To Whom It May Concern...

I was just telling somebody about my adventure with Slackware 10.1. I don't have a working burner. My network is shoddy at this point. So here's the steps I did. Download the boot/root floppy disk images Download the software sets for slackware. (They have chucks of the OS and apps broken into software sets, like the basic OS is set A, games are set G...) Download and set up an NFS server (demo), took 2 trys to get one that worked. Unplug my windoze box from the Cable Modem and plug it into the hub with the Linux box Boot off the floppies and give the installer my network settings Reinstall cause I missed the Lilo step And now I've got it running. It was a great learning experience.

Slackware 10.1 set up. Things to do: Get sound working Set up mono, do some mono stuff Get the box on the internet hosting my site I'm waiting for some network gear my bro and dad were going to send me, but may just pick up a $9 NIC and a strech of cable. We'll see. (I'm going cheap and will use one of these boxes to route for now.) Work is humming along. Current accomplishments: Repaired DataMatch's install Wrote a cropping Windows Forms User Control that can be used on the web as well. (This was while we were waiting for a quote from a contractor to do the same thing.) I also loaded BitTorrent on this (Windoze) box. DL'd a few TV shows for testing. Had some health issues this weekend. Put a damper on things, but was able to get to the wedding of some friends Saturday. Congratulations Ed and Becky! Hope you had a good time where-ever you went. (Ed surprised Becky with the honeymoon destination.) ALSO: Put some more links on my Tech-Links page. I have to get my...

First I had to get a KVM switch. Then I had to get a video card that would handle the KVM switch. I do not have a CD Burner, so I had to find a way to get linux installed without a CD. I don't have a router, so I needed to download files to my Windoze PC. Then connect the Windoze PC to my hub, and run the Slackware NFS install. And I did. HAHA HAAHAHA Cackle cackle... (Thunder and Lightning!!) Now I want to get mono set up on it, and Distributed.Net. BTW, I'm running Slackware 10.1 on a 400MHz with 130Mb RAM and 6Gb Hard drive.

That's what they all say. Anyway, figured I'd put a link to Novell . Funny stuff. I just got a box for Linux. It's only a 400 Mhz. I need a KVM switch and some other stuff to get it up and running, but what are your thoughts about the flavor of Linux to go with?

Getting pretty proficient with coding now. Feel a lot more comfortable. A while back we had a consultant come in and he taught me many techniques that I still use and find helpful. We also had him work on a couple of projects in areas he had less experience in. Those projects are not yet 100% and it's been almost a year, so I don't feel so bad that I'm still working on some stuff. Feature creep, where features keep getting added to the project, seem to get things bogged down for me. But those other projects never did work right and we haven't added any features. In other news, saw Phantom of the Opera last night. If you've ever seen the play, see the movie. If you haven't seen the play, see the movie then the play. Fantastic. Sunday my wife's grandfather (mom's dad) died. We've been dealing with that. Friday I found out my father still has osteoperosis (sorry if misspelled). Wasn't just a mis-diagnose. He'll be living with that for t...

I'm deep in the heart of eagle land. If I don't make it out alive, the Patriot's will have it by the third quarter... shhhh... somebody's coming... Aaaagghg

Instead of Impress... Okay, Century Color Online forms, has been the bane of my existance in some regards. Never enough, always updating, never easy to work in. I was ready to hate ASP .Net simply because I never wanted to look at it again after working on these forms. That's because I was being idiotic. (No, I'm not an idiot, just naive.) For example, our Review order page. Basically, it was a simple page that used this: Dim objRequest As System.Net.WebRequest = System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(url) objResponse = objRequest.GetResponse() Dim sr As New System.IO.StreamReader(objResponse.GetResponseStream()) Now, do you follow what that did? It did an HTTPWebRequest into a StreamReader. Then I stripped out all the form tags and other undesirable tags and other bad tags, and dumped the resulting huge string into a label control. At the time I thought it was pretty ingenious. Until of course I wanted that form to do stuff. Today, in 2 lines of code, (and remo...

Added another link, don't know why I didn't have it before. It's an article on the 4 Guys from Rolla site. Enjoy.

