Blog
Well, it's a new year which means new exciting challenges both in my personal and professional life. I wanted to use this post so I can share with you my (three) readers, what my plans are for the content for blog for the upcoming year.
Theme for 2008: Simplicity
That's right, simplicity. For those of you that know me personally or have worked with me, are now saying, "Simplicity, WTF?!? You?" Just kidding...well, not about the simplicity theme. ;-) Over the past year, I've learned that the "best" approach to a problem does not mean that it has to...
I was looking at my blog posts numbers and I must say, they're pretty sad. In the past three months, I've had 15 posts...For those of you that are regular readers, thanks for sticking around. Honestly, I've been pretty busy with my workout routine and with my new job, that I've had little time to do interesting blog posts. Don't worry, I have some really good posts that I need to finish up and publish. Another reason, which is a little less obvious, is that twitter is taking up most of my "random" blog posts. If you follow my tweets,...
Ok, so I'm really, really, really stupid! I like other people out there suffer from the always popular I-have-too-many-passwords (IH2MP) syndrome. Earlier this past weekend, I was trying to administer my blog and managed to forget the editor password so I could access the website. After several failed attempts, I searched the application folders of Windows Live Writer to see where my password was kept. It appears that by default, Live Writer stores its configuration information under the registry. To retrieve the configuration information correctly, you need to use their API. Here's a sample on how you can accomplish this:using...
While playing around with Silverlight during lunch, I ran into this plugin for Windows Live Writer (WLW) called JetFuel. It takes the creation of Silverlight applications to the next level. It's a nice little package of the steps outlined in the SDK into a wizard.
Well, I've finally had it with my current install of .Text (.9.4.something) that I decided to upgrade to SubText. The SubText engine has a lot more features (and available code base) that I can definitely use going forward. Unfortunatelly, I was not able to use the .Text Import feature of SubText to pull my data in. I kept getting an error during the import process. So instead, I just whipped up some T-SQL scripts to pull the data over. I still need to fix the referral data, but that's for another day. What do you guys think about the new...
Just wanted to say that currently comments for posts are not working. I'm still trying to figure out what happened so bare with me as I get them back in working order. If you need to contact me, you can do so by email: javier (at) lozanotek (dot) com Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!
When I first read Scott's post on it, I decided to give ISAPI_Rewrite a try. I've been thinking for a while to re-direct the end-point of my blog from http://lozanotek.com http://www.lozanotek.com to http://blog.lozanotek.com Why? Well, I've always been a fan of subdomains that define a purpose rather than the typical /InsertYourAppNameHere. Technically they're the same, but it's just nice to "package" your web application under it's own subdomain. I mean, come'on, you spent the time working it, why shouldn't it have it's own spot? Remember, when you buy a domain name, you buy *.mydomainnamehere.com not just the www subdomain. I agree...
Just wanted to wish my readers (both old and new) a happy new year! I'm sorry I haven't had the chance to blog more but I've been quite busy at work. I've been doing a lot of working with interop with VB6 and VB.NET. I've also added some MVP and WCF to spice things up as we slowly scale and re-write our application. My main task it to finish my Extending ASP.NET article series on Code Project.
I'm planning to have a couple of C# “syntactic sugar” posts. While working on our framework at work, I'm been using some of new features of C# 2.0 that help...
So, after posting about v2.0 of my blogiversary, I wanted to check out my stats on Google. When, I looked at the amount of dots on it, I was pretty impressed about the location of the 10 heavy hitters. City Country # Visits London United Kingdom 20 Bangalore India 17 Bellevue, Washington United States 14 Des Moines, Iowa United States 12 Warszawa Poland 11 Hyderabad India 11 Singapore Singapore 11 Madrid Spain 9 Bombay India 9 Buenos Aires Argentina 8 I was surprised to...
That's right! It's been two years since I messed up my first blog setup! And from the stats from FeedBurner, looks like I grew from a year of 1 (me) in 2004 to 50 (hey, bots count!!). During this time, you've stuck me my rants, some-what-useful posts and most of all, my poor writing skills (I'm a web developer, not a writer!). In all, I would like to thank you my three readers (including myself) and 47 bots for sticking around and listening. I promise that this next blogging year will be even better!
Finally, something I've wanted for a long time from MS...a blog post writer thingy. However, I like other people wanted this functionality added to OneNote since you can consider (at least I do), your blog as an online version of your OneNote thoughts. Scott Hanselman has a great post on his thoughts on Live Writer; in particular on how it behaves/interacts with dasBlog. I do agree with him that this writer seems/feels very familiar as BlogJet (an editor that I decided to purchase). Some of the layout of the editor has a certain feel to OneNote (like the right panel...
