Testing Geolocation Locally with Chrome and URIs with file://

If you need to test geolocation in Chrome using local files -- where your URL is going to start with file:// -- you need to throw a switch when you start Chrome.

--allow-file-access-from-files

If you're a Launchy user like me, you can do this by starting to type Chrome, hitting Tab, then pasting in that switch.

This issue is documented and tracked here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=13009

Freeware and Shareware Tools

I'll always forget about some of these tools primarily because I don't use all of them all of the time.

• ASP.NET / Visual Studio-related
  
  • Ankh
  • Castle Windsor
  • CruiseControl.NET
  • ELMAH
  • Enterprise Library
  • FxCop
  • GhostDoc
  • JustDecompile
  • Log4Net
  • NAnt
  • NArrange
  • NCover
  • NHibernate
  • NuGet
  • NUnit
  • PowerCommands
  • Productivity Power Tools
  • Reflector
  • ReSharper
  • Sandcastle
  • StyleCop
  • TestDriven.NET
• BitKinex
• CLRProfiler
• ColorPic
• DAEMON Tools Lite (mounting CDs)
• Dexpot (multiple Windows desktops)
• Eclipse
• eXist-db
• FeedDemon
• Fiddler2 and Fil
• FileZilla
• Firefox
• Add n Edit Cookies
• BetterPrivacy
• Firebug
• Flashblock
• Google Gears
• HTTPS-Everywhere
• Live HTTP Headers
• SQLite Manager
• Web Developer Toolbar
• YSlow
• FreeMind
• gVim (been good at opening *really* large text files)
• GNUWin32 tools
• HTTrack Website Copier
• IETester
• IISPeek
• IrfanView
• IZArc
• Launchy
• MarkLogic Server
• Mercurial
• Notepad++
• OpenProject
• Oxygen XML Editor
• Paint.NET
• PasswordSafe
• Pidgin
• PowerShell
• Process Explorer
• PuTTY
• Remote Desktop
  • Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection Manager
  • visionapp Remote Desktop
• Saxon
• Selenium
• Skype
• SQLite
• Sublime Text 2
• Package Control
• Export HTML
• Format SQL
• JsFormat
• Terminal
• sumatraPDF
• Textml Server
• TinkerTool (Mac)
• Tor
• TortoiseSVN
• Unison (Mac)
• Unlocker
• VirtualBox
• VisualSVN Server
• Web Application Test (WAPT)
• WebStorm from JetBrains
• WinMerge
• XAMPP
• XVI32
• 7-Zip
• Audio and video tools
• Audacity
• Handbrake
• videoLAN
• XLD
• Chrome JSON Formatter
• Chrome Postman
• Charles Proxy

Launchy, Remote Desktop, Dual Monitors, and Windows 7

I've come to love Launchy -- to the point where I get irritated when it's not installed on a machine I might be working on temporarily.

Unfortunately, when I setup my new machine, I suddenly could not trigger Launchy while using my preferred remote desktop application, visionapp Remote Desktop. I'm not sure if it was my new dual-monitor configuration or Windows 7, but every time I hit Alt+Space it would trigger Launchy on my machine no matter what I did. This was not a problem on XP with a single monitor.

The work-around I found was to change the hotkey combination on the remote machine. I simply changed it to Ctrl+Alt+Space and it worked perfectly! Wish I thought of that sooner!

Stop All Visual Studio Web Applications From Starting When Debugging

If you have a Visual Studio solution with more than one web application project, when you start the debugger you'll likely find that all the web applications will start their own ASP.NET Development Server instance.

I wanted to stop that because I didn't need them all to start and I wanted to keep the system resources. Select the web application project. Go to the properties tab. Find the "Always Start When Debugging" option and set it to False.

A Little URL Rewriting with Managed Fusion Rewriter

I'm stuck on IIS 6 for now and I needed to do a bunch of URL rewriting. No one wants to spend money these days, so we didn't spring for the Helicon ISAPI_Rewrite product. I have a lot of legacy URLs to handle, but we won't keep them in place for more than a year and by that time we'll likely be on IIS 7 with its own rewriting tools.

I went with the Managed Fusion Rewriter tool both for its promised flexibility and the fact that it used the Apache mod_rewrite syntax.

I like it, but I ran into a few quirks I thought I'd pass along.

First, if you're using RewriteCond and trying to grab query string parameter values, %1 will hold the name/value pair. %2 will hold the value you're probably looking for. If you have multiple values you're catching you would just continue to increment -- %3, %4, etc. Here's an example that works as I expected it:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^lessonid=([0-9]+)$
RewriteRule ^/Explore/KeyQuestions.aspx$ /Analyze/Display/%2 [R=301,NC,L]

Second, in mod_rewrite you can apparently stack multiple RewriteCond one on top of another. I was not able to get it to work with this tool.

