Long story short – for a few days last week I was unwittingly subverting the Chinese Government.  Somehow my private proxy server was discovered and published.  I may get into that story more later, but for now all you need to know is that I decided to ask around a few cheap hosting sites to see if I could run a small ad-supported proxy site.  This particular host shows up when Googling proxy hosting, but a couple of support tickets later it turns out that they don’t actually allow proxy hosting.  I let them know about the Google ad and got this enthusiastic sales pitch:

Hi, David.
Thanks for your notification.
If you like to host your sites, xxxxxxxxxxxx might be one of your choices. Let us know if you need more help. Thanks.

Now, I don’t know about YOU, but as for ME – I really like to host my sites.  It brings me much more happiness than when I was burning them onto a CD and trying to fling them into open car windows as I drove to work.  (readership tanked in winter and return visitors were hard to come by if the CD happened to peg them in the face).

So we’ve established that I like to host my sites, the Tech follows with the time-tested hard sell technique of telling me their product is soooo great it just might make it onto my list of choices.  It might be time to rewrite the script here folks!

Happy New Year Everyone!  Have you had any similar bad sales pitches?

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If you’re coming here from the Programmer Day site, you might want to check out the post I did last year on Programmer’s Day, it’s one of the most popular i’ve ever done: 5 Great Code Search Engines.

Have a great day and don’t eat too many doughnuts!

If you haven’t read the KnightKnetwork for long (or ever before) you may not know that I’m a programmer. I work primarily in a heavily macroed assembler that NO ONE else in the world still uses (or I doubt they do anyway).

I’m a big fan of The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas, and one of the suggestions they make is to learn a new programming language every year. So, to do this, I’ve dabbled in Python and PHP but lacking a clear goal, I usually stopped learning as soon as I completed whatever personal project I was working on and got busy with other things. If I want to take on some side projects or more complicated personal ones, then I need more than that and more than my regular assembler so I’ve decided to get some MS Certifications, specifcally the new ASP 3.5 ones.  I’m not sure how many and which paths I’ll go down, but this post will serve as a way to mark the path I do take. These certifications provide set goals and should force me to a more comprehensive knowledge of the technology than I’ve been achieving.

I’ll bookmark useful sites, provide book links to Amazon (affiliate links) of anything I purchase, and post any useful tips I come up with along the way.

General Books And Tools:

• Book: Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB (Programmer to Programmer)
• Site: Microsoft Learning – Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Certification
• Exam Discounts: MS First to Know

Exam 70-536: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation

• Core exam required for all the others
• MS Learning Site for Exam 70-536
• Book: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation

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Image by Robert Scott Photography via Flickr

I’m seeing a very interesting increase in traffic coming in searching for the term ‘VX11000′.  This would presumably be the next in the V, enV/(enV2), and Voyager series from Verizon, although that’s certainly not guaranteed.    The Voyager was Verizon’s response to the iPhone and while an amazing peice of equipment, it certainly didn’t come close to meeting the iPhone killer hype that was piled on it.

If you’re reading this and have come to the site by searching for the VX11000, please leave me a comment and tell me why!  What prompted your search?

Image by Dekuwa via Flickr

My man on the inside has reported that the 3G iPhone was announced today to great fanfare. A few quick points:

• 8GB 3G iPhone – $199
• 16GB 3G iPhone – $299
• Small Battery (in size)
• 5 hours Talk time
• Real GPS instead of cell phone triangulation
• Many more countries
• Available July 11th

I also hear that it was a great keynote and one of the biggest cheers went up when India was announced as one of the new countries where the phone would be available.

See Also: More pictures and Live Blog

There should be a drop in price on ebay for the 1st generations soon:

Image by lloydi via Flickr

CA Internet security and I haven’t gotten along very well in the past and my attempts to get rid of it were just a continuation of the same problems. Previously I had had problems getting a Removed by HIPS FW error on webpages and that led to me researching the efw file problem that so many people were having. Well, the next and hopefully final problem I’ve had is when trying to uninstall. I was signed in as the administrator but still got a W9011 error claiming I didn’t have the correct permissions and giving me a registry key.

It’s pretty easy to give yourself the correct permissions, but we do have to dive into the registry so you’ll want to be very careful and change only the items that are listed in the error message (or 10 messages as mine ended up)

Here’s what you need to do to fix the problem

1. Run the uninstall and leave the error message up on the screen
2. Click on the Start Button and the Click ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’ and press enter
3. You should now see the registry editor
4. Find the correct registry key (this is set up like normal folders so just navigate like you would in the windows file system
5. Right-click and select permissions
6. Click on your user name
7. Check the Full Control box and apply
8. Close the error and rerun the uninstall process
9. Repeat as needed for more error messages

Let me offer the disclaimer that I don’t regularly program in MS products, I do occasionally and I’ve been considering going for the new certifications when they are released to beef up my knowledge and ability to do work on the side. Still, I love going to MS events because they are so well presented and really get you excited about the work MS is doing for developers. I usually leave an event wanting to go out and try the technology immediately even if I have no ability to do so! To give you idea of how this launch event went, I haven’t installed any of that nice new, shiny, powerful software yet. It’s still shrink wrapped a week later. I wasn’t motivated, I wasn’t inspired, and I wasn’t impressed.

All this is not to say that these products aren’t great and that the new features weren’t covered, it’s just that the coverage was a watered down rehash of info gone over at MSDN Events or was presented without any point of reference to how it was better. If you have a captive audience staring a big screen then make use of the visual! I was 75% of the way towards the back and I couldn’t read any of the code unless the presenter zoomed his screen (this only happened once while I was there). If you want the audience to Oooooh and Aaaaah like they’re watching a knife cut through a cement block then you’re going to have to give us some eye candy… why no silverlight?!? Being in Beta is no excuse, it has never stopped an MSDN Event presenter from showing us the goods.

All said I’ll keep coming to the launch events for the software, but I hope to see better presentations in the future. MS knows you can’t do much that’s meaningful in the short time we’re a captive audience so give us a quick run down if the changes, some before and after code samples, and lots of eye-candy!