Eric Longman

Internet geek. Project Manager. Propellerhead.

Yesterday, I killed my computer. Well, not so much killed it as put it in a big hairy coma.  And all with the best of intentions.  I had purchased the latest version of Acronis True Image (an excellent piece of backup software) because the old version I had didn’t play nice with Microsoft Vista.  It [...]

See, here’s the thing.  I’ve got a Cingular (now AT&T) cell phone, and I’ve got all kinds of automated systems that page me when things in my business go awry.  All of my systems are set to send email to [mycellphonenumber]@mobile.mycingular.com. But in the last couple of days, I’ve noticed that notifications that should have [...]

Here’s an excellent starting point for managing configuration files in your .NET desktop applications: The .NET Framework provides many ways to track application data, with its inherent XML support providing the perfect vehicle for maintaining this data. Take a closer look at storing application data in an XML file. From TechRepublic, article by Tony Patton: [...]

Been poking around trying to get a handle on SQL Server 2000 Full Text Indexing for a couple of projects, and found this very good article on it: http://www.developer.com/db/article.php/3446891 Ain’t Google cool? These look pretty good, too: http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/1438211 http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20010422.asp That should be enough to get me (and you?) started.  Have fun.

From Joel on Software, referring to Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code: [It’s] a great look at one particular type of software project: the kind that ends up spinning and spinning its wheels without really going anywhere because the vision was too grand and the details were a little short. Near as I can tell, Chandler’s [...]

I had a server with a flaky drive sneak up on me today.  After the server took a break (requiring a hard reboot), I found this in the dmesg report: md: md3: raid array is not clean — starting background reconstructionmd: RAID level 1 does not need chunksize! Continuing anyway.md3: max total readahead window set [...]

I’ve been playing with ASP.NET AJAX over the last several days, and I have to say that it’s very cool.  It can also be hugely frustrating. Here’s the scenario that wrapped me around the axle for a couple of hours tonight: First, I created a test web project in Visual Studio 2005 and built a [...]

The MINI got new shoes today (this is the third set of tires on the car in its life). Here’s the history: Pirelli eufori@ Run-Flat (OEM) – Pretty good tires, but they wore really quickly.  By 20,000 miles they were done for.  One of the four had a persistent super-slow leak (it would take weeks [...]

Neat.  For you geeky types: curvyCorners is a free JavaScript program that will create on-the-fly rounded corners for any HTML DIV element, that look as good as any graphically created corners. curvyCorners – Ultimate Rounded Corners..

I’ve been running IE7 Beta 3 for a few weeks now, and I’ve got to say that Microsoft got practically everything just right.  The tabbed browsing experience is every bit as good as Firefox, and the browser is quite fast.  It’s also got great features for printing (for example, web copy can be shrunk to [...]