Quick shout out to Peter-Paul Koch at QuirksMode.org for his very nice javascript browser detection script.
Clever, and definately deserved more than a tweet.
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As I was walking around the local Geranium Festival at the weekend (they completely shut down the center of our sleepy little town for a bunch of vendors to set up stalls) I came across a guy doing caricatures. We've had them done for the kids a few times but this time I stepped up for a laugh! I figured I could use it as an avatar if it looked anything like me. It was only $12!
The family thought it was hilarious, so here it is. What do you think? 
Personally I think I have a lot more hair.
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After developing for *cough* some time it's not often that I come across a new style of URL that I've never even heard of before.
A few days ago I saw a forum post about a 404 message someone got about their geotrust smartseal badge. I followed up and found that the javascript that geotrust supply has a URL style that I've never seen before - note below that there is no protocol!
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript" src="//smarticon.geotrust.com/si.js"></SCRIPT>
..and two leading //.
Then I noticed that the Authorize.net badge on the same page was very similar:
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"
src="//VERIFY.AUTHORIZE.NET/anetseal/seal.js" ></script>
Google wasn't helpful for this, but after asking around on some technical lists I got an answer from Adam Sills.
Look at http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial2/3.html and you'll see that..
"A relative URL that begins with // (two slashes) always replaces everything from the hostname onwards."
You really can learn something every day. This is clever actually, because it means that no matter if your page is being requested as http or https the badges will be requested with the same protocol - meaning that you won't see any security warnings.
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From wikipedia:
A jobsworth is a person who uses his or her job description in a
deliberately obstructive way, "a minor factotum whose only status comes
from enforcing otherwise petty regulations". The term comes from the phrase "I can't do that, it's more than my job's worth."
You may not be familiar with this term in the U.S. but in England it's a very common phrase. My wife's been involved with one of these people for a few weeks now and this morning I think we're close to seeing a meltdown. Soon this "official" is going to be feeling the wrath, and I'm staying in my office until it's over, thankyouverymuch.
My wife wants a part-time job. She figures the school system is a good place for this, so she applied to the local county school system. After submitting forms, applying for open positions, etc we get this email.
"Dear Mrs Shaw, We need proof of your graduating high school" or words to that effect.
Aaah, well, you see in England we don't graduate high school. You just kinda..leave. You take exams, sure, but no-one here knows what a CSE, GSCE, etc are. Or cares.
So, we contact the old school. They send emails and finally a fax on headed paper to the county saying that my wife had left high school with good grades, passed exams and could have gone to college.
(Apparently, "could have gone to college" is a key phrase here, because only people who graduate high school can go to college)
None of this helped, unfortunately.
Mrs Jobsworth at the Henry County School Administration says that the correct words weren't used. The FIVE emails and letters that have been sent from the English school JUST WON'T DO. Sorry, she spoke to her supervisor but they still need a certificate or something.
We don't want to cause the poor woman in England any more grief, so we're probably going to drop the whole thing. But as you can imagine, my wife is pissed.
It got me thinking though, isn't this a subtle form of racial discrimination? Aren't schools the world over going to have trouble producing a high school diploma?
This is the problem dealing with jobsworth's - you are almost always better off just walking away before you say or do something you regret later..
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Until today I have been reviewing my gmail spam folder each day or so, and marking all new spam as read when I've reviewed it. Most of the time that works ok, but I've noticed that there are times when I get spam with a presumably deliberately wrong date - maybe a few years ago.
That's quite clever of them really, in a way, because it means that I don't see it in my first page of spam.
And it's pretty dumb of them in another way, because, well, I don't see it. Not making much money off viagra if no-one sees the email, guys!
In any case, typing in the "in:spam is:unread" to find them got too much for me today, so I switched over to a new method. Rather than marking as read, I now review spam and then hit the "delete forever" link.
As a little bonus, I get a "feel-good" message back from Google each time!
Thanks Google, you old kidder!
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First, always keep the wrapping, even the little twisty ties that keep the wires tidy. Keep the paperwork and the CD's - and I try to open the tamper-proof stickers with a sharp knife so that I don't rip the paperwork.
I'm getting very good at this because I've returned multiple routers and associated equipment in the last month.
I was trying to move from my very reliable but old and slow 802.11b router you see. It has a huge range (my office is 100 feet and 5 walls away from the router) though. The 11mbps just wasn't cutting it though when I had a couple of RDC's open and my daughters got onto myspace and youtube in the evening.
My first attempt was an N+ router - great, but the range sucked and no expanders are available yet. Plus 802.11n is a draft spec and there were some issues although I can't remember what they were now.
Next was a Belkin G+ MIMO F5D9230-4 router. Setup easily, worked perfectly with all the laptops and desktops in the house. Out in the office there was still good signal and I was getting 48mbps most of the time. Just one problem; every few minutes all my IM windows would go dark and then reconnnect. Same with RDC - continually trying to reconnect - trust me that's just not going to fly in my job.
It's not my setup - it's a known problem with this router. Gamers were all over the networking forums posting about this router because of course it was dropping them out of their games all the time.
Last night I went back to best Buy again, this time I chose a linksys WRT54G2 - new version of the WRT54G which has to be the most well-known router ever. Great, everything worked but signal sucked a little. Down to 1-2 bars and 11mbps in the office. So I got a WRE54G expander which in theory takes the signal from the limits of the wireless router and sends it out again - doubling the range.
