Well, that’s what you’d have to believe judging by the shirts that were handed out today at the Microsoft launch. I mean, just look at this thing on me, it’s freakin huge! There is easily enough room for one-and-a-half of me in there. And that was the smallest size that they made them (XL); I’m not sure exactly how big they went to.

The saddest part is that it’s one of the better shirts that I’ve got from an event; the design on the front is palatable and on the back it looks like a concert tour shirt (which was kind-of the theme for the whole event).

Does anyone want it?

In happier news though, I found a gift voucher for Amazon in my pile of unprocessed mail today – a birthday present from my only nephew Owen! What a legend, not even 6 months old and already he has my tastes down pat. And in other happy news, soon I’ll be the proud owner of another new toy…

Quote of the day today goes to the Corel corporation for this brilliant one-liner about using their Wordperfect MAIL software.

Change your outlook. Classic.

Is it just me, or is spam continually getting worse? My hosting company doesn’t do a great deal to block it either; they have simple spam filters which block “known addresses”, but that means spammers that spoof their domain still get their e-mails through.

I’m not sure where the spammers get the e-mail address from, either. In a few of my early posts to blog I know I made the mistake of publishing (bogus) e-mail addresses in some of the stories – and clearly they’ve been picked up by spambots. But there’s also some wierd ones in there – like “www.keith” (@gerrod.com). And, since mails sent to any address for my domain just forward to my proper address (i.e. “catchall”), they all end up in my account.

To help combat this, I’ve set up some auto-responders which forward mails sent to the bogus addresses into a spam account. Every few months I go and clean it out, which I’ve just started to do now. There’s 3,800 mails in there, which have accumlated in less than 3 months – that’s about 40 spam mails per day! Unfortunately – and worst of all – I’ve started getting spam mail sent to my proper mail address. Thankfully I don’t get a heap of spam sent there; but I don’t know if that will change or not. Only time will tell, I guess.

Still, I always try to focus on the positives of any situation, so I guess I’ll always have lots of places to buy cheap software or weight-loss pills, lots of people willing to lend me money at great rates, lots of chances to get a free cell phone or iPod, and lots of places where I can get another degree and earn more money.

Actually, there’s a lot of reasons that I hate Internet Explorer, not the least of them being:

• It’s not standards compliant (actually no browser is, but Microsoft is the worst of all in this field. At least they’re getting better with IE 6).
• No tabbed-based browsing.
• It’s shipped with Windows and it’s free to use – so most people don’t know that there’s much better browsers out there.
• Worse still, this breeds an attitude with developers that says, “If my site looks OK in Internet Explorer, then it’s good enough to deploy.” — hence there are a lot of sites that are non-Internet Explorer friendly.
• It’s error messages are about as useful as a chocolate teapot, and far less tasty.
• It’s behavior is largely inconsistant between versions.

It’s these last 2 points that has caused me much grief today. I’ve got a web page with a select on it. The user presses a link which fires up a popup window. They select something in the popup window and I then use javascript to add a new value into the parent select, then close the window. Pretty straight-forward, right?

Well, yes – very straight-forward in firefox and Opera. But not IE – it returns me most helpful error messages, like:

• R6025 – pure virtual function call
• The server threw an exception
• Error – Unknown error

After about an hour of going insane, I finally found this article on MSDN which told me what the problem was. Thank goodness, problem solved. Still – if the world just used firefox instead, it just wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place.

I’ve added a new section to the blog – Events – which we’ll use to track upcoming events. Seems rather obvious when I put it like that I guess. Anyway – check it out, and feel free to let me know what you think!

I found the W3C’s Validation Site the other day, so I decided to give my blog a whirl through it. My CSS was valid straight away – bonus! But my web page wasn’t – I had 46 errors to correct!

As it turns out, some of the errors were caused by the way that ASP.NET renders HTML, for example labels get changed to a span tag – and a p tag isn’t valid inside a span. So some of the fixes involved me changing the way I render the articles inside a repeater.

But some of the fixes were a bit more obscure – for example, an ampresand inside stories was getting interpretted as an escape sequence. Bugger! I’ve put in some fixes to get around the problems that I found, so hopefully the site will stay compliant. Anyway – in the meantime, I’m now sporting my extra geeky status with my W3C compliance images in the left-hand nav bar. Wicked!

