test {     private int _myInt;     private string _myString;     public int MyInt {       get { return _myInt; }       set { _myInt = value; }     }     public string MyString {       get { return _myString; }       set { _myString = value; }     }      public Test() {     }     public void...

posted @ Monday, February 14, 2005 10:24 PM | Feedback (22)

It's Better to Rob Peter than Download Paul... Or something

Karl Wagenfuehr points out the laughably disproportionate penalties for downloading movies versus actually stealing them: For stealing the DVD you could face no more than up to 1 year imprisonment and up to a $100,000 fine; for downloading the same material you could face statutory damages of up to $3,300,000, costs and attorney's fees (ie: the other guy's attorneys), as well as up to 1 year imprisonment, and up to a $100,000 fine...Am I alone in thinking there is something really, really wrong here? No, no you're not.

posted @ Friday, February 11, 2005 10:17 PM | Feedback (0)

Snoozer Bowl

This year's SuperBowl HalfTime show was easily the least memorable in history. When you remove the absolute possibility of anything exciting happening you get dry, boring, entertainment free television. Nothing, absolutely nothing unexpected happened, no Ringo, no special guest stars. Hell I wouldn't have minded Britney Spears butchering some Wings, at least it would have been interesting. It's like they didn't even try. Nothing against Paul McCartney mind you, he's a great musician and seems like a great guy, but a 12 minute excerpt of a P.M. concert with 20 years old songs is not SuperBowl worthy TV, it's not even PrimeTime TV. It's something I would...

posted @ Tuesday, February 08, 2005 5:44 AM | Feedback (0)

Dr. Bug-love or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bugzilla

I had the pleasure of spending the weekend trying to get Bugzilla installed on a Windows 2000/XP box. I would say it took me over 8 hours to get it set up correctly. You would think that an application built with Perl, an established cross-platform language, wouldn't be too hard to get running on Windows, a popular computing platform. You would be wrong. It didn't help that the platform specific documentation that comes with Bugzilla is outdated and wrong. It also didn't help that there are some compatibility issues with the latest version(s) of MySQL (which wasn't mentioned in said documentation). Fortunately, I did find current documentation during a...

posted @ Tuesday, February 08, 2005 3:40 AM | Feedback (0)

Custom .Text 0.95 Build and Upgrading to 0.96

Since I switched over to Firefox a couple of months ago, it's been more and more painful to switch back to IE just to get the nice FreeTextBox controls to update my blog. FreeTextBox (irononically not entirely free anymore) has supported non-IE browsers for a while now, but .Text was built against an early version. So I grabbed the source code for .Text 0.95 from gotdotnet, which is the last version publically released from Scott Watermasysk, since he rolled .Text into Telligent Systems' Community Server (which has a lot more features, but may or may not have a more restrictive liscense, which is perhaps why so...

posted @ Thursday, February 03, 2005 9:03 AM | Feedback (1)