Stuff
The amazon.com web site has been unavailable since around 11:20 am PST with a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" message and nothing else. It is possible to access the site through https://www.amazon.com, but not through http. Were they hacked or attacked or sabotaged? In this day and age of redundant hardware it is hard to believe that an Amazon would suffer such a massive failure. Interestingly, the stock price took an immediate hit as well with a 3.85% decline since the outage started. It will be...
Posted On Friday, June 06, 2008 11:40 AM | Feedback (0)
Recently, while getting fired up for a family Rockband session, our XBox died. Red ring of death. Put down the guitar controller - the third one nonetheless - first one got its strum bar stuck, second one had a miscalibrated tilt sensor - and go through the routine... call, ship, wait. We'd only done it three times in the last two years, so yes, we know the routine. Two weeks later (life without an XBox isn't all that bad, really - did you know there's a whole world outside the front door) the box...
Posted On Tuesday, April 29, 2008 10:40 AM | Feedback (7)
Here's an easily misinterpreted error when consuming a WCF service that's hosted in IIS (vs. a self-hosted service): The content type text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (text/xml; charset=utf-8). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly. This typically happens with a mis-configured service. Anything that will result in a configuration or compile error will be returned as a 500...
Posted On Friday, February 01, 2008 5:28 PM | Feedback (8)
I had to spent more time than I wished I would spend last weekend trying to find a RegEx that would validate US and Canadian postal codes for me. So here for the record, are the regular expression strings that I was looking for ^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]{1}\d{... *\d{1}[A-Z]{1}\d{1}$ Matches Canadian PostalCode formats with or without spaces (e.g., "T2X 1V4" or "T2X1V4") ^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$ Matches all US format zip code formats (e.g., "94105-0011" or "94105") (^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$)|(^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]{1}\d{...
Posted On Monday, December 03, 2007 11:19 AM | Feedback (37)
If you have not discovered Pandora Radio you're missing out big time. Pandora happen to be based in my neighborhood, potentially clouding my judgment, but what can be wrong with a radio station that plays only WHAT I LIKE? Pandora's biggest value is that it is based on the Music Genome Project, an effort to classify music by a large set of criteria. Listeners configure their own radio stations and seed them with one or more artists or songs through a ridiculously simple user interface. Voila. Pandora...
Posted On Thursday, October 18, 2007 6:47 AM | Feedback (1)
This is my second attempt to maintain a blog in my busy life. How do people find the time? Well I am making a pledge that this space will fill with usefulness as I encounter solutions and share them here
Posted On Wednesday, October 17, 2007 2:41 PM | Feedback (2)