AngryPets.com

« October 2006 | Main | January 2007 »

November 09, 2006

I've so got issues

So, with the 3 monitors, it's needless to say that I'm loving life.

Only, my face sure feels hot all the time. (It's also freezing outside, and with the door to my office closed, my heater-vent closed, and my 3 monitors + my servers it stays above 76 degrees in here - sometimes hitting nearly 80, in fact.)

I just set the background on my desktop to black - and I swear I could immediately feel the drop in heat on my face.

I've never really liked a black background before, but it's sure feeling soothing right now.

Posted on November 09, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

ASP.NET 2.0 and IE Conditional Formatting

Internet Explorer's Conditional Formatting is some very cool stuff. Well, conditional formatting is a bit of a mis-nomer - it's actually just conditional comments, leveraged for css styling.

It makes styling documents tons easier, and results in cleaner CSS than a single page with all sorts of CSS Hacks in place. Employed for CSS Styling, Conditional comments let you 1) style a document/site in FF and then account for any abnormalities by providing a specialized Stylesheet for Internet Explorer (even different versions if needed).

Example:

With this main.css is applied to just about everything, but any boogers are sponged-up by a specific IE 6 or IE 7 set of overrides.

The problem though, is how do you do this, if you need to do it in ASP.NET, and also want the location of these stylesheets to be dynamically generated? You could try stuffing an <asp:Literal> control up in your header, but red-squiggles let you know that it's not a cool idea (even though it actually works at run-time):

So.. I spent a few minutes tonight looking at the new Page.Header control - which you get a reference to if you set <header runat="server"> in your markup. But it didn't have any real love - i.e., no methods for injecting comments or other things (though you can change the page's title, inject meta-data, and inject style info/references if you'd like).

So, I just decided to try dynamically creating a Literal control on the server and stuffing it in to the Header's .Controls collection. It worked perfectly.

(Using a GenericHtmlControl might also be an option, but I didn't play around with it long enough to figure out how to get around the fact that it really wants to use tagnames... )

Posted on November 09, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 08, 2006

Hacking RDP connections to XP

Okay, hacking is a bit too strong of a term, but one of the things I dislike about RDP (Remote Desktop) Sessions into XP boxes is that you don't have the option to power down the box from the console.

Most of the XP boxes I log into via RDP are, in fact, Virtual Machines, so turning them off is still totally within my control via various other digital interfaces, but I still prefer to have the option to Shut Down when I close out Sessions on some boxes.

So, yesterday I remembered the Shutdown command. Yup, no big secret there, but it's been working like a charm. At present I've just been opening a command prompt and typing:
Shutdown -f -s - t 2 (-f = force a shutdown, -s = shutdown (instead of reboot/etc), and -t specifies the number of seconds to wait... type Shutdown /? at the prompt for more options/info).

What's really cool too is that the RDP window/session just terminates gracefully when you do this. No 'dunkkk' sound as RDP says: "Heyyy, something pulled the rug out from under us, and we lost connectivity...". (Bonus)

Since I'm lazy, I think I'll probably put that command into a simple batch script and then drag a short-cut to it on the quick-launch bar of most of my XP VMs... just to make the shutdown process quicker/easier. (Cuz who needs typing to shutdown a machine?)

(It's also possible to send remote Shutdown commands - but since I don't always use the same username on my VMs as my local machine, NTLM can't grant me a session on the remote box... and it just doesn't work as efficiently as a simple Shutdown command on the targeted box itself. (Especially since I work out of a workgroup, and my VMs frequently are part of a domain... ))

UPDATE: Corey sayz (via the comments) that CTRL+ALT+END in RDP gets you to the Shut Down Dialog (added to the Task Manager as an additional menu). Thanks for the tip Corey!

Posted on November 08, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

November 06, 2006

Pre-Election Thought

BACKGROUND:
WW2 - I'm a huge history buff - to the point where my kids know that I love watching WW II documentaries, even if they aren't in color.

Cassi - My lovely and talented wife.

Caleb - My 5-year old son, who would rather play Nintendo most of the time than watch one of my 'black and white' WW II documentaries.

Nick - 5-year old 'neighbor kid' who's one of Caleb's best-buds.

----------------------------------------------

Nick (to Cassi): So, are you for the war, or are you for peace?
Cassi: Well, that's a bit of a complicated subject...
Nick: You mean because some people want to go to war with us?
Cassi: That's part of it...
Caleb (interjecting) : Well, it's not like WW II where everything was black and white...

Posted on November 06, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)