Chris May

At Walsh Construction, we have a service that filters out our spam.  This company is called mxlogic. 

They really do a good job in my opinion.  Since we switched over to using them, I am no longer worried about giving out my email address b/c I know that spam will most likely not reach my inbox.

Now, it looks like Microsoft is going to offer a similar service:  http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/services/buy.mspx

I might want to look into this for some of my long lost email addresses.

I have been wanting to switch off of TMobile for a long time due to the lack of high speed data they offer.

I was looking at Verizon, who I currently have my PC card with, and Cingular, who I am currently demoing the 8525 with.

I just looked up their data coverage, and found out that Cingular has a much smaller footprint on chicagoland when compared with Verizon.

See here for Cingular and here for Verizon.

Not the biggest issue, but I do have some clients out West where Cingular would drop me to their slow network.

Update: As far as I can tell, the Cingular 3G network is terrible.  Browsing on it is no better than my 56k max connection on TMobile.  Bandwidth tests show good results, but acutally trying to get websites to show up is terrible.

This site lets you create images with text in them for fun.

They link to a ton of sites that offer these types of things...

http://www.txt2pic.com/

I don't know anyone having the same problems I am with Outlook 2007, so it could be just my machine, but Outlook 2007 is really ticking me off.

I can deal with a program crashing every now and then, but Oulook does 2 things.

1) Simply stops getting my email from the Exchange server.  I usually notice this when I say... Jeez, I haven't had an email in the last 3 hours?  That can't be right.  So I check my status and it either thinks I'm Disconnected (and reconnecting doesn't have any effect) or it is locked in a "Trying to establish a connection....".  

But wait there's more....

So I close down Outlook and relaunch it, only it never appears.  Sometimes I notice that it didn't show up, but most times I am already on to the next thing and don't realize it until minutes later when I am looking for my email and wondering... "Didn't I already launch it (again)?".

2) Outlook doesn't close down properly, and these processes seem to keep new ones from working correctly.  So I go to task manager and there will be like 3-6 outlook.exe processes running.  One of them will have like 50-60MB of RAM, and the others will only have 3MB.  I have to kill them all before I can start a new process and launch outlook successfully.

Really really annoying, esp when you miss important emails... or emails you really need to have sent are found sitting in your outbox for hours.

Google does a lot more than just return search results.

Some of the stuff I use it for include weather, calculation and unit conversion, movie times, and as a dictionary.

Here is a page that talks about some of these, and some others that I didn't know about, like package tracking.

If you ever work with an IFrame, you will notice that you can't set height=100%.

But, many times you might want to have an IFrame act as if that property had the desired effect.  i.e. If you make your browser window taller, you want the heigh of your IFrame to grow as well.

You can acheive this using the following script:

       function resize_iframe() {
            var myWidth = 0, myHeight = 0;
            if( typeof( window.innerWidth ) == 'number' ) {
                //Non-IE
                myWidth = window.innerWidth;
                myHeight = window.innerHeight;
            } else if( document.documentElement && ( document.documentElement.clientWidth || document.documentElement.clientHeight ) ) {
                //IE 6+ in 'standards compliant mode'
                myWidth = document.documentElement.clientWidth;
                myHeight = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
            } else if( document.body && ( document.body.clientWidth || document.body.clientHeight ) ) {
                //IE 4 compatible
                myWidth = document.body.clientWidth;
                myHeight = document.body.clientHeight;
            }
            
            var iNewHeight;
            iNewHeight = parseInt(myHeight)-40;
            document.getElementById("WgipIFrame").style.height = iNewHeight;     
        }

        //-- see if there is already something on the onresize
        var tempOnresize = window.onresize; 
        //-- create our event handler
        window.onresize = function(){ 
            //-- if tempFunc is a function, try to call it
            if (typeof (tempOnresize) == "function"){ 
                try{ 
                    tempOnresize(); 
                } catch(e){} //--- if it errors, don't let it crash our script
            } 
            resize_iframe();
        }

Then you can set the IFrame's onload="resize_iframe();" like this:

<iframe src="x.htm" style="width:100%;" 
  id="WgipIFrame" name="WgipIFrame" 
  onload="resize_iframe();"></iframe>

I just went to download the song "Mad World", which is featured in a really cool commerical for Gears of War.

When I went to download it, I found that the song, along with a remix, were part of the Donnie Darko sound track.

Donnie Darko was one of those movies that almost no one saw, and somehow I ended up renting it, and it was fantastic.

I guess I am really attracted to movies like Darko.  The Butterfly Effect was another movie that the critics, and most people I guess, didn't like, but I also throught it was really cool.

Both feature people who are experiencing things that shouldn't be happening...  I guess you could throw the Matrix movies in with this group too, but they were really popular.

