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Technology Today

Pete Amundson — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 18:01:24 +0000

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

Pete Amundson — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:28:29 +0000

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

Pete Amundson — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:24:54 +0000

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).

<script type="text/javascript">
    var results = jLinq
        .from([
            {name:"John", age:25, admin:true},
            {name:"Mike", age:35, admin:false},
            {name:"Randal", age:41, admin:false},
            {name:"Stephanie", age:32, admin:true}]) // array of data
        .ignoreCase()
        .startsWith("name", "m") // "name" property starts with "a"
        .or("j")                 // "name" property starts with "j"
        .is("admin")             // "admin" property is true
        .orderBy("age")
        .select();
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

Pete Amundson — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:37:07 +0000

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:

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.
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.
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.
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

Pete Amundson — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:52:45 +0000

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:

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.
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\
Run the Windows Communication Foundation Installation Utility with the following command: ServiceModelReg –i

IE6 the Final Chapter

Pete Amundson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:00:44 +0000

The Champ, the George Foreman of web browsers has finally fallen to FireFox.

Long has it been the brunt of jokes and aggressive “switch” campaigns. You’ve been neglected by your makers, had lipstick put on your pig of a face, and drawn the ire of an entire segment of developers. Although you still command the largest share by version (wait, whut!), everyone across the Intarwebs is calling for you to resign. They say you are finished, out-dated, and plain ugly. I would agree, and I understand that it is not your fault. Corporations are your crux, your bread and butter, and we all know that they don’t move quickly (Windows 7 is out, SRSLY upgrade already!).

Congratulations to FireFox, today you have finally become a real man. I understand that it took the addition of all three active versions (FF2+FF3+FF3.5) of you to best IE6, but it is the best any other browser has come (unless you count IE7+IE8).

On a side note: Thanks to all the bloggers that enjoy making statistics look their way :)

Live Mesh

Pete Amundson — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:02:52 +0000

Microsoft is full of ways to push your data into the “cloud” SkyDrive, MyPhone, Office Live Workspace, and many other services across all of their verticals. One of the newer entrants into this space is Live Mesh. This platform is used for syncing data between your computers (PC, Mac, and Windows Phone).

I’ve been using Live Mesh for the past couple months and it has been a great experience. From the user experience and tight integration with Explorer (I haven’t tested on a Mac) to the web interface “Live Desktop”, it is well above competitors like SugarSync. One other welcome feature is the inclusion of a “Remote Desktop” type integration for remote access into your connected machines. This is available from the mesh application running on your machine or via the web. The best part is that it is completely free (as in beer!).

With this one platform I have completely replaced SugarSync and LogMeIn (+Pro features like Clipboard & File copying).

Note: If you want to enable the Beta for Windows Mobile use the following link: https://www.mesh.com/Web/Promo.aspx?pcode=Mob_FCFS1

Mobile Forum: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/LiveMeshMobile/

Launchy + ClickOnce

Pete Amundson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:41:49 +0000

Launchy is one of the most popular keyboard launchers for Windows (also works on Linux). This handy little tool gives you quick access by indexing your start menu, documents, or any folder that you give it. All of this is available out of the box, but if you use Windows and have any "ClickOnce" applications, you will notice that Launchy fails you. The reason you can find your applications (in my case Blu from Thirteen23) in the start menu but not via Launchy is because ClickOnce applications use "Application References" instead of directly linking to the .exe file. To index these files you need to go into the Options of Launchy (right-click). Go to the Catalog tab and add *.appref-ms to the File Types. Once that is done just Rescan the Catalog and you are done!

Using WinMerge with Visual Studio Team System 2008

Pete Amundson — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:49:21 +0000

I have grown tired of using the baked in merge tool in Visual Studio Team System and have struck out to find something better. Right now I am trying out WinMerge. WinMerge is an open source Compare and Merge tool available at:

To integrate WinMerge with Visual Studio you can follow the steps below that I found at:
http://serialseb.blogspot.com/2007/01/using-winmerge-as-merge-tool-in-visual.html

Go to Tools > Options > Source Control > Visual Studio Team Foundation Server > Configure User Tools...

Add a Compare pointing to winmergeU.exe and using:

/e /x /s /wl /dl %6 /dr %7 %1 %2

as a command-line argument.

Repeat the operation for merge, this time using:

/e /s /x /ub /dl %6 /dr %7 %1 %2 %4

Meta-Me

Pete Amundson — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:57:46 +0000

If you haven't noticed (and you probably haven't since I don't get any traffic!) I have been adding any widget I can to the website. Right now my site is still a work in progress and I haven't decided if I want to it to be a blog or if I should have it be more of a preview of all the neat little things I use over the course of my day. As of now it is a repository of stuff about me and most of these things are widgets that aggregate information from other sites. All of this is publicly available (kinda scary, huh?) and it shows how much privacy has changed over the years. The web (Intertubes) has become a storage medium for "Meta-Pete" consisting of a little bits of my personal and professional life. For all those other "Meta-Me's" out there, put your best foot forward, don't post anything you wouldn't want your significant other, grandmother, or boss seeing. Oh, and if you want to chat with me, I added the Digsby widget so drop me a line or two when I'm online!