Chinh Do

I used to shop at Circuit City a lot and I kind of miss it now that it’s gone. I live in Richmond’s West End where there used to be two big Circuit City stores within a few miles of each others. Today I got an email from CircuitCity.com and it looks like the web site now has a new owner.

A few months ago when they were having the liquidation sale at one of their headquarter buildings, I came in, bought a few things, and took a few pictures. Having gone through a dotcom bust earlier in my career, the site actually looked eerily familiar.

A while ago I had been posting my Finds of the Weeks series and this is the continuation of that. Instead of weekly though, this series will be more of a “whenever possible” kind of thing.

General Programming

• Some code optimizations can actually slow down your app. Beautiful Code: False Optimizations by sernaferna.
• Quad core + 8GB RAM + Server 2008 with Hyper-V = A Great Dev Environment. By Craig Lussier.
• I started using JQuery a few months ago and it’s now my favorite Javascript library. Combine with Visual Studio 2008’s Javascript intellisense, and you have scripting nirvana.
• jqModal is a modal dialog plug-in for JQuery. Worked great for a project I was working on two months ago.
• Safari Books Online is a great online programming books service. For a monthly fee, you get to read several books using your browser. The browser interface is not great, but the price is much lower than actually buying the book.
• Randomly ordering an array is simple. That’s what I thought until I ran across Techniques for Randomly Reordering an Array (by Scott Michell).

.NET/C# Stuff

• Eugene Osovetsky explained a few peculiarities when consuming WCF services from Visual Studio 2003: Solving the “disappearing data” issue when using Add Web Reference or Wsdl.exe with WCF services.
• If you have a DataReader and don’t intend to read all records from it, call IDbCommand.Cancel before you call IDataReader.Close so that the rest of the unread records are skipped.
• Scott Hanselman: Assembly Fiefdoms: What’s the Right Number of Assemblies/Libraries?
• VS.NET Tip of the Day: Reusing C# Source Code Across Multiple Assemblies. By ShawnVN.
• Setting the log file location at runtime with a DOM configured log4net. By Keyley on Kode.
• WCF – Recommended Settings for Tracing and Message Logging. MSDN.
• WCF – Enabling Performance Counters. By Nicholas Allen.
• One of these days I’ll get back into Windows Mobile programming. Adjust Your Ring Volume For Ambient Noise, Chris Mitchell.
• Did you know ReSharper supports wildcards in its Go To Type dialog box? Joe White’s 31 Days of ReSharper series is a must read for ReSharper fanatics like me.
• Is image processing in C++ a thing of the past? Discover Enhanced Image Manipulation with GDI+ (by Tade Oyebode).
• DataContractSerializer can be used to deserialize WCF messages.
• Unraveling the Mysteries of .NET 2.0 Configuration, by Jon Rista.

Database

• Stefan Delmarco talked about the NEWSEQUENTIALID function in SQL Server 2005.
• Mutexes are fun: Application Locks (or Mutexes) in SQL Server 2005. Mladen Prajdic.

Windows

• Experiencing strange issues with your Windows (like dialog boxes that don’t show up)? You may be having a desktop heap issue. Try these articles:
  • Windows XP flakiness – solved. By Kevin Dente.
  • “Out of Memory” error message appears when you have a large number of programs running. Microsoft Support.
• If IE crashes when you try to open SharePoint documents, try this fix: regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OWSSUPP.DLL”.

Software, Tools, etc.

• If you have a Linksys WRT54* router, I highly recommend loading Tomato firmware. I have been using it for about 6 months now and it’s so much better than the built-in Linksys firmware. Tomato’s QOS works great to make sure my Vonage phone line remains usable at all times.

PowerShell

• Ben Pierce posted a series of very useful PowerShell command-line demos: Demo1 (Administering Windows), Demo 2 (Administering Servers in bulk), Demo 3 (How do I Know Which Class to Use), Demo 4 (Administering Hyper-V).

Something Different

• World War is a very nicely done digital animation by Vincent Chai. My son can watch it for hours.
• Your browsing history can be used by any web site out there to guess your gender. Using your browser URL history to estimate gender, by Mike on Ads.
• Humans can fly (video).
• A fascinating into the human mind: The Interpreter (Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?). By John Colapinto.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/ParkinsonsDisease/tb/5405

Just kidding of course… but at least it’s not all bad.

Testing. One. Two.

Ever since the early days of the Web, I have always had a home page or two. Remember those home pages back in the mid 90’s? With the forever “under construction” signs, ubiquitous guest books, Javascript roll-over images, and white text on dark backgrounds? Well, at least my home page didn’t suffer from all of the above mentioned afflictions. Fast forward to 2007: the personal home page fad had passed.

Now people have blogs. So I guess I’ll have one too.

Actually I have been thinking about starting a blog for a while now but I just didn’t sit down and do it yet because I was afraid that it would take a considerable amount of work to set one up. Also since I do .Net development for a living, I thought I would code the blog myself from scratch (boy am I glad I didn’t choose the custom development route).

Two hours ago, I started out with Blogger. After creating a test account and playing with it, then trying to see if I can host the blog on my own domain (you can’t with the beta version of Blogger), I finally found this article which lead me to WordPress. Thirty minutes later… I have this. It wasn’t too bad setting up a WordPress blog on my own domain.

I will probably write mostly about programming (.NET, C#, architecture), gadgets, and technology topics. For my friends and family, they will be subjected to the same boring stuff as before: family pictures.