Brrreeeport beats Lodefizzle by 8 furlongs

February 14, 2006

Scoble is running a little experiment to test out the various blog search engines. Basically, he wanted everyone to create a post containing the word “brrreeeport”.

Have you figured out what I was up to yet? Why, of course! It was an opportunity for me to try the blog search engines out!

Of course, this is somewhat similar to Mike’s recent “Lodefizzle” experiment.

Go Brrreeeport!

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Comment Signatures

February 12, 2006

A few weeks ago, Alex King had a post trying out different email signatures in response to Scott’s post about leveraging email signatures. In my response to which signature layout looked best, I ended with “What’s next? Blog signatures?” and put in a signature that I have been using in various forums:

– Matt Smith –
MyHomePoint - Powering the Modern Family
SwoofWare - It’s only work if somebody makes you do it

I initially said it as somewhat of a joke and it was also another opportunity to drop a link to MyHomePoint. However, I’ve been mulling it over since then, and I really don’t see why you wouldn’t want to incorporate a signature into your blog comments. Sure, you usually have the option to leave a URL which is linked to your name, but really, what are the odds that you’ll click a link to Matt Smith? Wouldn’t it be so much nicer to provide a little more context about yourself?

I’ve done it a couple times here and there since my original post, but I was getting tired of typing it in and or locating the text to copy and paste. What I really wanted was some easy mechanism to pick the appropriate signature (HTML, UBB, TextPattern, etc.) and quickly drop it into the comment I am working on. Well, guess what I found tonight? I was reading Scoble’s post on Firefox extensions and he listed off several from Mack Male’s notes from Northern Voice and one of the ones mentioned was Signature. Bingo! This is exactly what I was looking for. I now have the ability to right-click in any textarea and quickly and easily drop a signature in any of the formats that I define.

I’m sure that there are a number of people that will frown on such an approach and consider it another form of spamming. I don’t necessarily consider it spamming since it would be accompanied with relevant comments and the links wouldn’t be about p0rn, \/iagra, p0k3r, etc. Plus, if you can do it in email and forums, why not blog comments?

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

The SDK for the ‘net-1.1′ framework is not available or not configured.

February 5, 2006

I’m in the process of trying to implement NAnt into our build process. Once I got a basic script going for one of our projects, it was fairly trivial to implement it for others up the chain. Trivial until I got to the web project. No surprise there, right? We’ve all lamented about how annoying it is to deal with web projects and the complexities and frustration they introduce.

Anyway, NAnt kept complaining that I was trying to compile a web application and that I needed to use the <WebMap> node to define the relationship between the project file and the web site where it was running. I spent a couple of hours on it to no avail. I tried all sorts of different combinations to get it to work but had no luck. So, I went extreme and decided that once and for all I had had enough of Visual Studio’s web application crap. The NAnt book I’ve been working from (Expert .Net Delivery) actually recommended early on in the process to ditch web projects and referenced Fritz Onion’s page on ASP.NET Applications without Web Projects.

I’ve been aware of the ASP.NET Applications without Web Projects for a long time now but had never taken action on it because from a quick glance, it always seemed that there were lingering issues: loss of design time functionality (Yay!), inability to debug, etc. However, I gave it a pretty thorough read this time and decided that the issues weren’t pervasive and were limited to a few users only. Plus, once I actually read the instructions, I realized that it was pretty trivial to implement and just as trivial to reverse if I had the need to do so. So I spent a little time unhooking everything and held my breath when I ran NAnt against it for the first time. Great. I got past the other errors, but now I was facing: “The SDK for the ‘net-1.1′ framework is not available or not configured.”

I spent an hour or so trying to find the answer to get me past this hurdle, but wasn’t have much luck. I was afraid I was screwed since this would be one of those situations where you can’t get any help because you are doing so many different things at once. I was almost to the point of reversing everything when I gave it one last search and came up with the following thread: Build error when using task. It appears that because of the resource files used in ASP.Net apps, that you need a little more to compile than just the regular old .Net framework. And this would explain my situation. I am running the NAnt scripts on a server which has the minimum amount of application cruft on it as possible. As such, I only installed the .Net Framework and didn’t install the SDK back when I brought it online.

