When it comes to Apple and quality software, stuff like this is just par for the course:
Setting up WPA-PSK on Cisco Aironet 1100 APs
I know what you are thinking…
Setting up WPA on an AP is so easy even my mom could do it!
Well, Cisco APs give you 1001 options and no clear way of setting up WPA-PSK.
To configure these devices here is what you need to do:
1) Express Security: Setup the SSID with Encryption of “None” and not WPA (yea I know…).
2) Under SecurityEncryption Manager, select to use a Cipher and pick the option for TKIP.
3) Under SecuritySSID Manager, select your SSID, and then pick “Open Authentication” with “No Addition”. Then change Key Management to “Manditory” and select the “WPA” checkbox. Enter a WPA Pre-Shared Key.
I ignored the other billion options.
The alias ServerName could not be opened…
Have I mentioned how much I don’t like working with Macs?
I have some friends who like them, so I won’t go as far as some Mac fanboys to claim that Macs suck and everyone is better off with an XP computer (but that is pretty much how I feel).
I bought a Mac for my wife a year ago, because at school there are still people emailing around clarisworks files, and from time to time we want to do something that would require accessing a shared folder on the network.
Problem is: it never works.
“The alias ServerName could not be opened because the original item cannot be found”
Searching google turned up 101 different ways to connect to a network share, and they all failed in different ways.
Last nigiht I found myself trying to get it to work once again, but this time I happened across a solution.
After hours of wasting my time, I finally found the solution here.
Windows 2003 Servers encrypt their communications, Macs can’t deal with this. Problem solved.
Forced Security
The world is full of idiots.
Because so many of these people have wrecked their servers by accidentally installing malware, MS now feels they have to force hightened security on the rest of us.
So I have wasted 30 minutes trying to get an activeX control installed on a server.
IE won’t let me do it, even though I marked the site as Trusted, and even though I went through every ActiveX option in advanced tools and turned them all to Enabled. Nope, still nothing.
I then decided to try changing the default security levels… oh wait, they won’t even LET me do that. Are you kidding me??
I finally found a link to download an install.
Now IE tells me “Your security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded.”
Do I seriously need to go install firefox to just get this damned flie downloaded??
No, because thankfully I was able to open up the page source and go find where the activeX is getting pulled from, and realized it was coming from a different subdomain (which of course is not apparnet to any normal users).
Adding that subdomain manually to my trusted sites fixed the problem.
The whole thing is just stupid.
Public DNS
Ever had some DNS problem and you wished you could just connect to a different DNS server for testing reasons?
I recently found out from my friend Pat Wirtz (yes the Pat Wirtz of Notre Dame lore and legend) that you can use these 2 public DNS servers:
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.1
That’s all.
Deploying Database Development
Simple-talk.com has a pretty in depth article about deployment and mangement of databases.
Rolling out changes to the application is only 1 part of a deployment. Updating the database can be more difficult depending on your schema.
We could have more process around the DB development and deployment process. I will be giving this a read shortly.
Model View Presenter Guidance From MS Patterns and Practices
Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group has released some guidance for creating MVP web applications.
http://www.pnpguidance.net/Tag/MVPBundle.aspx
I haven’t checked this out, so I can’t verify if they are worth looking into you, but I will be reading them in the near future.
FancyUpload Component
I recently wrote about how the Flickr Uploadr tool sucks, but the other part of that article was how the web upload tools for Flickr is very nice!
FancyUpload is a set of code using Flash/Javascript to perform out of band file uploads.
This is basically how Flickr allows you to queue files for upload in their web client, and it is very useful in this sense because it would be extremely painful to be forced to post every single image individually.
For me, I am more interested in the ability to post very large files without leaving the brower in a fashion that seems to make it look like it is “stuck” when really it is just uploading a giant file.
Flickr Uploadr Kinda Sucks
Flickr provides an application called Flickr Uploadr to help you upload your images, and it really sucks.
I have been trying to get it to upload my collection of images for the last 24 hours and it has failed at various stages of completion upwards of 10 times. Each time it fails in the middle of a batch, it seems unclear as to if when I restart I am uploading the same images again or if it is smart enough to not upload images that have already been uploaded in the earlier batch.
I think it probably isn’t smart enough.
The other thing that is really crappy is that it is really really slow.
Using the web based upload tool (which is really sweet btw) is about 4-8x faster than using the Uploadr tool. This is very frustrating because it should be the other way around. You can do a lot of things with a rich client that you can’t do in a web page, but apparently Flickr didn’t put the effort into the Uploadr app.
Globalization and Localization in ASP.NET
This is a good article from Microsoft on globalization and localization of asp.net applications.
The article describes how to automate the process of moving static content from pages (inside labels) into resource files and setup the proper binding between the content controls and the resource files.
This article has some interesting and useful information as well about some other topics such as global vs local, implicit globalization settings, dealing with scripts etc.
Chris May 