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Website upgrade

May 2, 2010 00:26 by ckincincy

Something you probably shouldn’t notice, but this site is now running under .NET 4.0. 

If you notice anything odd, please notify me. 


Book Review: The Language of Love And Respect

April 18, 2010 18:36 by ckincincy

image

I debated posting this on this blog. I try to keep this blog fairly technical, but do make an exception on occasion.

As techies, we sometimes have a hard time relating with others.  Plus our spouses need to be extra patient when we are on our 60+ hour schedules near the end of a project.  This book, while Christian at its core, is loaded with practical's for having a strong and healthy marriage.

As a member of the Thomas Nelson Blogging team I get the occasional free book to review.  When The Language of Love and Respect by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs came up as available I jumped all over it.

Many months later I am done.  I really struggled with reading this book because I have been reading and following Dr. Eggerichs’s teachings since he first aired on Focus on the Family many years ago.  I bought the CD of the Focus on the Family broadcast, bought and read the book, and went on a two day retreat around this teaching. 

The unfortunate side effect of this, is that there was little new in this book.  It was rehashing a lot of what I heard during the two day retreat focused on the book.  However, as I finally fought through the book I found the meat that made this book worthwhile.  Chapter 14 and on was very refreshing to read.  Several practical points with the Love and Respect teaching.  I’ll be going back over those chapters and making sure I pick up more of the pointers in them.

While my reading of this book was a bit saturated with past knowledge, if you haven’t been exposed to the Love and Respect teaching I would highly recommend this book.  This will change any marriage when applied.  Even if it doesn’t, when this book in particular is applied your perspective of your marriage will change.  It makes a difficult marriage something a person can work through personally.


Categories: Book Review
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Protecting your information on Facebook

April 8, 2010 19:33 by ckincincy

If you are on Facebook, read this.  It is worth your time and I think my suggestion at the end is a huge win for how to navigate Facebook.

Having your information on Facebook can be a problem.  You basically don’t want to put anything on Facebook that you don’t want known by EVERYBODY, because things happen.  Computer glitches happen which expose, even if only temporary, your most private information.

imageHowever, you can at least be smarter with your information.  Take a moment to review your privacy settings, it is that important.  Go to the top right side of your landing page and hit the Account tab, and select Privacy Settings.

In this next screen you are given several area’s to edit your privacy settings.  Be sure to click in each and every one of them to review all of your settings.  I do this once every few months to find out what new settings Facebook has made available to me.  The “Applications and Websites” area freaked me out the last time I looked at it.

Every area that Facebook gives you the ability to set permissions on will have a drop down similar to this:

image

For much of my profile and contact information I allow “Only Friends”.  I don’t allow “Friends of Friends” to see much of my information.  Just because they are your friend doesn’t mean they are my friend and I want them to see my information.  In fact, in several cases… I don’t like some of your friends :-).

For my Photos and Videos of me I have my setting to “Only Me”.  The reason for this is that I don’t want everybody seeing photos and videos I am tagged in, by default.  Some pictures may be embarrassing or show information that I don’t want public (I am a certified foster parent, and have to worry about that). 

However for a select few sections I actually go into the ‘customize’ section.  This gives the following pop up:

image

You see that little item in who I allow to see things?  It is a list that I created, “See Updates”.  [This is the huge win for this post, I’ll expand on it shortly]

The fact is, just because I am your friend doesn’t mean that I want you seeing my Facebook updates.  I am connected to you and I don’t mind being connected to you at all, but I do value some of my privacy and Facebook allows me to control that.  Frankly, just because your my friend doesn’t mean you want to see some of my updates.

List are a great tool on Facebook.  I actually have 18 list on Facebook.  For your benefit and mine.  I have a ‘Youngens’ group that easily allows me to hide status updates from them if they are not age appropriate.  I have a list for people who live near me when I am talking about locally relevant information.  My family in Florida doesn’t care about a local pizza parlor.

The main list that I have though is, “See Updates”.  These are people I don’t mind seeing all of my status updates.   They get to see everything I post…. unless, for some reason I need to hide somebody.

The way I utilize this is pretty strait forward, on your main landing page you when you go to update your status you get an option to edit who you are sharing that update with.

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When you click the custom here, you get this window:

image

You can see that I have the “See Updates” in my approved list, however what you should notice is the little check box in the lower left hand corner.  “Make this my default setting.”  By checking this, the setting you use here will be the default setting for all future status updates. 

Now I recommend using an approved list instead of a blocked list.  The reason being that if you forget to update your approved list, the only thing you lose is not sharing your information with somebody you want to share with.  If you go the other way around you end up sharing your information with somebody you don’t want seeing your information.  I’d rather error on the side of caution.

However, remember what I said at the beginning of this article.  don’t share anything on Facebook that you don’t want the entire world knowing.  Because things do go bad in Facebook land.


Convert Any Document to PDF

March 29, 2010 06:00 by ckincincy

image Occasionally I get a Microsoft Publisher document emailed to me, and I don’t have the software to open it.  So I went looking and found PDF Online.  They allow you to upload a document and they will give you a PDF back.

Alternatively you can purchase BCL easyPDF Printer to convert *ANY* printable document into PDF.

The free version supports teh following documents:

-MS Word (DOC)
-HTML (MHT)

-MS Word (RTF)
-Text (TXT)

-MS PowerPoint (PPT)
-JPG, PNG

-MS PowerPoint (PPS)
-BMP, TIFF

-MS Publisher (PUB)
-WMF, EMF, GIF

-MS Excel (XLS)

Not a bad resource when you are in a bind!


Categories: Tech Tips | Tools
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Where to buy cheap and affordable ink

March 9, 2010 00:01 by ckincincy

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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. 


Completely Remove .NET Framework

March 6, 2010 06:00 by ckincincy

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.


WebDev.Webserver.exe has stopped working fix

March 3, 2010 06:00 by ckincincy

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!


Recent Referrers User Control

March 1, 2010 06:00 by ckincincy

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.

imageSo 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


Stop DotNetBlogEngine.NET Comment Spam

February 27, 2010 16:57 by ckincincy

image 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.


Creative Destruction

February 9, 2010 01:36 by ckincincy

image 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.

imageI 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?