Well, I managed to install a new instance of SQL Server 2005 in my old Exchange Server box. I removed Exchange since I no longer host my own email. That’s right, my @lozanotek.com email accounts are hosted through Google. It’s nice to get both my Gmail and lozanotek emails through one interface. Why did I switch? Since my IP address is dymanic, at times my email got rejected from a reciepient’s mail server (such case is with Microsoft’s mail servers). After a while, I got pretty tired of it.
Anywho, I now have two SQL Servers running, one to host the blog...
I've noticed that I have on average 30+ readers for my feeds. Just a simple question, where are you guys from? If you could use the comments section to list your name and location, that would be great!
I’ve added Talkr to my blog to provide a podcast version of my text posts. Really, it’s pretty sweet. If you want to check out my “text-based” podcasts, you can subscribe here.
WOW! I just read this really great post showing you to enable HTTP Compression on IIS 6.0. I must say, the decrease in documentation by compression is huge (~80% change!). If you host your own blog and can enable this on your IIS server, DO IT!
Also, if you’re wondering the size of your web content, you can use PipeBoost to find out.
I decided to add a new About section to my blog. I also got a little more creative and started playing around with CSS to add a cool drop shadow to my pic.
While looking through my Google Analytics stats, I noticed there’s a lot of people out there visiting the blog!
Nice to see that I have a bast number of people tunned into my ramblings! Thanks for listening!
Well, these are the top 10 posts for the last two months of the year. These statistics are based on the numbers acquire from Google Analytics:
Post Title
Visits
Pageviews
Avg Visit Time
1.
Javier G. Lozano
355
657
00:02:07
2.
Windows Vista Beta 1 For Download
250
503
00:01:19
3.
Crosstab Queries in SQL Server
61
75
00:01:16
4.
Quick Look: Fusion Logs
58
79
00:06:24
5.
Installing IIS on a Win XP Pro SP2 Machine
58
74
00:02:28
6.
Querying Active Directory for User Emails
54
59
00:02:34
7.
Microsoft's C# Coding Guidelines
41
53
00:02:34
8.
ASP.NET Loggin And VS.NET 2003
28
29
00:04:29
9.
ASP.NET Photo Album
27
43
00:01:30
10.
If it's a .dll or .exe, it's an assembly, right??
17
17
00:00:26
Today I changed the way I performed searching for the blog. Instead of using the old post back method for getting information from MSN Search, I decided to post to an HTTP handler instead using AJAX. Why did I do this? Well, why not?! It has been a while since I’ve done some web development, so I wanted to get back into it slowly… ;-)
If you get a change to play with it, let me know what you think.
I’ve updated my blog to use my rss feed to use my account at FeedBurner. If you’re currently subscribed to my rss feed, don’t worry, your request for feed goodness will be redirected to FeedBurner.
Also, after reading Nick’s post on Google Analytics, I signed up and started collecting more statistics for my blog.
What can I say? I like free stuff!
Nick first showed me this. But I couldn’t post it due to my little incident.
My blog is worth $1,693.62.How much is your blog worth?
Only took two freaking days, but I was able to get my exchange server back and running. Theoritically it could have taken less, but when you only work on it 2 hours a day … it takes a little longer.
And now to the IIS and SQL Server!!
Me, being the idiot that I am managed to mess up my dc server (and also managed to take out my Exchange Server) along with the blog for two days! Yay for me! Fortunately, I was able to get a mock web server up and running for the time being.
What’s on my agenda? Well, build a new dc, install exchange, build a new web server/db server and bring the world back to a happy place.
I guess that’s what I get for my stupid a** mistakes.
Well, it's been a year since my second-first post. I just hope that my random thoughts and rants have provided you, my three readers, with insightful information.
I promise to keep up bloggin' good stuff for at least one more year!
For my three loyal fans out there, the blog is back up! Sorry for the inconvenience of taking it down for the past couple of days. We just moved into a new house last week and did not get internet (DSL) until 7/19. And to make matters worse, I've been out of town since last Wednesday.
Oh well, I have to catch up with the lack of bloggin in these past weeks!
My blog will be unavailable this weekend and for the first part of next week. Why? Well, we're moving to a new house and I need to tear down the servers and disconnect from my internet connection.
Just giving people a heads up.
