Chris May

Here are some various hold em shareware programs.

This article from FiringSquad talks about some of the "finer" points to consider when building a machine.

Stuff like which brand of equipment, configurations, and methodology. Pretty interesting read.

This $300 phone from Samsung purports to have a cordless range of 30 miles.
This would be really cool if it in fact worked, w/o the terrible cell phone like reception.

Exception Management Blocks and the Instramentation Framework were referenced in an article I just read on handling exceptions in managed code.

This hard to locate web-group can be accessed by logging in with u: betanews\wusoepnews, p: Update.

The Edge and Poker Office are 2 other programs that deal with hold'em stats.

Here are some pretty cool .NET tools written by a generous programmer. There are a few in here that could be pretty useful, like the XML viewer.

This is an interesting article from a SEO "professional." These guys are usually regarded as scum, making crappy web pages appear near the top of searches instead of the actual results desired by an honest system. But much like spammers, they often use interesting techniques to acheive their results.

This article is really interesting. It discusses 13 things that don't make sense, or that we don't understand. The one that I have found most interesting over the years is the question of why the Pioneer spacecraft seem to be accelerating out of our solar system. The small acceleration, which was noticed on both space craft, amounts of the one ship being 400,000 Km ahead of where it should be at this point. Some propose that this could be caused by the same dark energy that seems to be at the source of our ever expanding universe.

I had to look up again that CTP means Community Technology Preview. It can be downloaded here.

This write up from Rick Strahl's blog is pretty cool. It was in response to something I posted to the newsgroups.

His blog is powered by dotText, or .Text, which is getting incorporated into the new Telligent Systems Community Server project. That is a cool project.

This blog entry, and a follow up by another chap here show some ways of implementing dialog box types in ASP.NET.

I'm not sure this is a good idea, but worth reading. I guess you could incorporate some common UI elements into your site w/ dialogs, but there aren't enough times when you need a modal yes/no/cancel that you need an abstracted control, espically when you can use confim(). But I think there is clearly a place for stuff like this to be helpful.

We are getting a few errors in the IIS logs here and there. Some are no big deal, others should probably be looked into.

This page from MS ( and this one too I guess) shows basically what they all represent. The ones we are seeing are:

Connection_Abandoned_By_AppPool
A worker process from the application pool that quit unexpectedly or orphaned a pending request by closing its handle.
I'm not sure if this means "quit unexpectedly" like an exception was thrown, and handled, or if it means an unhandled exception was thrown, or the web.config was updated and the wp recycled. I guess it shouldn't be that last one actually because it is supposed to spawn a new wp and wait to kill the old one until it has completed all its requests, or varios criteria are met (like a request is in the queue for a long time, indicating a real problem anyway).

Connection_Dropped
Reserved. Not currently used.
Ha, looks like they haven't updated this doc recently. I still can't find any real info about this, but when looking through the logs it looks like these errors occurr either on pages that are known to have experienced timeouts of one kind or another (SQL timeout, or reportserver timeout), or page requests that happen very close to the a know timeout page. So maybe some page fails when trying to generate a billion page PDF report, and there are 4 more Connection_Dropped errors for "normal" pages right after that. Maybe those 4 were queued up by the thread that died?

There is probably nothing new in this article, but I haven't had time to look at it in like week, so I'm putting it here.

Software like this is what I would think people who play online would use.

This isn't a ton of help, but if you get an error code you can run:
SELECT *, sysmessages.*
FROM sysmessages
WHERE (error = 1934)
(assuming that 1934 was your error code) to get some information about that error.

You have to run this against the master database of course.

Robert Hensing's blog post discusses the case for using pass phrases in leu of passWORDS.

Very interesting. There were some comments about how passphrases could be easily cracked, if you used all common words or a common phrase. I think salting your passphrase would eliminate this.

What I mean is "one small step for man" would be easy to crack, but "one small step for man!@#$" would not be easy.

I wrote Robert about this and he replied:
Oh I absolutely understand what you're talking about - I thought I had addressed this in my blog - maybe it was in subsequent posts or discussion - it was a while ago.

The net net is that the general consensus is that if everyone starts doing this we will of course see pass-phrase cracking tools pop-up that know about the English language and it will be optimized to try only certain word combinations which actually make sense and have a list of popular / common phrases.

To counter this - you are absolutely right - your 'salt' would probably work fine and force the cracker to go into hybrid mode (try each phrase / sentence with a small brute-force attack of characters on the end to catch people who just do !@#$ at the end etc.).

That's where punctuation, mis-spelling, and slang all come in handy. :) In the south we say 'ya'll' a lot - use that. Etc.

The SciFi channel is starting to offer commentary of their Battlestar Gallactica episodes via podcast. This shows started out really good, and I was very excited about it, but it has sense started to drift a bit. They are doing the thing I hate most in shows like these, not introducing any new stories / information over many episodes. Basically the last several episodes could have been wrapped up into 1 show, w/o losing information that the viewer needs to know or cares about. For example, very early on we learn that "Boomer" is really a cylon (sp?). Here we are... I don't know.... maybe 5 episodes later, and nothing new has developed from that revelation.

This page shows how to use a linux package called Asterisk@Home to create a PBX system w/ all kinds of cool features.

This application is a nice front end to the Indexing search.

Here is an article on CodeGuru.com that discusses avoiding brute force attacks. Their main suggestion is to randomly sleep the thread, which is no big suprise. This article on CodeProject.com discusses the creation of a CAPTCHA control for use with brute force attacks.

Here is the Wikipedia page on Aglie development. I know lots of the hard and fast "rules" of Agile and XP development, but this discusses a little more of the philosophy.