General

Kayaking on the Deep River

Lance Robinson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:42:21 GMT

If you know of a better place to take-out of the Deep River at US1, I’d appreciate a note here. :) Yesterday, my buddy Blake and I went out on a kayak adventure on the Deep River. “Kayak”, because we took kayaks with us. “Adventure” because it was very loosely planned and we figured if we ran into any trouble we’d just figure it out and deal with it. Turned out we did run into some trouble and we did deal with it! It was a ton of fun! We knew there was a take-out spot somewhere near the US1 bridge over the Deep River in Chatham County, and we knew there was a put-in spot somewhere near the 15-501 bridge (roughly 7 miles up river). Unfortunately we couldn’t find an obvious take-out spot…there was one place, but it was below a spillway, and neither of us thought it would be fun to kayak over the spillway. :) We ended up driving around searching, but never found a place. Finally we just decided we’d take-out before the spillway and drag the kayaks out the rest of the way (adventure #1). Problem was…we’d spend so much time searching that now it was late enough in the day to worry about darkness. We decided that we could make our way through the woods down the river in the dark with a mini-maglight that Blake had in his car (adventure #2). :)

With a plan in mind, we put in and headed down the river. This section of the Deep River is wide, shallow (hah), slow, and rocky. The river was beautiful, we saw ducks, cool birds, and a river otter that barely escaped our cameras. It was a slow and steady paddle, with a few minor fast parts that were unfortunately slowed by running into underwater rocks we couldn’t see.

Thankfully we got through one really slow-going rocky part just before dark. Because it would have taken us forever to get through there in the complete dark. Whew.

Now its complete dark. We got to the spillway and couldn’t find a place to get out, but we’d met a stranger along the way who mentioned that he thought there was a way to paddle around the spillway. We poked around and saw something, but by this point it was so dark we couldn’t really tell what anything was. The mini-maglight was no good from more than a few feet away. Then we saw someone elses flashlight beam ahead – it was the stranger. They’d found a place to take-out off to the side, but couldn’t paddle around the spillway, unfortunately.

The stranger dragged his kayak out through the woods to a nearby road where he was to be picked up. We decided to walk around the spillway area and get back in the water somehow. We may or may not have gotten into some sort of canal that ran alongside the river. I don’t think we were supposed to be in it, but our options were limited. We made it down to the US1 bridge, but now we needed to cross the river in order to get out! In the dark, we managed to somehow climb out of our kayaks onto the steep bank of the canal, walk through the grass and woods to the river, and drop back into the river. Visibility was about 6 or 7 feet I’d say, which made for a very interesting and spooky paddle adventure. I said I felt like a native American on a night-time war raid, and he said he felt like a marine. We decided we were native American marines, or something like that.

Technorati Tags: Kayaking,Deep River,Chatham County

Adding Tweet Button to ActiveModules’ ActiveForums

Lance Robinson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:20:29 GMT

Here is how to add a “Tweet” button to your ActiveForums threads, using John Resig’s (@jeresig) “Easy Retweet Button”. I added a “Tweet” button to the header of each post, right next to the existing quote/reply buttons.

First, modified the default styling of John’s retweet.js so that the tweet button matches ActiveForums. I modified retweet in the following ways:

Set the link_text to just “ Tweet”.
I killed the click count by setting count_type to “none”.
Completely deleted the “styling:” section at the top of retweet.js.
Near the bottom of the script, I removed the line of code that adds the title of the page to the content of the tweet (this line: elem.title = document.title). Not doing so results in an ugly tweet text.
I added a tiny twitter logo to the “Tweet” link text by modifying the setting of elem.innerHTML:
elem.innerHTML = "<span><img align='absMiddle' src='http://www.rat-terrier.com/images/Twitter_16x16.png' border='0'>" + RetweetJS.link_text + "</span>";

Here is the modified retweet.js. Copy your own retweet.js file to your own server and include it in your DNN page by adding the following line to the top of your skins ascx file.:

Update: Previously I'd suggested adding the above line to the root default.aspx. Stephen Webster of bikeclicks.com corrected me and suggested adding this line to the skin within your DNN portal instead. This keeps the functionality limited to a specific portal (even if it's portal 0) and when you upgrade DNN the next time your changes won't get over-written.

