Configure Thunderbird Filelink

Mozilla Thunderbird installed an update today, and one of the new features is the built-in ability to use a dropbox-type service for handling big files, instead of sending them as email attachments. The pages in Thunderbird that pops up to show new features lists this as one, but doesnt really show how to set it up. So, here is how:

 

-Click “Tools”, then “Options”

-Click the button “Attachments”, then “Outgoing”

-Click “Add”

-Enter your YouSendIt user info if you have it.

-Or, click the “Need a new account?” button if you don’t already have one, or click the following link to sign up – YouSendIt 14 Day Free Trial.

 

Looks like YouSendIt works best with one of the paid accounts, as the base one is somewhat size constrained… I’ll be watching for plugins to enable outer filelink providers, like dropbox etc.

Orchard and Microformats and Schema.org

I’ve been using Orchard for some time now, as well as some other cms and ecommerce platforms. Since I’m kinda big on SEO, it would be nice to see microformats, and specifically schema.org implemented in Orchard. Not sure if this would be good to do as a module, or if it would be necessary to do at a more core level of the system.

 

I found a uservoice entry regarding this and voted that it be added, I encourage you do the same if this interests you. see http://orchard.uservoice.com/forums/50435-general/suggestions/998443-support-microformats

 

 

Freelancer.com, heal thyself

Freelancer.com is a great resource for finding temporary talent to help you with you software development project (or one of hundreds of other categories of work). But if this is the case, why is their website soooo annoying to use?

I have a project currently open and am in communication with my offshore guy doing the work. He posts new files to the site almost daily, and the email I receive includes a link to “view files”. perfect! But when I click on this link, what follows is similar to my related experiences with the site, which is are often ones of frustration. This link loads the project page, but no files. Where are the file? Wander around a bit, and then finally realize, oh I’m not logged in. The link was to go view files, not to view the project page, so why didnt the site prompt me to login? Also, why didn’t it remember my login? I’ve specifically told it ever time to remember my login.

Ok, so this is just one little bug, no big deal. Except that, this is typical of every part of Freelancer.com that I use. I can never find what I need, if I want to see current stuff I’m working on it requires I go to some top level menu and drill down through several links before even getting close. Add on top of all this that the site is often quite slow, and this slowness combined with the excessive use of ajax screen refreshes which don’t always show any kind of wait spinner… you sometimes aren’t sure if anything is happening at all.

To add to this headache, I tried to fill out a form to list some services my company performs. I fill out half the form, then hit a rich text eentry box which refused to take focus and let me type in it. Woops. I guess it’s not IE9 compatible, so I turn on compat mode. Now it lets me type in the box, but after filling the whole form and clicking submit… nothing. It just sat there, and didn’t do a thing. I finally tried this whole thing again in Chrome and it finally worked. I then popped up a support window and reported the IE9 bug, and was told basically that yes, if you have problems on our website, please use something other than IE. Really?

Maybe it’s time for freelancer.com to put a project on their own site to get some resources to fix all their issues. I just hope this isn’t what they did originally.

Oh and one more thing- employers like myself would love a mobile version of your site.

Twitter Bootstrap Theme for Orchard

Looks like David Hayden knocked out a “Twitter Bootstrap” theme for Orchard… Really looking forward to trying this one out. I might even update this site to run this theme, though I need to find out which versions it supports first.  See more at http://www.davidhayden.me/blog/twitter-bootstrap-orchard-theme

I also found this Nuget package that contains an MVC3 template for Twitter Bootstrap, over here – https://nuget.org/packages/MahApps.Twitter.Bootstrap

Brute force RDP login attempts

Our primary webserver was taken offline yesterday for a while, which we figured out was due to it being overwhelmed by RDP login attempts The security audit log showed thousands of login attempts on various user names, from a variety of IP addresses. so just blocking an IP would not help. We finally decided to just change the default RDP port to an unknown one. In the process of changing the firewall rules for the new port, and doing all this configuration over RDP itself, we managed to lock ourselves out of the server completely… even though we were doing things specifically to make sure this didn’t happen, sometimes those plans just don’t quite work out.

