Jason Mauss' Blog Cabin

Since I almost exclusively use an aggregator these days to get my info from the web, I'm probably late noticing this. Anyhow, I just noticed today that foO implemented a pretty cool blog archive search on his site. Go to the 'Live Search' area of the home page and type in your search and watch the page dynamically return search results right underneath! Pretty awesome, I think. So seeing this got me thinking, "What other cool applications are there for XmlHttpRequest?" We've already seen it used for e-mail (and spell-checking) with GMail and OddPost. We've seen it used for type-ahead with Google's Suggest, and now search results on foO's page. Does anybody know if MSN Web Messenger is powered by XmlHttpRequest?

Started out the week solving a mysterious problem. Come to find out that on our web server (running IIS) that port 80 was being used by some other process than inetinfo.exe. Trying to start IIS yielded the "Address already in use" message. At first I tried netstat -an but that didn't give me anything very useful. Next I ran TDIMon to see which processes was blocking port 80. It turned out to be mswmi.exe . I have no idea how that happened. I don't think we got hacked but, I could be wrong. So I went to Task Manager to kill mswmi.exe but it wouldn't let me. "Access denied", as they say. So I ran ActivePorts 1.4 which confirmed that it was indeed mswmi.exe blocking port 80, but, more importantly, allowed me to kill the process and start the website so that inetinfo.exe could bind to port 80 again.

I don't mean houses, I mean websites.

Part of the reason I've been so quiet on the blog lately is that work has picked up in an exciting way. Our product, EVS, which is already in production use now at Exelon, has been given the green light to be put in at another big company. I'm not sure if I can mention the company name because of NDA's we've signed with them about the implementation, but they are a very large leader in the aerospace industry.

Rocky is one of my favorite writers, so it's not much of a surprise that he's the man behind an interesting article on TheServerSide.NET entitled "The Fallacy of the Data Layer" that discusses SOA, service boundaries and much more.

Reading over at Scoble's blog the reaction by some about the MSN Search thing...

Joel Spolsky talks about Google is really making cool stuff with the XmlHttpRequest technique. He says:

I've had a lot of really spiritual and religious experiences lately (not because it's Christmas) so it's kind of appropriate that I thought up this new line: