I was browsing tech articles today and ran across this comparison of Red Hat, Canonical [Ubuntu], and Windows. Now, before I begin on this brief but ever so relevant diatribe, let me preface my rant with the fact that I have been a regular user of various Linux flavors (Mandrake, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, etc.) since the late 1990’s, so though I am not a system administrator, I have a fair amount of Linux administration experience.

Over the past few years, when approached with the question of which OS one should run on their corporate network, I unwaveringly respond, “Windows XP” [of course]. The principle argument being that most small businesses cannot afford a full-time system administrator to administer a non-Windows network. It is nice to now have some numbers to support my argument. Keep in mind, I do not state one way or the other which OS is more secure, reliable, or robust. I only mention this for the simple fact that running a Windows based network, over the long run, will almost always be more affordable.

Compete solely on price, no thanks

Tonight, I arrived home hoping to jump right in to my “moonlighting” gig only to discover that an issue with my computer from this morning had persisted. For some reason, something, some application was causing a consistent amount of traffic (not large amounts of it mind you) across my local Ethernet connection. Fortunately for me, I am somewhat tech savvy and thus commenced troubleshooting to discover the source rogue application.

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I have been architecting, designing, and programming Ektron CMS400.NET web applications for over a year now. Though not an expert, I feel I am to the point I can actually add value to other programmers/architects who may be running into similar issues as I have. This is my first snippet of advice.

When developing custom action pages for the built in Ektron forms, remember to set the Page directives as specified in the Administrator Manual.

page 312

If your site is using URL Aliasing, the action page’s header must include the following:
EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewStateMac="false"


Apparently when you set the EnableViewStateMac attribute to true, the encoded and encrypted view state is not checked to verify that it has not been tampered with on the client. Otherwise .NET will not persist the Viewstate from the original .NET form to the action page specified in the Ektron form.

Though disabling the EnableEventValidation attribute may be necessary, I don’t see any real reason since the page that is handling the postback shouldn’t have any controls on it in the first place. However, in the event it does, the page’s validation must be turned off else the postback handler will not validate the form post.

I have been using the Visual Studio JavaScript debugger for years (since VS 6.0). Apparently, a lot of developers with which I have spoken are oblivious to the fact that, in fact, you can debug many things from VS.NET (JS being one of them). Rather than put up a lengthy tutorial, I figured I would at least share what the keystroke combination is to access the Script Explorer from within VS.NET.

First, you’ll need to actually be attached to Internet Explorer (will not work with Firefox, at least to my knowledge) in script mode. Once attached, you then hit the CTRL + ALT + N keys to bring up the Script Explorer window. This will list out all the files IE has loaded at that time. You can then open up any HTML, JS, etc. files and set breakpoints to debug at runtime.

Amazing and pretty dang useful at the same time. Feel free to comment if you find this useful.

As a part-time freelance systems administrator I have often been approached with questions regarding computer performance (or lack thereof.) Besides upgrading RAM, processor, or other hardware peripherals, one of the first things I suggest is to do a hard drive defrag. I lack the time now to fully explain the ins-and-outs of the defrag process, nevertheless, I wish to show how to setup a computer to run a weekly (or more frequent) scheduled disk defrag.
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http://www.k-state.edu/techbytes/fireworks/handout.html

I’ve had this link lying around for a while and thought I’d post it for historical purposes.

Enjoy.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/unicode.html

A great article on the ins and outs of UNICODE. Something I ran across a couple of years ago but have yet to add it for reference.