Archive for August, 2008

Perfect virtual desktops. Almost…

Aug 26th

Posted by reggie in Technology

19 comments

Like most Windows devs I really like the Sysinternals family of products.  So when I caught wind this morning of a new product called Desktops that creates a virtual workspace of up to 4 desktops I just knew it was the product I was looking for.  Well, it sort of is.

You can’t ask for an easier installation.  Unzip it and drop it on a folder and run it.  In the dialog that appears you can select whether to run it at startup.  Here’s a shot of that dialog.

image 

It has a nice selection of options to select which desktop you are using but sadly it doesn’t support the most important one — the arrow keys!  Someone who is using virtual desktop software is enough of a power user that they will want to switch desktops on-the-fly without looking at the keyboard.  Sure I can whack a number key without looking but the T-shape arrow keypad just fits with the metaphor a bit better.  A simple Ctrl+Shift+Arrow would do the trick.

The other problem is the speed. It’s a bit slow and has no nice swipes or transitions but it is free software so I’m really not griping about that too much.

All in all a welcome bit of software.  Thanks Mark!

MySQL Connector/Net 5.1.7 has been released

Aug 21st

Posted by reggie in .NET

101 comments

MySQL Connector/Net 5.1.7 a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is a minor release involving mainly bug fixes.

Version 5.1.7 works with all versions of MySQL including MySQL-4.1,  MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1 beta or the MySQL-6.0 beta releases.

It is now available in source and binary form from [

Connector/Net 5.2.3 GA has been released

Aug 18th

Posted by reggie in .NET

81 comments

MySQL Connector/Net 5.2.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This release is of GA quality and is suitable for  use in production environments.  We strongly urge you to  review the change log that is shipped with the product for a thorough review of the changes.

Version 5.2.3 works with all versions of MySQL including MySQL-4.1,  MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1 beta or the MySQL-6.0 Falcon “Preview”.

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.2.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time – if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

Changes since 5.2.2

  • Increased the speed of MySqlDataReader.GetOrdinal dramatically by using a couple of hashes for lookups
  • Fixed problem where some tables that support the web providers used the latin1 character set instead of the database default.  (bug #36444)
  • Changed how the procedure schema collection is retrieved.  If ‘use procedure bodies=true’ then we select on the mysql.proc table directly as this is up to 50x faster than our current IS implementation.  If ‘use procedure bodies=false’, then the IS collection is queried.  (bug #36694)
  • Fixed problem with our GetOrdinal speedup where we would attempt to add an already existing key to a hash when a resultset had more than 1 column with the same name. (bug #37239)
  • small fix to how we were allowing in/out and out parameters to slide through parameter serialization.  Before we were setting the AllowUserVariables connection setting but that had the unfortunate side effect of setting the value for all connections that shared that connection string.  This way we isolate it just to our particular command.  This may fix bug #37104
  • Fixed documentation surrounding use of ? vs @ for parameters (bug #37349)
  • Reduced network traffic for the normal case where the web provider schema is up to date (bug #37469)
  • Improved error reporting when a timeout occurs.  It no longer uses a message like ‘reading from stream failed’.  (bug #38119)
  • fixed problem where adding a non-existent user to a role would not auto-create the user record (bug #38243)
  • moved string escaping routine from the MySqlString class to the MySqlHelper class and made it public and static.  (bug #36205)
  • Fixed problem where column metadata was not being read with the correct character set  (bug #38721)
  • Fixed problem where the uninstall was not cleaning up the state files (bug #38534)
  • Added ‘Functions Return String’ connection string option
  • Several other fixes merged in from 5.0 and 5.1

Windows Home Server and blog self-hosting

Aug 11th

Posted by reggie in BlogEngine.NET

68 comments

I recently setup one of my old machines using Windows Home Server and thought it would be nice to run my blog on it instead of GoDaddy.  The obvious approach was to use the terrific Whiist add-in and that’s exactly what I did at first.

I encountered the first problem when setting up the web site because my site had to be a subsite under the main site.  I didn’t really want my site to be found at xxxx.homeserver.com/reggie so I started playing with domain forwarding and masking at GoDaddy.  With the help of their fine support I managed to get www.reggieburnett.com redirected to my sub-web but none of the sub-links worked (photos, archives, etc).  Plus I didn’t really like the CNAME redirect.

So this morning I set out to fix that and fix it I did.  Here’s what I did:

  1. Removed forwarding of my site at GoDaddy
  2. Signed up for the free trial at www.zoneedit.com.  You get free dynamic DNS support for up to 5 sites and 200 MB of DNS traffic (apparently that is *ALOT*)
  3. I was already using the excellent dd-wrt firmware on my Linksys router so I just needed to tell it to update zoneedit when my IP changes (and give it my hostname and credentials)
  4. Then I disabled my site using the Whiist add-in
  5. And finally redirected the default site under IIS properties to point to my blog folder.  The /home and /remote subwebs are still there and point to the correct place.

Now you can go to www.reggieburnett.com and land on my self-hosted blog and I can also reach the WHS goodies through subweb URLs.

**EDIT** looks like my home link is broken but I can fix that with some web.config hacking.  No time right now though.  :)