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Posts Categorized / Technology

  • Mar 05 / 2013
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Terso Solutions
Technology

Shameless self promotion

Terso SolutionsI’m currently working for a company called Terso Solutions.  We at Terso are essentially an inventory control company.

It breaks down like this…

We specialize in “high value medical goods” that are tracked with RFID tags.  Our cabinets are secured by utilization of RFID passes.  When a person wants something from one of our cabinets, they present their pass to the cabinet.  An access check is run and if the pass is legit, the door opens.  The person takes what they want.  When the enclosure door closes, a scan is run by the cabinet to determine what was taken (or what was put in).  That data is transmitted to headquarters for processing.

That’s the interesting part.  The data transmission from the device to headquarters.  That’s where Jetstream comes in.

Jetstream is a cloud platform which allows software companies to add distributed RFID capabilities quickly through simple programming interfaces.

If you happen to come across this blog and read this post, you might check Jetstream and/or Terso out.

  • Jan 14 / 2013
  • 0
Technology

Moving from MS SQLServer to MySQL

MySQLCaptureMicrosoft’s SQL Server is a really solid product, but it can be overkill for a lot of applications.  Oracle picked up MySQL a while back.  For many applications, that is a really viable alternative.  Not only is MySQL a fully mature product with support available, it’s an option on most web hosting sites as well as major service providers.  We use Amazon Web Services here.  They offer MySQL support with lots of extra benefits such as replication across availability zones.

Having coded my app in SQL Server and then getting the direction to move it to MySQL, I was a little unsure how to go about it.  Here’s what I learned from the process. Continue Reading

  • Jan 04 / 2013
  • 0
Technology

Weird HTTP Error 503

503I’m working on an MVC Website.  In development in Visual Studio, things are working perfectly.  My app needs to run in IIS.  Easy enough, right?  Just set it up in IIS and you’re off and running.

Recently though, my IIS instance of the site stopped working.  What?!  I began to get the following error:

HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

Wha wha wha?!  I checked IIS and it’s running properly.  What the heck?  SQL Server is okay.  The thing works perfectly in Visual Studio.  ARG. Continue Reading

  • Jan 03 / 2013
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codesnippet
Technology

Automatically logging users out of a website

codesnippetSession state is a funny thing.  It works really well.  But if users don’t stay active, they’ll lose their session.  That can make for some really strange problems if session isn’t used immediately.  Of course session can be checked for, but that’s a hassle.  It would be easier to simply log users out before their session expires. Continue Reading

  • Aug 10 / 2012
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photo
Technology

Seeing all my Google Calendars on my iPhone

We have a number of calendars in our household.  One for me, one for my wife, a shared one (usually used for anniversaries and birthdays) as well as one each for each of our kids.  It would be really handy to be able to see all of those as native calendars on my iPhone.  Despite the built in syncing and such, it’s not quite as straight forward as you might think.

It’s actually not all that hard though.  Simply login to Safari on your phone and navigate to http://google.com/calendar/iphoneselect.  There, you may have to login but then you’ll be able to pick the calendars you’re interested in syncing.  Amen!

 

  • Jun 28 / 2012
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vbox
Technology

Windows Embedded = Hassle

I’ve been working with Windows Embedded a lot lately.  Specifically, Windows Embedded Standard 7 or WES7.  The lack of information out there is shocking.  I was assigned to work on a project that would utilize WES7.  When the assignment came down, I had zero experience with it.  I was literally starting from scratch.

Getting started really wasn’t too hard.  Handling the details of actually doing the work is where the hassles began. Continue Reading

  • May 24 / 2012
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100% CPU
Technology

Stressing and Load testing

I’m working on a project right now that requires certain behavior when in case the system starts spinning out of control.  Specifically, if the CPU the system is on hits 90% for more than 5 minutes in a row or if we run out of RAM for 5 minutes, we need to take certain actions.

The question I’m addressing in this post is not how to detect CPU utilization or Memory usage in C#… it’s how to load up your system so you can actually hit 100% CPU or use up all the RAM.

You could write a program that does it, but it turns out there’s already a tool for it.  The CONSUME command in Windows will allow you to load your system the way you want.

Using the command, you can spool up your CPU utilization so you can test your program.  It’s really slick.

  • Aug 03 / 2011
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Technology

Decrypting app.Config

Do you need to decrypt an app.config file? There are lots of directions explaining the process if you’re dealing with a web application, but if you’re dealing with a windows app or a service of some sort, you don’t have a web.config…  all you have is an app.config. The process isn’t all that different.

Here’s what an encrypted app.config “appSettings” section might look like. Continue Reading

  • Jun 15 / 2011
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Featured
Technology

CustomPrincipal and Serialization

Recently, I’ve been working on a project that relies on a backend business object layer.  The business object (BO) layer, requires authentication in order to be used.  For most of the systems, this is okay, but my project is to be used by end users.  We don’t need to authenticate the users… we need to authenticate the system.

This is easy enough using the CustomPrincipal object in Rocky Lhotka’s CSLA framework (which is also being used).  We simply create the CustomPrincipal and add that to the ApplicationContext. Continue Reading

  • Jun 10 / 2011
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images
Technology

Use it or lose it

There’s a commonly known piece of information that pretty much everyone knows… use it or lose it.  It applies to foreign languages, computer language, cooking techniques… all sorts of things.

Things like the code to unlock restrictions on an iPhone! Continue Reading

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