I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so...

To all Japanese/Chinese/Koreans readers out there, my apologies: I have no idea what language this is that Chrome is using. But the song came to mind, and thus the title. The bigger question is: why on earth is this error coming up like this?

Password insanity

Tonight I had to fill out some official paperwork and went online to get it done.  (Before I start griping – the online form was fine, I could fill it out with minimal problems and got a nice PDF with all the entered info at the end.) 

But to get to the form – oh boy.

I’d been to this site before, so I knew I had an account – I guessed my password – err.  Ok, time to hit the forgot password link.

Oh – ok, “the password expires every 60 days”, so that’s why.  I enter the answer to my “secret” question (the answer to which is a matter of public record, and would probably take a hacker 5 minutes to figure out) and am allowed to attempt to enter my new password.  Err.  “Your password can not contain more than three consecutive letters from your old password”. 

Alright odd, but, attempt 2.  Err.  “Your password must be at least 8 characters”.

Ok, fine – should have guessed that.  Attempt 3.  Err. “Your password must contain a special character AND two entries from the three groups: number, upper case and lowercase.” 

Uhm – ok?.  Attempt 4.  Err.  “Your password must begin and end with a letter.”

WTF?  Attempt 5: I enter an upper case letter, a set of adjacent keyboard symbols, and a lower case letter and lo and behold the password is accepted. 

Don’t ask me what the password was – even if I WOULD tell you, I couldn’t – I have already forgotten.  But that’s fine, next time I’ll just repeat the same exercise and get in by answering my “secret” question.

XKCD says it oh so well:

Someone's hacking my Blogger account

To my annoyance, someone has successfully posted two porn-spam links as posts (not comments!) to my blog. I already changed my Google password, to no avail, so I am guessing they came in through the mobile/email interface, which I have now disabled. To all my 5 loyal readers, my apologies for the posts.

IE 9 HTML5 Testing: “Works on My Machine”

One of my esteemed colleagues on an internal forum posted about how great IE 9’s HTML5 support was, based on the result of Microsoft’s test pages.  MS’s tests are sadly self-selective however: meaning they only seem to test for elements that IE9 supports: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

“Cross-browser Test Results Summary:

W3C Web Standards	Number of Submitted Tests	Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview	Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3	Opera 10.52	Apple Safari 4.05	Google Chrome 4.1
HTML5	40	78%	63%	48%	43%	43%
...”

Compare that to my own results running html5test.com on the 6(!) browsers I have installed:

Html5 is the first time in a decade that the browser vendors have had a new major standard to fight over; I’m just grateful that this time around we’ll have an army of frameworks such as jQuery that can level the development playing field for us.

Oops - “spellcheck any multiligual texts…”

So I was responding to an internal developer forum request for recommendations for a WYSIWYG html editor with spell check.  I was going to recommend Telerik’s Editor and related RadSpell component.  Not so sure any more…

Cobbler. Children.  All that.

Odd MINOR Outlook 2007 Bug

First message: sent 12:34, from EST timezone

Second message: sent 12:59, also from EST timezone – note the discrepancy between list and preview.

SharePoint Office Server 2010, on Windows 7, in Google Chrome

It took a few hours of downloading, a few hours of installing (with workarounds), but I now have SharePoint 2010 Office Server Beta (aka the MOSS upgrade) running on my Windows 7 laptop; and as can be seen, it renders beautifully in Google Chrome. <UPDATE1> installed and uninstalled the dang thing several times, with the same result:  I keep getting WCF errors:

System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive. (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\Profile\client.config line 56)

</UPDATE1>

<UPDATE2>
I completely uninstalled every bit of SharePoint 2010, Visual Studio 2010, .net 4, and every prerequisite of SP.  Then reinstalled.  This time I ran the configuration wizard (as admin) while connected to the domain controller (via vpn).  MOST of SP2010 now seems to work.

I then tried adding the local SP admin account (hat I had created for my first install) to the Farm Administrators group.  Same damn WCF error.

So I simply backed up then edited client.config to remove the offensive attribute both from line 57 and from a second instance on line 97.  Then I rebooted and tried the Farm Admin Addition again.

Same error message (note that I am NOT running SPF, I am running the full Office Server version)…

… but different cause this time:

Local administrator privilege is required to update the Farm Administrators' group.

