I'll be heading to Nebraska this afternoon for a few days on a business trip. So, I will probably have limited contact with the outside world. I'll be back on Thursday, so I'll attempt to get caught up at that point.

I just signed up to attend HDC '04 located in Des Moines, IA this coming December. Its going to be a long 4-5 hour trip, but I think it'll all work out since I'll be able to network with all you other geeks out there. If you're heading out too, make sure you attend the party Thursday night...maybe we could meet up and chat!

BTW, how can you pass up the registration fee, its 18 fricking bucks! I figure between hotel costs and gas, I'll spend (err, my company) about $300 bucks. Not too shabby.

No, I'm not talking about their browser only being half the way there, I'm talking about their goal of 1 million downloads in 10 days. I can't believe that in only a mere 2 days, over 500,000 estimated downloads have of Firefox 1.0PR have taken place. At this rate, I think they'll reach the 1 million mark by day 5.

Go Firefox Go! BTW, if you've not downloaded Firefox, I'd suggest doing so, it is by far becoming my primary browser both at home and at work.

So I just finished competing in the qualification round for Google's Top Coder contest, and well, damn there are some quick coders out there. You basically had 1 hour to code solutions for 2 problems, 1 being worth 400 points and the other worth being 1000 points. Points are based on how fast you submit your code, but are later tested against system tests and code reviews in which they can remove points from you.

Lets just say I got 311 points total (in 14 minutes), and that was for problem 1. Problem #2 was difficult, but I just needed more time than 46 minutes to complete it...I was close darnit! It truly is a test of ones ability to code accurately under a time crunch.

Since the qualification round is still going on, I can't really divulge my problems as it could give other coders out there an advantage against me. 500 participants will continue on (they take 100 participants from each of the 5 different problem sets), so I can only cross my fingers that I advance, however I won't be heartbroken if I don't. I set out merely to see if I could actually code under a time crunch like this, and I feel I didn't do too bad. Other coders out there that actually submit both solutions just amaze me, but who knows if their solutions are correct...only time will tell.

So, wish me luck and cross your fingers for me, I'd really like to get that "free plane trip" to compete in the final round.

Firefox 1.0PR has been released, amongst other Mozilla based browser updates. I've personally tried to start using Firefox more, but I seem to always revert back to IE. I however, have spent about 30 min customizing Firefox to my browsing habits, so maybe that will help me in my conversion.

So, if you're still running and older version of Firefox, download 1.0PR now! BTW, some extensions do not function in the new version, specifically the google extension and a few others I was using. So, don't fret just because of that, its still a great build!

Just read yesterday's Dilbert (not web, but desk calendar)...its truely priceless:

Boss: "My keyboard is broken. It only types asterisks for passwords"
Dogbert (Tech support): "Try changing your password to five asterisks."
Boss: "I hope I can remember it."

Talk about great!

So since I announced the rebranding of WebDeploy to Unleash It, I added a keyword search feed for "unleash it" through NewsGator. I've concluded that there are a lot of blogs out there that use "unleash" quite a bit concerning John Kerry and his campaign. And, after last nights presentation by Dick Cheney, he now appears a multitude of times. Now, I don't really care much for politics, but its quite funny to see "unleash" "unleash" "unleash" come out of so many peoples blogs on politics.

I just moved my site from my current hoster over to WebHost4Life and my DNS changes look like they're starting to propogate. So, if you notice any quirkiness in the next few days, that is why. Also, its quite possible any forum posts that were entered around the switchover time will be *lost* (actually, they won't be brought over).

Update: Downloading my controls and viewing my forums now works. Sorry to those who attempted to download the controls and couldn't. Thats what you get with a website transition.

Exactly how bothered are you by the Olympics already? Well, there obviously is some people who just don't want to see anything about the Olympics.

Go to Yahoo, and over on the right hand column, check the "Hide Olympic results on this page" checkbox. Now, notice what happens, stuff dissapears dynamically. The really funny part is when it makes things dissapear from the bullet list of items just above it.

Thanks to my co-worker for pointing this out...now, back to my non-reading Olympic information only

So I found another weird quirck with Reporting Services tonight, that is a must share in case anyone else runs across it. My server setup at home doesn't run IIS on the default port 80, but rather on port 8181. This is for security reasons since its publicly open via my Cable modem service (but behind my firewall/router).

On my server, I wanted to get reporting services installed so I can do some reporting against the anonymous usage statistics being collected via WebDeploy. So, briefly - my default website is running on port 8181, and the reporting services installation doesn't prompt you to determine which website you wish to use.

Attempt #1:

I ran the installation CD as well as the SP1 CD. Everything went fine, no errors, nothing. I open up IE, point my browser to http://localhost:8181/Reports and nothing happens. I get a 404 error. Hmm, what could be wrong? Okay, so I open up IIS management, and much to my amazement, there sits 2 websites. The first default one being my main website running on port 8181. There exists another default website (yes they are named the same) which is running on port 80, and guess what...it has the 2 virtual directories Reports and ReportServer.

Okay, so I manually add virtual directories (configuring them the same) to my port 8181 website, remove the port 80 website and refresh the browser. This time it prompts me for a user, however when it does go through its normal ASP.NET startup, it gives me some nasty error.

Okay, so I figured if reporting services installed everything on a port website, it'll look for a port 80 website to uninstall the virtual directories. So I change the ports to port 80 on my port 8181 site. Uninstall went smoothly, and everything was gone.

Attempt #2:

So after the uninstall, I figured I'll just leave the website at port 80 until after install. So thats what I do...I install reporting services and SP1 all over again. This time, the 2 virtual directories are created in the proper website...yay! Okay, so I test things out in the browser using port 80...things look good, awesome! Time to change that port back to 8181...done. Refresh the browser for 8181, and what do I see? Well that nasty error message has creeped back up. Okay, so its gotta be something in the configuration...

I open up file explorer, and browse to c:\program files\microsoft sql server\mssql\reporting services\reportmanager and notice that there are 3 config files. I start with web.config...hmm, nothing looks like what I want there...okay, onto the next config. I open up RSWebApplication.config and what do I see? Well, there's a XML element with a URL to the report server sitting right there...and it had http://<ServerName>/ReportServer sitting there. So, I change that to http://<URL>:8181/ReportServer, save the config file and open up IE again. Refresh the page, and whammo, things are working again.

So, I guess the moral of this story is be cautious on how your server is setup with Reporting Services. I also find it quite odd that URLs are hard-coded within configuration files, and that its highly dependent on those for usability. To me, this doesn't seem flexible for users who didn't know what they were doing.