Next, modify the ActiveForums TopicView template to make use of the retweet code (easiest way is to modify TopicView.txt in DesktopModules/NTForums/templates/). Here is an example snippet:

[TOPIC]
<tr>
    <td valign=top class="[POSTINFOCSS]" height=100>[POSTINFO]<br>[SPACER:1:125]</td>
    <td valign=top class="[POSTREPLYCSS]" width=100%>
        <table cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%">
            <tr>
                <td class="afsubrow"><a name="[POSTID]"></a>[POSTDATE]</td>
                <td class="afsubrow" align=right valign=top>[ACTIONS:DELETE]
                        [ACTIONS:EDIT]
                        [ACTIONS:QUOTE]
                        [ACTIONS:REPLY]
                        <a class='retweet self'>[SUBJECT]</a>
                        [ACTIONS:ALERT] 
                </td>
            </tr>

Note: I did this with ActiveForums v3.7.0.12761.

Technorati Tags: ActiveModules,ActiveForums,Twitter,DotNetNuke

Adding Google Adsense to ActiveModules’ ActiveForums

Lance Robinson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:20:19 GMT

Go to the forum control panel, Templates.
If want to modify the ForumView, click on it and insert your Adsense code after the very first [BREADCRUMB], ie:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="ForumJump" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTForums/controls/af_forumjump.ascx"%>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="Stats" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTForums/controls/af_stats.ascx"%>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="WhosOnline" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTForums/controls/af_whosonline.ascx"%>
[BREADCRUMB]
<p align="center">
<script type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</p>
[GROUPSECTION]
If you want to modify the TopicView, click on it and insert your Adsense code in a new table row just before the end of the [TOPIC] section, ie:

<tr><td colspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #ccc;text-align:center">
<script type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</td></tr>
[/TOPIC]
If you want to modify the TopicsView, you’re on your own. Just follow the above examples.

Note: I did this with ActiveForums v3.7.0.12761.

Technorati Tags: ActiveModules,ActiveForums,Adsense,DotNetNuke

SlickEdit 2009 Evaluation

Lance Robinson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:00:13 GMT

I was asked to evaluate SlickEdit 2009, so I dropped Ultra-Edit for about three weeks and used only SlickEdit 2009. Here is a little “log” of my thoughts on the switch:

- SE setup asked to add to my system path – I don’t like having to add stuff to my path. What is the benefit of adding this?

[SE Staff:] Many of our customers are heavy keyboard and command line users. Adding SlickEdit to the path allows you to invoke it and its related utilities using the command line.

- The first thing I went to edit was an .htm file. I couldn’t find a way to quickly launch the browser to see the browser view of the document. Ultra-Edit has this and I use it a lot. Later on, I discovered that I can add an “HTML” toolbar, but I wish it would just automatically add that toolbar when I am editing an .htm/.aspx/etc document.

- The next thing I went to edit was a .cs file containing one small class. I loved the way SE showed me a list of all the class members, and when I click a class member it jumps to that spot in the code. I wished it could let me “collapse to definition” like Visual Studio does – and it turns out, it does!

[SE Staff:] Check out View > Function headers. You can also invoke a SlickEdit command to do this. Press ESC to bring up the command line and type in “collapse-to-definitions”. There’s a lot of different ways to collapse text. Look through the items on the View menu plus View > Selective Display. That’s what we call this feature.

- I seemed to recall a slow startup time the last time I tried SlickEdit. There was none of that this time. But, when SE sits unused for a while, and then later I want to drag some files into it…it takes upwards of 4-5 seconds for it to even start responding. I’m not sure what its doing, but the cpu % is at about 5-6 during that time.

- It took me 3 clicks to integrate SE with SVN! Love this feature. At this point I am blaming the slow responsiveness on Vista, and I am thinking I might just be hooked on SE now.

Conclusion:

There are so many features in this editor that it can be hard to find the ones you want (ie, view in browser and the many “selective displays”). Its not as lightweight as UltraEdit, but has many more features than Ultra-Edit. It is a much more functional and powerful editor, but one that requires some system resources.

Twitter Button to GeekswithBlogs/SubText Skin

Lance Robinson — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:03:21 GMT

I’ve always wished I could customize the skin on my blog at GeeksWithBlogs.Net. GeeksWithBlogs is built on SubText, and of course its just a skin, but since GWB is hosting my blog and I don’t have control over the skin files myself I am limited to what I can do with it.

Well, today I finally did it, after some inspiration from John Resig (@jeresig) and his “Easy Retweet Button”. I added a “Tweet This!” button to the footer of each post.

First, I modified the default styling of John’s retweet.js so that the tweet button matches the Cogitation skin. Then I added an “updatediv” function using John’s own code, this new function just inserts the “Tweet This" button into the footer of each post, right next to the posted-date and the number of comments. Here is the modified retweet.js. My modifications are preceeded with an “//LR” comment. You can of course modify it to alter other pieces of the skin, such as the postTitle or postText.