Could this be a limitation of running SharePoint2010 on Windows 7?
</UPDATE2>

The one Another challenge of the installation was that the Configuration wizard would fail repeatedly on step 2 (of 10) when attempting to set up the configuration database.  The error was “user can not be found”.  I then noticed that my domain account did not have full admin rights on my SQL server instance, unless I started SQL Management Studio as Run as Admin.

The workaround I used was to create a local admin account, grant that account full db access, switch to the new admin account, run the configuration wizard, and then switch back to my regular user account.  Crude, but effective.

<UPDATE2>
The better alternative is to connect to your corporate network to gain access to your domain controller.  On my 3rd, 4th and 5th (!) time running the configuration wizard, this was the approach I took, and it seems to work well.  (I understand this is also something that is necessary for the VS 2010 TFS install.)</UPDATE2>

I have no opinions on speed, etc – more of that to come, I’m sure.

<UPDATE3>
So I finally ended up scrapping Windows 7 AND 2008 R2.  With our code, there just was no getting around compatibility issues.  So for now I am running on good ol’ Windows Server 2008 x64.

Can’t wait for MS to release bootable, sysprepped developer vhds for this...
</UPDATE3>

This is Business Productivity?

Really, Microsoft?  This is the appropriate stock-photo for business productivity?

Are they productive because they are wearing suits?

Are they watching other people work productively?

Is the business being productive without them?

Did they just finish being productive and are now basking in the glow of their success?

(from http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9690494)

Subtle Google Map/Search Usability Bug

When searching for a company in Google, if Google can determine a map result it’ll show it, along with a crowd-sourcing link to let you verify the accuracy of the business listing:

Only problem is that the confirmation message asks the OPPOSITE of the original question:

…

Oops – was I supposed to do that?

Wonder how much of a late-pickup-fee daycare will charge me for being 133 weeks picking up my son?  But thanks Outlook, for the reminder!

Making T4MVC comply with CLS

FXCop rule CA1014 tells you to mark your assembly as CLSCompliant. If you adhere to this, your T4MVC (as of build 2.4.01 at least) will throw compiler warnings saying stuff like

Identifier

‘xxxController._Actions’ ’xxxController._Views’ ’T4MVC._Dummy’

is not CLS-Compliant.

If you have 10 controllers and 50 views this will result in 61 warnings…

The reason is that these are public members that start with an underscore, which is a CLS no-no:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1195030/why-is-this-name-not-cls-compliant

 

To solve this, edit the T4MVC.tt file to mark the code with a [CLSCompliant(false)] attribute.  Once you start this, you’ll also find additional warnings from mebers that implement the now-explicitly-non-compliant members, but a few more [CLSCompliant(false)] attribute handles that. Full code in gist below.

Web Setup MSI woes on IIS7 + solution

Just a note to my future self and to anyone else who might stumble on this:

We created an MSI to install our MVC app, but the new test server refused to install it:

The Installer simply stopped, with an Installation interrupted message, and the application event log listed the following:

Windows Installer installed the product. Product Name: XXXXX. Product Version: x.y.z. Product Language: 1033. Installation success or error status: 1603.

The correct google search term here is: Installation success or error status: 1603.

It will lead you to the solution by Ben Noyce at NInitiative:

Long nights and story short, in order to install a web setup project on Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7, you need to install the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility role service.

Thanks, Ben!

ASP.NET MVC: Corrected Moq based MvcMockHelpers

I've been reading the mostly excellent Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework book by Steven Sanderson, but when trying to implement some of his code in my current project (yay – not SharePoint for a change), I encountered a bug by omission.  In Chapter 8, page 248, he shows how to mock the HttpContext using Moq.  Works great for most urls, but bombs if you include a Query String parameter.

 

Steve Michelotti pointed me to what he uses: the Hanselman/Kzu based MvcMockHelpers class.  Unfortunately it too has some issues (at least as written in Scott’s old post), so below is an updated version.  Get it from github.

