General

How to Clear the Squid Proxy Cache in Windows

Lance Robinson — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:52:16 GMT

For some reason directions for clearing the Squid proxy cache (in Windows) seemed hard to come by on the web, so I thought I’d post them here. Hope this helps someone:

Run MMC and load the services snap-in, kill the running squid process.
Empty Squid’s cache folder (e.g. C:\squid\vars\cache\).
Run Squid with the –z parameter to rebuild the cache folder structure (e.g. C:\squid\sbin\squid.exe –z).
From the services snap-in of MMC, restart the squid service.

Automatically Wake Your PC Before Your Arrival

Lance Robinson — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:50 GMT

Just a quickie convenience tip.

Some mornings it seems to take my computer a little too long to “wake up” after being hibernated overnight. This annoyed me, but as of today it annoys me no longer. This morning my computer was fresh and ready to go as soon as I sat down at my desk.

These instructions are for Windows 7, however the same basic idea will work fine in Vista and XP.

From Control Panel, choose Administrative Tools, and then Task Scheduler.
Create a basic task. This task can be for anything – maybe you actually have an app you’d like to run or a message you like to display – whatever. Just pick something. Schedule it so that it runs a few minutes before your usual arrival. When you get to the last dialog in the task wizard, check the checkbox that says “Open the Properties dialog for this task when I click Finish”.
In the properties dialog, on the Conditions tab, check the checkbox that says “Wake the computer to run this task”. Click OK and you’re done.

When the task runs, it will wake up your computer.

Remote Desktop Copy and Paste Clipboard Stopped Working

Lance Robinson — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:41:44 GMT

Seemingly out of the blue, copy and paste from my local desktop to Remote Desktop stopped working. I had to resort to *gasp* FTP (ok, so it wasn’t that big a deal but it was still annoying to me). Anyway, the solution turned out to be very simple: On the remote machine, just bring up the task manager and kill and restart rdpclip.exe. Voila, problem solved.

Leaving /n software, headed to new startup

Lance Robinson — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:56:49 GMT

I've been extremely fortunate to work at /n software, but after more than 9 years, the time has come for me to say "goodbye". This Friday will be my last day. The people behind the amazing machine that is /n software are great, hard working people, and I'll be a fan for life. Most importantly though, I'm looking forward to new experiences and new challenges. I'll be joining an exciting new online marketing startup in Chapel Hill (more about them later!). My new work will be as a C# developer, but I'll continue to be a presence on Twitter, still talking about the technologies I love and the process of building techie goodness, and I'll continue to blog away about PowerShell, software development, and more!

Update soon!

Kayaking on the Deep River

Lance Robinson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:42:21 GMT

If you know of a better place to take-out of the Deep River at US1, I’d appreciate a note here. :) Yesterday, my buddy Blake and I went out on a kayak adventure on the Deep River. “Kayak”, because we took kayaks with us. “Adventure” because it was very loosely planned and we figured if we ran into any trouble we’d just figure it out and deal with it. Turned out we did run into some trouble and we did deal with it! It was a ton of fun! We knew there was a take-out spot somewhere near the US1 bridge over the Deep River in Chatham County, and we knew there was a put-in spot somewhere near the 15-501 bridge (roughly 7 miles up river). Unfortunately we couldn’t find an obvious take-out spot…there was one place, but it was below a spillway, and neither of us thought it would be fun to kayak over the spillway. :) We ended up driving around searching, but never found a place. Finally we just decided we’d take-out before the spillway and drag the kayaks out the rest of the way (adventure #1). Problem was…we’d spend so much time searching that now it was late enough in the day to worry about darkness. We decided that we could make our way through the woods down the river in the dark with a mini-maglight that Blake had in his car (adventure #2). :)

With a plan in mind, we put in and headed down the river. This section of the Deep River is wide, shallow (hah), slow, and rocky. The river was beautiful, we saw ducks, cool birds, and a river otter that barely escaped our cameras. It was a slow and steady paddle, with a few minor fast parts that were unfortunately slowed by running into underwater rocks we couldn’t see.

Thankfully we got through one really slow-going rocky part just before dark. Because it would have taken us forever to get through there in the complete dark. Whew.

Now its complete dark. We got to the spillway and couldn’t find a place to get out, but we’d met a stranger along the way who mentioned that he thought there was a way to paddle around the spillway. We poked around and saw something, but by this point it was so dark we couldn’t really tell what anything was. The mini-maglight was no good from more than a few feet away. Then we saw someone elses flashlight beam ahead – it was the stranger. They’d found a place to take-out off to the side, but couldn’t paddle around the spillway, unfortunately.