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.

Add XQuery Support to UltraEdit

Leave it to the team that works on UltraEdit to make adding XQuery support easy.

Here's a tutorial on adding a language.

Here's the XQuery wordfile they provide.

Done in about 15 seconds.  Nice.

New XQuery Component for SyntaxHighlighter

I created an XQuery component for Alex Gorbatchev's SyntaxHighlighter, which you see in use with my XQuery snippets on this blog.

I've asked Alex to add it to the download package, but you can also download it from my site.

Add Syntax Highlighting to Your Blogger Blog

Here are a couple of good links to help you add syntax highlighting to your Blogger blog.

1. The source in Google's code base.
2. A "Yet Another Coding Blog" article.
3. An alternate blog post in case one goes dark.
   

Free Information Retrieval Book Available

Introduction to Information Retrieval published by Cambridge University Press is available free online. Many thanks to the authors for this. They say it will remain free after the book is published. I may grab a copy of the PDFs...just in case.

Just reading the introduction makes me wish I paid more attention in math. I wonder if there are any math textbooks available on USENET? ;-)

The Time Stamp of Your IIS Logs is Not Wrong

Looking at your IIS server logs and wondering why the time stamp doesn't seem to reflect the actual server time? If you have IIS set to write the logs in W3C extended log file format, the date is always in GMT. Microsoft does have a knowledge base article on this.

Here's a GMT conversion chart for the United States.

List of APIs

Here's a list of APIs that seems to be updated regularly.

I always feel like I should be doing more to make mashups with these as I work on new products.

Another Great List of Development Tools

Scott Hanselman has a great list of development tools on his blog. It's so easy to forget about some of these.

Web Development Toolbox

Mashable has a very handy list of web devleopment tools. Check it out. They have several other lists on different topics that are equally interesting, too.

TortoiseSVN Icon Overlays Disappearing in Windows Explorer

We're using TortoiseSVN as a Subversion client for Windows and it's been great, but the icon overlays that appear in Windows Explorer have suddenly started to disappear. What's really strange is that they may appear at the top-most directory, but disappear when you drill down.

I haven't found the root cause yet, but here's how to get them back.

1. Open the Task Manager. Find TSVNCache.exe and click End Process.
2. Shutdown and then restart Windows Explorer. Go to Start > Shutdown. Hold down the Shift+Alt keys and then click the Cancel button. To bring up the Task Manager, hold down the Ctrl+Shift keys and then click Esc. Now, in the Task Manager, go to File > New Task and type in explorer.exe. Supposedly, this is the "proper" way to kill and restart the Windows Explorer process.

Others have reported similar problems. See http://svn.haxx.se/tsvn/archive-2007-01/0190.shtml for one example.

UPDATE: In XP Pro, all I needed to do was end TSVNCache.exe and then I could refresh Windows Explorer and the overlays came back.

Web Design Toolbox

Mashable had a pretty handy list of web design tools and I'm sure there are plenty more in the comments.

http://mashable.com/2007/07/24/web-design/

A$$hole Driven Development

Scott Berkun has a funny post all of the different development methodologies out there. I'd say where I'm working now is somewhere between...

Development By Denial (DBD): Everybody pretends there is a method for what’s being done, and that things are going ok, when in reality, things are a mess and the process is on the floor. The worse things get, the more people depend on their denial of what’s really happening, or their isolation in their own small part of the project, to survive.

…and…

Shovel-Driven Development: Get it out the door as quickly as possible, cut-n-paste from anything that you find that works on Google, if it works it’s ready. Closely related to “Duct-tape Driven Design”

…with a healthy smattering of…

Decapitated Chicken Process: A time honored micromanagement technique where each day managers identify a drastic emergency and require developers drop what they are doing (and whatever process they are using) and immediately attend to the latest conflagration. Since this does the double duty of creating new bugs and making other tasks fall behind, fires become easier and easier for managers to spot and then freak out about. Practically a standard in the games industry.

Sad, but true.

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2007/asshole-driven-development/

Installing TortiseSVN after Installing and Configuring WordPress

If you have WordPress installed and running successfully on a Windows server, then you install the TortiseSVN client, and then you export a block of code from Subversion, you may notice that the WordPress admin UI can no longer save edited presentation files. I found that the TortiseSVN install removed the IIS guest user account I had allowed on the themes directory, changing the permissions on that directory back to what they were originally, so it had to be added back to allow access.

Odd.

Firefox and Internet Explorer Development Tools

I always lose this, so here's the list of Firefox extensions I'm using

• DOM Inspector
• Firebug
• Flashblock
• Header Monitor
• Live HTTP Headers
• Web Developer
• XML Developer Toolbar

On Internet Explorer, I have the IE Developer Toolbar