I’ve done something I’ve never done before, I pre-ordered a book!

Book: The Lost Symbol
Author: Dan Brown
Link: The Lost Symbol

I hurried home from work, my package arrived on the release date from Amazon, and began reading Dan Brown’s third book in his Robert Langdon’s series.
I enjoyed it. It was a fun read, and like expected it was action packed. I didn’t like the last 50 pages. The story for all intent and purposes ends with 50 pages to spare. He then proceeds to wrap up a few loose ends but it takes about 40 pages too long.

The story was good, it took a few twists and turns, and if you’re like me, you may be able to guess a few ahead of time.

It probably ranks third compared to The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons.

I did enjoy that the book had me googling several references in the book to buildings in Washington, DC and art work. I kept checking google’s rank to see if others were doing it on release day, didn’t see anyone else.

In a final note, I love the research Dan Brown completes in his books, all the computer related sections were fairly on mark (a short section with a hacker). I like when authors do not embellish computer interaction in their novels.

Every once in a great while I need to just return the date of a date time and forget about the time part of it.

SELECT CAST(FLOOR(CAST(getDate() AS FLOAT)) AS DATETIME) as MyDate

Obviously you can replace getDate() with a column.

Recently upgraded my WinXP 32 bit to Win 7 64 bit. There’s been a few bumps in the road, and here’s one that cost me about an hour:

Sometimes I like to publish a website to the local IIS to be able to use it independent of visual studio.

So I went to Build -> Publish “ProjectName”

Put in http://localhost/projectname like I did on Windows XP.

No such luck, I need to be administrator of IIS metabase or front page extensions need to be installed.

So I did the Run As Administrator. Still nothing. I don’t think there is front page extensions anymore, nor do I really want to install them, so I cross that off.

I had to do the following:

Make sure IIS management studio is installed, then create a web site. Give it a unique ip or port number. I used 8080 as my port number.

THEN, I could publish to http://localhost:8080

So far so good. But when I go to the site, i receive:

Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Data’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

So I checked the .NET version, (Tip: That’s under Application Pools in IIS7, not under the site). It was set to 2.0, so that wasn’t it.

A little googling indicated it’s probably my project was a 32 bit app, and I was using a 64bit web server. Great. I didn’t wanna change the project because it works in production, so I don’t wanna mess with anything.

After some research and some good luck, I figured out how to make both work:

1. In IIS management studio, go to your computer (the top most node)

2. Run the Configuration Editor under Management.

3. Under Section select, System.ApplicationHost/ApplicationPools

4. Expand applicationPoolDefaults

5. Set Enable32bitApponWin64 to True.

!! Just like that it worked. You mileage may vary. I was expecting to atleast have to tell the application pool it was 32 bit, but I was surprised I avoided that step.

Well, that’s another transition to Windows 7 I survived, I’m still waiting for the big one.

I’m a big fan of Steve Czaban’s national radio show, but unlike his other foxsports brethen, his shows are not podcasted.

Looks like a station in L.A. has answered my prayers:

http://www.am570radio.com/cc-common/podcast/single_podcast.html?podcast=steveczaban.xml

Commerical Free! It’s going to be a sad day if this ever goes away.  Now I can catch the first two hours after i get to work.

Want to run the latest version of the excellent open source game freecol?

Here’s how on windows:

1. Make sure you have Java SE/ jdk installed, http://java.sun.com/new2java/downloads/index.jsp

2. Download and install ANT. http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi

3. Make a directory for freecol source to reside.

Now, whenever I want to run freecol, I made this little .bat file to ensure I have the latest version:

cd “C:\freecol_svn”

set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_13

set ANT_HOME=C:\ant\bin

svn co https://freecol.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/freecol/freecol/trunk trunk

cd trunk

C:\ant\bin\ant clean

C:\ant\bin\ant

java -Xmx256M -jar FreeCol.jar –windowed

enjoy!