Not dead yet.....

......but close. I'll get more details out soon.

~M.

.....and that my friend, is why I'm terrified of the Future.

I read. I read a lot. And while the contextual quality of my choices might not be on par with War and Peace, it doesn't change the fact that I spend a good portion of my day soaking up information. If one was to follow the vast majority of my web-surfing, my technophilia would be apparent to even the most casual observer. I care about all things computer related, be it solid state hard drives, new graphics cards, or alternate OSs, and I honestly feel as a generation (ours and the ones following us), technology is so infused into every aspect of our lives, that it has become an external appendage to our natural bodies.

We use technology in such a natural way, we don't really stop to consider the ramifications of our usage in the eyes of the casual observer, the uninformed, and especially the technophobe. I'm speaking of the proverbial "The Man" here, as he has evolved in my mind over the last decade, from the upper class suit who kept the working man down (or so I've been told), to the law author and politician, who's goal is to control the use and activities of the every growing technology.

The Man terrifies me, but not because I think "he's evil, and that in general, government should stay out of my buisiness, but rather because I feel that when it comes to the cognition of technologies, and how they should be used, the current establishment falls short.

People are making laws regulating topics that they have absolutely no understanding of. I'll go ahead and dredge up Sen. Ted Stevens "The internet is a series of tubes..." analogy, made excruciatingly painful by the simple fact that he was, at the time, the Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Today I found an article that scares me almost as much. Apparently there is a British judge that admitted to not understanding what exactly a "Web Site" was, among other things, and then relied on the prosecution to provide a viable definition. I don't know, if I were the one being prosecuted, if i would be overjoyed, or incredulous to find out that my judge did not even possess the base knowledge to make a good decision upon.

Basically what it's boiling down to is that the current governmental body is creating laws and policies that are directly effecting me and my interests for the first time ever. What's worse is they're making uninformed decisions based on misleading information, and in many cases, just plain incorrect and in many cases inaccurate information.

Good night, and Good Luck.

~M.

One code to Screw them all.

AA-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-XX (first and last two chars removed to protect the innocent. And kittens. And deaf people. And your mom.)

Who would have thought that one little code could cause so many problems? And so much anger? If you take the code, and remove all the dashes, you would be left with quite possibly the most famous number on the internet right now.

The first part of this week saw the advent of an attempt at stifling the circulation of this special number, but what do you do when all it takes is a copy and paste to add yet another reference? Apparently you whip out Cease and Desists. The plan? Blanket Cease and Desist. Hit everything that you think you have a chance in hell of influencing. Digg?? Yup, hit. Google? Yeah they got it too.

But that pesky code keeps popping up everywhere!! Like in site banners(at least at the time of this posting). Hell, it's even already a registered domain!! Viva la resistance!!

I personally think this is further testament to the phrase: "What one man builds, another can destroy." No matter what encryption you put on something, no matter the copy protection or verification, it's all a matter of time until someone just as smart as you cracks it, and distributes it.

~M.

Microsoft. Really the Antichrist?

Looking back, I've been a Microsoft monkey for as long as I can remember. Commodore 64 aside, one of my earliest computing memories was manipulating DOS on my fathers monochrome display work laptop, and playing Battle Chess off of a floppy. Windows 3.1? I still have my install disks. Hell I think I still have a Windows ME hiding somewhere (you know, just in case the zombies attack).

Over the course of the years, I've caught quite a bit of flak for being a MS Whore, from the Linux Fanatics to the Mac Junkies. After having the pleasure of trying to support Macs on a college campus, coupled with the pretentious cork soaker-ness of the Mac community on a whole, it's a safe bet that I will never jump that ship. I don't even own an IPod because I'm too afraid of being forced to kill some fanboy/girl at the Mac store, and I don't want to go to jail. In fact, I just might dislike Mac enough to buy me a Zune out of spite!

Now for you Linux-ers, my home machine is currently dual booting WinXP64 and Debian 4 (64 bit as well), and I absolutely love my Linux. The thing about Linux is hardware support, especially when it comes to newer hardware. Sure I have gotten most everything working (aside from random issues with my usb mouse), but it's taken me hours of work / research to do, WHICH I THINK IS FUN! I love working through issues and convincing things to function properly, but apparently the wife thinks I should be focusing elsewhere, like on her.

