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By John Bowen, 8 August, 2008

Earlier this week, I started receiving emails (apparently) from the folks at junkemailfilter.com. Actually, the messages are from unmonitored accounts on their mail servers, but let's not split hairs. The point is, jef is passing rejected email messages 'back' to me...apparently they're seeing (and stopping) spam messages that originated on my own mail server.

By John Bowen, 9 July, 2008

While troubleshooting what I *thought* was a problem with my Linux DHCP/DNS/File/Gateway server today, I found myself knocked off the Internet. I wrongly assumed something in the Linux box had broken (will I ever learn?) and focused there. It wasn't until I tried shutting down ZoneAlarm on my client (Windows XP Pro) machine that the Internet came back. Very weird, since ZoneAlarm didn't seem to update or anything prior to the problem.

By John Bowen, 7 July, 2008

I've been building up for a blog-rant over this issue for weeks...

"Windows recently downloaded and installed an important security update to help protect your computer. This update required an automatic restart of your computer."

That's the message you get when you leave your Windows machine sitting overnight, when Windows has downloaded something _really_ important, shut itself down, and wiped out all the work you had in progress. VERY annoying.

By John Bowen, 30 May, 2008

I've been having trouble forever with viewing some attachments in ChatterEmail on my Palm 755p; some attachments just don't appear at all. When I go to a desktop PC, the attachments appear and load just fine with Thunderbird, but Chatter can't see them.

So, I tried the OTA upgrade from within Chatter. It looked neat, said it downloaded the update and installed, but when I tried to load the application I got "The version of chatterutils on your treo is out of date" as a fatal error message.

By John Bowen, 20 May, 2008

In a moment of severe mental weakness, I couldn't remember how to assign an integer's value as a text (string) value (yes, really). I found it funny enough to write up here. Here's what I tried (this actually works!):

this.lblItemID.Text = ((int)0).ToString();

After I wrote it, I just stared at it for a few seconds, before realizing the better (and easier, and obvious) way:

this.lblItemID.Text = "0';

By John Bowen, 2 May, 2008

A favorite way for the kids to pass time in the car on long trips is to watch movies. I've thought for a while it would be better to have their DVD collection on a laptop's hard drive, instead of needing their disc folder (which always seems to end up on the floor of the car, anyway).

By John Bowen, 29 April, 2008

I can never remember how to add users to Postfix, mostly because I don't have to do it often enough to commit it to memory. Here it is...hopefully I can remember where I wrote it down next time...

These instructions assume a new user named 'new_user'. Credit to falko and his post on howtoforge for part of this code.

By John Bowen, 27 April, 2008

I had an ASP.NET form, where I wanted a quick Javascript function to un-check a CheckBox if the user changed the selection in a related DropDownList. Restated, I wanted any change in the DropDownList's selected item to clear the CheckBox. The user could then (if needed) re-check the CheckBox once they're done selecting from the DropDownList.

Adding the javascript onchange() event to the DropDownList's attributes from the ASP.NET class file turned out to be the easy part. In Page_Load():

this.ddTeams.Attributes.Add("onChange", "uncheckbox()")

By John Bowen, 27 April, 2008

Even though I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for months now, I still haven't spent much time checking some of my old (but production) code for compatibility. After taking a quick look, I can't believe customers haven't complained...

In that context, I noticed that Firefox doesn't respect the 'width' setting for the ASP.NET TextBox control. IE handles this just fine, but FireFox (and probably other browsers) just stick with the 'default' TextBox width, which is often too long/wide.

By John Bowen, 26 April, 2008

The big news this week in our area is a forest fire that broke out Thursday (4/24) around 3-4pm just south of Grayling, along I-75 just north of 4 Mile Road (Exit 251). Helped by high winds and extremely dry conditions, the fire spread north and west, along the west side of the city of Grayling, burning off some 1,100 acres of woodlands and 6 structures. A significant number of businesses and homes in Grayling were evacuated ahead of the flames...

Apparently, the fire was finally contained when it slowed down at the swamp directly west of town, around 11pm.

By John Bowen, 7 April, 2008

While trying to test a web site on a local (development) machine, I ran into this error from ASP.NET:

unexpected error 0x8ffe2740 occurred

Simple dialog, "OK" button is the only option.

I found this blog post, where Lorin Thwaits suggests that some other program is already controlling port 80, and then gives an easy way to find the culprit and kill it.

By John Bowen, 7 April, 2008

I found a few great addons for Firefox. They aren't new, just new to me, and already they're helping me with one of my weakest web development points...css.