One of my projects involves changes to text files and quite often recycle of the application pool. Generally this means going the long way of opening the IIS Manager, going to the application pool node, right clicking on the app pool and selecting recycle, but there is a quicker way. You can create a shortcut in the quick launch area of the task bar that recycles a specific application pool.
Blog
During the course of the day I encounter lots of challenges, some of which take minutes to solve and others that take much longer. My goal for this section is to keep track of these challenges and their solutions. I will turn the longer ones into articles, while the shorter ones will stay as blog entries. You can expect topics to range from very specific programming challenges to broader topics like life.
Below is a list of the recent blog entries. You can also browse the blog by using the tags on the right side, or if you know what you are looking for then you can use the search box at the top right.
How to Quickly Recycle an IIS Application Pool
Random Slowdown of Browsers in OS X Mountain Lion
Recently I noticed a random slowdown of browsing speed. I first thought that it was my browser, Google Chrome, that was the culprit. So, I switch to Safari, but that behaved similarly. I switched to Firefox, which, at first, seemed to be much faster, but after a bit of use it started slowing down randomly.
One place where Apple is blowing Google/Android out of the water
With the recent iPhone 5 release we are seeing quite a few comparisons between Apple and Google, Samsung, Nokia among others. All the technical specs aside, there is one thing where Apple is literally blowing all the other competition out of the water. And that is, with their control over the cellphone providers (AT&T, Verizon, etc.). Let me explain what I mean.
Nice, cellphone manufacturers are finally starting to pay attention to battery
I just read that Tech Crunch had a post showing the Motorola Droid Razr HD pictures. Most of the specs aren’t something that we haven’t seen already, but what did catch my eye was the battery size. The rumor is that it will have a 3,300mAh battery! Compare that to the 2,100mAh battery that the current Samsung Galaxy S3 has.
According to this post if the S3 with it’s screen set to 50% brightness lasts about 8h:26m then this phone should last about 13h:15m (3300/2100 * 8.43 = 13.25). That’s generally the most that I can get out of my S2 (1,650mAh batterY) with it’s screen off!
I hate the fact that whenever I use my phone to it’s fullest (e.g. using GPS) my first concern ends up being the battery life. So, I am very happy to see that manufacturers are finally starting to pay attention to the battery life.
Differences between buying from Amazon Wireless and Verizon direct
I have been looking into switching my cellphone services providers from Sprint to Verizon because 1) Sprint has really slow data service in my area, and 2) Verizon has 4G LTE coverage. Anyways, as I started looking around for options I noticed that Amazon Wireless had pretty good prices for phones with 2-year contracts (who can beat $0.01 for Galaxy Nexus ?). I knew there had to be a catch, but I wasn’t able to find much about the differences online.
Shady T-Mobile Comparison
This is just not cool. T-Mobile is comparing a Samsung Galaxy S3 on a 4G connection to a Verizon iPhone, which only supports 3G. What’s even worst is that they classify this as a 4G connection comparison. Seriously, T-mobile, you are being shady to the extreme.
I am currently on Sprint, and I am in the market for a better service provider (slow data speeds). I was looking at T-Mobile for a bit, but such shady marketing practices just screams trouble down the road.
Honestly, I am sad at the current state of carriers in the US. I was pretty much settled on Verizon, but their recent practice of locking the boot loader on the S3 really disappointed me.
Using sed to batch rename files
Image Resize for Windows is a handy utility for batch resizing images. I use that for batch resizing pictures, but the only thing about the resized pictures is that it puts “ (Custom)” or whatever size you specify in the filename. To rename the resized files you can use sed (if you have cygwin on Windows) to easily rename these files to what pattern you need. To do this a command like the following will do. This specific version will replace
find . -iname \*Custom\* | sed -e 's/\(.*\)\( (Custom)\)\(.*\)/mv "\0" "\1_small\3"/' | sh
Disclaimer: There are a gazillion ways to achieve this goal; this is just one of them.
“The Next Bing Thing Is Here,” but please be aware (especially Sprint customers)
TLDR; If you care about Android OS updates don’t get the Samsung S3, especially on Sprint. You will get Jelly Bean in a few months, but you can forget about whatever the next version is going be. You will have to shell out full price for whatever “The Next Big Samsung Thing” will be at the time.
Delete-from-disk upgraded to support Songbird 2.0
FYI, I have updated my delete-from-disk extension for Songbird to support Songbird version 2.0. Check out the project page for details.
See the dots connect looking backwards? What about focus?
So, Steve Jobs said “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” But if you are focused (i.e. doing what’s relevant to the end goal, assuming you have one) then shouldn’t the dots be connecting in some way as you proceed, otherwise, you are doing it wrong? Or is it that only after a certain point in life the dots need to start connecting?