Dev::Blog

I’ve recently gotten started with ASP.NET’s membership and roles features (after re-working a MySQL provider found here), and I’ve gotta say, for the simple purposes I’ve been using it, it’s easier to implement than Rails’ various LoginGenerator systems.

The only thing that sucks about it is the administration, which seems to require Visual Studio 2005 and is tied to your web.config settings, which may (should?) be different between dev and prod. In an unrelated Google, I stumped upon Rahul Soni’s guide to running the web admin tool without VS2005. Haven’t tried it yet, so this is more of a bookmark than anything else, but well worth noting - up until now I’ve been admining the users locally and then uploading a dump of the user table to the server with my changes, and that won’t work too well once people start changing passwords and whatnot…

Scott Guthrie has written up what’s got to be the authoritative guide to URL rewriting in ASP.NET.

I haven’t yet implemented any of those tricks, but I do at least try to ensure that the majority of my pages are in their own folders and are the Default page, so URLs don’t look quite as ugly when I email them out and the technology behind the site is somewhat masked*. This all goes to hell, of course, on a postback, but Scott’s tips on using Control Adapters might do the trick for getting rid of the “Default.aspx” in the URL.

* (Not that I’m about to migrate away from ASP.NET of course…)

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET, URL Rewriting

I admit, I never studied compiler design or parsers back in school, but when I see Martin Fowler trying a simple “Hello World” type thing that involves cameras and lasers, I’m tempted to hit the books again.

Seriously, if all tech writing contained references to cameras and lasers, together, nobody would ever study geography.

Following up on the “OMG, feed stats way up” theme, FeedBurner has a writeup that might interest you: Link (via A VC).

If you think a slow site deters you from reading it, you should see what it does to your desire to update it.

All my WordPress installs on Dreamhost were taking 5 seconds or more to load each page. Combined with some recent database issues (they moved the db without repointing the host names) and a recurring “let’s drop the custom DNS entries” problem, it became clear that it was time to move on.

I’ve actually had a dedicated box for a few months now, but haven’t had the time to do anything with it. The original plan was to start new projects on it and leave things as is on the old server, but now my most used apps are on the new box.

Thanks to a lot of DNS rules, I’m able to keep my mail at Dreamhost (I may move it someday, but migrating mail is the worst part of a transfer) along with some subdomains here and there. All in all, it’s not a bad setup. The biggest part I’ll miss is the snapshots Dreamhost takes every hour/night/week, but some cron jobs will address the backup issues on the new box (yeah yeah, I’ll get to them).

This is exciting! I’ve got all kinds of ideas now with very few limitations, except for, oh yeah, time. Oh well, I’ll get to what I get to when I get to it.

Footnote: interestingly, DH was down again during my migration. Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing downtime redirect pages, guys!

Puretracks is claiming that they’re, well, in their words, “the first North American digital service provider to launch ‘a la carte’ MP3 music downloads.” What’s more, they’re from a lot of bands that I’ve actually heard of, though I suspect most are from smaller labels - you can see some of the list here. This is a great opportunity to show side by side sales stats of protected vs unprotected content sales, and it’ll be interesting to see how that data can be used to influence the labels.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love teh Google?

Overambitious server tweaking seems to have mangled my php installation. No problem, the interweb’s full of instructions for upgrading. If I run into an error, I just Google the error text, find the package I need, and keep going. Sometimes these pages aren’t even in English. Doesn’t matter. If I’m worried that I’m about to run something malicious, I just need to read a few more pages to generate a consensus.

Sure, there are cases where an incredibly detailed knowledge of one’s infrastructure can be essential. For the rest of those one-off admin jobs that aren’t a core part of what you do, teh Google is awesome.

Lots of people have been writing about how Google Reader has started reporting number of subscribers in its crawls, but until I actually went and checked I had no idea how many people actually used the thing.

(And no, that’s not for this blog.)

Technorati Tags: Google Reader

If, like I was, you’re going insane trying to configure port forwarding on a SpeedStream 6520 router, read on…

I was trying to redirect port 80 to expose our internal webserver, but after putting in the information, going to the external URL kept bringing me to the router configuration screen. Changing the router’s port or trying to map port 8080 didn’t do anything useful either.

It turns out that this is by design.

Once I overrode the domain in my hosts file everything was fine, as confirmed when I checked the site out from another (outside) server.

Here’s a fun one: I was troubleshooting some text import code that takes a pipe delimited text file and stuffs it into a database, but only if there’s been an update to the given row. The thing was, it was updating a lot more rows than it should have - for example, running the job twice in a row on the same file (which should have made for 0 updates on the second run) came up with about 50% of the rows updated.

It turns out trailing whitespace is ignored in MySQL, but only in versions prior to 5.0.3:

VARCHAR values are not padded when they are stored. Handling of trailing spaces is version-dependent. As of MySQL 5.0.3, trailing spaces are retained when values are stored and retrieved, in conformance with standard SQL. Before MySQL 5.0.3, trailing spaces are removed from values when they are stored into a VARCHAR column; this means that the spaces also are absent from retrieved values.

Technorati Tags: MySQL