Livin' the life...

This is mostly a reminder for me, but in generally, here's a nice way to access files on another PC on your network.

"Start > Settings Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy. In the left column, Local Policies > Security Options. In the right column, find Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts. Double-click on this, then choose Classic.

From another computer, you can now access your current computer's hard drive by: Start > Run > "\\computername\c$" (for drive c). You may then be prompted for a login and password: enter the administrator login and password on the computer you are trying to connect to (If "computername" doesn't work, try using the IP address, i.e. "\\192.168.0.4\c$")." (Ref)

This file access method can work quite nicely with Remote Desktop.

"Iraq beats Saudi Arabia 1-0 for Asian title" was the title of the article that caught my eye just moments ago.. I must admit, it's nice to see that even though many consider Iraq to be a nation in almost complete turmoil, that these players shook it off and won this football title. Congrats indeed Iraq!

Actually, this reminds me a lot of ... the entire Italy situation at the World Cup last year.. yet Italy still were the ones to lift the World Cup. I guess it all just goes to show..

Well, I'm back from my sabbatical! And back safely, thank you Lord!

For those of you who didn't know, I took a trip to the land of many waters, aka Guyana. Sad to say it was mostly a business trip, so I don't have that many pictures to share. The few I have shown below are pictures of random streets (the first row) and the Guyana sea wall (the second row).

I especially like the one on the bottom left, that was a really nice photo, all the conditions were great! In that photo to the left, that's the Atlantic Ocean.. The sea wall is significant because since Guyana's coastline is just below sea level, there is the constant threat of the Atlantic Ocean swamping the place. The Dutch are credited for erecting the sea defense system (sea wall), extending for most of the coastline. (Ref) 

As usual, if you'd like a copy of the photos, let me know and I'll hook you up, . Bye for now!

Not 100% sure but I may be "offline" for this week. I expect to have pictures to show you why! :-)

I leave you with this snippet about my favourite TV show - 24:

The United States will have a female president next year -- on the Fox TV series "24."

Tony Award-winning actress Cherry Jones will play President Allison Taylor when the show about the exploits of counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) returns in January for its seventh season, the network announced Sunday. (Source)

And also this Photos of the Week from Yahoo! and Week in Review (Oct 29 - Nov 4 2004) from the washingtonpost.com.

As a web application developer knowledge of regular expressions, or at least, what they can do for you, is a mUSt. These strange looking character sets can do anything from checking for a numeric value in a textbox to protecting against cross-site scripting (XSS) .

Here's an article a pal (thanks Ramal)directed me to lately that I think is well.. appropriately titled! : 5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know.

Truth-be-told though, I think (web) developers should seriously understand how to construct their own, as the need for unique expressions is almost inevitable. However, if you're in a rush and need one quickly (as is often the case with me), you can head over to this library, it's pretty extensive and the expressions are reasonably reliable.

The highlight for me today is definitely the video below.. too too funny! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Oh, by the way, it's called Dont'cha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me?

LoL! This needs to make ABC morning show or something! These guys should get sponsored!!

I also recommend checking out this "Eye on the World" page from washingtonpost.com. It has some really nice photos from around the world, all from this week.

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. [Not sure about that]

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! [I dare not spell-check this post though.. lol]

Humans are amazing creatures indeed. Got to thank our Creator for that one! Thanks for the mail M!

"Casting the whole of your care [all your anxieties, all your worries, all your concerns, once and for all] on Him, for He cares for you affectionately and cares about you watchfully."

1 Peter 5:7

Have a great day!

"Liverpool enjoyed the perfect start as Voronin produced a cool finish after intercepting a poor pass and rounding the goalkeeper. ... Riise produced a trademark thunderbolt to restore the lead with a free-kick from distance... Ukrainian Voronin, a free transfer from Bayer Leverkusen, put the game beyond Werder with a cunning finish after a brilliant Xabi Alonso pass." [Werder Bremen 2 - 3 Pool in Grenchen, Switzerland on 17 July // ESPNsoccernet]

A.. snapshot... maybe? What I think is interesting though is that Voronin was free! Hmm.. I'll have to wait now to see how well Torres and Babel fit it. To be fair though, I think Voronin was at Pool for a bit longer so he may be more familiar with how the guys play. I'll keep checking youtube for the full highlights of the match.. keep you posted, .