Another one like these is The Forgotten, where a Mother wakes up and finds that no one can remember that she had a child at one point.  She questions her own sanity, as does Darko and so does the Aston Kutcher character in Butterfly.

The Mothman Prophecies is also a pretty similar film, although, not quite as good. 

But all of these movies kept me very interested, and really left a creepy feeling after they were over.

Here is a nice script, part of a larger section on getting window size/positions and scroll data out of various browsers.  This page really has a lot of good information.

function alertSize() {
    var myWidth = 0, myHeight = 0;
    if( typeof( window.innerWidth ) == 'number' ) {
        //Non-IE
        myWidth = window.innerWidth;
        myHeight = window.innerHeight;
    } else if( document.documentElement && ( document.documentElement.clientWidth || document.documentElement.clientHeight ) ) {
        //IE 6+ in 'standards compliant mode'
        myWidth = document.documentElement.clientWidth;
        myHeight = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
    } else if( document.body && ( document.body.clientWidth || document.body.clientHeight ) ) {
        //IE 4 compatible
        myWidth = document.body.clientWidth;
        myHeight = document.body.clientHeight;
    }
    window.alert( 'Width = ' + myWidth );
    window.alert( 'Height = ' + myHeight );
}

I have been researching ways to reset a domain admin password for a client who forgot what they typed in when they set the password.

Most password crackers work only on local accounts, not for anything on a domain.  It seems like the way to go about this is to reset the local admin account, then login using Directory Service Recovery Mode to reset the domain admin account.

Here are some of the articles I have been reading:

http://www.jms1.net/nt-unlock.shtml  <-- this idiot won't let you view his pages if you are running IE, so use firebox, but again, that's just stupid

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

http://www.loginrecovery.com/about.html

http://www.petri.co.il/reset_domain_admin_password_in_windows_server_2003_ad.htm

I find myself frequently trying to find the dates on this calendar, and I can never find any links to this site.

http://academic-calendar.uchicago.edu/future/index.html

It has all the dates of academic interest (days off, starting and ending days of each quater).

This quater I am planning on taking Bioinformatics.

I saw a presentation on Bioinformatics at Fermi Lab.  They have searching programs to look at, I believe, the genome sequence, to find similar patterns.  Pretty interesting.

Hopefully the course will be good too!

Bill Bither has an article at Code Project showing how to use Atalasoft's DotImage to OCR a PDF to make it searchable.

http://www.codeproject.com/showcase/SearchablePDFs.asp

I have been working with DotImage to see if we could make use of their webviewer and thumbnail controls.

When you are creating reusable javascript files, there are times when you want to tap into the window.onload event, which is fired when the window has finished loading the content.

The problem here, is that you can't have multiple event handlers for the same event.

So if you have a page that uses 2 scripts which both use the window.onload event, then which ever is loaded last will win, and the other script will never catch the event.

Well one way you can deal with this problem is to write your window.onload (or other events for that matter) using this type of a pattern:

    //-- see if there is already something on the onload
    var tempFunc = window.onload; 
    //-- create our event handler
    window.onload = function(){ 
        //-- if tempFunc is a function, try to call it
        if (typeof (tempFunc) == "function"){ 
            try{ 
                tempFunc(); 
            } catch(e){} //--- if it errors, don't let it crash our script
        } 
     //-- Call your onload function here
    }

This way, you can have several function that all utilize the onload event, and none of them have to know about each other.

Well I guess I will need ANOTHER new video card...

http://media.pc.ign.com/media/694/694190/vid_1755062.html

Here is the online version (free) of 37Signals.com book on development: Getting Real.

I think they have basically an agile approach to not only software development but business as well.

Like almost all development methodologies, I think some of their ideas are pretty valid, unless they aren't.

For example, some of the things I hear a lot from the sort of XP / Agile development styles are things like:

 "Get your app out as soon as possible, even if it isn't fully debugged or fully complete.  Let your users tell you what features need to be added, rather than spending the time guessing what they want"

and

"2 rules of performance optimization. 1) Don't.  2) Not yet!"

1) If you get your app out, and you start spending you time getting people to use it, and it sucks, then you have actively made people who had no opinion of your product now have a negative opinion.  If you fix the bugs and add features later, they will just remember that they tried it, and it sucked.

2) You can always add performance optimization later, except what about when need to rewrite 2 months of work because you were too lazy to spend an extra 4 hours during the design phase to build in some ability to scale? 

This is awesome!

(Click 2 times in the space below to get the video to show)

I came across this game: http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm

It's more of a puzzle or mind teaser.  Apparently it took Bill Gates 90 minutes to figure it out.  I did it in about 10, not that I think I'm smart or anything :).

See if you can "crack the code."

This is a pretty interesting idea.

You agree to serve up some ads on your site, and in exchange, your ad will be served up on others site, w/o any cost to either party.

Pretty interesting idea.