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Buying ink for your home printer is always a huge pain.  It is where the printer manufacturers make their money.

However after needing to buy ink for my Cannon Pixma MP620B I found InkForSale.net.  I bought two cartridges on my first order, a black and a magenta.  The black went in without a hitch, the magenta however would never take. 

So I contacted InkForSale.net and they, slowly, replied and said they would send me a replacement.  At this point, I also needed a Yellow cartridge.  So I told them I would go ahead and order that and they can ship them together to save some money.  Unfortunately when my package came it only had the Yellow cartridge in it.  So I emailed them again and never got a reply, however the magenta cartridge did arrive and work as expected.

So three out of four cartridges worked fine, and they did replace the broken one. 

So will I purchase from them again?   You better believe it.  The savings is well worth it.  The big difference is that I will order more than I need and store the new ones. 

Last week I came into the office to find my box was completely hosed.  I kept getting a compile error that the webengine.dll could not be found. 

I tried many different uninstalls and reinstalls of .NET but it wouldn’t fix the problem.  However I notice that even though .NET was uninstalled, it wasn’t.  I went looking for a tool to completely uninstall .NET and found this website.

After using that process to uninstall .NET and then rebooting, I reinstalled .NET and was good to go.

Was one of the most frustrating work days I have had in some time, have never been so close to being beaten by a technical problem like this.

I’ve been doing some work on the DotNetBlogEngine and recently I would get this error when I tried to debug.

Thankfully after an online search I found this solution.

In short, open up your .SLN file in notepad and edit the VWDPort entry to a lower number.  You should be up and running after that. 

Thanks to JBERKE for the help!

In the past, Chris Blankenship had written a user control to show the recent referrers in DotNetBlogEngine.  I’ve used it on my site since then.  However in a recent upgrade of the code base it stopped working.  Having a little free time on my hand, I took the time to fix it for version 1.6. 

While doing that I wanted the ability to white list and black list certain domains.  The logic in DotNetBlogEngine to see if a referrer is spam is a little limited.  It does a simple web request on the referrer to see if it can find the host domain in the returned HTML.  This leads to a lot of good referrals being marked as spam.  Then there are some ‘good’ domains that I want hidden.

So I added a white and black list to the referrer page.

The end result you see on the side bar of my site. 

If you’d like the code, you download it below.  This change does require a recompile of the business logic dll, and a schema change if you are using SQL.

Download Referrer Patch 1.1 – 31.4KB

Comment spam on the DotNetBlogEngine platform has been a huge frustration.  Spammers have taken aim and generally have won. There have been various solutions offered up from the community.  Version 1.6 was almost solely targeted to combat spam.  So what happened?  The spam got much worse.

So in this cat and mouse game a new trick has been deployed.  Filip Stanek has incorporated the reCaptcha solution into DotNetBlogEngine. 

I deployed it last night and went from 20+ spam comments a day, to none so far.  Now, obviously, this is just another step on the cat and mouse game.  Will be interesting to see how long this works.

On another blog I wrote about a company I worked for many years ago going out of business.  It was a manufacturing company.  I wrote it about the time of all the bailouts and questioned the legitimacy of the thought that some companies were ‘too big to fail’.  We live in a Capitalistic country, the very foundation of capitalism is creative destruction.  The process of companies dying due to the creativity of other companies. 

On the way into work today I heard about Hollywood Video closing 800 stores.  Attributed to Netflix and Red Box.  Anybody reading this blog knows what Netflix is.  Red Box could be a bit more unknown.  At many locations are DVD rental kiosk, these are Red Box.  For $1 a day you can rent a  DVD. You don’t have to go out of your way to shop their product, you can do it when you go to buy Milk.  You usually don’t have to race the clock because they are located in 24 hour stores. 

Blockbuster isn’t much better off.  They are losing customers at a pace that they can’t reallocate their business model.  Even if they did reallocate their business model, the new business model of Kiosk and mail order movies actually erodes their own customer base and they have to close stores and lay people off.

I haven’t use a movie rental place outside of Red Box and Neflix in years.  My wife has hit the local movie rental, not to rent movies, but to buy used ones at a fraction of the price.  I am an avid Netflix user.  We have the two DVD plan, and I LOVE the streaming. 

Creative destruction is the foundation of business in America.  Nobody is too big to fail and nobody should be propped up by the government.  Let capitalism work, the outcome is companies like Microsoft and Google.  Netflix and Red Box. Even Walmart.  I grew up when K-Mart was king, now they are nothing but an after-thought.  I actually wonder what damage is being done to our future economy due to the government propping up failing companies.  What innovation will never come to fruition because GM was too big to fail?

