I added a Feedburner feed to my blog.  Hopefully I’ll be able to automatically redirect any of the other feed links to the feedburner one, so I can track my readers.

If you subscribe to my blog, please change the feed url to http://feeds.feedburner.com/flux88

People who know me can tell you that I have about zero patience for software.  Especially software that is so integral to my day-to-day use of the computer.

One such program is my media player.  I have tried pretty much every single one out there, and I haven’t been too impressed with any of them.  I constantly evaluate these programs and usually just end up settling. 

(I should also note that I’m probably the only person on the planet that doesn’t have an iPod.  Heck, even the Pope has one!)

• Windows Media Player – The library integration is weak and not very usable for me.  The built-in cd burner is piss-poor, and I generally don’t like the interface.  I usually just use this for viewing temporary media (like my phone’s voicemail or little video clips).  The built-in taskbar toolbar is KICKASS and more media players should do this.
• WinAMP – Fantastic for a file-based collection, but I have grown to need more.  My library was out of control and I was tired of manually tagging/renaming.  The media library didn’t suit me.  The visualizations are top-notch and the skin community is HUGE.  I like the interface, but again, I needed more control over my library.
• MusicMatch – As much as I’d like this one to work for me, it still didn’t feel right.  I didn’t get a good view of my music, and I was sick of it trying to get me to subscribe to it’s mp3 download service.  I uninstalled it.
• iTunes – I have chosen to stick with this one for now.  The interface is pretty well thought-out and I really like the smart playlists.  The ability to share music on the local network is very nice, though I’d like this to be able to stream over the internet as well (authenticated, of course).  It has decent support for podcast subscriptions, though a bit-torrent-aware plugin would be nice for this.  I also like the ability to rate songs easily.

I gathered some tips on generating some good smart playlists from Andy Budd.  Basically this keeps my playlists alive and I can rate songs to help shape the playlists.  I can un-check songs that I don’t want to be included in ANY playlist (like stand-up comedy, podcasts, or 0:20 long tracks that are skits or preludes to other songs on the same cd).

So now that the media situation was settled, I needed a nice way to keep my music in sync from my desktop and laptop (at work).  I’d still like streaming ability over the internet, but these are the machines I use most, so they’ll have to do.  At the advice of Scott Hanselman I decided to give FolderShare another go.  This time around I noticed that 2 things changed:

• Microsoft bought them out
• Now it’s FREE!

This definitely got me interested.  I decided to setup my mp3 folder as my share folder and installed FolderShare on both PCs.  When I get new music in, I import it using iTunes (which copies and renames the files) and will automatically be synchronized with the other PC.  That means I can import music on either my laptop or my desktop and everything will stay organized.  This is a big plus for me.

So far this is working out fairly well.  If I rename or change the tag of a file, then the whole file has to be transferred back to the other PC, so this can use up quite a bit of bandwidth.  I haven’t run into any issues with this so far.

Some other cool music links are:

• MusicBrainz Tagger – This open-source free service is a GREAT idea.  Basically it will scan your mp3’s, make a digital footprint of each one, then try to match it with the online database.  It will give you a percentage of confidence so you can setup to automatically tag those files that are 90% or greater and sift through the ones it wasn’t sure about.  If it cannot find a match, it will ask you to help the community out and supply some tag info.  This can run in the background to automatically organize your mp3s.  Very cool.
• iTunes Registry – Upload your iTunes playlists and get suggestions based on data from the other uploaded playlists.  See what other people are listening to.
• music mobs – Mark songs that you like and see what other people suggest.

Are there any other helpful media links that I might add here?

UPDATE:  I recently saw some issues when synchronizing the folders that iTunes manages on both ends.  If one iTunes collection modifies a filename or adds a file to the list, the 2nd iTunes will not pick it up, since I am not sync’ing the iTunes .xml files.  To fix this, I found a script that will scan your folder and re-import all of the songs.  Best of all, this will *not* reset your playcounts, ratings, or tag info.  This includes songs that were not already in your library, so it’s perfect for me.  If you use it, make sure and edit it to include your music directory.

Click here for the iTunes Folder Sync script.  Thanks to Garreth Farrington for this.  (Anybody want to wrap this script in an easier-to-use app?)

 

Oy.

My hard drive that stored my subversion repository burned up.  No, really.  It burned up.  I saw smoke coming from one of the ICs on the PCB.

The drive is still under warranty, but I don’t care about the drive.  Hard drives are cheap.  This contained three large personal projects, a boatload of mp3s, tax documents from the last 3 years, and unfortunately something non-replaceable:  A recording of my mom singing a lullaby that she wrote.

