This past week I took part of my vacation time. I figured since I am leaving in 3 weeks, it was a good time to take a weeks vacation. I spent Monday through Wednesday at Ocean City, New Jersey, at the beach with my good friend Dave Grimm and his family. It was a blast; we had great weather so we spent plenty of time on the beach and on the boardwalk. On Thursday my brother Allen and I went hiking at Blue Rocks campground. We had a good time together hiking to the top of a mountain. On Friday my Dad and I went to the Eagles training camp at Lehigh University. That was really cool. It was neat to see the players up close during practice. I took plenty of pictures during the week and here are just a few of them.
Click to see Pictures. Continue reading ‘A Week of Vacation!’
This has been a crazy week! Tuesday night we had a huge storm, with hurrican force winds. I believe it was a part of Tropical Storm Beryl. At 7:30 PM on Tuesday night, some 500,000 people in our area lost electricity. Of course we did too. But now on Friday afternoon, I still do not have power at my house. In fact most of our township is without power. Its pretty crazy, and really annoying. I’ve had a bunch of stuff to get done before I go to school in three weeks, and now I have less time to do it. Hopefully we will get power soon.
But I thought about it more, and realized that PECO (our electric provider) has really shot their uptime statistics for this year. We usually lose power for approximatly a total of 24 hours a year. This is 99.7% uptime. In my work in the IT department with an ASP, this amount of uptime is unacceptable. We have to have at least 99.99%. Well with this 70+ hour downtime, PECO’s uptime for this year will be 98.5%. Ouch. Somebody would get fired in most IT shops for that kind of poor uptime. But there is only so much you can do when trees fall on your power lines. This would make a good case for lines buried in the ground. One good thing this kind of storm outage does is raise awareness for disaster recovery. At least at my company we have already made changes to our plan, and ordered more equipment that will help ensure our office will still function after any future storms may try to shut us down. (We almost lost one important old dev server after a power surge on Tues night. But after several hours on the phone with HP we got it back in order.)
So PECO, turn my lights back on. I want to build a linux server this weekend. (Before I go to the beach next week)
While building a new web server today I decided to see if there was a way to create Virtual Directories in IIS 6 from the command line. I had a bunch to create and wanted to script the creation for the next time I build a web server. I came across two vbscripts that are installed into c:\windows\system32 with IIS. This is the Microsoft article for the scripts. Continue reading ‘Create IIS6 Web Sites and Virtual Directories from the Command Line’
Winternals Software announced today that they have been bought by Microsoft. They were bought so that Microsoft could hire the two founders of the company, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. These two guys are talented Windows programmers who should add a lot to the Windows development team. They are well known for Sysinternals, the system tools that are extremely helpful in troubleshooting windows. Microsoft is also aquiring all these tools in the deal. I think that this is an excellent move by Microsoft. They get two excellent developers, and all the great support tools. I know Microsoft likes to use the Sysinternals tools, because every time I am on a support call with them they have me download and use one of the tools. It would be great if Microsoft could bundle these tools into Windows, or the windows support tools pack. This would make it much easier to use these tools.
However part of the reason that the Sysinternals tools were so great were because they were third party tools. Now that they are owned by Microsoft, more people will be more distrustful of the tools. But I think that it is a good move overall. Perhaps some other developers in Microsoft will be able to add helpful features to the tools. I definitly do not think that Microsoft will charge for these tools, since there support department uses them so much.
The first new item I saw on slashdot this morning was this post from the Debian dev mailing list. It describes how the dev box gluck.debian.org has been compromised. It mainly caught my eye, because I had just made the decision to try out Debian on a new Linux server I am building. I had planned to install it tonight. I wanted to try out apt-get and the distro, since I have never used Debian before. But now I have read that this isn’t the first time they have been compromised. This sure makes me think twice about putting Debian on my new server.
I recently came across SharpMail, a UK based company that offers a fake email service similar to the service I host here. They offer a lot of cool features like reply back, file attachments, SMS for text messages (doesn’t work in US), rich text messages, and premade prank emails. However they have several features that I don’t like and that make my service better. First you have to register an account with them to do anything. Second they put a very noticeable link in the email. So the recipient knows very quickly that the email is fake. They also have a huge x-header that alerts to the fact that it is a prank. For $35 a year, you can remove these. So if you want to send a more truely anonymous (and free) email try out this. It is my goal to add a few more features to the script, like an optional reply feature, and maybe a new form with a rich text editor. I am also working on a C# program that will do the same stuff.
I have written a small program that will generate random passwords of any size. I am constantly making up new passwords for different things, and found several other password generators online. But I thought I’d write my own for the fun of it. I wrote it in C# using the new Visual C# Express Edition. So it requires the .Net 2.0 framework to run. Next I’d like to convert it to javascript and put it online. You can download the program here and the source here. Feel free to do with it as you like. Continue reading ‘C# Password Generator’