One month in to my side project, and It’s going well.
I now have a name for it, however, I’m not ready to disclose it until it goes live.
The concept is simple: You enter in your assets & debts, it plots out some charts/graphs about your net worth, and then its publicly available for anyone/everyone to see.
If everything goes smoothly, I’m hoping to be ready to launch at the end of May.
I started working on a new side project last night.
I don’t have a name for it yet, but it has me very motivated and I’m going to pour all my spare time into it (as much as I can anyway).
I’ll share more when I can.
Last weekend, a family member stopped by the house so I could take at an issue with her laptop. I managed to recreate the error, and fired up my work laptop so I could “Bing it”. (Yes, I wear that like a badge of honor!).
At the login prompt, I banged away on the keyboard, hit enter, and was dropped into the “Formerly-Known-As-Metro” interface.
At this point I hit Window-D to get into the familiar Windows Desktop interface, but was instead mocked with a beeping sound for each keystroke I typed.
The mouse worked, but that was it.
Okay, screw it…I grabbed the Surface RT. I drew my picture password, and again was now sitting at the tablet-y interface. (seriously, what’s that new interface called?)
Same thing again, Window-D, and mocked with failure. I tried the Windows button, and all it did was vibrate…it didn’t actually do anything.
Okay, I’m feeling *just* a bit embarrassed at this point…
Finally, I grabbed my laptop and threw it into my office docking station, and logged in.
Since I have dual monitors, one screen shows the Windows Desktop interface, the other shows the new interface. Immediately I recognized an icon in the notification area down by the clock.
FilterKeys? OMG.
So here it goes.
Signing into Windows 8 with a Microsoft Account is awesome. All my game saves, favorites, browser history, backgrounds/themes…all synced between machines.
And therein lies the problem.
The night before, our 3 year old daughter wanted to play a Disney game on their website. It uses Flash, so the iPad was out – I had let her use the Surface RT. At some point she managed to turn on FilterKeys and that setting got replicated across all my machines.
I don’t have a static IP, but with a cable modem, it rarely changes (as opposed to when I had DSL it changed weekly). The fact that it changes so rarely is what frustrates me – it always catches me off-guard.
I feel lost when I’m remote and I can’t get to my home network, so I wrote an app that: runs every 5 minutes, determines if I have a new IP, and if so, sends me a text message with the new IP.
I’ll summarize it down to 2 lines of c#:
var twilio = new TwilioRestClient(accountSID, authToken);
var msg = twilio.SendSmsMessage(TwilioNumber, MyCellNumber, newIP);
It’s literally that simple.
Check out Twilio.com for more info about the texting service.
If you’re on Windows 8 using IE and need the Datasheet View to work, grab this: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23734
Recently, Scott Hanselman challenged software developers to blog more – to stop “wasting their words.”
He emphasized how important it is to own your own domain and content and so I looked for a way to self-host a WordPress blog, for free. (I chose WordPress because I previously had a WordPress-hosted blog)
Here’s how to do it:
1) Sign up for Microsoft BizSpark** program.
2) Sign up for Windows Azure using the BizSpark Azure benefits
3) Create a new WordPress blog website (from the gallery)
4) Create a CNAME with your domain registrar to point your www name to the name Azure gives you.
5) In Azure, convert your site from “Shared” to “Reserved” in the Scale section.
6) Add your www name into the website configuration of Azure
7) Blog.
There you go, free blog for 3 years.
**There are certain eligibility requirements for the BizSpark program, so please make sure you qualify before going down this path.
The Cisco AnyConnect VPN will install on Windows 8 just fine. When you try to connect though, it will fail with an error (which I don’t have a screenshot of).
In any case, a simple registry hack will fix it. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\vpnva and change the value of the DisplayName key.
It will likely be something like this: @oem7.inf,%vpna_Desc%;Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter for Windows x64
Just get rid of everything before “Cisco”, keeping just the bold text shown above, reboot, and you should be good to go!
UPDATE
As Pete pointed out – version 3.x versions will connect fine. I tried 3.0.08057 on a fresh Win8 install, and had zero problems.
There is no native Netflix app (yet), so you’ll have to watch it through Windows Media Center.
1) Add the Windows Media Center Feature (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57445533-75/how-to-add-media-center-to-windows-8-release-preview/)
2) Run the Netflix app in WMC
3) Install Silverlight when prompted
4) Close WMC (so Silverlight will finish installing)
5) Open WMC >> Netflix. Enjoy!
Users need “Edit Item” permissions in order to use the attachment functionality of web-based InfoPath 2007 forms on MOSS 2007.
I thought “Contribute” would have been enough, but the Attach a File button is grayed out when this is the case.
You can see the difference, as subtle as it is, in the image below.
If you get this error, and haven’t touched a page layout, don’t worry:
This page is not using a valid page layout. To correct the problem, edit page settings and select a valid page layout.
I panicked at first thinking about how I might have destroyed my development environment, but it turned out to be something very simple.
During a quick prototype, I used a querystring parameter of “ID” in a web part. It had the unintended consequence of throwing this error. Simply changing the parameter name to something else will fix it up quick!
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