FireFox 2.0 Speed Tips

Props to CCS for this trick: http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php

Top Secret Project!

I've got a whole mess of ideas: Inventions, if you will - that I would like to document.  I want to capture what I think could be done with them - and do some design work - maybe a virtual prototype - but I have a fear: Someone will steal the idea.

There are various encryption techniques that I'm using to keep just the basics, but right now I want to share some of the secret data with specific people.  Possibly even audit what they see - but I don't know how.

I'm working on one of the ideas, developing a prototype, and I've taken some pictures.  The pictures alone don't give away anything - but if the idea takes flight, I'd really like to have a history of the project, a timeline to look back on and see perhaps where I went wrong, or just remember how clueless I was.

I guess what I need is a selectivly published blog - something that only specific people can see.  Most of it probably no-one can see.

One Blog to bind them...

I've got 3 blogs right now - this one, a running one, and a personal "Catch All" one for stuff that doesn't fit in the first two.

What I really need is one blog with tags, and a way to publish a "tag filtered" version to the people I know who read them. 

Another technical challange is to embed google map tracks of my runs into the running blog.  I could simply do an image publish, but I'd like it to be single click type functionality.

HttpHandler IIS Config Problem

Delvign into the world of httpHandlers, and it looks like pretty much EVERYONE has written a tutorial on how to get them going - but there's not much info on keeping them going. My problem was that IIS was refusing to pass the request to the HttpHandler, and kept spitting out a 404 instead (I'm testing with paths to files that do not exist, planning to map them dynamically (and yes I know there are a number of ways to do this)).

Anyhow - spent the morning trying to figure out what I forgot to do: Checked the config file, made sure the assembly was there (expieremented with adding X's to the config settings, and renaming the assembly to verify that linkage was perforing) The stub protodevelopment site is working on one machine, but not on a staging server I need to test it on.

Eventually I decided to just start over and create a new Virtual Directory - and it just started working. Doing nothing different - it just working. I suspect it is an IIS metabase problem.

XQuery: SQL type 'xml' is not supported in XQuery.

Got this error today:
XQuery: SQL type 'xml' is not supported in XQuery.

Trying to use sql:variable() inside a .modify DML call. I found a couple people having the same problem, and this soultion: http://blogs.msdn.com/denisruc/archive/2006/05/17/600250.aspx

Basically, you can't insert XML into XML - which is VERY frustrating. You can update values and attributes and elements, but not insert a new node. I might just implment the call inside a CLR sproc and load up the DOM.

It's little things like this that make the SQL2005 XML funcrtionality more "blah" than "wonderful."

M@

Failed to access IIS metabase…

When trying to run a webservice project on a machine with dotnet 1.1 and dotnet 2.0 you get this error:

Failed to access IIS metabase…

The solution is to run this at the command prompt:
aspnet_regiis -i

It fixes the problem.

M@

Opera Browser

I'm making this post from the Opera browser. Free download here.

Only been on it an hour or so, but major positive feedback from me.
-Tab preview
-Close tab without opening
-Simple no question install did what I wanted it to do

Negative:
-Dunno if it's me, but when I log onto a site I type username + + password + + Space bar (to toggle the "remember me" field") + , and it doesn't seem to work as expected.

I haven't tapped the new features at all yet. Read a breif synop and I am exicted by mouse gestures which had some nice ground work in FireFox, but seemed to peter-out.

M@

Nifty Corners

Finally got around to putting in a WORKING rounded corner CSS implmentation. What's funny is I used to always blame "having to take care of the kids" for not having the time to figure this out - but yesterday in a full asault of screaming and needing milk or something - I was able to read and implment a version Nifty Corners And I like the way it came out a lot. I'm doing the old "rework the home page" and this is kinda step one in the design phase. Publish or perish holds true so here's step one in the home page redesign. The colors were chosen using the Color Scheme Generator.

WebService returning 500 error

Was getting webservices returning 500 errors.

First step was to turn off "Friendly Error Messages" in IE to see the error looked more like this;

"File or assembly name #######.dll, or one of its dependencies, was
not found."

Found on a couple sites this is a problem with security on the /windows/temp directory becuase the XML Serializer is writing something there. I don't think most people see this becuase they haven't mucked with the default IIS Setup of having anonymous users using the IIUSR_DFLT account. I'm going to point that back and hopefully the deployment of this webservice will not cause additional problems.

M@