Buying A Car Is A Big Deal
Posted on February 22, 2007 4:33 PM
For most people, a car is one of the biggest purchases they will ever make, next to their house. Unlike a house, a car has almost no chance of keeping its value and eventually will be worth next to nothing. Buying a car is like buying a $30,000 ice cream cone. It's just an ice cream cone that lasts a lot longer and can get you to work and back and has air bags and stuff. But just like that ice cream cone, the value of a car will melt away over time. Now that I've used a bad metaphor to explain that a car is an expense, let me get back on point.
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Blowing Stuff Up Is Fun
Posted on February 8, 2007 12:18 PM
When I was in the Marine Corps, I belonged to a unit named 1st Radio Battalion. Marines in that unit deployed out to different areas of the world regularly for temporary duty. Unless your temporary duty was for about 60 days or less, you had to pack up all your stuff (that you weren't taking with you) and put it in storage. I had a roommate whose name was Lou Boulden. Lou liked to put together model airplanes and then hang them from the ceiling or our room. The next time he was deployed, he left his collection of model airplanes behind, because they most likely would not have survived travel or storage.
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fireworks,
model airplanes,
video
Be Careful With Kill
Posted on February 7, 2007 7:41 AM
I was reading a useful article called
Most of the stuff there is pretty good, although in true Computer Geek form,
I already knew that.
I did take exception to one section of that post however:
| Quote: |
The -9 basically kills the process with extreme prejudice, it will die immediately.
|
Boy, as a sysadmin type I hate it when I see people say this. They make it sound like kill -9 is just a more powerful kill, like a higher caliber bullet or something. kill -9 should not be the default kill command you use. You should try using kill without -9 first, since when you use the -9 option, it will leave behind child processes that then run until they die or the next reboot. kill -9 means die now and don't clean up anything.
If you issue the kill command and the process doesn't die right away, it may be trying to clean up, especially if you're killing a command-line database script.
That being said, kill -9 CAN be used when you kicked off a process 2 hours ago that runs for 6 hours, and you want to go home for the day. Just ctrl-z the proc and then bg it, then you can kill -9 the shell that called it, which should leave your background process running. This can be useful for doing a fire and forget ftp download, if you don't have access to screen or vnc or something.
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Tags:
cli,
command-line,
kill,
unix
How To Shower: Men versus Women
Posted on February 6, 2007 7:38 PM
This hilarious video shows how to take a shower, with details for both men and women. Turns out that I've been missing a few steps in my routine.
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hygiene,
video
5 Ways To Gamble Legally
Posted on February 2, 2007 9:12 AM
Pennsylvania recently got slot parlors. I'm not sure how necessary it was for the state to get into the business of gambling at least more than it already is. There was much controversy involved about where these parlors would go and who would run them and most importantly, whose pockets would be lined with the money that they would undoubtedly be raking in with both hands.
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Tags:
buying on margin,
gambling,
insurance,
lottery,
selling short
Get Human
Posted on February 1, 2007 4:28 PM
At some point businesses everywhere decided that it is much better for you to waste your time trying to navigate through their automated telephone help systems than to pay friendly knowledgeable employees who speak your language competently to answer their phones. I am sure when you look at the bottom line it looks pretty good that you didn't spend a lot of money on customer service. Since everybody is doing it there's no competitive disadvantage to providing poor customer service, so why not?
The people over at have put together a very useful database of common companies and numbers with instructions on how to get to a human operator. No one can guarantee that you'll understand what the human on the other end of the line is saying, but at least you won't be so pissed that you have a coronary before you get to talk to somebody.
Special thanks go out to my buddy who sends me links like these. I just used it the other day to call the Postal Service. I should print this baby out and keep it in the phone book.
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customer service,
telephone
URL Rewriting with ASP.NET
Posted on February 1, 2007 1:25 PM
I found an written by Richard Birkby on The Code Project website that explains how to do URL rewriting using ASP.NET.
URL rewriting is commonly used to make URL's that look like:
http://rasputin.dnsalias.com/default.aspx?year=2006&month=1
look like:
http://rasputin.dnsalias.com/articles/2006/1/January2006.aspx
Mostly, the difference between the two is that the first one can get easily mangled, by both humans and intrusive email providers *cough* hotmail sucks *cough*. More importantly, the second format is more acceptable to search engines. Apparently, search engines are less likely to care what comes after the question mark in the first form. I just thought it would be cool to figure out how to do it, because that's the kind of guy that I am.
Taking a look at the article from Code Project and downloading the source files, the process is straight forward. For my own purposes, I changed the code here and there to make it work the way I want. Specifically, I wanted to implement this on a server that I do not necessarily have total access to. Mr. Birkby has you "copy" the compiled binary file into the windows/assembly directory. I will admit that I don't fully understand the purpose of this, but I do know that my hosting service probably isn't going to go for that.
In the web.config file, I replaced the following:
| Code: |
<section name="urlrewrites" type="ThunderMain.URLRewriter.Rewriter,
ThunderMain.URLRewriter, Version=1.0.783.30976,
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7a95f6f4820c8dc3"/>
|
with
| Code: |
<section name="urlrewrites" type="ThunderMain.URLRewriter.Rewriter, ThunderMain.URLRewriter, Version=1.0.783.30976, Culture=neutral"/>
|
Because I am not going to copy the binary into the assembly directory, I also removed these lines from the Rewriter.cs file:
| Code: |
[assembly: AssemblyDelaySign(false)]
[assembly: AssemblyKeyFile(@"keyfile.snk")]
[assembly: AssemblyKeyName("")]
[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.783.30976")]
|
After compiling the modified Rewriter.cs file I copied the DLL into my /bin directory on the webserver.
In his article, Mr. Birkby mentions that to have the url rewriter process all file extensions (not just .aspx) you'll have to add wildcard mapping to point to the ASP.NET ISAPI extension. While I might consider adding mapping for .asp or .html I want to stay away from adding a mapping for .* as he suggests. I may have done something wrong but that seems to mess up for urls that have no extension like:
http://rasputin.dnsalias.com/photos and http://rasputin.dnsalias.com/football
In any case, I don't mind keeping the .aspx extension, I just wanted to get rid of all the other weird little characters.
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Tags:
asp.net,
search engine optimization,
url rewriting