The stranger dragged his kayak out through the woods to a nearby road where he was to be picked up. We decided to walk around the spillway area and get back in the water somehow. We may or may not have gotten into some sort of canal that ran alongside the river. I don’t think we were supposed to be in it, but our options were limited. We made it down to the US1 bridge, but now we needed to cross the river in order to get out! In the dark, we managed to somehow climb out of our kayaks onto the steep bank of the canal, walk through the grass and woods to the river, and drop back into the river. Visibility was about 6 or 7 feet I’d say, which made for a very interesting and spooky paddle adventure. I said I felt like a native American on a night-time war raid, and he said he felt like a marine. We decided we were native American marines, or something like that.

Technorati Tags: Kayaking,Deep River,Chatham County

Adding Tweet Button to ActiveModules’ ActiveForums

Lance Robinson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:20:29 GMT

Here is how to add a “Tweet” button to your ActiveForums threads, using John Resig’s (@jeresig) “Easy Retweet Button”. I added a “Tweet” button to the header of each post, right next to the existing quote/reply buttons.

First, modified the default styling of John’s retweet.js so that the tweet button matches ActiveForums. I modified retweet in the following ways:

Set the link_text to just “ Tweet”.
I killed the click count by setting count_type to “none”.
Completely deleted the “styling:” section at the top of retweet.js.
Near the bottom of the script, I removed the line of code that adds the title of the page to the content of the tweet (this line: elem.title = document.title). Not doing so results in an ugly tweet text.
I added a tiny twitter logo to the “Tweet” link text by modifying the setting of elem.innerHTML:
elem.innerHTML = "<span><img align='absMiddle' src='http://www.rat-terrier.com/images/Twitter_16x16.png' border='0'>" + RetweetJS.link_text + "</span>";

Here is the modified retweet.js. Copy your own retweet.js file to your own server and include it in your DNN page by adding the following line to the top of your skins ascx file.:

Update: Previously I'd suggested adding the above line to the root default.aspx. Stephen Webster of bikeclicks.com corrected me and suggested adding this line to the skin within your DNN portal instead. This keeps the functionality limited to a specific portal (even if it's portal 0) and when you upgrade DNN the next time your changes won't get over-written.

Next, modify the ActiveForums TopicView template to make use of the retweet code (easiest way is to modify TopicView.txt in DesktopModules/NTForums/templates/). Here is an example snippet:

[TOPIC]
<tr>
    <td valign=top class="[POSTINFOCSS]" height=100>[POSTINFO]<br>[SPACER:1:125]</td>
    <td valign=top class="[POSTREPLYCSS]" width=100%>
        <table cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%">
            <tr>
                <td class="afsubrow"><a name="[POSTID]"></a>[POSTDATE]</td>
                <td class="afsubrow" align=right valign=top>[ACTIONS:DELETE]
                        [ACTIONS:EDIT]
                        [ACTIONS:QUOTE]
                        [ACTIONS:REPLY]
                        <a class='retweet self'>[SUBJECT]</a>
                        [ACTIONS:ALERT] 
                </td>
            </tr>

Note: I did this with ActiveForums v3.7.0.12761.

Technorati Tags: ActiveModules,ActiveForums,Twitter,DotNetNuke

Adding Google Adsense to ActiveModules’ ActiveForums

Lance Robinson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:20:19 GMT

Go to the forum control panel, Templates.
If want to modify the ForumView, click on it and insert your Adsense code after the very first [BREADCRUMB], ie:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="ForumJump" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTForums/controls/af_forumjump.ascx"%>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="Stats" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTForums/controls/af_stats.ascx"%>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="am" TagName="WhosOnline" Src="~/DesktopModules/NTForums/controls/af_whosonline.ascx"%>
[BREADCRUMB]
<p align="center">
<script type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</p>
[GROUPSECTION]
If you want to modify the TopicView, click on it and insert your Adsense code in a new table row just before the end of the [TOPIC] section, ie:

<tr><td colspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #ccc;text-align:center">
<script type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</td></tr>
[/TOPIC]
If you want to modify the TopicsView, you’re on your own. Just follow the above examples.

Note: I did this with ActiveForums v3.7.0.12761.

Technorati Tags: ActiveModules,ActiveForums,Adsense,DotNetNuke

SlickEdit 2009 Evaluation

Lance Robinson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:00:13 GMT

I was asked to evaluate SlickEdit 2009, so I dropped Ultra-Edit for about three weeks and used only SlickEdit 2009. Here is a little “log” of my thoughts on the switch:

- SE setup asked to add to my system path – I don’t like having to add stuff to my path. What is the benefit of adding this?

[SE Staff:] Many of our customers are heavy keyboard and command line users. Adding SlickEdit to the path allows you to invoke it and its related utilities using the command line.