For my current project at work, I’ve been using ASP.NET 2.0, in its pre-release state. Though I’m impressed by the improvements that Microsoft have made to the framework (in general), there’s been a few things that I’ve found really annoying. I’m hoping that they’re just bugs which will be fixed by the next beta release.

One of these such bugs involves referencing a UserControl from another UserControl. So, very roughly, lets say you have your two controls defined as follows:

public partial class FirstControl_ascx : UserControl {
   // control implementation
}

public partial class SecondControl_ascx : UserControl {
    public FirstControl_ascx firstControl;

    // control implementation
}

Previously, this was no dramas at all (of course, presuming that you have them in the same namespace, or you have the correct using statements). However, typically now I get a compile error in SecondControl that basically tells me that it doesn’t know anything about FirstControl. Worse still, it’s temperamental – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pah!

My only plausable work-around to date is to create an interface that encapsulates the required methods from FirstControl, and then only reference the interface from SecondControl. So far so good, but clearly this is a bug in the framework! I hope Microsoft get around to fixing it before the next release.

Baxter – our family laptop – got his first reformat this week. I made the mistake of trusting the “factory install” of the operating system (and all the useless utilities that go along with it) when we first got him. Things started going a bit funny by about the second week, such as:

• I couldn’t replace the default useless Notepad with Notepad2
• The screen was always very dark in Call of Duty
• Icons wouldn’t stay where I put them on the desktop – each time I rebooted, they were somewhere different
• The start menu had a very large black gap in it, where it just refused to render (that was the breaking point)

Now that I’ve reformatted, I’m noticing a considerable performance boost! Things load faster, there’s much more available RAM, and the screen is looking better (though I suspect that could be from the new drivers that were released this month). The actual rebuilt process was really fast too – maybe an hour at most. This is the 3rd computer that I’ve had where the factory install has failed within the first few weeks of having the PC (I’ll never trust them again), so I’m getting pretty good at the rebuilt. Here’s my top tips:

1. Make sure you’ve got all the drivers you need before you reformat. This is especially true for laptops, or if you have an obscure network card/modem that Windows won’t natively recognize. Without the right drivers, you’ll have no luck connecting to the net to download what you need. Copy them all to an external drive, a memory key, or even a CD-ROM, and verify that they all work (i.e. aren’t corrupt) before you take the plunge.
2. Always do a complete format and re-install – don’t bother wasting time trying to repair windows, or re-installing over the top of an existing install.
3. Backup, backup, backup! At the very least, make sure you get your mail (the .PST file for outlook users), documents (usually the “My Documents” folder), media, save-games, and any software that you’ve downloaded. If your computer has multiple users, make sure you give everyone a good chance to back their stuff up too!
4. Once you’ve reformatted, only re-install things as you need them. If you haven’t installed something after a couple weeks, chances are you’re better off without it. Remember – a clean system is a fast system.
5. Most importantly, try to keep things organized on your hard drive. For example, create a “Media” folder in the root directory, and store all your media in subfolders under that – Photos, Music, Videos, etc. I also find that a “Download” and a “Temp” folder are very useful for “working storage”.
6. Most importantly, if you don’t know what you’re doing, then ask someone who does!

In the past I’ve generally believed that computers need to be reformatted about once a year to keep them running clean, but since using Windows XP I find that this isn’t necessarily true anymore. With a bit of disicpline, you can keep your system happy and healthy for its entire life – and only reformat it when it’s time for an upgrade!

gerrod.com has made it to the top of the MSN Beta search results! (Excluding sponsored links, of course). That’s 2 search engines that I’m king of now (I’ve been king of google for ages). Surely this is the type of stuff that should be on your resume… ?

Anyway – kudos to Professor W. Gerrod Parrot who didn’t even get a hit on the first page; and a special mention to Lois Szymanski and The Football Dog.

gerrod.com has had some updates. Welcome to gerrod.com | nyc! Note: If things are looking a little bit amiss in your browser, try pressing Ctrl+F5. Anyway, besides the new skin, here’s what’s changed:

• Comments now support (limited) HTML.
• The site is RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 compliant, for all you feed-readers out there.
• The Moblog gets pulled via an XMLHttpRequest – which means faster page loads.
• Some other small bug fixes, most of which I’ve forgotten.

There’s still a few more bugs to fix, but hopefully I’ll knock them over soon. Then, I’ll be back in Newstuffland! (Not related to Newfoundland).