Well, it’s final. The Lozanotek SQL Server is no more…so I had to improvise. For now, the domain controller will have to serve as an SQL Server backup until I get the new server (SQL2005) up and running.
sqlserver.lozanotek.com, you shall be missed…
Well, it appeared that the machine hosting my SQL Server decided to choke on me today. I went to check on the machine during lunch today and noticed that the screen said “Please insert system diskette and press Enter to restart.” Yeah, my thoughts exactly…
After a good ol’ hard boot, the server (old Thinkpad laptop) was up and running in no time.
Well, I’ve finally done it! You can now search my blog by using the Search link on the top menu. I’ve used the same method of searching that used by Nick and Scott Mitchell. To find out how you can add this feature to your .Text blog, read this post from Scott Mitchell's blog.
This one goes out to my three readers...What do you guys want to hear from me? The reason I ask is because I want to make sure that I'm providing you, my reader, with quality stuff. Lately I've been posting some of my blog finds and I've been lacking in the code examples. Do you guys like that or should I just stick with the code? Any feedback will be appreciated!
I've added a new "mod" to the blog last night that displays the top 10 viewed posts. This section is located underneath the My Stats section and it's called Today's Top Viewed Posts. Strangely enough, the top viewed post for quite sometime is the Crosstab Queries in SQL Server post I did a while back when I was on an Access project for work.
Managed to add a new section to the blog called "My Stats" to show the requests made to the blog. This number includes all of the requests except for the ones I make (like admin and my posts). See if you can help me kick these numbers up!
I finally broke down and decided to purchase a new router for my home network. Why? Well, the linksys one I had kept losing connection, thus the reason why my email/web was down sporatically. I went with the Netgear VPN Firewall Router (Model FVS318). Why? We have it at work and it works pretty good, so go with what you know.
Well, I would like to apologize for my lack of bloggin the past couple of days, but I was out of the country on vacation. Christa and I went on a 7 day Mexican Riviera Carnival Cruise with Ryan, his fiance and parents. We all had a great time lounging around the ship and I managed to get a lot of reading done (.NET centric of course!). I promise that from now on, I will keep up on the bloggin.
I got my new laptop yesterday, it's the Dell Inspiron 6000 with these specs:
Intel Pentium M Processor 730 (1.60GHz/2MBEA Cache/533MHz FSB)
15.4 inch WSXGA+ LCD Panel
1GB, Shared DDR2,400MHz 2 Dimm
Integrated Intel Media Accelerator 9000 Graphics
80GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive
Intel PRO/Wireless 2915 Internal Wireless (802.11a/b/g)
Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth
Now the fun job of moving everything from my old laptop to my new one is at hand! You can check out more info on the Dell website.
I just downloaded w.bloggar to help me post from my laptop rather than the admin section of .Text. The reason why I switch is since that have a heck of time formatting code samples using the built-in post mechanism. With w.bloggar, I can post message using straight HTML without the worries of how the FreeTextbox control will interpret XML or code.
I suggest you give w.bloggar a try!
Lozano out!
Live Message, a service provided by http://www.messagecast.net has a great service that bloggers can use. They use the .NET Alerts system to inform MSN Messenger users about updates of their favorite blogs. If you have the time check it out! Also, click here to register to my blog's update alerts!
While reading my usual blogs with SharpReader, I bumped into yesterday's Dilbert comic.
The strip says it all!
I just took an online quiz to find out how much of a nerd, I really am and wel...the picture speaks for itself.
(NOTE: My wife agrees with the score 100%!)
Well, as we all know, the race for the presidency is over. During the weeks leading to this 'historic' event, I managed to keep my time occupied by visiting http://www.electoral-vote.com. The site is filled with good statistical information gathered from various polls.
If you have time check it out.
After reading Rocky Lhotka's blog posting, I decided to try it out myself...I'm just too plain.
Which File Extension are You?
This past weekend, I was working on my “network infrastructure.” In other words, I just moved all of my current network configuration back to my old linksys router. Everything, thus far, appears to be working fine; however, earlier this year I did have some issues with this router. But hopefully the firmware upgrade will take of it.
If you are looking for a good wireless solution for your home, I recommend my wireless router. Granted, it's not a 802.11g, but honestly for surfing the internet, you are not going to get 52 mbps from your cable modem. And if you are...
Just would like to personally thank Nick Parker for providing me with a great custom CSS for displaying code in my blog. Check out my informal article explaining how to query Active Directory for user emails to see this CSS in action.
Thanks Nick!
Well, me in my infinite wisdom managed to mess up my SQL Server ... so, I lost all my blog entries. Well, I get start posting again. Stay tuned.