My sister alerted me to this one yesterday and I thought it was a rather cool feature!

As you can see there on the left, as you type, Yahoo! suggests search terms.. Somewhat like Apple's OS X Spotlight and like Vista search feature.

Here's a snippet from the article I found relating to it.

"Yahoo Search has added suggest feature which tries to auto-complete queries based upon what you type. It not only helps you cut down your search time by limiting the number of words you need to type in the search box, but it also comes handy if you excessively misspell words. Previously, this feature was exclusively available on Yahoo Toolbar." (Ref).

Nicely done Yahoo! You guys will have to work on improving it though! I had to type in "jason nur" to FINALLY find me! (lol).

Transformers. After getting two great reviews for this "old school" legend of a pic, I made my way to the box office this weekend to catch it for myself. Arg.. what can I say? It was.. good but, to me, not THAT GOOD (I liked.. Die Hard 4.0 more).

The story line was cool, and what I probably liked the most was that the Transformers were just like they were in the "old days".. just some fun-loving, crazy machines. The bullet-time action was More than welcome though!! The cinema went crazyy!!

I give it a 7/10. ESPECIALLY considering the first part with Bumblebee playing some VERY APPROPRIATE (music) selections and also fun quotes like, "It's a robot, like a super advanced robot, it's probably Japanese"! lol!

Here's some cause for concern - When You Mix Firefox And IE, You Risk A Critical Zero-Day Flaw. This applies to web people such as myself and especially developers, that have to have Firefox and IE installed to test web sites/apps for compatibility issues. The article is a bit on the techie side but, it's interesting..

Off and on for the last 5 hours, I've been trying to find out exactly how DLLs are handled and can be deployed within Visual Studio 2005 (ASP .NET 2.0). My issue is this:

When I drag a third party component (control) I'm using, onto an aspx web page, it correctly, automatically, (a) adds a link (create a reference) to the file in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and (b) adds an assembly reference in the web.config file. What it doesn't do however, is copy the necessary DLL to the Bin folder of the project!

This "not copying to local" as I term it, becomes an obvious problem at the imminent deployment stage, well, that's unless you always have the same GAC on your development machine as on the production server! (Hardly ever the case!) So, for the morning I've been trying to decide how best to handle this situation.

Another option would've been to find the DLLs and manually copy them to the application's Bin directory.. The problem with this however would be that you most probably would get a "ambiguous reference" error as VS2005 wouldn't know whether to use the DLL from the GAC or from the Bin folder.

Ok, after all that background info, I'll stop boring you and move on to the solution I've found.. . Simply, let the stuff I said in Paragraph #2 happen.. but when coming to deployment, where you'll need the DLLs to be on the production server, you can do the following: In Visual Studio Project, select the Bin folder but instead of going to "Add Reference...", use "Add Existing Item". When the window opens, navigate to the needed DLLs, click 'Ok' and then sit back and let VS2005 adds them to the Bin folder.. Once this is done you're ready for deployment..

One of the best things I think about this solution is that the references in the web.config folder are maintained.. So if on the production server, the files are in the GAC, I expect it'll use them from there, or, if they're not, it'll use the ones in the Bin folder (not 100% sure about this last part though, just going on "tech sense").

Enjoy!

Was just doing some random browsing and found a VERY interesting article that documents an interview with Tim Berners-Lee (yesterday) titled, "The future of the Web as seen by its creator". In this article, Mr. Berners-Lee discusses popular topics such as Semantic Web, Web 2.0 and also Web 3.0.

Techie or not, I think everyone (who uses the Web) should at least give this article a look through.

Captain's log, stardate 20070710, Eastern Caribbean Quadrant.. As I sit here building this web application for work, I am amazed at how "easy" MS has made things for us developers. I mean, dragging and dropping controls, nice pretty configuration screens and tools, directory security by access levels at the click of a couple rectangular buttons.. Does this happen in other languages? PHP? Coldfusion? I remember my stint with PHP and, yea.. it's super flexible and sure, it's free, but man.. I can't imagine developing the apps I do now in PHP.. especially not considering the time frame clients demand!

