I’ve been receiving a lot of phone calls, text messages and emails this evening about what’s going on with the hurricane where I live and how it is going to impact us.  Here is where things stand and our preparations. Gustav’s Track I’ve been using the following map to assist in tracking hurricane Gustav. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26295161/ Some of you have asked where I’m at so here is a map of where Gustav is supposed to track along with an arrow pointing where we are located. As you can tell we are about 60...

Update to latest version of Witty Twitter here: http://keithelder.net/software/witty/witty.application A new version of Witty Twitter was just published this morning, version 0.1.8.6.   There aren’t any major new features in this release but over the last several months there has been progress.  Here they are: Witty supports Tourniquet which is a personal caching twitter proxy.  Tourniquet was written by the mad scientist Jason Follas.  Tourniquet solves a lot of the problems with Twitter being down and opens the door for a lot of other interesting things to happen.  Check...

I love a good discussion even if blogs, comments, and track backs are an extremely poor way to have one.  Joe Brinkman, someone I have known face to face for several years, and someone I respect, read my previous article about my call to arms aimed at developers not spending enough time making their sites work across browsers who are using Asp.Net.   He responded with a post referencing the Alt.Net movement.  My article has a lot of truth in it and some good points but at the end of the article I gave a recommendation for developers to consider using...

I run Firefox pretty much all the time.  I like the plug ins and other features it has but there are times when I am forced, yes forced to open Internet Explorer.  That pretty much ruins my whole day to have to start another browser to do something.  It isn’t that I despise IE, if the opposite were true and I was running IE and had to open Firefox to do something well that would ruin my day.  Before you IE / MSFT haters jump in let me just say that no matter which operating system I have used over...

After installing Windows Server 2008 on my notebook I thought I had everything working and figured out.  I arrived at my friends house the other day with notebook in hand and wanted to check email.  I opened my notebook and his WIFI network wasn’t showing up on my machine.  I downloaded 4 different drivers and spent several hours trying to figure out why wireless wasn’t working.  I was literally about to give up on getting WIFI working on server 2008.  And then it hit me, did I enable the wireless LAN in features?  Turns out, it wasn’t on.  So if...

I’ve been using Google News for a long time.  There  are lots of news sites out there that allow one to keep up with lots of news.  News.Yahoo.Com, CNN, and others come to mind.  For some reason I like the simplicity of Google News and the ability to create alerts on news items so I use it quiet a bit.  I’m not sure when the feature “Add Section” was added but it is a welcomed feature to site but here is how it works. First visit http://news.google.com and be sure you are logged into your Google account. ...

Can you believe we made it to Episode 10!?  It is such a nice round number isn’t it?  If you think about it, technically we only have two more episodes than Michael Phelps has gold medals.  Episode 10 is part two of our Silverlight discussion with Shawn Wildermuth.  Honestly, I think this episode is the best of the two, mainly because we have a “rusty washers” segment in it that really runs Silverlight through its paces.  In this episode we welcome a new sponsor to the show, DevExpress, the makers of Coderush and Refactor Pro among a ton...

The Olympics are upon us and NBC has been making a lot of waves about having 2,000 hours of streaming Silverlight video available online. This is a great time to catch up on your Olympic Badminton and other sports online that don’t get a lot prime time coverage.  Yesterday I actually did watch a match of Olympic Badminton only to realize that I missed my Olympic dreams.  I seriously used to be really good at Badminton and think I could have played in the Olympics based on what I saw.  Before that I got to watch some basketball where Lebron...

What’s the worst thing that could happen to you electronically speaking?  Maybe someone could steal your bank account information?  How about get your credit card information?  Someone stealing your identity?  Those are all the standard things we think of when we think about electronic security.  Or at least the first ones that come to mind.  Sunday morning I woke up and was drinking coffee at the computer.  I saw a tweet from someone on Twitter who asked a question that I had a perfect answer for on my blog.  I typed in my blog address in my web browser to...

The Olympics are upon us!  I called myself preparing for the Olympics last night by installing Silverlight so I could watch the Oylympics via http://nbcolympics.com.  I’m running Server 2008 and I quickly ran into a problem.  The work around turned out to not be that difficult at all so here is a walk through. Step 1 Save the Silverlight.exe to your hard drive. Although you can run it directly it doesn’t work because of the default policy set on Server 2008. Step 2 Right click the Siliverlight.exe and click “Run as administrator”. ...

I was eating lunch today and listening to music via my favorite new music listening means, Pandora.Com.  For those that don’t know about Pandora it plays music that you like and allows you to build stations that play music you like by looking at difference characteristics of music based on how you have rated previous music. A Random Problem Today I was eating lunch and decided to switch my station on Pandora.  After I switched my station I pressed the CTRL-T key to open a new tab to go somewhere.  I pressed the key numerous times and it...

I’ve been running Server 2008 as my main workstation for a few weeks now and so far so good.  The only thing I haven’t found a solution for yet running the x64 version of Server 2008 is Windows Live Photo Gallery.  I have Live Writer and Messenger working, but cannot find a version of Windows Live Photo Gallery.  Live photo gallery has a really nice import feature that allows the timeframe to be adjusted when importing pictures as well as integration with Flickr.  Two very important features that make it a really nice app.  Beyond that I find the occasional...

I was in the sporting goods store the other day and came across this.  Had to take a picture. Apparently someone named Elder makes socks.  Who knew.

In episode #4 we recorded a show with Joe Stump from Digg.Com.  In that show we talked about how a site like Digg.Com scales using Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.  I thought it would be cool to do the same kind of show but look at it from the standpoint of using Microsoft technology.  What better place to get the scoop on something like that than Microsoft itself!?  Thus we sat down with Brad and Jim from MSCOM which run the IT department at Microsoft that is in charge of Microsoft.Com.  Here are some interesting facts we learned: ...