- The first thing I went to edit was an .htm file. I couldn’t find a way to quickly launch the browser to see the browser view of the document. Ultra-Edit has this and I use it a lot. Later on, I discovered that I can add an “HTML” toolbar, but I wish it would just automatically add that toolbar when I am editing an .htm/.aspx/etc document.

- The next thing I went to edit was a .cs file containing one small class. I loved the way SE showed me a list of all the class members, and when I click a class member it jumps to that spot in the code. I wished it could let me “collapse to definition” like Visual Studio does – and it turns out, it does!

[SE Staff:] Check out View > Function headers. You can also invoke a SlickEdit command to do this. Press ESC to bring up the command line and type in “collapse-to-definitions”. There’s a lot of different ways to collapse text. Look through the items on the View menu plus View > Selective Display. That’s what we call this feature.

- I seemed to recall a slow startup time the last time I tried SlickEdit. There was none of that this time. But, when SE sits unused for a while, and then later I want to drag some files into it…it takes upwards of 4-5 seconds for it to even start responding. I’m not sure what its doing, but the cpu % is at about 5-6 during that time.

- It took me 3 clicks to integrate SE with SVN! Love this feature. At this point I am blaming the slow responsiveness on Vista, and I am thinking I might just be hooked on SE now.

Conclusion:

There are so many features in this editor that it can be hard to find the ones you want (ie, view in browser and the many “selective displays”). Its not as lightweight as UltraEdit, but has many more features than Ultra-Edit. It is a much more functional and powerful editor, but one that requires some system resources.

Twitter Button to GeekswithBlogs/SubText Skin

Lance Robinson — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:03:21 GMT

I’ve always wished I could customize the skin on my blog at GeeksWithBlogs.Net. GeeksWithBlogs is built on SubText, and of course its just a skin, but since GWB is hosting my blog and I don’t have control over the skin files myself I am limited to what I can do with it.

Well, today I finally did it, after some inspiration from John Resig (@jeresig) and his “Easy Retweet Button”. I added a “Tweet This!” button to the footer of each post.

First, I modified the default styling of John’s retweet.js so that the tweet button matches the Cogitation skin. Then I added an “updatediv” function using John’s own code, this new function just inserts the “Tweet This" button into the footer of each post, right next to the posted-date and the number of comments. Here is the modified retweet.js. My modifications are preceeded with an “//LR” comment. You can of course modify it to alter other pieces of the skin, such as the postTitle or postText.

How to Use:

1. Copy the retweet.js file to your own server and include it in your GWB page via Options->Configure->Static News/Annoucement.

2. If you use a skin other than Cogitation, you may want to edit the retweet.js file to use your own styling. For that, see John’s blog post, under the heading “Configuration and Themeing“

Technorati Tags: Javascript, Twitter, SubText, GeeksWithBlogs

Stop Unfair Beer Taxation In North Carolina

Lance Robinson — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:13:05 GMT

I got the email below yesterday from the folks at "All About Beer" magazine - those that host the yearly Beer Festival in Raleigh and Durham. I don't know about you - but I don't want to my favorite small micro-breweries knocked out of business due to unfair taxation. We're already paying enough taxes on beer and wine.

If you are a citizen of North Carolina, I would ask that you take a minute to do the two quick things suggested in the email. Thanks!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stop Unfair Beer Taxation In North Carolina
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear LANCE,

The cost of your favorite beer will jump significantly if a proposed beer tax is instituted. Our passion and our brewery friends are being unfairly singled out by the governor and you can stop it with just a little bit of effort.

Governor Perdue is planning to impose a greater 'sin tax' on beer and wine. (She initially pushed to almost double the level of excise tax.) Please go on line and e-mail the governor and your legislators to tell them that a beer and wine tax increase is a bad idea.

Beer and wine lovers are not "sinners," nor we did not cause the recession, and we should not be singled out as a solution.
Many of the 100 North Carolina micro breweries and wineries could be put out of business with a tax increase.
North Carolina has 6th highest beer tax in the country and the 16th highest on wine.
North Carolina beer and wine taxes currently contributes close to $3 billion.
North Carolina already generates more beverage tax than more populous New York state!

I'm asking you to do two things.

First, please go to www.governor.state.nc.us and the 'Contact Us' link, where you will find a space to enter a comment, like "Don't threaten our fledgling brewing industry with a tax increase. We're already paying more than our fair share." You can also go to www.ncleg.net Enter your zip code to find your legislators and send them an e-mail. This is a zip plus four. If you don't know yours, use the county feature to get your representatives' addresses.

Second, please go to www.stopthencbeertax.com. Fill this in and it will be printed and collated with other forms and hand delivered the the appropriate elected official.

Doing both of these things will make a huge difference. Please pass this along to your beer-loving network. This is urgent.

Cheers,

Daniel Bradford
Publisher