But of course, I know, there's a price for the beauty of (the l33t versions of) MS tools, and at times the price is as shocking as the tools themselves! But.. really, can one say that it is not worth it? Also noting the amount of tools (more coming in each new edition) and the support from places like ASP.NET Forums?

I'd like to see two development teams build the same web application, one a ASP.NET team and the other a PHP team... I wonder who'd do it faster and which one of them would produce the better quality (reliable, and such) product.

Please note though, I'm not bashing PHP, it's a very workable, free alternative and I totally love the dollars sign ($) to indicate variables .. lol .. I guess the drag and drop of MS tools have me.

This weekend it was all about (Live Free or) Die Hard! I finally got the chance to watch it and what can I say but, excellent work guys. I expected it to be great and I was not at all disappointed (9/10 may be?). As for the picture it was doubled with i.e. Next with Nicholas Cage, to me that was the real shocker for the night. The reason being that usually when a "blockbuster" film like Die Hard shows, some "krappy" movie doubles with it, but Next was top notch film as well! It surely didn't get as much coverage as the Bruce Willis film but it did hold its own. I give it a 7/10.

On a side note though, if you ever think you had courage or probably you think you did something really silly, I DOUBT it is to the level of these guys - check out this article on San Fermin Festival where there's the running of the bulls! Or.. go directly to the slideshow!

Enjoy!

That's right! New wonders announced yesterday in Lisbon, Portugal!

And they are: The Great Wall of China, Rome's Colosseum, India's Taj Mahal, Peru's Machu Picchu, Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer, Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid and Jordan's Petra.

Believe it or not, it's estimated that 100 million votes were cast originating from every country in the world (I wonder who in Barbados was contacted!!), to select these new wonders! Hmm.. I've never actually thought about visiting any of these though.. that's a definitely a thought for the future.

For the video of this news check Yahoo!, for some other info check Wikipedia or if you wan all the info on it, the official New 7 Wonders site is your best bet.

I didn't want to go post on Torres again until he started to actually play but a friend (thanks Ramal) just shared this vid with me and I couldn't help but share it with you!

lol, man oh man, all I'm seeing is Puyol, not good dred!! lol! Also, you saw that one with Ronaldinho and that other Barca player?.. Ah.. I hope for great things from Torres!

"Do you have a really bad memory, or past heartache, that you would prefer to forget?

Researchers at Harvard and McGill University (in Montreal) are working on an amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories. The technique seems to allow psychiatrists to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled." (Live Science)

Wow! That would be sommeethiinng wouldn't it! Being rid of all those bad memories that seem to stick in your mind no matter what. I can definitely think of a couple I'd like to DEL. One interesting thing about this story is that they have already tested it on humans and had somewhat positive results... It will be fascinating to see how this all goes!

"Torres passes Pool medical" was the headline I saw as I headed over to ESPN's soccernet.com. So I guess the "big signing" of this 23-year-old star [shown to the left] is just about complete. Funny enough though, it costs Pool £26.5million!! And my guy Luis Garcia went as well!

All I can do is HOPE this doesn't turn out like the Morientes story... even so, Mori only costed like 11mill.. half the amount for young Torres. I guess the key word here is "young" as if he does well (cross fingers) he'll be kept for a while and if he doesn't, he still could be easily sold.

Here's the original story at Soccernet.

Ah Monday, the beginning of another week! To be quite frank, I'm somewhat glad to see the weekend go! It was a tooth short of a totally disappointing weekend! Everything I had planned to do, failed to "come off" and in some situations even backfired! Interestingly as well.. that was going to be my busiest weekend in a while! Had Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon & the evening planned.

Alas! Nothing happened (except Sunday evening) and I'm left to assume it was all for the best.

On the bright side of things, I got to resume my affair with Ubuntu and familiarise myself once again with the cool Beryl packages and generally, Linux's shell commands. Speaking about shell commands though, the techies of you who're familiar with Linux should definitely check out this video. In essence it demos a Text-Based YouTube Video Player for Linux. Thanks for the link Ramal!