Reality Me

Category: Technology

All things geeky.

  • WARNING ON BLOGRUSH!

    I was reading 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free and liking the suggestions. Perhaps it would be fun to promote a little extra traffic to the site. I despise watching websites get overloaded with Javascript widgets and gizmos. However, I am guilty of doing that to Reality Me. It is bogged down with useless, behind the scenes Javascript. My list of round tuits includes cleaning up Reality Me and Domestic Psychology. Things like RobotReplay and PhpMyVisites are no longer of use to me but they remain behind the scenes slowing the site down. The Twitter widget and the MyBlogLog widget I find enhancing to the functionality of the site. I see Google Analytics as a necessary evil and I still debate the value of Adsense on a blog such as Reality Me (although apparent it protects – Can someone help me find that citation? I think Michael Silence carried it a while back. Some law was passed saying that if you run ads on your website you are protected the same was as traditional journalists.).

    When I read 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free, BlogRush was in the number one or two position. I should have taken a warning when I noticed the author was not using a referral link. Today I noticed that the Javascript code I put in my sidebar to validate Reality Me with Blogrush had changed from a box of links to other sites to become a Google Adsense box. Now, I have Google ads that run on Reality Me (when the ad isn’t encouraging you to buy the shirt off Cathy’s back) so I think Blogrush put me in danger of being in violation of my TOS with Google. Granted, I was supposed to read the Blogrush TOS and I’m sure they revealed that putting ads on my site is part of the agreement. But I do not agree with that! So I will be parting company with Blogrush. I wonder what is in the #3 position on 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free?

  • Yesterday’s Butt Kicking Continues

    Yesterday’s morning R&D centered around trouble shooting an SMTP problem with a Windows2003 server and ASP. Basically, I don’t get the error on my development server, which is still a Windows2000 machine. That means it could be code or server setup. The problem manifests itself when an attempt is made to send an email after a form is submitted.

    CDO.Message.1 error ‘80040220’

    The “SendUsing” configuration value is invalid.

    This error message is all over Google (see also) (remember to use Blingo – aff link!).

    I solve this in the next 2 hours!

    Update: Why does Google continue to index www.experts-exchange.com?! Never click anything that is a link to www.experts-exchange.com! They obviously understand SEO really well.

    Update: Troubleshooting thus far.

    Title: The “SendUsing” configuration value is invalid in Windows 2003
    Name: Scott Forsyth
    Date: 3/27/2006 10:10:04 AM
    Comment:
    Hi Monde,

    On Windows Server 2003, if you don’t specify the default smtp server, it needs to obtain that from the IIS metabase. That isn’t allowed by default in IIS6, but you can add it with metaacl.vbs. Google and download a copy of metaacl.vbs and the run the following:

    cscript metaacl.vbs “IIS://Localhost/smtpsvc” IIS_WPG RE
    cscript metaacl.vbs “IIS://Localhost/smtpsvc/1” IIS_WPG RE

    This will give the IIS_WPG group read permissions to the smtpsrv node so that you’ll be able to obtain the default SMTP server without specifically setting it in code. This will often resolve the error that you have run into.

    [Source]

    Now, all of that said, only hurdle one has been jumped. My error message of "The "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid." is gone but mail is getting stuck in //Inetpub/mailroot/Queue. At least it is not going to the Badmail folder. Brief break then onto hurdle two.

  • Dear Technical Writers

    If you are writing a reference manual on a programming language, please, I beg you, include "Hello World" in the index!

  • What do I do?

    Yesterday I typed frantically for 20.5 hours straight. I am only going to count 12 hours of those since I broke for lunch and 3:30am to noon did include a lot of R&D. Let’s assume I type 60 words a minute. So 12 hours times 60 minutes equals 720 minutes. 720 minutes times 60 words = 43200 words.

    The average length of a novel is 60000-100000 words. [Source]
    65000+ [Source]
    12,500; 15,000; 62,500; or 75,000 [Source]

    So even if we cut my 43,200 words in half for 21,600 words it looks like I am well on my way to writing a novel in a day or two. Of course, we could add in the other 8.5 hours of typing for another 30,600 words plus the 43,200 totaling 73,800! A novel in a day! What does Stephen King make per book?