In theory.
The first one had issues, I couldn't set it up wired or wirelessly, automatic config or manual. The infamous red light that apparently many people get. Linksys tech support (India division) tried a few things then told me to take it back to the store. "How old is it sir?" "four hours"...
Another 10 miles and back to Best Buy. Another $3.49 in gas.
I got a replacement and it did setup correctly. And it worked - it took a poor signal up to 3-4 bars and 11mbps to 36/48mbps. Awesome!! But I know from experience that "getting it working" isn't the same as "does it work during work hours".
Today proved that yet again - first up, my little google desktop CPU gadget was showing my CPU going up and down. Sure enough, task manager showed that the network card was bouncing between 0-40% CPU, every other second. Hmmmm.
Then I got a popup; "There is an IP address conflict with another system in this network". Uh-oh.
A few minutes later, same error.
In the event log I see this:
The system detected an address conflict for IP address 192.168.1.102 with the system having network hardware address 00:1D:7E:A0:C2:BE
Ok, not sure what's going on here because the router shows the DHCP clients and none of them clash. In any case, I'll set the IP address manually on this PC.
10 minutes later, same popup.
I go and turn off every other computer on the network.
10 minutes later..you get the idea. I google it, lots of would-be nerds giving the same old advice, blah, blah, but then I realize that I can look up what device I'm conflicting with by MAC address.
It's the expander itself. Odd? I thought so, especially since I just changed the IP address 10 minutes ago - AND NOW THE EXPANDER IS USING MY HARDCODED IP ADDRESS 
Needless to say, it's back in the box with receipt ready to go back home with its buddies tomorrow.
I'm just worried that one of these days Best Buy are going to stop me buying stuff.
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Don't believe anything you read today. I know better, but I still forgot the date and believed Daniel had sold his company.
His post was very well done, but I still think my old April Fool's Joke was better. Back in 2005 it was more believable I guess. I had a load of congrats emails that day, and I felt quite mean telling people I was only joking.
Hell, I was quite sad myself.
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LOL, the best use yet for our awesome shared family calendar(s): the answer to the age-old question..
"What's for dinner, Mom?"
Tara created a new shared calendar called Menu and added "all-day" appointments (just because they are at top and bold like she wanted) that contains our evening meal! (Note: Tara likes to plan the week, shop once and cook every night - ymmv!)
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I was having loads of fun getting a "borrowed" web service running on the staging server yesterday.
As with all code that you take without asking, there are always.. shall we say, "hiccups". Apparently every line in the web.config conflicted with the root web.config. And not in a nice way.
Hack. Slash. Keyword/Value pairs flying everywhere in a mad frenzy.
Then, it worked! w00t!
I clicked around the site checking it out, and then it stopped working.
YSOD.
Insufficient permission. ???
I looked in IIS and there it was, no anonymous access to the web service folder. I was sure I'd set that. Oh well...
Sure enough it starts working again. A few pages later..you guessed it!
I check IIS. No anonymous access.
Now, I'm thinking should I google this bizarre behavior? It's almost like someone is on the server undoing my changes.
Check the calendar - nope, not April 1st yet. (although now I have some great ideas guys )
Then I remember..I had put in a ticket to NetOps earlier in the day about this server. The ghost was Rick, in there changing permissions to investigate. We were basically fighting over the permissions without realizing. 
So, Rick, this morning I shall be fixing my permission problem again. Pleasedon'tundoitthankyouverymuch.
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I came across some great quotes this evening from a business forum I recently joined..think about them.
When you complain..
"80% of the people don't care about your problems, and the other 20% are glad you have them"
Another..
"People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in five years."
But my favorite, one I think is quite profound..
"The grass is not
greener on the other side. The grass is greener wherever you water it
most."
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As I find them..
- Gmail: I've seen 20-30 good emails caught in spam, so check it often while you train it. Since I don't want to check the same message twice, I mark the spam as read whenever I check it.
Then, to check just the unread spam you can search for in:spam is:unread. Here's a list of other neat search terms.
- Google Calendar: If like me you used the Month view, instead try the Custom view set to "Next 4 weeks". It's much better since you don't see all those "old weeks" and the days are bigger so you see more s+.
- Adding the US Holidays was easy. Add > Add a public calendar. Here you see the family calendar!
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The best ASP.NET CMS yet, our own Graffiti, is in the running for the asp.netPRO annual Readers Choice award.
If you've played with it, you'll know why we're excited. Our old Dozing Dogs CMS came in second in it's first year in this event (2005) and with the amazing community response I've seen I'm convinced that Graffiti is going to do very well too.
Every vote counts - please lend your support!
And if you need a hint for best Web Hosting..
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Newbie tip. This is good:
if (error.Contains("Declined"))..
Not so much:
if (error.IndexOf("Declined") != -1)..
Guess which seems to be more common in code
P.S. Yes, I have old code with examples of the latter. Doesn't count.
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To copy your personal calendar to google, use their new synch tool...
..and then uninstall it.
It crashed my wife's Outlook 2003 almost every hour when it synched up, and I'm still finding strange entries in my Deleted Items folder in Outlook 2007 from when it was running - every hour it would create a few dozen empty appointments from 1979..
If like me you decide just to move over, then it's no problem. Just let it synch once, and uninstall. But if you're trying to sit on the fence then be aware there are issues with this tool.
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