Where I’m @

20070703

Making IIS Play Nice with Apple Media
Naturally, IIS 6.0 does not serve certain media by default. Notably, it does not serve MP4 or M4V files OOTB. Once again, it pays to let other people solve your problems for you. We didn’t even need to think about the solution, much less come up with a working one. The same answer was in a posting to a low-traffic French forum and on the Apple Streaming Servers Users mailing list. While taking this approach doesn’ build our hardcore 1337 geek skillz, it does get the job done.

Labels: GRB, iis, media, streaming, webservers

20061129

Scratching Our Head So Much, We’re Going Bald
Not that we’ve studied it carefully or anything, but we really find ourselves not understanding the .NET GAC. On our development box, we naturally have no trouble building and running our various web applications. Like every good developer, we muck about with our dev box so much we could never untangle the strands and replicate the environment faithfully. However, we’re still not sure why we had to register the MySQL Connector dll on our integration server (and here we use the word “server” loosely). We included the appropriate dll file in what seemed to be all the appropriate places, but kept getting the dread error about how the “manifest definition . . . does not match”. We took a look at the GAC on the integration server using gacutil, saw that the MySQL Connector was not listed, and figured we’d just stick it in the GAC. That did the trick, but we’re still not sure why it was not working before.

Labels: .net, coding, frustration, GRB, microsoft

20061128

A Power Together Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand
There is a GRB marketing site that promises to send you a free fully-licensed copy of Windows Vista Business if you register for and attend 3 webcasts, as well as give GRB a name, address, and phone number. Trouble is, when we registered, we got a horrible yet typical error message: “Sorry, a System Error Occurred.” We don't particularly care about your apologies, GRB, we want our free OS! (Especially after you duped us into giving you our address, albeit a work addy.)

Labels: bait-and-switch, cheating, free stuff, GRB, microsoft, offers