  • Today’s Mystery Error Message

    I have a little ASP application that works fine on my development server. On the production server I get:

    CDO.Message.1 error ‘80040220’

    The “SendUsing” configuration value is invalid.

    These are the things that make web application development a bit maddening.

  • MySQL Took Us Halfway

    I’m very disappointed that the MySQL Migration Toolkit is unidirectional. It will take a variety of databases and bring the structure and data into MySQL but won’t go the other way. I know it doesn’t seem to be in MySQL’s best interest to create a tool that would port away from their product but it really would serve them. Guess I need to see what DTS can do.

  • Life as a Coder

    Writers get writer’s block. Programmers get coder’s block. Breaking the block is the same. Just do it! Writer’s must write; Coders must code. Time to set the blocked problem aside and coding something simple and fun!

  • Haslam Makes Me Giggle

    Right! Sure. Billy you just keep fooling yourself.

    "These are great jobs with bright, creative people who have created something that’s special here," Haslam said. "When you talk about the media production business, now you talk about Knoxville in the same league as New York and Chicago and L.A. And maybe this is an even better place." [Source]

  • Developer Tip of the Day

    Development is hard but if its really hard then you are likely doing something wrong!

  • My Senators Do Not Represent Me

    Why?

    Statement of Purpose: To restore habeas corpus for those detained by the United States.

    Tennessee: Alexander (R-TN), Nay      Corker (R-TN), Nay
    [Source]

    See also and also. On the positive side, at least http://www.senate.gov/ is using ColdFusion.

  • Developer Tip of the Day

    If you have two servers with the same directory structure and you are ftp’d and remote desktop’d into one of these servers, when you ftp a file if it doesn’t immediately appear in the directory in the remote desktop, then you are probably ftp’d into the wrong server.

    To non-developers, I acknowledge that as you read that you probably hear Charlie Brown’s adult wah wahs in your head. For that, I apologize!

  • ASP Classic on Windows 2003? Jump a hoop!

    If you are trying to get an Active Server Pages class (instead of .NET) application to work on your Windows 2003 and not getting any pages returned, look in the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager at the Web Services Extensions. You are likely to see that Active Server Pages is Prohibited. Simply right click and choose Allow. Now your ASP classic application will function!

  • Dear Adobe…what’s wrong with you?

    Hello Adobe! Livedocs sucked much less (can’t say it was much better) when you could filter functions and tags by ColdFusion version. Believe it or not, everyone has not upgrade to ColdFusion 8 yet. Guess what! Not everyone will! I still have clients using ColdFusion 5. It isused to be very nice to be able to look in the documentation and see only the stuff that applied to a specific version of the product. Now you have to read the history notes to decipher what applies to your specific situation. Very cumbersome!

    I am certain some marketing person told you that including the ColdFusion 8 function descriptions in the help would excite people using older version to upgrade and yes the CF8 new functions sound very intriguing but that isn’t going to inspire me to run out and upgrade. I’m the developer! Not the purchasing agent. All you’ve done is frustrate an advocate of your products.

  • I like my work

    I build very complex web application systems. I mean so complex that sometimes I forget that certain functions were built into the program; sometimes they surprise and even impress me. One of my habits is to code for the impossible. I often will slip in error messages for conditions that should never occur.

    "Ever since the first computers [t]here have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code… that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated? There free radicals engender questions of free will… creativity… and even the nature of what we might call the soul." [Source] excerpted from I, Robot

    Tonight I was testing an application I am trying to launch when I received "Something strange has occurred. Please log out and log back into the system then try your request again." Strange indeed! I usually make my impossible error messages a little more meaningful.

  • Who Uses That Dying ColdFusion Anyway?

    ColdFusion? Since its inception naysayers have declared "ColdFusion is dying!" It remains my favorite web application language (over others like PHP, ASP classic, ASP .NET, etc). And I continue to pay our bills primarily working with CF.

    Who else uses it? Why the National Institute of Standards and Technology of course!