Microsoft’s Hotmail a Hot Topic (RANT)

If you have ever dealt with MS you have probably sighed in disbelief at the conclusion of you interaction with them. Frustrating? Yes! It makes you wonder how they got to be as big as they are…
Continue reading

Parsing the ridiculously large DNC file – .NET Edition

So previously I posted about a problem one of our customers had parsing the DNC. The solution was done in perl and you can read about it in the Perl Edition of this. And it worked rather well and very quickly. However it presented a support issue: They didn’t have a linux box nor the inclination to install perl on a windows box just for that meaning each month we needed to parse it for them.

So I rewrote it in Window using .NET…
Continue reading

Parsing the ridiculously large DNC file – Perl Edition

Recently, one of our customers had a unique problem. The national Do Not Call (DNC) list they pay $15,000 (yes, that’s a comma and yes those are zeros after it) per year for access to exceeded the 2Gb limit imposed by older systems they were running. Specifically, fox pro couldn’t handle 2Gb+ files. So they asked if we could make something for them that would separate the file into smaller files that could be consumed by the out dated system.

So we did…
Continue reading

What is DNS Propogation?

I have received this question many many times over the years as an internet … person… most recently from our new graphic artist contractor, a fine young man from Joseph Turner Graphics. And it’s a very valid question, since people are often told things like “Your website won’t be up until DNS propagates which could be as long as 72 hours.” 72 hours! This is the age of the Internet! 72 hours is an enormous amount of time. Why does it take so long? Why is the range so gaping? I mean if it was EXACTLY 72 hours, that’s more believable than “could be one hour, could be 12, could be 39, could be 72”.

Unfortunately, there is a reason. And it’s one that no one has control over.
Continue reading

What in the world would we do without Akismet?

The world of online marketing is split into two separate and occasionally difficult to distinguish groups: The first has legitimate products and services and attempts to spread the word about their products and services to the attention of the masses. The second sprays the internet with unsolicited garble and hopes that enough suckers will click thereon to justify their sad existance. Predominantly, they peddle pills, porn, or poker.

This article is about the latter… and queue the Law & Order music…
Continue reading

Automatically starting and broadcasting in Wirecast

Recently, one of the local radio stations here in town wanted to stream their stuff live over the internet. Being their ISP, we helped them quite a bit. You can read about that and how it was done here: Multiple parallel audio streams from multiple audio sources on one Wirecast license.. Recently, however, we have uncovered a huge flaw in Wirecast: it’s inability to recover from pretty much any error automatically, start automatically, or automatically broadcast. If you don’t have a 24/7 technician who can sit in front of the server and watch Wirecast around the clock, this presents a problem.

A HUGE problem. And Wirecast’s official answer is “it’s on the wish list”.

Nice. I’m done wishing. So here’s what I did…
Continue reading

Expand your desktop with Synergy.

The other day, several clients from up north came to visit as we helped them launch a new marketing product. As they sat watching me pound out code on my computers, they were quite curious about my three monitors. They watched me flow back and forth amongst the three, changing this, checking that, saving here, reloading there… normal operations for me, but not for them. One, who had some previous programming experience, asked if I preferred Linux to Windows. I replied that both had their uses and so I was using both. He was somewhat taken aback by my statement and looked closer at my monitors.

Yep, two windows, and one linux…
Continue reading

Dearest Halo, I don’t love you anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  There’s a new Halo release today and I’m not sick with the Halo Flu.  I’m not even buying it today.  Does this mean I’ve fallen off the gamer wagon?  Absolutely not.  It’s just… Well it’s not you, Halo, it’s me.  Just kidding, it’s you.  ODST was bad.  Don’t lie to yourself.  The only thing ODST was good for was being traded in for credit on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  Yup.  I said it.

Continue reading

Google’s Android is not quite ready for the tablet platform

Google is saying that the current version of it’s mobile OS Android, is not yet ready for the tablet pc platform.  They have said that the current build Froyo is not a platform for iPad rivals, though they are hinting that they will have a tablet oriented OS soon.

Continue reading

Powershell and Mysql featuring the null byte (x00)

For those of you who follow our blog, Brett does a lot of articles about PowerShell and how great it is. So the other day when I need to do a mysql dump of some data on a Windows 2008 server, I fired it up. The deep blue background touched my inner California beach bum, and the verbose bright red error messages made my inner programmer smile.

“This is pretty neat,” I thought. “Maybe Windows has finally made something to compete with Unix’s shell in a real and meaningful way.”

The dump finished and immediately my Common Sense began tingling…
Continue reading