I spoke to some data recovery people, and I got prices ranging from $1000 – $2500, and they are pretty confident in getting the data back.  The problem is that I am trying to save money for my wedding, and shelling out a grand for data recovery is out of the question at this time.

My other option is to buy an identical drive and just replace the PCB.  It looks easy enough, but I need to make sure that the PCB is the exact same one.  From what it looks like, there’s only 4 solder points, going directly into the drive controlling the heads. 

What should I do?  Should I attempt this ghetto-recovery?  Should I pay the $1k?

 

My sister had her second child today (a boy)!  His name is Preston.  I’m very proud and I can’t wait to meet him!

Benjamin Day spoke at Visual Studio live this year and was interviewed by Channel 9.  He talks about NHibernate.  If you don’t know what NHibernate is, it’s an object-relational mapper aiming to reduce/eliminate common data access code.  It’s based on the mature Hibernate for Java, and has growing community support.

Anyway, Ben Day and I used to shoot ideas back and forth and talk about NHibernate patterns and limitations.  He mentions me in the podcast (!), which you can download here.

Thanks Ben!

Internal applications commonly utilize Active Directory to manage their user-base.  With this approach organizations can define the users and roles in one central location, and have that information available to many applications.

For intranet websites, this is accomplished by using Integrated Windows Authentication.  But what happens when you are developing on a machine that does not have the same accounts as the target environment?  Case in point:  say you have some Active Directory domain groups that define who the “readers” of an appliciation are and who the “editors” are.  The simple solution is to make these groups configurable through the web.config, and you can have something like this for development:

<add key=”adminRole” value=”Administrators” />

and something like this for production:

<add key=”adminRole” value=”DOMAIN\ApplicationAdmins” />

This gives us the benefit of using a local machine account for debugging the different roles, and allows for Integrated Windows Authentication to work properly.

Here’s another concern.  What if your code accesses a secure resource like a database or web service that requires valid Windows credentials and authorization?  A test database can easily be configured to accept SQL Authentication provided via connection string, but a Web Service that requires integrated Windows authentication?  Would you really want to mock a complex external dependency like this (Especially if it is a read-only dependency) ??  If you do you end up spending a large portion of your time just setting up the environment to develop in. 

I was dealing with a scenario just like this and I wanted to do use the web.config’s impersonate=”true” feature where I can supply a username & password to run as (You can even configure it to encrypt this data and store it in the registry using aspnet_setreg.exe… see here).  The problem here is that if I give it a valid domain account to impersonate, my local machine cannot authenticate me unless I join the computer to a domain.  For a lot of scenarios this is way too much to ask, and may not even be an option.

I could end up just constructing a NetworkCredentials object with the credentials I need to access the secure web service, but I don’t like that approach either.  It requires me to specify an account in plain text (either in code or in web.config… both of which are bad ideas.

Any thoughts on this?

Well my webhost crashed and I lost a month of posts.  I’m trying to see if I can find a more recent backup, but for now this will have to do.

I moved over to webhost4life.  They have pretty good hosting for $10/month for:

• asp.net 2.0
• sql server 2000
• sql server 2005
• mail

The only downside is that you have to pay $15/year for each domain that points to a folder other than your root.  So if you have 2 sites, you’ll have to put them in their own subdirectory, and pay a little extra to get the domain to point there.

Still not a bad deal for 2 sites, $150 for a year, including mail.

I was installing Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 at a client site this week.  During and after the install we were getting very strange errors, eventually leaving the site useless until we could figure them out.  Installing WSS Service Pack 2 and SPS Service Pack 2 helped get through the installation, but even after the site was completely installed, we still received lots of errors.

It turns out that IIS didn't have script maps for ASP.NET 1.1, so only 2.0 showed up in the list.  Though the updates are supposed to work with 2.0, my experience tells me otherwise.  Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 *definitely* has issues if you run it in 2.0.  To add the option for 1.1 in IIS, you can run:

c:\windows\Microsoft .NET\Framework\v1.1433\aspnet_regiis -i

This will reinstall the script maps for that version into IIS.  I changed the SPS site to use 1.1,  but I still received errors. 

A reinstall put the site back on 2.0, which was quite odd...  I got the same errors as before.  Finally, to fix it I disabled 2.0 in IIS 6.0's Web Service Extensions section.  Then I reinstalled SPS, which was then forced to use 1.1.  All was well with the world after that...