Identity Interface

I was browsing codeplex, and I came across this really cool application.

SameDesk is an X windows for the browser environment, it allows for opening multiple web sites in a single browser window. It gives the user the ability to drag, minimize, maximize, etc. browser windows as if they were windowed applications.

I am always amazed at what people can do with just javascript and html.

This is some pretty cool stuff and the beta comes out soon. I can’t wait to see where this great project goes.

I must be cool, because the beastie boys sent me an email.

hi…
here’s a few things you might wanna know about..

see you soon….beastie boys

Over the past 2 years my primary media player has been Itunes. For some reason the other day I thought it would be nice to check out winamp again.

Some of the reason that I like winamp.

1. Smart Views

Beyond just having playlists you can have filtered views.  You can build whatever kind of  query that you want.

Example: audio by Air longer than 4 minutes: type = 0 & artist = “air” & length > 4:00

These are an incredibly powerful way to segregate arrange your music.

2. Audio CDs

You can make audio cd’s from within winamp.  Just drag some songs on the CD and voila and audio cd for your friends.

3. It can sync pretty much any type of media player including ipod.

4. It is winamp and not apple.

Need I say more:)

I started using subsonic a couple of weeks ago.

I have really been impressed about how easy it is to setup and use.

A few lines in your web.config, a reference to their dll, and .vbp file with the tables in it is all a person needs to get going with this time saving framework.

 During the first build it will go out and produce classes for each of the tables. 

There is a class for each table as well a collection for each table.

Making a site that does some simple database stuff is made much easier using this framework.

I just recently found out that Becker goes through about one train car of coal per day.

Man that is a lot of coal.

From Wyoming Coal

The typical coal train is 100 to 110 cars long-a mile of coal! Each hopper car holds 100 tons of coal which lasts only 20 minutes fueling a power plant. Bigger surface mines may load two or three Unit Trains of coal a day. Currently, eighty trains leave Wyoming every day. In 1999 we shipped out 25,882 trains. That’s 25,882 miles of coal-more than the circumference of the earth.

One unit train can keep a city of 3,000 households (10,000 people) in electricity for a year. How many trains (or cars) would it take to fuel the generators for your town?

I guess Becker only through 4 unit trains per year.

There must be a bunch of power plants on this particular rail line, because I think I see a unit train about once a week. Then again I don’t really pay attention to how often I see trains.

Well technically everyone else’s power got more expensive.

They are moving the fuel surcharge out, and making it an itemized charge instead of an adjustment.

So now I will pay less for my power.

And they announced they are green-e certified

Looks like everyone should go with wind:)

I just noticed that when I type an invalid address my isp, Charter Communications is showing me their own 404 page.

It has search results from yahoo, along with several search suggestions.

404 Products are pretty common as malware applications. They sit on your computer and watch all of your traffic, once they see a 404 they display their own page. Charter is now doing the same, everytime they see me hitting a 404 page they direct me to their page with a nice search suggestion.

http://www11.charter.net/search?qo=www.dxfdsfsdfas.com&rn=MZ_sFDrRNyrkhw5

It makes perfect sense, but at the same time if they are going to make money off of me, they should at least give me a portion of the cost savings.

Instead they give 768kbps at a 1.5Mbps price, and for the people that have a 3.0Mbps you are just getting 1.5Mbps. Giant rip off.

The City of St. Cloud gave Charter a nice gift by allowing them to buy Astound and create a complete cable monopoly. The only choice I have is Clearwire, which does not work at all in my apartment, and Qwest.

I have heard good things about DSL, s0 I think I will go that route.

The next step is for charter to send you to their search page every time you type in google, maybe give a helpful message like you typed “google” did you mean to type in “charter”

This past weekend I discovered the Superior Hiking trail makes it way through Duluth.

By Spirit Mountain there is a gorgeous Vista overlooking the St. Louis River as it makes it ways to Lake Superior.

A muddy hike but well worth the view.

I really like the concept of common table expressions, but I don’t think I am using them in the right way.

 I have a rather large query, it has several joins in each subquery and then the subqueries are joined together.

So I thought I would use three Common Table Expressions in the query and then join the CTE’s together.

Whenever I try to use mulitple CTE’s in the same stored procedure these are the errors I receive.

Msg 156, Level 15, State 1, Line 40

That is the error when I have two CTE’s right next to each other.
For some reason I just can’t add a semicolon to the end of one.
I have to add another statement with a semicolon

Invalid object name ‘CTE_Two’.

This error is what happens when I access a CTE that was before a previous semicolon.

So I guess we can only use one CTE per execution thread.

I can understand why this happens, and know that I should probably just write shorter queries.
I just think it would be nice to be able to use a bunch of these CTE’s in the same Stored Procedure so other programmers can understand how these giant queries are working.