March 2004 - Posts
Good 'ole Don Box has written a very clear description of HTTP.SYS and it's relationship to IIS and Indigo. I have to admit that even I was confused (and I worked on HTTP.SYS way back when it was called “Duct Tape”)!
This weekend I overhauled my webserver to be based on DotNetNuke. If you go to www.kindel.com, you'll see the results. I'm quite happy with it.
I have converted all of my “Kindel Systems” sites (MCE Controller, etc...) over but have not yet gotten to my personal sites... I also want to get my .Text blog integrated in, at least so that it's themed the same way. I was able to show a summary of my rss feed on the main www.kindel.com page using some XML/XSLT hacking.
DotNetNuke is quite nice. I had fun building my own custom skin (using Nina Miers “MacMe” skin as a basis). It makes it quite easy to create a professional looking portal website.
Let me know what you think.
No code changes. Just added an installer using the very cool NullSoft Scriptable Install System. Wow, that was easy!
Download and install from http://www.kindel.com/products/mcecontroller/
A few weeks back Scott posted about MaxiVista. I had just multi-mon at work with 2 DELL 20” LCDs using DVI and was loving it. I also had a 19” LCD on my desk I used for my server machines via a KVM switch. I thought it would be cool to somehow use the 3rd monitor in my multi-mon setup, but adding another video card to my main machine was questionable. MaxiVista to the rescue!
This killer little app is kinda like a light weight verison of terminal services. A video driver is installed on your main machine and a little daemon app is installed on the other machine. The video driver remotes the calls over to the other machine via the network. It works REALLY well. Using a 100mbps network I can even watch video on the 3rd monitor (it's a abit choppy). But standard desktop stuff works very, very, very well.
On a GigE network...
At home I have only a single 19” LCD. Now I have my old Sony F290 laptop with it's nice 15” screen sitting next to my LCD monitor acting as a 2nd display. I love it!
Also, I have found that Ultramon is a great utility for managing multiple displays.
Tonight I posted version 1.0.2 of MCE Controller. Basically one new feature:
The ability to shutdown, restart, standby, or hibernate the system. See the V1.0.2 readme at http://www.kindel.com/products/mcecontroller/1.0.2/Readme.htm.
The product page is at http://www.kindel.com/products/mcecontroller.
Looking for feedback!
Tonight I moved my source code out from the under the control of Visual Source Safe to Source Gear Vault. Even though I'm a single developer I really like having all my source stored in a source control system. It allows me to have “undo”, to be able to go back and build/update old versions of products, and ensures I have everything in a single place that can easily be backed up.
VSS is a good product, but I have had one database corruption (thankfully I had it backed up), and I have been thinking about switching to something “more modern” for a while. I came across Vault and decided to check it out. I worked with Eric long ago when I was working on IE 3.0 and the HTML 3.2 OBJECT tag and he seemed like a good/smart guy. His writings on software development are spot on IMHO.
Vault comes with a Visual Source Safe Import tool that worked very well. It worked as advertised. I also found the VS.NET IDE integration worked as expected.
And now my backup procedure is just another command in my SQL Server backup schedule. Backups happen in a fraction of the time ntbackup took backing up the VSS database.
Oh, and Vault is free for single users!
Good stuff. Highly recommended.
It's the time of year again for the sun to start showing here again. That means fun yard projects! Man, do I have a list of things to do this year:
- Get the sprinkler system up and running again. I started this today. I fired it up (my in-lake pump got bumped around during a storm in November so I was a bit nervous about it's condition...it worked!), and replaced a few broken heads and installed a new one after digging a 4 ft long trench to some bushes that weren't getting water before. I also upgraded the software I use to control the system. My sprinkler system is controlled via a set of RS485 controlled relays hooked to my Premise Home Control Software server. I had modified the built-in IrrigationSystem component last year and passed those mods back to the Premise forums. Over the winter Michael Lehv re-wrote it all with a nice new UI and better options. Today I downloaded his upgrade and installed it and I love it.
- Install my manual override for the sprinkler system. At some point I'll post an article about how I built this thing. It was a fun hardware project!
- Install my rain sensor for the sprinkler system. Bought it last fall...
- Clean out the basement. I guess this didn't need to wait until spring. But it's a mess.
- Install the dock. Our floating dock needs to be taken out of the water in the winter. Total pain, especially since it got a bit damaged last year. Gotta recruit friends to come over and help me... The good news is that we got our permit to build a fixed pier and construction should start late July! The floating dock will be for sale at the end of the summer. You live in WA and you want a floating dock?
- Do my hard core detailing of my 540 M-Sport. I keep it as clean as I can over the winter, but never seem to find the time to give it that concours detail due to the short days we have here.
- Clean and organize my office and workshop.
- Clean the window screens with the air compressor I just bought and install them.
- Get the boat ready and in the water.
- Clean the windows (outside).
And that doesn't include any of the home automation things I want to get done (e.g. finally get a UI setup for my all-house audio system).
The good news is when the weather's good like it was this weekend, these things are fun!
In an entry last November I noted that I was enjoying ADO.NET and ASP.NET so much that I'd have another go at writing a web based photo gallery app that stored the images in SQL. I had most of it working by the end of the year, but my cat ski trip to Canada gave me the perfect excuse to actually work on it. It' now at the point where I can actually use it.
I know that storing images in SQL Server vs. the file system has performance issues, but I don't plan on using this for anything but my own personal websites and I've structured things so it will be easy for me to change the database schema to have the images live in the file system without having to change the app. In anycase, because I did it using SQL I got to learn about HttpHandlers and URL re-writing in ASP.NET. Way cool stuff.
So go to http://www.kindel.com/revelstoke/2004 and click on “Photos”. You'll be taken to an ugly photo gallery (I'm no web designer). Note if you click on a thumbnail you get a medium sized image, and if you click on that, you get the full sized image. The URL to the full sized image is just a “.JPG” URL. But the file was actually served up out of the database. For fun append “?size=med” to one of these URLs and load it. Cool, eh?
URL re-writing allows the webserver to receive request for a particular url (say foo.jpg) and “re-write” it before the app server (ASP.NET in my case) processes it (say to viewimage.aspx?name=foo.jpg). I found a great URL re-writing example on 15seconds.com at http://www.15seconds.com/issue/030522.htm. I had to modify Rewrite.NET to suit my needs, but it's a great sample. (Oh, I also had to re-learn regular expressions which is cool).
Fun stuff.
Wow. My cat skiing trip was amazing. This was the 6th year I've done it and while the conditions were not as good as they had been in the past, the experience was still unbelievable. Now I have the task of updating my Revelstoke web site with all of the pictures (145+) and movies (45+ minutes) we took. I caught a bit of a cold and have been going to bed early so haven't been able to get on it yet...
I'll post here when I've updated the site (http://www.kindel.com/revelstoke).
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