The good news is the guys are Codero were able to get us straitened out without issue. Once I logged back into the server, there was my corrected firewall rule, already configured and ready to go. Big thanks to the guys at Codero for continuing to give great tech support!

WatiN and missing Interop.SHDocVw.dll

One more WatiN gotcha to post – in a freshly created project with WatiN added (via nuget), creating the new instance of the IE object will (always? often?) result in an exception thrown with the error message that the Interop.SHDocVw dll missing. The apparent solution for this is-

-Click on this dll in the References section

-In the properties for this reference, find the property “Embed Interop Types”, and switch it from True to False.

Try running again and it should work now.

WatiN and the .Net 4.0 Client Profile

This is one of those I had to learn twice before it stuck-

When using WatiN with a .Net application (which is, uh, always), I’ve had my project fail to recognize the WatiN namespace… on two occasions.

Especially when building on WPF, it seems visual studio defaults to the .Net client profile, which does not include the system.web libraries that WatiN requires. So after banging your head on the wall for a while, you might notice that there is one or two “warnings” in visual studio.. open those up, and you’ll see the warning about a dependency of WatiN, System.Web dot blah blah cannot be found etc.

Changing from the client profile to the full .Net 4.0 framework fixes this.

(now, after writing this, maybe I won’t forget on the third time)

orchard vs. wordpress popularity

A bit of keyword researching this evening lead me to the phrase “orchard themes”, which I have some interest (and stake) in since I’ve been working with orchard for quite a while now. This exact phrase is searched only about 100 times per month in the US, which didn’t sound like a lot to me. Then I did a search for “wordpress themes” to get a comparison, and sure enough… 100,000 searches per month. The global searches were about the same ratio, roughly 300 and 300,000.

So a very rough approximation of this data would tell us that wordpress is currently 1000 time as popular as Orchard. Ouch!

Oh the currently-empty project I currently have for for this is over at orchard themes on codeplex.

Tesla Coil

Was reminded by a buddy today of the Tesla coil I built back in my early teens. By the numbers, it put out around 100kv of lightning, just enough to be scary. I’ll try to find some photos tucked away and get them online.

Probably was a bad idea to remind me of this, as I’m now remembering all the details about it.. and thinking of improvements… and realizing if I’d actually had funds back then, how I could built it much better. And then reminding myself that yes, though I have funds now, it would be a terrible idea to build one of these again, especially since I’d likely wind up doing something stupid like a 1Megavolt rig. Not only do these coils completely trash any radio signals in the area (knock knock, FCC, open the door), they can easily even fry small electronics within the vicinity. Not to mention the real danger of being hit by a million volts of lightning.

Nope, I’ll just stick to software for now.

For now….

Business Ideas list (from ycombinator)

This list has been around a while, but a good number of items still stand true. Some of the things I’d still like to see done correctly are

-item #21- displace intuit quickbooks. They charge too much, and are lazy because they don’t have competition. Oh and I hate using their bloated software. How tough could it be to build a simple small business accounting system?

-item #22 – build a hybrid between excel and access. I’ve thought this for a long time, there needs to be a newer version of access for large sets of data (no 2gb limit), and a simple set of tools for throwing a UI on top of a database. Integrate that all into a portable, standardized file, like the old MDE’s were. Then also make it useful like excel, with formulas and such. This list specifically mentions making it browser based, but I’d actually like to see it do both – a desktop enabled data file that can then be run online as well. Being a .Net guy, I’d love to see some built-in scripting capabilities that utilize .Net, but that’s probably the wrong choice for portability reasons (unless we stay a Windows based tool.. which access and excel already are, so….)

see http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (Link is now outdated, seeking new link. For now, they have published a new list for 2020 with 13 ideas (appropriate for 2020) at this link: https://blog.ycombinator.com/13-startup-ideas/ )

Of course I have a few I’d add to that list as well. Unlike ycombinator, I’m not secure enough to go blab them here. but let’s try a couple for fun

-A global online reputation system – why prove your worthiness on every platform you use. Example: my stack overflow rating is over 1000, not awesome but pretty good. but when I log into a new forum, i’m a nothing. What if each of these sites/services were to be able to aware categories reputation points that you could take with you other places. Include fun things like badges etc.

