Kevin Dente's Blog
The Blip in the Noise
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If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it
Last weekend I decided to upgrade the firmware on my US Robotics 8054 wireless router. The latest firmware (1.64b34) added WPA support, as well as bumping the speed up to 125 Mbps and improving resistence to interference. This turned out to be a bad decision. At first the upgrade looked good (aside from the fact that the upgrade dumped the entire router configuration - an ongoing issue with firmware upgrades on this router).
Things turned ugly, however, when I connected to my company's VPN over the wireless connection (it worked fine over a wired connection). After about a minute, the router would reboot itself and dropped all connections. A little Googling showed that other people have had the problem, and that there's no resolution yet. This firmware version has been out since October, so it stinks that they haven't fixed it. After downgrading to the previous version of the firmware, the problem disappeared, but I wasted almost half a day working on it.
Incidentally, there's lots of good information on various vendors' networking hardware over at Broadband Reports. I won't again make the mistake of upgrading the firmware before consulting that site for known issue. I should have known enough to check there in the first place - I had problems with firmware upgrades on my first wireless access point too.
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Microsoft's Fiddler PowerToy?
Today I ran across this article on MSDN, titled "Fiddler PowerToy - Part 1: HTTP Debugging". Now, I've been using Fiddler for ages - it's a fabulous tool. But "Microsoft Fidder"? Has it always been a Microsoft tool? Did I miss something? Near as I can figure, it was either developed by a Microsoft employee but originally delivered independently, or it was aquired by Microsoft on the down-low, Lookout style. Either way, I'm glad to see it's still being enhanced. But it caught me by surprise.
UPDATE - Omar dispels my conspiracy theories by informing me that Fiddler is (and always was) written by a MS employee. Damn you and your dose of reality, Omar. :)
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Storing network passwords in Windows
Every once in a while I run across some feature of Windows that somehow has escaped my attention over the years. Usually this realization is followed immediately by slap to the forehead, followed by wondering if I'm the last person to discover this feature. I had one of those moments this week.
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Christmas Fun
'Twas the night before Christmas,
and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring,
Especially my hot water heater,
which decided to eat itself on Christmas Eve,
the day before we host Christmas dinner for the extended family.
Naturally. -
Generics are now CLSCompliant
Woo-hoo! A while back I was complaining about generics not being CLS Compliant in .NET 2.0. Apparently the folks at MS have changed their mind. Great news. [via Richard Blewitt]
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Work with Visual Studio 2005 begins in earnest
So far most of my time spent with Visual Studoi 2005 has been just playing around. That's changing - I'm ramping up to do some serious development, 05 style, and looking forward to it.
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Visual Studio 2005 November CTP install surprise
After an interminable download, I finally installed the November CTP version of Visual Studio 2005. The first part of the install - the actual IDE - went without a hitch. The second part - MSDN Library - didn't go so well. It complained that Windows XP SP2 was a requirement for the MSDN Library install. Huh? Visual Studio doesn't require SP2, but the help does? Weird. I'm doing this all in a VM, so it's not really a problem to install SP2. It just seems like an odd requirement.
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Can someone explain why this VB.NET code fails to compile?
Imports System.ComponentModel
Public Enum Mode
Mode1
Mode2
End Enum -
ISO CD burning
Ever find yourself stuck on a Windows XP machine with only the built-in CD burning support but needing to burn an ISO image to CD? I did over the Thanksgiving. Luckily I ran across Burn-at-once. It's a nice, simple, free (donation-ware) tool that does the job nicely. Recommended.
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Google Suggests
The geek world is all a-flutter with the release of Google Suggest. My first reaction was "hey, neat". However, it quickly became clear that the hardcore tech stuff that I usually end up searching for (weird error messages that I'm trying to diagnose, or compiler errors, or things of that ilk) wasn't going to benefit much from the suggest feature. But hey, next time I'm looking for Paris Hilton's latest video, it'll be a snap.