Robert Robbins

Over the long weekend I made some excellent progress in my online video production work. I managed to significantly improve the quality of my YouTube videos and I explored Microsoft Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming.

Today I've just realized that the vast majority of my work has been customizing shipping rules. You'll never be out of work if you specialize in shipping rules. Businesses can never seem to accept the default shipping options and software cannot be designed with a fully configurable shipping rule system. All ecommerce shopping carts try to make the shipping options configurable but they simply can't accommodate all the special needs for pricing and shipping a wide variety of products.

I'm back from a fantastic vacation, the first YouCruise, a Carnival cruise organized by YouTube vloggers. I will blog about the cruise extensively elsewhere but I do think it is appropriate to write about the social computing aspects here.

I've been struggling to solve a file lock problem with some files I send as email attachments. I finally solved the problem by creating my documents in memory and sending the email attachment from a memory stream. This eliminated the need to write a file to disk and delete it later. I didn't find any sample code that did exactly what I wanted so I'll share the code I finally came up with.

Today I got wind of a new book that makes me laugh, "Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers: Riding the IT Crest" by Ed Burns. This book has not been published yet but based on the clues I would guess it focuses on Java programmers. I thought "rock star programmers" only used Ruby On Rails.

Today I learned several things that were "noteworthy" so I might as well share my knowledge. Whenever I learn something new in the course of my work I add it to my massive collection of notes.

I have managed to restore my WordPress blog by taking advantage of search engine caches. This is a good opportunity to review the lessons learned during an unexpected hosting company snafu.

I've been migrating a classic ASP web application to ASP.NET 2.0. I'm converting the existing user management system to the ASP.NET 2.0 profile, roles, and membership API because it is the new standard. However, I have been frustrated by the lack of a back end user management system. Microsoft provided the Web Site Administration Tool which can be invoked in Visual Studio during development but you can't use that as part of your web application management back end. There really should have been a pre-built user management tool to include in your project.