-A similar type of rep system, but utilized in customer support scenarios. When I call my internet provider, they could route my support call based on a rating that shows I’m a guru in networking, and neither I nor they need to waste time telling me how to reboot a router. They save money on eliminating uncessary support, and the customer may even survive the experience without suffering extreme infuriation.

HTML5 Cross-domain communication

I hadn’t realized until reading this article that html5 has baked in a way to allow a hosting webpage to receive messages from a page contains in a child iframe. This is normally not allowed in modern browsers due to the potential for big ol security problems, but this html5 method has security measures in place that prevent it being abused. Nice stuff.

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=109

 

StartSSL no longer free

I’ve been using the StartSSL service on a couple websites for a number of years, and enjoyed being able to utilize a free SSL cert that actually works with most of the browsers out there. After receiving notice that one of my certs was expiring soon, I went back to the site and went through the process of renewing it. Except this time, instead of getting my rewned cert, I instead got an email that the free certs are not allowed for commercial use (ie, ecommerce). Even though everything on their website indicates it is fine to use them this way, and I’d had no problem using them for some time on my commercial sites. Instead, theyre now steering me to use their “Class 2” cert which is a paid option.

So, don’t bother signing up with these guys if you need an ssl cert for your website. You might “luck out” and get a free one, but next year they’ll likely suddenly remember that you’re not supposed to be using it for what it is intended.

Guess I’ll go shopping and see who’s gouging me the least these days for a silly SSL cert…

 

IIS7 URL Rewrite – Remove www from all urls

I’ve always used the canonical rule template on IIS rewrite to force a www prefix on my urls. Recently I’ve started setting up sites that do the opposite – force no www in the front. Easy enough to do if you have nost headers configured, just select which host name to force to and bam, done.

Now I have a project that is a single web app mapped to an IP. Im running orchard 1.3x on it, so the multi-tenant module allows quick configuraiton of a new site. With the dedicated IP, I don’t have to mess with adding host headers every time I need to create a new site- just set it in DNS and away we go.

The problem with this scenario is – I still had to go into IIS and configure canonical url rules for each new site. What would be nice is to just set one rule that says “strip the www off ANY url coming to this site”.

 

I found the basics for this rule elsewhere on the web, and tuned it to do exactly that:

 

<rule name=”Remove www” stopProcessing=”true”>
  <match url=”(.*)” ignoreCase=”true” />
  <conditions logicalGrouping=”MatchAll”>
    <add input=”{HTTP_HOST}” pattern=”^www\.(.+)$” />
  </conditions>
  <action type=”Redirect” url=”http://{C:1}/{R:0}” appendQueryString=”true” redirectType=”Permanent” />
</rule>

 

Add this in your rules section of the web.config file and you’ll be good to go.

How to add a password to a zip file

I used to use winzip back before it became a bloated absolute garbage piece of an app, and it was my no-brainer way of adding a password to a zip file whenever I needed to do so. Recently I needed to add a password to a zip I needed to email to someone, and in the process discovered that windows 7 no longer has the option to add the password (like windows xp had). Strange. Quickly decided that firing up xp mode (virtual pc) just couldnt possibly be the answer. I have winrar installed, so tried it, but couldnt find a way to do this either. Quick search revealed that 7zip has password capabilities. So I go download and install it.

I already had zipped my content into a zip file, so I just opened this in 7zip so I could add the pw – but no luck. I look through every menu and find nothing. Reading through the help file, I find references to adding the password on the commandline… so I started to think that maybe the commandline is the only way the password can be added. Argh.

Finally an associate showed me that you can select all the files you want to zip, right click on them, select 7zip, and select Add to archive. This pops up a “new archive” window that… sure enough… has the password settings right there in front of you.

Frustrating experience, but lesson learned, and best of all: I don’t have to use winzip.