How to Use:

1. Copy the retweet.js file to your own server and include it in your GWB page via Options->Configure->Static News/Annoucement.

2. If you use a skin other than Cogitation, you may want to edit the retweet.js file to use your own styling. For that, see John’s blog post, under the heading “Configuration and Themeing“

Technorati Tags: Javascript, Twitter, SubText, GeeksWithBlogs

Stop Unfair Beer Taxation In North Carolina

Lance Robinson — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:13:05 GMT

I got the email below yesterday from the folks at "All About Beer" magazine - those that host the yearly Beer Festival in Raleigh and Durham. I don't know about you - but I don't want to my favorite small micro-breweries knocked out of business due to unfair taxation. We're already paying enough taxes on beer and wine.

If you are a citizen of North Carolina, I would ask that you take a minute to do the two quick things suggested in the email. Thanks!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stop Unfair Beer Taxation In North Carolina
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear LANCE,

The cost of your favorite beer will jump significantly if a proposed beer tax is instituted. Our passion and our brewery friends are being unfairly singled out by the governor and you can stop it with just a little bit of effort.

Governor Perdue is planning to impose a greater 'sin tax' on beer and wine. (She initially pushed to almost double the level of excise tax.) Please go on line and e-mail the governor and your legislators to tell them that a beer and wine tax increase is a bad idea.

Beer and wine lovers are not "sinners," nor we did not cause the recession, and we should not be singled out as a solution.
Many of the 100 North Carolina micro breweries and wineries could be put out of business with a tax increase.
North Carolina has 6th highest beer tax in the country and the 16th highest on wine.
North Carolina beer and wine taxes currently contributes close to $3 billion.
North Carolina already generates more beverage tax than more populous New York state!

I'm asking you to do two things.

First, please go to www.governor.state.nc.us and the 'Contact Us' link, where you will find a space to enter a comment, like "Don't threaten our fledgling brewing industry with a tax increase. We're already paying more than our fair share." You can also go to www.ncleg.net Enter your zip code to find your legislators and send them an e-mail. This is a zip plus four. If you don't know yours, use the county feature to get your representatives' addresses.

Second, please go to www.stopthencbeertax.com. Fill this in and it will be printed and collated with other forms and hand delivered the the appropriate elected official.

Doing both of these things will make a huge difference. Please pass this along to your beer-loving network. This is urgent.

Cheers,

Daniel Bradford
Publisher

Lance's Non-Techie Guide to Free HD TV

Lance Robinson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:30:06 GMT

I have been free of my monstrous cable tv bill for many months now, and I love it! Woooo! A while back I posted about how I want to get revenge on Cable companies by helping as many people as I can kill their cable service in favor of free HD tv over the air and over the Internet.

There are other “free TV” guides on the Internet – but they suck because they are too generic, too technical, or not technical enough. Hopefully this one doesn’t suck. Let me know if you have any questions – if you tell me that you are going to cancel your cable tv service, I will answer all your questions.

Over the Air HD

Most people (including me until not long ago) don’t realize that tv stations all over the place are broadcasting over-the-air (OTA) HD signals, and that the quality of those signals can be better than what you can get over cable or satellite (because these OTA signals don’t use all the lossy compression that cable and satellite signals do). Buying a UHF digital antenna, available at your local hardware store or online, will allow you to pickup these signals, for free. Of course you won’t be able to pick up cable networks like TNT, ESPN, MTV, and Comedy Central with this – instead I just get whatever signals are broadcast in my geographic location. In my case those are FOX/HD, CBS/HD, NBC/HD, ABC/HD, PBS/HD, CW/HD, WRDC/HD, and some spanish channels. Sweet!

The OTA antenna gives me access to HD pictures from all the major networks: FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, plus the CW (whatever that is) and WRDC which is a local network. This pretty much covers most of the tv shows that I watch, except a few that come on cable channels like Good Eats, Colbert Report, Daily Show, Psych, Monk, and a few others I’m not willing to mention. But, don’t stress. Most of those other shows I can catch online. More on that later in this post.

