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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Remote computing with Logmein

There are many ways to connect to your home computer and do some sort of remote control operation. I’ve discussed in the past RDP and Powershell options, but today I’m going to focus on another tool that I find myself using quite a bit. That tool / service is Logmein http://www.logmein.com . 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…
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Free cloning software that works well with windows 7 and server 2008

Cloning a hard drive can be done through a variety of methods, and for a variety of reasons.  In this blog I’m going to make a couple assumptions. The first, is that you the reader, are looking to clone a drive on the basis that you would like to use this as part of a backup solution. The second, is that you are running windows 7, windows vista, or windows server 2008.

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Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Issues.

brett March 19th 2009, Microsoft released IE8 to the general public and made it available for Windows updates. The good news with this version of IE is it includes improved standards support.  However for many of you who’s websites were designed with frontpage, word,  or powerpoint, you may find that your website no longer displays correctly. Some websites will be viewable by using the compatibility mode, but even that will not solve all the problems.

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ASP CDO Email – Fixing the authentication error

As the developer here at High Speed Web, I get to deal with customers on special occasions. Generally these entail stand-offs between the technical support staff (which may or may not include network administrators) and the customers. The latter states that the problem is the server, while the former contends that it is the user’s code. So they bring in me, to either slap the administrators for not setting up their servers right or to show the user what we like to call the correct way to code. During my time here, I have helped several people out with their ASP scripts as pertaining to sending email. They all used CDO, and they all had the same problem: SMTP Authentication.
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