Lance's Whiteboard

Lala is a recently launched service to help individuals list their music CD library to enable them to trade them with other users.

The website is a nice AJAX mash-up with what is essentially just a db of CD covers and users who either own or want them.

How does this work? The site is free to register, but they make their money by charging a transaction fee.   Each trade costs each user $1.49 (1$ fee + $.49 shipping) and there is no middleman.


What makes me sad is that I had come up with a strikingly similar concept several years ago with a coworker, but we could not get it past the prototype stage due to lack of time to work on it....sigh chalk that up with yet another lost opportunity...but great work by LaLa!

While doing some asp.net dev today I needed to hack my hosts file so I could mimic a live website.  However after modifying my hosts file it didnt seem to affect things.  I figured there was some kind of DNS caching going on, which prompted me to remember this handy Windows command-line tool:

    ipconfig /flushdns

Similarly, the other night I ran into a port-80 conflict that was preventing IIS from operting properly so I used this command to find which apps were listening on Port 80:

    netstat -a -b -v

Hopefully this blog post will save me the time it took for me to dig-around and find these tools again...

First Notebook With NAND Solid State Disk Announced:

The days of notebooks with spinning hard disk drives are going to come an end. Samsung hopes to start the demise of hard disk drives this June when they launch the first solid state disk in their Q30 notebook this June.

Dirk is going to dominate tonight....

Prediction:   Mavericks win by 8!

    It took me a while to remember where the MetaWeblogAPI went in CS 2.x, so here is the url in case anyone else is trying to get their favorite blog-posting tool to work with the newly revamped weblogs.asp.net site:

Like many of the newer cell phones, my new Samsung A950 doubles as a mp3 player (well really just WMA) via MicroSD (aka TransFlash) memory.  However most of the compatible memory on the market right now is only available in 1gb or less.   This product from US Modular looks like just the ticket to work around this limitation!

US Modular - Product Page:

US Modular’s Stik&StorTM cell phone memory upgrades come in densities up to 4GB--which means you can store up to eight times the data, music, photos and video currently possible with any TransFlashTM or MicroSDTM upgrades. Fits Motorola, Samsung, Kyocera, and any other phone with a TransFlashTM or microSDTM slot. It all means more freedom, more fun and less hassle for the millions who know cell phones aren’t just for talkin’. Rock on!

I was trying to access a blog post while the weblogs.asp.net site was down over the weekend, and remembered this resource for grabbing old versions of websistes:

Archives of Dead Web Pages: Wayback, Cache, and More:

Finding Old Web Pages -  The Web changes constantly, and sometimes that page that had just the information you needed yesterday (or last month or two years ago) is not available today. At other times you may want to see how a page's content or design has changed. There are several sources for finding Web pages as they used to exist.

Read more...

I have been following this project from a distance, but am starting to like their idea of an end-to-end guidance for Web Service development.  The P&P team recently announced the release of the VS2005-integrated "Guidance Package" to help you implement their proscribed best practices:

patterns & practices: Service Factory: Home:

We have just released our May Community release of the Web Service Software Factory to our GotDotNet community - http://practices.gotdotnet.com/projects/svcfactory. Highlights of this release include: - Updates to our base WCF guidance package based on your feedback - An entire guidance package dedicated to securing your services using - X.509 certificates - Kerberos - Direct authentication using Windows, ADAM, or SQL - A MEX based policy generator to help you secure your client applications - A partially complete Interop configurator to help you apply security policy based on your interop requirements - Improved documentation including: - A Service Factory navigator to help you navigate the documentation and the Service Factory - Extensive documentation to support the security guidance package - Documentation for customizing your own guidance packages - A new reference implementation - Based on feedback from our community we have applied a slightly different combination of patterns. Take a look and let us know what you think.