I know I said I would update more regularly, but I had an interesting issue, or three.

First issue for fun and enjoyment, my laptop died. Dead. Kapoot. I can get the data off of it, which is good because it had a lot of my stuff on there, but it would not charge at all. The charger works, and no I didn’t lick it to find out. It would just not charge or turn. So reset in peace Annonymous. For a replacement I am using an iBook G4, it is actually a really nice replacement for 90% of the simple things that I do. I read email, try to respond to it, look at web pages, I tried to do a blog update but couldn’t type overly well on it, REALLY small keyboard.

I also got another car, I need to post a pic or two of it, maybe Angsto will want to run downtown this weekend and take a couple pics of it. It is an 1998 Honda Civic CX. The manufacture color is “Dark Amethyst Metallic Pearl” that means it is a pretty shiny purple color. Although to be honest and fair to it, the car does look blue in some lights, grey in some lights, and purple in direct sunlight. The idea behind it is to save gas, it gets about 35MPG so keep the moding on it to things that will only improve MPG I should be good.

I am trying to find a tip that is helpful and when asking a couple of people they had some interesting ones, today we are going with Kolbold’s choices of commands:

Tree – shows you a tree view of all the folders on your computer.

Attrib – allows you to view and change the attributes on a file or folder

Assoc – shows you the file association view, by extention

Find – allows you to locate files form the command line.

I think it is time to start expanding my web site. But this will wait till after the in-laws leave. They are visiting from Canada. But some items I think need changing.

• Rotating odd links - put back the random links
• blog rolls - find out what they are and if i actually want to use them
• news feeds - everyone else is doing it
• removal of the Silverlight photo gallery - not everyone has silverlight

This is just a short list and I am not going to redesign the entire site, I really like the look and feel and I thank angsto for the nice background pic.

Other randomness - a 1997 Honda Civic gets better gas mileage then most new cars, including the Hyundai Accent, Scion Xd, Mazda 3, and 2007 Honda Civic http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ 

So a quick one for you all. Windows Find command. It is a nice simple command and it helps find files and folders on a computer, but it can also work kind of like grep for linux. It can read the output of another command and find what you are looking for.

C:\Users\smcgroarty>netstat -ano | find  /i "135"
  TCP    0.0.0.0:135            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       832
  TCP    [::]:135               [::]:0                 LISTENING       832

When used with the /i switch it tells it to ignore case so it will just match what is in the double quotes.

C:\Users\smcgroarty>systeminfo | find /i "Boot time"
System Boot Time:          7/8/2008, 11:44:04 PM

C:\Users\smcgroarty>systeminfo | find "Boot time"

So that is my tip of the week.

Next time I am going to try for terminal services.

Ok Kolbold, you have a point, I have all this knowledge in my brain, and I should start sharing some of it.

Something topical about IIS 6.0. Some people don't know how to configure a simple web site with ASP.NET v2.0 so I am going to touch on that with a couple of screen shots.

Start with Opening IIS Manager and expand the IIS Server > Web Sites and then Right Click on it and select New > Web Site

Select Next on the first screen and you will have to give it a description, this description will be what you see when you look at the Web Sites on IIS.

The next couple of options can be fun for all.

The IP Address is what IP on the server you want the site to respond to, be default it will try to answer on all IP Addresses on the server, if you leave the IP address as All Unassigned it will answer to either All the IP Addresses on the server if it is the first site on the server.

TCP Port this Web site should use is defaulted to the standard web port of 80. If you change this you have  remember to use the colon and the port number in your web browser, such as http://www.google.com:8080 (this doesnt work, google answers on port 80)

The last part of this page is the Host header, this is the address that the web site will answer to. If you use this part you either need to have your DNS setup correctly to resolve to this site/server or edit your local hosts file. If you do not have a Fully Qualified Domain Name then it is best to leave this blank.

The next part is the path, you can browse for the location or you can create a new location.

If you have not uploaded/copied your files to your web server then it is best to create the location at this step.

Also if you plan on allowing just anyone to connect to this location, like every other site on the internet, you will want to leaved the box for Allow Anonymous access checked.

When you click next, you will be given a couple of more choices.

By default the Read option is checked, this is so others can view your web site
Run scripts is mainly for older scripts such as asp and java scripts, depending on your site usage you can leave it unchecked or check it.
Execute is for perl or CGI applications.
Write: you really dont want to check this, in fact you want to do everything possible to keep from checking this box. This allows people to write to your website, change files, and upload new content, all to your website.
Browse allows people to browse the files of your site, this listing would generally come up if someone goes to the top of a directory, if you do not have a default document.

It is ok to just the default Read checked.
Then Next and you are finished

Notice nothing about the ASP.NET version to use, or even a configuration on it. That part is next

In IIS Manager, you will see the your web that you just created. Now Right Click on it and select Properties. You will notice serveral tabs on this page, select ASP.NET and choose your version.

Somehow I lost ASP.NET v1, so currently i have only one choice, but yours should have two or three choices.