CTO Blog

I wanted to write a little bit about using the Windows registry from a .NET language.  I’ve been working on a small desktop application and I wanted to store some state information that is used upon starting the application.  The Windows registry made sense in this particular instance.  Naturally, I turned to the Google machine to find some code examples on access the registry only to find that most of the code examples didn’t work at runtime, at least under the .NET Framework 3.5.  I corrected the problem and am sharing the code with anyone interested.

(more…)

After installing Windows 7 Ultimate, I tried installing ESRI’s ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.  With less than a minute left in the install, the installer threw an exception and rolled back the installation.  The solution to this problem is to download the latest VC++ 2008 Redistributable package from Microsoft and install it.  ArcGIS should install without any problems.

I just finished upgrading Icinga from 0.8.4 to 1.0RC1 on an Ubuntu server.  The upgrade was straight forward.  I recommend you backup your /usr/local/icinga/etc directory prior to upgrading just in case something goes wrong.

(more…)

The blogosphere is abuzz over a newly publicized bug in Windows 7.

http://digg.com/d3zn2N?e

iPhone virus: What you need to know | Mobilize – InfoWorld

Posted using ShareThis

I found an interesting topic on masking passwords (you know, the little bullets that appear when you type in your password).  Dr. Jakob Nielsen argues that masking passwords degrades the usability experience.  Michael Kassner of TechRepublic weighs in on the matter.  What do you think?

Read article

This is an interesting presentation from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, CA this year.  It presents some interesting ideas on building web sites around social objects.

As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix’s 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles.

Read More >>

Since I develop for both Windows and Linux, I running Windows Vista as my host system with VirtualBox virtualization software.  I am currently using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installed as a guest system for Linux development.  One thing to remember (which I always tend to forget), whenever you upgrade VirtualBox or the Linux kernel, you need to reinstall the VirtualBox Guest Additions, otherwise woe is you!  It’s kind of a hassle, but it keeps Ubuntu happy.

While attending the SugarCRM conference this year, I learned about a microframework for developing mobile interfaces to enterprise applications.  The Rhodes microframework offers the advantage of building an application once and deploying to multiple platforms using tools based on Ruby on Rails.  This is the first time I’ve really used Ruby.  In this article, I will describe how to install a working development project using Rhodes connected to a MySQL server.

(more…)