It’s a sad state of business when you need to proclaim as a distinctive quality of your company

“We show up” as one of the reasons for hiring/contracting their services.

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New WPF 4.0 Features

Highlights:

• A Bindable run. No more crazy solutions to getting a block of text to support binding without a hack!
• LayoutRounding. Objects will be placed on pixel boundaries – less blur!
• Text clarity improvements. Smaller fonts can be rendered and still be readable!
• Caret and Selection Brushes exposed! Now you can fully skin even a text box without worrying about whether it will be usable on all systems.

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if you’re into systems, performance, troubleshooting, etc. of Windows, check out the AskPerf blog on Technet.

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Oxo Good Grips Food Scale with Pull-Out Display

I’ll be honest, but I don’t own one of those yet. Our digital scale is functional, but not nearly as fun or useful as this awesome scale from Oxo. I saw it reviewed recently on America’s Test Kitchen last week and nearly walked over to our existing scale and accidentally knocked it into the garbage (whoops!). Amazon has it for $49 and it’s gotten awesome reviews. (49 people have given it nearly a perfect 5.0 rating!). As soon as our digital scale needs replacement (or a little earlier than that!), this is the scale I’ll buy (or an even better version!)

If you don’t see what’s cool about this – it’s the fact that you can actually read the measurement even with a large plate sitting on top of the scale! Oxo has some cool products – you can tell their designers actually think about how people cook, and how just repeating what other companies are doing often isn’t the right answer.

Back to (un)regularly scheduled blogging.

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Jimmy is a great photographer – and clearly has mastered fears of heights and falling! (It’s not so much the height that bother me …, it’s that whole falling part!).

Check out his portfolio/web site here and blog here.

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I just saw this combination of advertisements pop up on my web site:

Yeah. To think of the all of the code that goes into ad placement. And this is the best that it could come up with.

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I switched from my ASP.NET host (at Crystal Tech) to a LAMP host (Dream Host). I really hadn’t been using the ASP.NET features at all and the cost was about $10 more a month than I could spend elsewhere. After some searching, I decided on DreamHost. The prices are competitive, the features are competitive, the employees are active, and they are carbon neutral/green hosts. Their control panel is extensive (and generally very easy to use!) and the set of features they’ll allow you to tweak, although not endless, is significantly higher than other hosts I’ve used. ASP.NET hosts tend to be extremely locked down and unnecessarily expensive.

The also offer unlimited storage (who doesn’t besides ASP.NET sites these days), but also they legitimately allow you to store up to 50GB of personal data – as an offsite back up if you want. That’s unique. With a few  clicks, you can configure Google to be your host of e-mail and calendars as well.

I’ve created a promo code for them which offers $50 off and 1 free lifetime unique IP address.

The Promo code is WIREDPRAIRIE1 (make sure you type it in when prompted during sign-up to get the promotion!).

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Sorry, that means I haven’t successfully created an Apache .htaccess file redirecting all of the various feed URLs to Google’s FeedBurner. I’ve looked at the 404 logs though and think I’ve covered all of the files/options I’ve used over the years.

If you are reading this, thanks!

I’ve also added a CNAME entry to my DNS settings for WiredPrairie for my photos, so that it uses SmugMug more discretely now …. You can find my public photos at photos.wiredprairie.us now.

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Our household DSL modem, which is generally very reliable, occasionally, and mysteriously seems to forget a setting that I like to enable. I don’t know why, and I’ve never determined whether there’s a pattern to the loss or not (like maybe it’s every 30 days or some crazy thing like that).

Tonight, I finally decided to attempt to fix the problem in the simplest way I knew how: write some code.

Thankfully, the DSL modem has a simple web based management system with basic authentication.

So, I’ve set up a scheduled task on my Windows Home Server every 45 minutes to call into this console application:

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace SendHttpCommand
{
    class Program
    {
        static int Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args.Length != 3)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("SendHttpCommand requires 3 parameters in this order:");
                Console.WriteLine("    username");
                Console.WriteLine("    password");
                Console.WriteLine("    url");
                return -1;
            }
            Uri uri = new Uri(args[2]);
            HttpWebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(uri) as HttpWebRequest;
            request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(args[0], args[1]);
            HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;
            try
            {
                if (response != null)
                {
                    using (Stream receiveStream = response.GetResponseStream())
                    {
                        StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(receiveStream);
                        string result = readStream.ReadToEnd();
                        Console.WriteLine(result);
                    }

                }
            }
            catch { }
            finally
            {
                response.Close();
            }

            return 0;
        }
    }
}

It literally was 10 minutes of coding, and 2 for testing. And now the DSL modem setting should generally always be set the way I like it (except for the 45 minute window). The program could be smaller by removing the response reading portion – but I thought it was more interesting that way, so I left it in.

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