I recently spent some time building an install package for a web application using WiX. There are some nice IIS extensions for WiX to help with that, but they’re missing the ability to set some advanced properties, like an Application Pool’s “Enable 32 Bit Applications” property.
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The National Security Agency (NSA) has a video about their polygraph testing, which was critiqued by AntiPolygraph.org, and recently reported about on Slashdot. In 1991, while still a college student, I applied for a summer internship with the NSA, so I got to take one of these tests myself. The official results were “inconclusive”, but I think they suspected that I was secretly gay.

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The Windows MessageBox is really convenient to use. A single line of code gets you a dialog box with a caption, a message, an icon and a set of available buttons that cover a lot of possible input scenarios. Unfortunately, the text on the buttons is supplied by the system, so if you’re building an application that is intended to be localized, you invariably end up with something that looks like a bug.

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I kept getting a message from Visual Studio 2008 when opening a solution saying:

This solution contains a web site at ‘http://localhost/Services’. There is already a web site at this location on this computer. Do you wish to use this existing location for your web site (existing files will be overwritten)?

It looks like the (one?) cause is a corrupt solution file.

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Despite the fact that I earn a living with technology, and that even many of my leisure hours are spent in front of a computer, I’m feeling especially consumed by technology lately. By “consumed” I mean more of the “waste or burn away” sense.

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Maybe I’ve just imagined this — created my own straw man to take down — but I’ve sometimes sensed some disparagement of user interface programming. “It’s just UI,” the architect will say. “It’s not like it’s a hard or interesting part of the system.” As I’ve done more and more UI development lately, I’ve had to consider if this is the direction I want my career to go.
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So shortly after crowing about how cheaply I was getting cell phone service, I’ve sailed headlong into the rocks of an $80 a month smart phone plan. In spite of all the Android buzz of late, I went with the Palm Pre.

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I frequently say, only half-jokingly, that printers are evil. Actually I love my HP LaserJet 1320, but my Canon Pixma 620 is just plain E-V-I-L.

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