Technology Today

Today I am completely impressed by technology.  The integration of services, platforms, and how they all come together in my daily life is plain awesome.  Right now it is 69° and sunny on a late October Sunday, that might be impressive for Chicago, but we’re talking tech here.  My realization came while sitting at my PC trying to catch up on twitter, email and my overfilled RSS reader.  I have Windows Media Center open, watching the Bears vs. Washington in HD, Chrome has gmail and reader open, Firefox has my wife’s latest shopping list (more shoes, really?), Zune is syncing my ZuneHD (Windows Phone 7 soon), and Live Mesh is backing up my pictures to SkyDrive.  Even with all this going on within my reach, PlayOn is running in the background and streaming Hulu to the Xbox in our living room where my wife is watching the latest cop drama.

Now my computer isn’t that awesome.  It is a standard, off-the-shelf, consumer PC.  Maybe that is why I’m so impressed, anyone can do this, it isn’t some fancy, overly-complex setup.  The average user on the average PC can do what I am.  I guess the question is, why aren’t they?

Down with WWW

The WWW subdomain has been a staple of the Internet since before AOL was the most prominent figure in CD manufacture dail-up.  Just about everyone knows that you can substitute that wonderful TLA with others like “mail” or “blog” and get a different, more specialized piece of a website.  However, not many people realize that the WWW is just a vestigial appendage that has long since been rendered useless.  If you are Internet savvy at all you would have noticed a trend towards cleaning up the URLs we use everyday (see: gdgt.com, digg.com, slashdot.org not so much: cnn.com). Actually, this movement has been in motion for many years.  If you look at no-www.org, you’ll see that they have had a mission to get web admins to switch away from using www since 2003.  They even have a handy checker for validating your website.  Go ahead, check your site.  You better not fail.  But, if you do, head straight to your admin portal and switch it up.  I’m hosted at squarespace.com (which fails the above test…grrr) and here is a handy resource for easily switching your default URL.

First, login to the admin console and then select the “Custom Domain” option:From there  you should see both the www and non-www version of your domain.  You will want to select “make primary” for the non-www version.  See, easy as pie.

Now, if only someone would get rid of that damn “http://” (oh wait, Google’s Chrome is already doing that for us).

Linq for JavaScript

The past couple days I have been living on StackOverflow (I’m waiting on a client to give the go-ahead signal) and I came across an ad about jLinq.  Now, my first inclination was that of shock and bewilderment, but I’m starting to get over that.  jLinq is a Linq framework for working with Arrays in JavaScript.  If you don’t know about Linq then you probably don’t understand how awesomely scary that is.  Anyways, the syntax seems similar to the how C# works (with some added “memory” for previous actions). 

1. <script type="text/javascript">
2.     var results = jLinq
3.         .from([
4.             {name:"John", age:25, admin:true},
5.             {name:"Mike", age:35, admin:false},
6.             {name:"Randal", age:41, admin:false},
7.             {name:"Stephanie", age:32, admin:true}]) // array of data
8.         .ignoreCase()
9.         .startsWith("name", "m") // "name" property starts with "a"
10.         .or("j")                 // "name" property starts with "j"
11.         .is("admin")             // "admin" property is true
12.         .orderBy("age")
13.         .select();
14. </script>

While Linq is just a “less code” way of doing the same things you’ve been doing for years, I’m looking forward to using it and removing chunks of JavaScript loops.

Windows Phone 7 Predictions

Next week at Mobile World Congress Steve Balmer is going to hop up on stage and introduce Windows Phone 7 (maybe the Zune Phone…who knows).  Right now MS is completely behind in the smartphone arena.  Their aging Windows Phone (Windows Mobile) platform is the whipping-boy of the blog-o-sphere and Redmond has been slow to respond.  Hopefully, we’ll see an “about-face” from the giant software company and I’m going to throw out my predictions of what might come out of the MWC announcements on Feb 15th:

1. Zune Integration – thankfully, no more “Windows Mobile Device Center.”  All syncing will be done through the Zune software.  This will mean USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth synchronization of files, contacts, music, videos, applications, etc.
2. Windows Marketplace – Current 6.5 phones already can buy and download applications from the Marketplace, but because of the Zune Integration, there will be music, videos, and apps.
3. Application Framework - All Applications will run off the XNA Framework, like current Zune applications (and Xbox Community Games *hint hint*).  This will facilitate a clean break from older applications – which is why they will announce hardware for the 3rd-4th quarter 2010.
4. Xbox Integration – they are already hints that Gamercards, Gamerscore, and Achievements are going to be present.  I am going to go one step further and say that all of the new Xbox Game Room games will run on the phone.  Microsoft has already announced that all games purchased will have the ability to run on the Xbox or on the PC and since they have been pushing the “Three Screens” vision this is the next logical step.

Microsoft needs a real “win” to get back into prominence with smartphones.  I guess we’ll see next week.

How to: Fix .svc “Not Found” Error on IIS7

When I first started tinkering with WCF Services, I ran into a nasty little error “HTTP Error 404.3 – Not Found”.  At first I thought it was just me being a noob and setting up the project or service bindings wrong.  So, I shelved it and went on my merry way working on other projects and POCs.  However, today I started investigating an example app that showed a working service, however when I updated it to run under IIS instead of the Visual Studio Development Server it crapped out with the same “Not Found” error.  I immediately knew that the HTTP Handler was not being registered for the *.svc extension.  However, after adding the *.svc mapping it still didn’t work.  At that point, it was time to do some searching and after a couple crap-tastik “solutions” I came across exactly what I was looking for:

1. Start the Command Prompt application (cmd.exe) in Administrator Mode.  You may need to go to your start menu –> Programs –> Accessories and right-click on the link to get to run with the higher permissions.
2. Navigate to the Windows Communication Foundation folder:
   • For 32-bit use: cd: C:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation\
   • For 64-bit use: cd: C:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation\
3. Run the Windows Communication Foundation Installation Utility with the following command: ServiceModelReg –i