So, I dug around in our MSDN subscription and found the SDK DVD, grabbed the install I needed and installed the SDK on the server. Voila! The NAnt build process ran like a charm. OK, it made it past that error and hung up on another unrelated error. But for the purposes of this article, it installing the SDK got rid of the “The SDK for the ‘net-1.1′ framework is not available or not configured.” I was experiencing with my NAnt script.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

Lodefizzle

February 4, 2006

Mike Davidson over at Mike Industries wrote up a great post about his experiments with Google, search engine optimization, code quality and semantics. The impetus for the article was to find out why he is #5 on the Google for “Mike” and why Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater ranks higher than him with complete crap for HTML. He performed a very nice experiment with the word “lodefizzle” to see how it would rank and documented the various results.

Conclusion: Although good semantics are somewhat valuable in optimization, simple things like proper titles, descriptive filenames, and incoming links are dramatically more important.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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coComment

February 4, 2006

Sweet! Persistence pays off. Even though I was 5 hours after the last invitation drop on Scoble’s coComment post, I found a code that was still working. I’m looking forward to trying this out. This is exactly what Geof Morris was talking about in his Personal Comment Aggregation post and what I was referring to as Postmarks in my own post along similar lines. I think I’m actually going to give this one a try. For some reason, I still haven’t gotten into the whole flickr and del.icio.us. I’ll have to follow up after a few days with a review.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 6 Comments 

Kama Sutra worm alert

February 2, 2006

I just received the following email from SpamStopsHere. I was vaguely aware of the Kama Sutra worm but really hadn’t realized the consequences. In addition to making sure that all my virus apps are up-to-date, I guess I am going to round up all of my files with the listed extensions and burn them to disk where they should be safe. Note: Don’t think you can just zip them up into one file and leave it on your system as zip is listed as an affected extension.

Dear SpamStopsHere Customer:

You are receiving this email because you are a SpamStopsHere customer and we wanted to notify you of important information regarding your SpamStopsHere anti-virus protection.

The Kama Sutra (W32.Blackmal.E@mm) worm, identified as W32/Nyxem.E@mm by SpamStopsHere’s provided anti-virus engine, is reported to cause damage to potentially important documents starting Friday, February 3, 2006.

Unlike most recent email worms which simply open a back door to allow for theft of information and services, this malware actually truncates all files with the following filename extensions:

.doc
.xls
.mdb
.mde
.ppt
.pps
.zip
.rar
.pdf
.psd
.dmp

Although SpamStopsHere has been removing this virus from the email of our anti-virus customers, it’s possible that computers may already be infected, especially if you aren’t a subscriber of our anti-virus service. This virus was first spotted in the wild on January 16, 2006.

Right now, the only symptoms of the virus may have been that your computer locked up requiring a reboot. The owner of an infected system isn’t likely to notice any other symptoms until tomorrow when many potentially important documents would be irrecoverable. Depending on the files erased, and the availability of backups, this virus could cause irreperable harm and monetary damages.

The security industry is suggesting that organizations and personal computer owners ensure the availability of their document backups and also to check for this worm on all systems before Friday, February 3, 2006.

Symantec(tm) is offering a free detection and removal tool at the following URL:

W32.Blackmal@mm Removal Tool

Thank you for your valuable time.

Sincerely,

SpamStopsHere Technical Support

I’ve actually become a little complacent lately because I am subscribed to SpamStopsHere virus service and haven’t had to worry about anything in a long time. That filters most of the incoming email (except for Yahoo and Hotmail accounts). I don’t spend too much time worrying about the other computers in the house since I am the only Admin that logs on to them, and the rest of the family logs in with regular guest privileges. I would take a chance, but I haven’t backed anything up in forever so I might as well use this as my excuse to do it. You should do the same.

Popularity: 43% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

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