*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

A few days ago I posted about registering on the Twitter web site.  Since then I’ve been sending updates from my Cingular 8525 mobile phone.  Pretty easy to do when on the road.  But now, I’m back at my desk in the office and I want to Twitter from instant message but can’t because Twitter AIM bot hates me.  

When you visit the Twitter site and click on settings they give you the Twitter IM account for AIM and then a random generated string which you send to this “bot” listening on the other end.  Once you send the secret message it verifies you are you and then of course activates AIM msgs from your user account so you can “twitter” to the AIM bot.   

Like I said the Twitter bot hates me because for the past several days I’ve been getting this error message:

Today I broke down and sent a message to Twitter.com’s technical support.  Hopefully they will respond with a sense of urgency so the world….. dare I say universe can keep up with my twittering.  I am certain they will see the world is losing valuable information by me not being able to Twitter via AIM and respond soon with the fix.

In a few minutes (about an hour to be exact) I will be speaking to an entire 7th grade class about the wonderful profession of a Software Engineer.  This is one of the speaking engagements that I have been looking forward to the most for some time.  I really do miss teaching sometimes and interacting with the kids.  This is truly going to be a fun experience getting to talk to the kids about the software industry.   I’ve got my slides prepared and my demo of building a calculator ready to go!  Quicken Loans also sent a bunch of those pop-out Frisbees.  If I start to bomb, I can always resort to passing those out and I’ll be a hit. 

For those that want to keep track of what is going on today, just hit my Twitter site.  I’ll be keeping you up to date with things as they happen. 

Today is trash day in the great Hub City of Hattiesburg.  While I was taking out the trash early this morning my phone rang.  It was an engineer at work calling to tell me that our web service in the test environment wasn’t responding.  I quickly threw my trash out and jumped on the situation.

My first question as I started to look into everything was “Who changed something?”.   Obviously computers just don’t stop magically working.  In my 15 years of dealing with computers there is always a reason.  I was of course told, no one changed anything.  Suuuuuuuuure.

I opened up my web browser and pointed it to the test environment, clicked on a web service call and typed in some bogus information hoping the service would fault, catch its exception and then log the error so I could see what was going on.  Instead I was greeted with this error:

System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: The entry ‘ExceptionPolicy’ has already been added. (C:\sites\myapp\web.config line 87)

This alerted me that this was an Enterprise Library error.  My initial reaction was the web.config file was misconfigured. I opened it up and and it appeared to be fine.  I decided to reset the config file to the one that was working on another test server and it still nothing.  Same error.  After redeploying the application and resetting IIS  still the same error.  Then it hit me what was happening.   Obviously the file was correct and worked on another server, something else must be inserting the exception policy somewhere.

We conference in one of the windows engineers and within a minute he said, yep, the configuration wasn’t right.  The way it was configured was the root folder of IIS was using the service and the virtual directory mappings were including itself twice.  Example:

http://testserver/myservice/service.asmx  => throwing the error above

http://testserver/service.asmx => worked fine

So you see the entire setup was misconfigured based on how we wanted things to be setup.  The windows engineer reconfigured everything and we were back in business.  Hopefully this will help someone else out in the future if you run into the same error.

Who says it doesn’t pay to read blogs during lunch?  Well I was just going through my blog reader while eating a Subway salad and came across Joe Healey’s find that solved his networking problem.  I also face a similar situation due to how my house is setup. 

My end goal is to have my Xbox 360 sitting in the living room and then record all of my TV shows with my main computer sitting in the home office.  I thought about running an ethernet drop over to my Xbox 360 so it could serve as a media extender but that would mean I would have to do something physical like running wires (yuck).  Sorry, that’s not going to happen. 

The reason I can’t just run the Xbox wirelessly with the G wireless adapter is I have some Mac’s on the network that can’t do anything but B wirelessly and thus it slows down the connection of the wireless router.  And no, I’m not going to spend money on the Macs to upgrade their wireless cards.  Basically if I do a network check from the Xbox 360 it tells me I suck and can’t run video with media center (even though I have a Linksys N wireless router). 

According to the reviews I started reading (and Joe’s review), the Netgear 85Mbps might be the thing I was looking for to allow me to stream video from the media center in my home office to the Xbox in the living room without the need to run wires.  Thus giving me only one device in the living room to turn on and worry with.   It would also fulfill the Xbox’s vision of taking over my living room as my main media device.   Think it’ll work?

Jeff Barnes posted an blog entry at the beginning of May whereby he was in the top 11 on http://www.Community-Credit.Com for April.   I met the sites creator, David Silverlight, at the MVP Summit in Seattle during March and I of course promised him I would sign-up as well.  Well David, after Jeff won an incredibly cool t-shirt it reminded me of my promise and to sign up as well.

After my initial May points got approved I am currently second on the site.  And yes Andre (the current leader), I’m gunning for first so watch out!

To save you the trouble of visiting the site (not that you shouldn’t) I captured a screen shot for posterity sakes in case my ranking gets bested.  Of course going off past results the odds are in favor of my second ranking falling since last month’s winner had 68,575 points.