{ Monthly Archives }

July 2006

For future reference… PDF reference cards!

Don’t you hate it when you find a great online resource, then time passes and you can’t find it again, and then you do finally find it, and so you slam it into a blog entry, which causes the sentence to magically morph into “don’t you love it”?

In this case, handy-dandy PDF versions of foldable reference cards, including the one for CVS that I thought I’d lost forever.

Now if only someone would make a reference card explaining double sided printing…

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2006 07 17

Programming

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More metrics!

In a recent post about a conference (which includes some interesting comparisons between the .Net and Ruby communities), Jeremy Miller covers some quotes from the weekend, including this one

“Low Truck Number” — A statistic measuring the healthy duplication of knowledge and understanding within a project team. If your Truck Number == 1, a single person getting hit by a bus, or offered more money across the street, effectively ends your project. I’ve been the “what if you were hit by bus” guy in the past. It wasn’t fun, and I learned to hate that phrase.

I used to be in a shop with maybe a dozen developers, but intense silos and a large number of applications led to a pretty low truck number.  In my new job, I am the tech department.  At least now I have a name for my pain.

2006 07 14

General

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MSDN: Esposito on enums

Dino Esposito did a writeup over at MSDN on enumeration types. I was about to dismiss it, but then I realized that I don’t really use them in my code, so I should probably review them. Sure enough, I leaned a few things, particularly around using them as bitfields via the Flags attribute:

1 [Flags]

2 enum Foods : int

3 {

4 apples = 1,

5 pears = 2,

6 oranges = 4,

7 bananas = 8,

8 beans = 16

9 }

10

11 static void Main(string[] args)

12 {

13 Foods foods = Foods.apples | Foods.bananas;

14 Console.WriteLine(Enum.Format(typeof(Foods), foods, “g”));

15 Console.ReadLine();

16 }

That outputs “apples, bananas” which is a handy way out of writing an output loop with comma separators, but is kind of useless. Where it gets handy is the Parse operator, which can take “apples, bananas” from a string, say, for instance, a config string, and make it into a variable. Nice.

1 static void Main(string[] args)

2 {

3 Foods myFoods = (Foods)Enum.Parse(typeof(Foods), “pears, beans, oranges”);

4 Console.WriteLine(Enum.Format(typeof(Foods), myFoods, “g”));

5 Console.ReadLine();

6 }

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2006 07 14

MSDN
Programming

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IIS and Unexpected error 0×8ffe2740

One of the (only) good things about switching computers every 8 months (I wish I could explain it, but I can’t. It just happens) is that I never forget how to set things up, which is a very handy skill in the ever-intuitive world of Windows. Take, for instance, IIS. If it’s not there in the stock install, I know that I need to go to Control Panel, Add or Remove Programs, and THEN pick Add or Remove Windows Components. Once that’s done I can go into IIS through Adminstrative Tools, set up a new home directory, and it’s all good.

Except today.

Today I got the ever-so-helpful “Unexpected error 0×8ffe2740 occurred.” I haven’t decoded big hexadecimal numbers in a few years, but I suspect the result wouldn’t be the start of a series of clues of Da Vinci Code magnitude leading to the solution, but it would have been a pretty crappy book if they’d just used Google like I did, right?

According to this KBase article, the problem is that something else is using port 80. WTF? Anyway, using FPort as suggested, it turns out the offender was… Skype. Didn’t see that coming.

Apparently there’s an option in the Skype config to use port 80 as an alternate incoming port:

Skype uses port 80 by default

Yep, that’ll do it… Clearing the option did the trick.

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2006 07 12

Config

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Now I need a wider layout

If Colin Coller’s CopySourceAsHtml works half as well as I hope it will, the rotation of the Earth might skip a beat in a minute

   26         public string LastName

   27         {

   28             get { return _lastName; }

   29             set { _lastName = value; }

   30         }

Did you feel that? I know I felt that.  And I’m still feeling it, know what I mean?

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2006 07 06

Visual Studio

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Fun with dead languages

I missed DemoCamp7 last night, which had me kind of bummed (true geek story: I was working all day on a laptop that was set to the wrong time zone, then wondered why I was feeling so hungry at only 5:30, when it was really 7:30…), mostly because Damian Conway was going to be presenting some Perl stuff, and then I saw this post on The Farm, which at first I thought was just a report on last night’s fun, but sweet mother of, well, whatever, Damian was giving a talk tonight!

After seeing Fun With Dead Languages, big one sentence paragraphs are all I’m capable of.   It’s been a long time since I’ve been so entertained while someone demonstrates how very smart he is.  OK, that was a 2 sentence paragraph.  Now 3.  Now 4.  Urg, need recursion.

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2006 07 05

General
Perl
Programming

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