I knew that user controls couldn't be that difficult. They aren't. I'm working on simplifying code. I have several forms I work on, they have slightly different layouts, depending on what type of order the user is placing. But some of the controls, and therefore code, get duplicated. I am working to unify the code, making it easier. Therefore, I have added a link on my Technical Links page . One other point... who's idea was it to so tightly pack coffee filters together! You really think they're useable after separating them first thing in the morning, with bleary eyes and fumbling fingers?!?!

Yesterday, about 5PM I went out to get groceries. Got back about 6 and noticed footprints in the snow. I looked around, cause I'm a little suspicous of footprints, and they went around the house, so I figured they were the landlord's. Went to my book study at about 7:15, and came back about 8:45PM. At 10:30, as my wife was covering our bird, she looked out the window. This was the living room window. Since we just moved in, it just had sheer, lacey, curtains, so she could look right out. She asked me if I had walked up to the window. I hadn't. So I go out and look, and realize there is a new set of foot prints, similar to the first set, coming right up to and looking in our window. Definetly not our landlord. So, needless to say, we were creeped out. The worst part is, my wife was home alone while I was at the book study. Thankfully nothing happened, except that we didn't get to sleep until after 1AM. We called the police and left a report, barricaded the front do...

Please click the link below to vote for the type of pirate I am. Just to help you vote: Okay, the two people who bothered to vote have voted, and I have decided I'm just a regular, run-of-the-mill, Jimmey Buffet kind of pirate.

In my previous post I mentioned how I needed to save some settings. I found this article on MSDN that helped me to write a class that reads and writes app settings to the CommonApplicationData area. It's pretty slick. I added on to what they had by checking for the path first, and if necessary, creating the directory and file.

Whoa boy... Thanks Ian for your help. I wanted to save user settings for my app, in this case, the path to another app that they would need to use. That's no problem', I thought, figuring it I'd just dump it into the app.config file with the deployment settings. Ian posted this great article that taught me otherwise. Instead, I'm going to roll my own AppSettings class, and save it in the users ApplicationData folder. Check it out... It's a good idea considering security is tightening everywhere.

Ben Mawoo gota 56. Here's mine:

This article made me laugh, a feat no article had done in quite some time. This is what I thought was funny: "I don't even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere," Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters on Wednesday. "We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them -- they elected a moron." And then there's this one . Reminds me of this video clip .

Ace FTP might be the first FTP software I ever buy. It's so simple, but has so many powerfull features. This FTP software let's you drag and drop, auto queues files, and will even give you a throughput graph for starters. And, if you're on dial-up and need to save some bandwidth while it transfers in the background, you can throtle the throughput. Check it out here .

Saturday my grandfather passed away. Here is his obituary .

I have a new phone #. I still don't have a cable jack in my office. And my grandfather died this evening. Now I am on the phone with Netzero who made unauthorized withdrawels from my account. Fun day.

Ah, to end from that wearisome nomadic feeling. What a trip. I'm here in my new office, coffee brewing in the kitchen, cable running up the hall from my bedroom to said office so that my cable modem can connect. Why? Well, after 4 visits, a signed letter from my landlord, and me finally taking a hammer drill to the wall, I still don't have a jack in the wall of my office. I can't go into the cable company's lock box, and they can't do it without a work order. Oh the red tape. How about the move itself? Well, Friday was an adventure of stairs and stacking... won't go any more into that. Saturday, got started 45 minutes later than we wanted, but ended up down here 4 hours later. Multiple stops to tie down the tarp on my fathers truck in a fruitless effort. Plus one 2 1/2 hour diversion in Lords Valley PA, to replace the tire on the moving truck. A nice big spike, screw with a hex head, got lodged in the front right tire. Happily, there was a guy 1/2 mile down t...

I guess I forgot to post it, in all the hustle and the bustle. I finished the project, or at least the portion I needed to. I was able to handle events from the Kodak 14n and copy the file to the hard drive. Now adays, everything is WIA, TWAIN, or mass storage device. Kodak makes it hard. Oh well, it works. I have to wrap up some stuff, and then incorporate it into Data.Match, but I'm glad it's done. Check out this long Channel9 post .