Ramblings of an inquisitive software developer in the Dallas area
10 posts · page 1 of 10
· Programming · Comments
At work, I was tasked with creating a class to strip RTF tags from RTF formatted text, leaving only the plain text. Microsoft’s RichTextBox can do this with its Text property, but it was unavailable in the context in which I’m working. RTF formatting uses control characters escaped with backslashes along with nested curly braces.…
· Technology · Comments
This article assumes you already know how to set up a SOCKS proxy, likely via SSH using PuTTY. Lots of people use FoxyProxy in Firefox to selectively proxy based on rules. FoxyProxy for Chrome exists now, which uses the Chrome Proxy API. However, this still leaks DNS via pre-fetch queries in other places in the…
Continue reading Conditional Proxying In Chrome Like FoxyProxy →
· Programming · Comments
Yesterday I noticed a strange anomaly in the logs of an application I wrote and manage at work while investigating another issue. It manifested as us sending duplicate messages from a queue to a third party over and over. I looked into the code and since threading was involved, I figured there was some thread…
· Technology · Comments
Feb 26, 2014 Update: Verizon appears to have solved the problem on their end and an MTU of 1500 will work again. The original problem lasted from at least the beginning of Feb 24, 2014 until mid-day Feb 26, 2014. Verizon’s escalation team later called me back and provided the following information: New uplinks were…
Continue reading How To Fix Verizon FiOS Problem Connecting To Websites →
· Programming · Comments
TLDR: The title is pretty much the entire post. We receive data from a third-party vendor on a nightly basis and we are migrating to a new version of the data. Once the data (a zip file) is downloaded, it must be extracted and we are using #ziplib to walk the zip file looking for…
Continue reading System.IO.File.OpenWrite Doesn't Overwrite an Existing File →
· Programming · Comments
Dilbert.com Hates Its Users Update 2: Dilbert support has been removed due to current events relating to its author. Update 1: Yahoo Pipes is shutting down. As a result, I started a new software project to replace it. The feeds are updated below. Bad RSS Feed with No Pictures Dilbert.com recently messed up their web…
· Technology · Comments
Meet Pebble I got the Pebble Smart Watch a couple of weeks ago, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a watch that connects to your smart phone and lets you get your notifications like text, emails, and phone calls on your wrist without digging out your phone. It lasts a really long time, about 9…
· Programming · Comments
Site My last post was in April 2012, so it’s probably time for an update. I successfully imported my blog into a static HTML generating tool called PieCrust. It creates the files serving this site now. As part of the move, I totally redid the site’s design and functionality at the same time. I had…
· Technology · Comments
iTunes Unlock Confirmation Summary (TL;DR) This is a bit long but the short and sweet is that you have to: Get AT&T to go to a separate “iPhone Unlock” page before they send the unlocking email. The email is not connected to your IMEI unlock in any way. It’s just instructions. Put a non-AT&T SIM…
Continue reading Successful Unlock of Two AT&T iPhones (iPhone 3G and iPhone 4S) →
· Programming · Comments
Right now .Net 4.5 is still in beta, but I noticed something that will make developers who must interact with zip files happy: .Net 4.5 will have native support for dealing with zip files. Up until now, the System.IO.Compression namespace only had support for GZipStream and DeflateStream. This post explores how working with SharpZipLib now compares to working with what is upcoming in the .Net 4.5 framework.
Continue reading Zip File Classes Finally Available in .Net 4.5 →