New Phrase: Smells Like Mountain Oysters To Me

I suggest the casual usage of a new phrase: smells like mountain oysters to me.

What does it mean? Roughly, it means someone's trying to make you look like an fool, possibly in front of others, but definitely for their own gain. It could also simply mean someone's trying to feed you a line of bullshit.

Would you eat a bull's testicles? Neither would I, but that's what mountain oysters are. The thought of that makes me want to vomit. No one should be eating anyone else's balls. Ever. Calling them "mountain oysters" is so ridiculously misleading to me that it makes me want to punch your mom.

By the way, if you're reading this and you would eat them, stop reading my fucking blog and never ever come back.

So....

The next time you suspect someone's trying to get you to do something and you think they're withholding key information, smells like mountain oysters to me.

The next time someone's asking you questions and you think they're going to use the information against you in some way, smells like mountain oysters to me.

The next time you think someone's intentionally trying to lead you into making a bad decision to advance their own goals or just to entertain himself, smells like mountain oysters to me.

Fiddler, Localhost, and Visual Studio

When you're running a site through Visual Studio's internal web server, Fiddler doesn't pick up the traffic. The help documentation gives a few tips for working around this problem, but the one that worked for me I found on Loren Halvorson's blog: add a dot [.] after localhost and before the port colon.

http://localhost.:2951/

Props to Loren.

XQuery Link-Love

Hi there.

I recently received some link-love from Pete Aven (Twitter, Blog) for some XQuery and MarkLogic Server posts I have here. The posts are kind of out-dated at this point, but I leave them up in case they help someone out. When I was just starting out, this kind of information was invaluable to me so I'm just trying to pay it forward.

I'm currently on a big SQL Server based project and my last MarkLogic project had some hellish deadlines that didn't leave much time for posting newer bits. With a little luck the next project I have lined up will bring me back into the XQuery/MarkLogic fold!

In the meantime, read Pete's blog and the other bloggers he has listed here.

TinyGet and URL Parameters

TinyGet is still a tool I use for some quick and dirty load testing, but I never needed to pass it URL parameters before. Simply adding an amerpsand was failing. The trick is escape it with the ^ character.

tinyget -srv:mydomain.com -uri:/Search/Results?q=food^&pIndex=5 -loop:10

Thanks to the folks on the IIS forums for their help!

Quick Console App to Ping a Server

This is based mostly off of something in the Microsoft documentation. It's just a quick hack to let me know when a remote server comes back up.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  Ping pingSender = new Ping();
  PingOptions options = new PingOptions();
  // Create a buffer of 32 bytes of data to be transmitted.
  string data = "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa";
  byte[] buffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(data);
  int timeout = 120;
  //PingReply reply = pingSender.Send(args[0], timeout, buffer, options);
  PingReply reply = pingSender.Send("server.domain.com", timeout, buffer, options);
  for (; ; )
  {
   if (reply.Status == IPStatus.Success)
   {
    Console.WriteLine("Address: {0}", reply.Address.ToString());
    for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) Console.WriteLine("\a");
    // Or System.Media.SystemSounds.Beep.Play();
    // Or Console.Beep();
    break;                    
   }
   else
   {
    Console.WriteLine("Failed " + System.DateTime.Now);
    Thread.Sleep(30000);
   }
  }
 Console.ReadKey();
}