Today is my birthday and below are a few restuarants that I enjoy eating at around this time. If you sign up for thier newsletter they will email you a certificate for a free meal around your birthday.
You might get a few emails throughout the year with other advertisments, but it is well worth it.
So my trusty 1992 Buick did not pass the State Inspection this year. Who knew that the driver side power window needs to be fully operational? Anyhow, to make a short story shorter, I have decided not to fix my car (at least not right now).
I would like to wait for an electric car to come out before buying a new one. Perhaps a Chevy Volt, or a possible plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius, but they seem to be at least a year or more out.
So until something changes, ill be depending a lot more on the metro system for my daily commute to work. Today I took the Metro Bus to Tysons Corner for the first time. It uses your SmartTrip card, runs frequently, was well heated, and even announces and displays the next stop (like airport shuttles). It does add a half an hour each way and I need to walk a little bit more, but overall it is great. Certainly much easier and convenient that I first expected.
WMATA also updated their website today. If you haven’t used it recently, check it out. You can email trip itineraries to yourself and there are also direct links to Google Maps walking directions.
If you ever need to capture video of
your desktop with sound or take a bunch of quick screen shots, check out
Jing. It is free, easy to use and just works.
In the future I will be posing some screencasts of various products using this
tool.
When developing .NET applications, particularly Sharepoint applications you might find yourself updating the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) and restarting IIS a lot. This can be time consuming if you are making a lot of short interations in your development cycle. Below are two steps you can take to automate this and minimize your wait time.
First instead of restarting IIS using iisreset, we can restart just the app pool we are working with. Just add the following commands to you pre build event of your project. I add it to the pre-build instead of the post build, because if I attempt to build before restarting the app pool then it will often error complaining that .NET has it locked. In order to give the restart command time to run before the build starts, the next command functions as a wait for 5 seconds.
cscript c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs /a “SharePoint - 80” /r
ping -n 5 127.0.0.1 > NUL 2>&1
When needed, I also update my project post build event to add my new dll to the GAC with this command.
gacutil -if “$(TargetPath)”
You can find gacutil.exe under C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 (you dont have to be using 1.1) and move it to c:\windows\system32 so that it can be found.
During my daily commute I listen to a number of podcasts on my iPod mini. It allows me to really keep up on a lot of different topics. Below are my favorite podcasts which I highly recommend:
Hanselminutes where Scott Hanselman covers in depth a wide range of Microsoft and other web technologies I also frequently listen to and enjoy:
this Week in Tech also by Leo Laporte
Carbon emissions are a significant cause of global warming. Therefore, each of us needs to take responsibility in reducing our carbon footprint. In order to do this, we have to understand how much carbon we are using. Dopplr.com is a service for frequent travellers, that primarily allows you to share your plans with other travellers. However they also calculate the carbon footprint of your flights. As a technical consultant there has been months where I have travelled week after week all over the country. As I become more and more aware of my personal impact I continue to look for alternatives whether it be using web conferencing tools, combining trips or recommending to work remotely. I encourage you to track your carbon footprint, and I highly recommend Dopplr to help you do so.
Above is an screenshot from Dopplr showing the carbon footprint of some of my trips.
As employees use more and more applications outside corporate network boundaries traditional identity systems start to break down. Example business applications that fit this description are Google Apps, Microsoft Online Services, Zoho, Salesforce, ADP, WebEx, QuickArrow to name a few. Luckily OpenID can step in and provide a great experience for IT administrators and end users. OpenID is a web authentication protocol based on open standards.
Currently end users have to create new accounts at each of the sites above, much like early days of the enterprise when you had to create a new account for each application until SSO solutions came along. Creating new accounts is not only a pain for employees but perhaps even more so to IT administrators that need to manage these accounts. Below are 5 reasons to create a corporate OpenID provider instead of having your users create new accounts:
Account creation and removal = Normally users have to create a new account at each site. When a user leaves the organization they could potentially still have access as they created the account, unless you have a good process in place to deactivate accounts. OpenID can be integrated with your existing user repository such as Active Directory or LDAP so that when accounts are deleted they can no longer be used.
Authentication method = Since you control the OpenID provider, you can control the authentication method. You can use different methods such as Username/Password, InfoCards, SSL Client Certificates or Tokens.
Password Managment = When web applications outside your organization control the account, they might not have as robust password management features which places more responsibility on your employees. When you control the authentication using OpenID, you can set your own password policies and there is only one password that the user needs to remember.
Company branding and identity, naming conventions = OpenID uses a URL as a users identity, therefore you can include your company name, such as http://user.company.com. This allows you to set a standard naming convention that is consistant throughout your organizations, much like your email addresses are.
User experience = Users only have to remember one account.
An example is Sun, they have setup a OpenID for their employees at https://openid.sun.com
Please leave your thoughts in the comments!
Virtualization technology is used everywhere these days. It really has changed the way I work and provides a number of advantages over traditional tools and methods. I’ve created a library of VMWare instances with different products installed on each to avoid bogging down my laptop.
One difficulty I often run into is the size of vmware images can quickly become quite large. Which in turn makes transfering them across the network to coworkers slow and painful. Below are some tips on how I keep vmware instances down to a reasonable size.
If you have any other tips on how to manage vmware images, please post them in the comments!