There are three criterion to consider when purchasing a digital antenna:

Range: You can get short-range, mid-range, and long-range antennas. To decide which you should get, visit antennaweb.org, enter your address, and it will show you all the broadcasting networks in your area, and how far away they are, and what kind of range your antenna will need.
Mounting: Antennas can be tv-side, atic mounted, or roof mounted. For best results you’ll want the roof mount, for which you’ll probably want to get a pro to mount it for you (ask at your local hardware store and they can probably handle that job for you). I personally have my DB4 antenna mounted in my attic, and it does a fine job for me. The tv-side antennas, like the Philips PHDTV1 Silver Sensor, sit right on top of or beside your tv and do a good job for short range signals.
Directional/Multi-Directional: If you purchase a directional antenna, you’ll have to point it in the direction in which you want it to pick up signals. If you purchase a multi-direction antenna, no pointing is necessary, it will pick up signals from all directions. Obviously I recommend multi-directional.

Internet TV

Many people don’t have an interest in Internet TV because they don’t want to watch tv on their laptop or on their desktop computer. That’s completely understandable. But most of those people don’t realize that it is extremely easy to connect your computer to your tv! You can take this as far as you want to go – from literally just connecting the computer video output to your tv, to having a dedicated computer sit next to your tv, to adding a remote control to your computer, etc.

Basic Setup
For the basics, all you need is one of those cables that people use every day to connect their computer to their computer monitor (this is called an RBG cable). Most televisions purchased in the last 10 years will have a connection on the back for such a cable. Just connect the two, and use your television remote to put it into “PC Input” mode. At first you may not see anything, but on your computer look for the function key (Fnc) and the F8 button. Pressing Fnc and F8 simultaneously should toggle the computer through its possible output modes – including the one that outputs to television output. F8 is commonly labeled “crt/lcd” or something similar.
Advanced Setup

If you want to get a little more nerdy with your setup, you’ll want a dedicated PC for your tv (aka, a DVR or PVR). There are a lot of choices here, but since most people are comfortable with Windows, probably the easiest solution is just to buy a cheap PC with Windows Media Center pre-installed on it (ie Vista Home Premium, which comes with Windows Media Center). This will not only give you convenient access to the Internet from your tv, but you can also connect a digital antenna to this PC and get free HD over the air. Media Center PC’s usually come with one tv-tuner card, but you can add one or more additional tv tuner cards. When you buy another tv tuner card, you’ll most likely get a remote control bundled with it. I also recommend a wireless keyboard for browsing the net, something compact that you can hide away in a coffee table drawer or beside the couch. If you just want somebody to tell you exactly what to buy, let me know and I can talk you through a shopping list. There’s more on setting up your own DVR later in this post.
Content

There are many choices for watching fresh television content online. Network websites, Hulu.com, Amazon UnBox, etc.

a. TV Network/Channel Websites: All of the major networks and channels provide on-demand viewing for many of their top shows, including NBC (The Office, etc), ABC (LOST, Grey’s Anatomy, etc), FOX, and CBS. CBS is the worst, they only provide 1 or 2 episodes at a time, if any.

b. Hulu.com. My new favorite website of all time. Hulu.com lets you view an unlimited amount of free tv and movies. The quality of the content here is great! On Hulu you can watch The Office, Daily Show, Colbert Report, Family Guy, and many many more. You can create an account, and “subscribe” to television shows, so that when a new episode airs it will be added to your queue. Thank you Hulu! I love you and will cherish all of your advertisements.

c. Amazon UnBox – ok, this one is not free. But, you can purchase entire seasons (or single episodes) of television shows.

d. NetFlix – if you already have a NetFlix account, you can watch an amazing amount of content for free over the Internet through Netflix’s “Instant” play-now functionality. This includes movies and television show seasons that have already been released on DVD.

Free DVR

If you’re into setting up something more advanced, you’ll want to setup your own DVR. I built a dvr out of some spare parts from an old PC and a few purchases from Tiger Direct. I got a second one buy just buying a cheapo Vista Home Premium (which comes with Windows Media Center), also from Tiger Direct.

What you want in a DVR:

A nice graphics card, but you don’t need anything special. Contrary to popular belief, whatever comes pre-installed on the PC is probably enough!
SATA hard drive. You’ll want a SATA drive. I recommend two. One for your OS and software, and one dedicated to tv tuner recordings.
Lots of ram. Its cheap, so you may as well stock up for best performance.
Vista home premium pre-installed. Vista Home Premium, which comes with Windows Media Center, works great and requires almost zero setup time to get started! If you are afraid of Vista, you can go the XP route as well. Also, I hear great things about the Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista.

Other Options

Internet service provider: AT&T offers high speed DSL service. Currently high speed DSL is not available in my area, so for now I will stick with Road Runner for my Internet connection. Verizon also has high speed service in some areas.
DVD only. Many people are killing their tv watching completely except for purchasing full season DVD’s of television shows they want to watch. If you go this route, I recommend a Netflix plan.

