Verizon EVDO Will Not Connect To Broadband Access

Posted on November 23, 2007 by chrismay

On my new laptop, I had lenovo build it with a Sierra Wireless 1xEV-DO Network Adapter card built in to the laptop.

This means I should be able to access EVDO RevA “BroadbandAccess” basically across all of Chicagoland. However, lately the VZ Manager software from Verizon has been only connecting me to the dialup-like “NationalAccess” and not the DSL like BroadbandAccess. The signal shows that it is plenty strong, and I am using in the exact same places where I have used my old EVDO card, and even in places where my laptop worked at first.

This is so frustrating I can’t explain it.

I contacted Verizon, and of course they were no help.

So now I might end up in the situation of having to buy (and keep plugged in all the time) a pcmcia card for the verizon network, even though I already paid to have this functionality built into my laptop.

This really stinks :(.

VS.Net Macro Editor Errors

Posted on November 19, 2007 by chrismay

When I try to edit some of my Macros I get this nice little message:

Microsoft Visual Studio Macros: An Add-In has caused an access violation while sinking on ‘ProjectAdded’.

Google turns up nothing on this guy.

Does anyone out there have any idea how to fix this?

ASP.NET Application Not Reading The Web.Config File

Posted on November 16, 2007 by chrismay

I recently ran into an interesting problem… my webservice application seemed unable to read info from the web.config file.

I tried adding some invalid < marks to the config file and the app still ran w/o any error (but still wouldn’t read the web.config appSettings or connectionString sections).

So I created another IIS application and it worked as expected.

So I deleted the troubled IIS App and recreated it. Still broken!

The solution was to clear out the ASP.NET Temporarly Files folder in c:windows……

Once that was gone, and I restarted IIS, everything went back to normal.

Hey Windows Update, thanks for losing all my work.

Posted on November 15, 2007 by chrismay

Last nigiht before I went to bed, I was working on a bunch of stuff.

Lots of files, tons of programs, all open to serve the task at hand.

So, at 3am, I was kinda up for some reason, but luck for me, that meant that I got to hear the sound of my laptop rebooting.

I almost got up to go check on it and make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but sure enough in the morning I came down to find a login prompt.

Windows Updates on my new laptop. was set to automatically download and install updates at 3am. Which is a good thing, unless the updates require a restart, which it will do wheather you want it or not.

So I had to turn off automatic updates for this reason, but this brings me to a bigger question. Couldn’t microsoft see this possability and give you and option to download/install but NOT reboot?

They already have a “feature” that is annoying as hell, that bugs you ever 15 minutes when you have installed a windows udpate that requires a reboot, but haven’t rebooted yet. They could just use that to make sure you DO reboot at some time.

Frustrating.

Update: Windows update rebooted my friend Mike’s work desktop, even though he had it set to only download and not install updates. So all those SQL Jobs that were running at the time…. yea they all got screwed up.

Solution for "Thread was being aborted" exception when you call Response.End (or .Redirect)

Posted on November 13, 2007 by chrismay

You’ve probably seen this one.

Whenever you do one of the following:

Response.End()
Response.Redirect("page.aspx")
Server.Transfer("page.aspx")

You end up with a ThreadAbortException, “Thread was being aborted”.

I had previously dealt with this by swallowing the ThreadAbortException, which of course isn’t a great method, but it worked.

Well today I came across a better way for all of these.

Replace This	With This
Response.End	HttpContext.Current.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest
Response.Redirect(“page.aspx”)	Response.Redirect(“page.aspx”,false)
Server.Transfer(“page.aspx”)	Server.Execute(“page.aspx”)

Awk Tutorial and Regular Expressions

Posted on November 12, 2007 by chrismay

Awk is a tool for processing text files, or data that is treated as text.

For some stuff I have been working on, I tend to use Awk a lot to filter down text being returned from another program (like a ls command).

Here is a nice tutorial on Awk.

Also, when using regular expressions (regexp, or regex) with Awk, here are a few helpful reminders and links.

.	matches any character
*	zero or more repetitions of the previous character or expression
?	zero or one occurrence of the previous expression
+	one or more occurrences of the previous expression

Regexp cheat sheet.

Test regular expressions.

Regexp website (tutorials and more)

Another Regexp tutorial

Yahoo Music Influencers

Posted on November 10, 2007 by chrismay

I was having problems getting streaming media to play on my old messed up laptop.

So now that I am finally on my new machine, I can again listen to launchcast (music.yahoo.com).

Launchcast was doing what Pandora Radio is doing, way before Pandora became popular.

Launchcast learns from your ratings and plays music it thinks you would like. In addition, you can setup other users as “Influencers,” which I have done with my brother who also users Launchcast.

So for example, when my brother ranks a song up, eventurally it will play on my station.

See this image for example:

Pretty sweet.

I love this service. I have found so much music this way.

My Dark Theme for Visual Studio.Net

Posted on November 9, 2007 by chrismay

I have been wanting to try a dark theme for vs.net, but I couldn’t quit find one I liked.

So I took bits from here and from Scott Hanselman and created my own.

Take a look at some screen shots, and you can download the settings file at the bottom.

Here is my settings file:
Dark-Theme.vssettings (32.85 KB)

If you like this, please leave a comment! Thanks.

Site Statistics

Posted on November 5, 2007 by chrismay

Here are some site statistics for the last 12 months. Over a quater million visitors and almost 750,000 page views. Not bad.

Hits
Total Hits	1,607,524
Average Hits per Day	4,380
Average Hits per Visitor	5.87
Cached Requests	132,924
Failed Requests	157,190
Page Views
Total Page Views	737,197
Average Page Views per Day	2,008
Average Page Views per Visitor	2.69
Visitors
Total Visitors	273,988
Average Visitors per Day	746
Total Unique IPs	49,647