For the longest time I’ve wanted a way to see if I’ve been unfriended on Facebook, and I read today that there was an app for that.  However, as you read that article you see that Facebook reacted quickly and disabled the application.

However, briefly mentioned in that article is a GreaseMonkey script to tell you if a friend has unfriended you.

I did a test an had my daughter unfriend me, and it worked like a champ.

So why do I care?  I’m a bit OCD and I just like to know such things :-)

One of the neat little things I’ve learned on the big project I am on is how to show a default image if the one you need isn’t found.

To give a bit of a background, my last two jobs have been on catalog like websites.  Where you have thousands (on the bigger site… hundreds of thousands) of items in the catalog.  Each with several size variations of the image.  At my prior employer I had a pretty complex algorithm to determine if an image was available.  At the most basis level, querying the the hard drive to see if the file exist.   What I am using now is handled on the client side, and I tend to like the performance a bit more.

In a standard image tag, you have the following:

<img alt=”” src=”someimage.jpg” />

Adding a simple onerror tag to it, gives you a default image if the one you expect to be there doesn’t exist:

<img alt=”” src=”someimage.jpg” onerror=”this.onerror=null;this.src=’default.jpg’;” />

Pretty nice little trick, surprised I had never heard of it.

As covered in my prior post, I recently went on an in depth search for a web host.  I ended up at JODOHost.com.

Their price was unbelievable.  For unlimited sites, 4.5 GB of space, 65GB of transfer, and much more it is only $17.50 a month.  The great thing about this is that you can have Window servers and Linux servers. 

They actually support multiple domains in a true way, all the other host had their domains as sub directories of a root domain.  That isn’t the case with JodoHost, a domain is a unique folder.

They are based out of India, and there is an honest and fair criticism from Indian tech support about it being poor.  However, overall, I have found Jodo’s support to be more than acceptable.  There has been the occasional person who was below par, but I get that with American based support companies as well.

The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t make a folder writable on your own.  You have to open a support ticket so they can change that for you.

Overall, if you are looking for an ASP.NET host, JodoHost was by far the best one I tried. 

In a prior post I asked for some help on browser stats on certain sites.  The goal being, to answer the question if IE 6 is dead.  The answer really is, it depends.

Lets first show some of the numbers:

Now as you can see only two of these sites are over 10%, these two site are two of my largest visited sites in these stats.  Where 10% means millions of visitors.    Two key things to note is that with many of these sites had two to three times the IE 6 traffic just one year ago and I did remove a few sites who had stats well outside the norm.  One clear fact is that IE 6 usage has plummeted this year. 

Site 1 was the third highest IE 6 usage, this was not unexpected for me as this site has a older age bracket that uses it.  But the fact that it was as low as it was shocked me.  Just six months ago, the IE 6 usage was 25%. 

Now for the sites that showed the lowest IE 6 usage, is also fairly explainable.  Sites 7, 6 and 2 are not WELL traveled sites and their usage would likely be younger.  Younger people will own newer computers and IE 6 is Eight years old. 

So is IE 6 dead?

It depends on three things. 

1. The size of the project you are on.  If you are working on a site that may be hit by millions of people, then no it is not dead.  If your site is a fairly minimal site, then I’d not support IE 6. 

2. Is IE 6 capable? IE 6 is 8 years old and it will have limitations.  If those limitations are deal breakers, then you either have to change the plan for your project or you have to drop support for IE 6.

3. Is the time needed to work with IE 6 in the budget? In the last project I was in, it took us four weeks to work out all of the IE 6 issues.  That is not free time and if the customer isn’t willing to pay for this time, then IE 6 should be dropped.

I will not support IE 6 on any personal projects moving forward.  7% and declining is not worth the hassle.

One of the biggest reasons this conversation needs to start ramping up is the simple fact that large sites and services, even Microsoft, are starting to drop support for IE 6.

Microsoft Office Web Applications
YouTube
Microsoft Sharepoint 2010
Apple’s MobileMe

That is a fairly important list for my quick search online.  Plus the two sites that had the most IE 6 usage in my list above, will be dropping official support for IE 6 in 2010!  Why then?  Because their corporate computers are being upgraded to Windows 7, so there isn’t as much political need to have IE 6.

On this site, I actually display a warning if you visit with IE 6.  I have for some time, and I think at some point soon I am be ornery and block IE 6 users.  I want that browser to die and whatever that takes, I’m going to support it.