Technorati Tags: Time Warner Cable, Cable Bill, Free TV, PVR, DVR

I’ll be a guest on the PowerScripting Podcast

Lance Robinson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:28:25 GMT

I’ll be a guest on the extremely informative PowerScripting Podcast this Thursday evening (4/2/09). I’ll talk about some of the PowerShell-related products I am working on at /n software like NetCmdlets, RSSBus, PowerShell Server, as well as join in on some general PowerShell geek fun. Also I’ll give a sneak peak of some new freebie PowerShell toys coming out for PowerShell enthusiasts.

Join in on the live UStream at 9pm EST Thursday and say “hi” – or download the podcast later from the PowerScripting blog.

Giving Google Reader a 2nd Try…

Lance Robinson — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:49:33 GMT

I have been a long time user of FeedDemon, which I think is an excellent product. Unfortunately I do not feel the same way about NewsGator’s online reader, and its sync with FeedDemon on my desktop leaves much to be desired. In an effort to be able to read my subscriptions from anywhere, I’ve decided to make the switch to Google Reader. I tried GR a long time ago, when it first came out, and I didn’t like the interface, but they have cleaned that up. Thankfully. :) Also, I do plan to keep FeedDemon around on my desktop for certain local feeds that I keep that GR cannot access.

So my experience this time is MUCH improved. I like it a lot. Here is what I am missing:

There is a feature to mark articles as read once I scroll past them. There is one problems with this, though:
1. Sometimes when there is only one article, which does not require scrolling to read, and I shouldn’t have to scroll just to mark it read. I’m missing an option to mark articles read as soon as I click on the source and load the articles.
Per subscription viewing options. This is one of my favorite features of FeedDemon. Some feeds are best viewed in what Google Reader calls “List view”, and others are best viewed in what Google Reader calls “Expanded view”. FeedDemon actually provides a dozen or so different display styles that any feed can use. With Google Reader, its all or nothing. All feeds display as either a list of titles, or an expanded title + full description. Big hole here.
Use of attention data – FeedDemon will show me the feeds I pay the most attention to, the feeds I pay the least attention to, and “newspaper” displays of posts from my favorite feeds. Google Reader has a similar “Trends” page, but the “Home” page of Google Reader doesn’t appear to take this information into account when choosing what stories to highlight. But I should give this more time because maybe it just needs to catch up with my habits.
Editing of Feeds. I can rename or trash subscriptions, but I cannot edit their urls. Not a huge feature, I realize, but useful for me.
updated 10/1/2008: I’d love the Gmail “Labels” feature here. I need some way of “flagging”/”starring” items that I want to pay attention to later, but I want them to be separated in the display by category/tag/label.

What I like about Google Reader:

I love the way I can choose whether or not to show all my feeds, or only the ones that have updates. This eliminates a lot of the clutter that I feel with FeedDemon.
I love the Google Reader gadget that I can add to my iGoogle page, even though it also doesn’t take advantage of attention data.
The speed is quite impressive. Not just for a web app, but for any app. Shockingly fast, almost.
Of course, that good ole’ built-in Google search that I love so much is there for my feeds as well.

Hmm…let me explore some more…

Technorati Tags: "Google Reader"

Help save Internet radio!

Lance Robinson — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:12:00 GMT

Good news from Pandora yesterday – The Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 was passed in the House, enabling Internet radio to exist without paying ridiculous per listener fees. Here’s the email from Pandora:

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora;
Today, thanks to the extraordinary support of many Pandora listeners, we took a giant step forward when the House of Representatives supported Pandora and Internet radio and passed the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008. Now we need your help so that the Senate will pass it also - and quickly... The finish line is in sight!
After a yearlong negotiation, Pandora, SoundExchange and the RIAA are finally optimistic about reaching an agreement on royalties that would save Pandora and Internet radio. The legislation would give us the extra time we need to finalize the deal.
Please call your Senators Monday morning starting at 9:00 (Eastern) and ask them to support the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008.
The person who answers the phone in your Senator's office may ask for the bill number - it's H.R. 7084 (if they ask for a Senate bill number, you can assure them that in this unusual case, the Senate is actually voting on the House bill number).
Senator Richard Burr: (202) 224-3154
Senator Elizabeth Dole: (202) 224-6342
If the phone is busy, please try again until you get through. These calls really do make a difference.
Thanks so much for you ongoing support.
Tim

The senators listed there are from North Carolina. Find your own senator contact #’s here. There you have it.