My point is, sometimes its nice to have things just work (OK, so as long as you're not a complete moron, things just work). Microsoft, through debatable tactics, has provided a relatively solid platform and product series to work from. I found a great article here, which explores this topic a little bit, more from the .Net development standpoint, but I think the core message is very applicable to more than just development.

I do believe that MS does have one thing going, and that would be "Solidarity". By providing a cohesive base of operations, it has provided a solid framework for development and growth. Personally, I think that this is one of the major problems with the open source community. There's just too much, and if all the effort was combined for a single purpose, well the sky would be the limit!

Peace,
~M.

Avenged Sevenfold - Exploding through your ear hole, and sodomizing your pleasure cortex....in a good way.

Avenged Sevenfold. They create music that is so full of awesome that it could rape your mother and you'd be like "That's coo." Well maybe not, but it has been quite a while since I've been rocked quite like I'm being rocked now. A friend referred to them as "A little hardcore don't you think?" to which I promptly kicked him in the face and called him a "pussy".

I'm not going to waste valuable time trying to put into words what it feels to be rocked like this, just go to their website and download some of the free samples, and witness the rocking-ness for yourselves. Go. Now.

Ok, if you're still here, I do in fact have more things to say regarding Avenged Sevenfold. One of their songs "Beast and the Harlot" (Available for download from their site...go get it!!!) makes an appearance in Guitar Hero 2. Now I've been able to resist the call of GH II for quite a while now, despite the fact that it combines 2 of my favorite 3 things in the world, Guitars and Video Games. The third favorite of course being sex, but the combination of Guitars and Video Games just might be enough so supersede sex.

As I said, I've been able to resist the ever seductive call of GH II, but with the advent of my discovery of "Beast and the Harlot", I might break. I have never in my life thought I would see the day when I'd buy a video game simply because of a song in it.

Peace,
~M.

A total and complete lack of inspiration.

I'm sure we've all done it. You've had "another one of those weeks", and when Friday finally rolls around, the most productive thing you can manage is bringing up Visual Studio (or your IDE of choice), and staring at the same function for *HOURS*. Holy balls of suckage Batman.

As it is, most of the time when I'm not getting jack done with work, I try to open up blogger and write a little bit, but today........well today I opened up the window around 8:00, and now it's 11:09, and I'm just finding the motivation to even type this up. C'est la vi.

Well since today is pretty much a bust, go ahead and check out Too Similar, a comic created by 2 artists that I read regularly. Thank god for *something* that passes the time.

~M.

Updating existing ASP.Net pages to implement AJAX

Recently at work it fell to me to take an existing ASP.Net project / product, and implement AJAX. Although I despise AJAX for becoming the buzzword of the month, and I do honestly believe that I just might punch the next person that walks up and mentions it without being able to tell me what exactly AJAX is and how it works. Salesmen be warned, I will hit you.

All of the changes required to get AJAX to function correctly in existing ASP.Net web pages (and projects) are made in the existing web.config file for that project. The details can be found here:

http://ajax.asp.net/docs/ConfiguringASPNETAJAX.aspx

with one major change. In the “Controls Element” section of the article, the recommended action is to place the following in the web.config:

[system.web]
[pages]
[controls]
[add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/]
[/controls]
[/pages]
[/system.web]

For some reason, Visual Studio does not like to add the AJAX controls to the TagPrefix library “asp”, and the controls will not show up or be useable. Rather, you need to choose a different tagPrefix:

[system.web]
[pages]
[controls]
[add tagPrefix="ajax" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/]
[/controls]
[/pages]
[/system.web]

Obviously the server must have AJAX installed on it, the install can be found here, with the toolkit being a optional download:

http://ajax.asp.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=47

If you follow the article correctly, your asp project should now be “AJAX Enabled”, but if you are working in a Web Application Project, there is another step that needs to be taken. WAPs add an extra tag to the web.config:

[configuration]
[system.web]
[xhtmlConformance mode="Legacy" /]
[/system.web]
[/configuration]

This needs to be removed for AJAX controls to work propertly. If not removed, tags will appear to function properly, but when you actually “run” the site, they will not function at all.

(Reference for this issue)
http://forums.asp.net/thread/1607522.aspx

(Good info on the background of the problem)
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/12/10/gotcha-don-t-use-xhtmlconformance-mode-legacy-with-asp-net-ajax.aspx