 

Use and abuse at will

Twitter Conversations: More fun with Yahoo Pipes

<Preface>
Lets imagine that you can’t actually do all of this directly in Twitter Search like this:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from:jaketapper+to:senjohnmccain+OR+from:senjohnmccain+to:jaketapper&since=2009-06-16&until=2009-06-16&rpp=50
</Preface>

(Now contrived) How To follows:

I stumbled upon an impromptu (or so they claim) twitter interview between Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) of ABC and Sen. John McCain (@senjohnmccain).  Unfortunately, short of following both of them, it was hard to get a gist of the actual conversation – I tried the Conversation view on Twitter Search, and a couple of other services, like Tweader (appears broken) and Quotably (dead).

Twitter Search has an advanced search/allows parameters to specify searching for tweets from one person to another, but that only gives you half a conversation.  And as far as I can tell, Twitter search doesn’t allow multiple from:/to: pairs.  Enter Yahoo Pipes’ union module:

This module merges up to five separate sources of items into a single list of items.

Since Twitter Search results can be had in both Atom and RSS flavor, this means we’re good to go:

<interlude> 
…and this is where I discovered that you could indeed do duplex conversation searches in twitter search, so the rest of this will be short…
</interlude>

See http://pipes.yahoo.com/austegard/twitterconversations; click View Source or Clone to play with it (requires Yahoo id).

Outlook's dumbest feature?

and the corresponding

Why? Why? Why?

It seems 9 out of 10 times the line breaks are significant and SHOULDN’T be removed.

The feature has persisted for about a decade (if not longer – I don’t recall if it was part of 97 and 98); if you don’t know by now, this is how you remove it:

Tools – Options – Preferences – Email Options, Uncheck the Remove… checkbox.

Amazon Payment Woes Not Quite Over

Uhm, this ain’t right (clik to see full-size pic):

Basically, AmazonPayments/JungleDisk decided to charge me 8 (EIGHT!) times for the same service.

Gmail Voicemail coming soon?

I just started using Vonage, and get my voicemails delivered to my gmail account.  So I tried setting up a filter:

It certainly makes sense that Google Voice and Gmail would be integrated one of these days…

Help the internets are down?!

Seriously, how can someone as big and distributed as Google have network issues?  (And when my blog is on Google, how can I gripe about it?)

This morning’s tracert (and confirmed via a quick twitter search):

C:\Users\oskar.austegard>tracert google.com

Tracing route to google.com [209.85.171.100]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     6 ms     4 ms     4 ms  xx.xxx.xx.xx
  3     6 ms     5 ms     8 ms  xxxxxxx.verizon-gni.net [130.81.xxx.xxx]
  4     6 ms     8 ms     5 ms  so-3-0-0-0.LCC1-RES-BB-RTR1-RE1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.29.0]
  5     8 ms     5 ms     6 ms  0.so-1-2-0.XL3.IAD8.ALTER.NET [152.63.37.117]
  6    12 ms    14 ms     7 ms  0.ge-6-0-0.BR2.IAD8.ALTER.NET [152.63.41.149]
  7     9 ms     8 ms     9 ms  te-11-3-0.edge1.Washington4.level3.net [4.68.63.169]
  8    10 ms    16 ms    17 ms  vlan69.csw1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.68.17.62]
  9    11 ms     9 ms    10 ms  ae-62-62.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.145]
 10    28 ms    35 ms    28 ms  ae-2-2.ebr2.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.69]
 11    27 ms    27 ms    29 ms  ae-1-100.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.113]
 12    54 ms    55 ms    54 ms  ae-3.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.132.61]
 13   103 ms    92 ms   104 ms  ae-2.ebr2.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.53]
 14    92 ms    92 ms    92 ms  ae-21-52.car1.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.34]
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18   369 ms     *        *     64.233.174.125
 19     *        *      285 ms  64.233.174.99
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21   375 ms   347 ms     *     74.125.30.134
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *      350 ms  cg-in-f100.google.com [209.85.171.100]

Trace complete.

Wrap-up: Amazon Payments responds. In English.

I finally received my first decent response from Amazon Payment Customer Support:

Amazon.com Customer Service to me

Hello again from Amazon Payments.

I apologize for our misunderstanding and delay in responding to your message.

We do have the ability to review your previous correspondence with us, and I see that you were notified April 25 that your account had been reinstated.

It appears that my colleague misunderstood your concern, and instead of recognizing your desire to simply have the account reinstated, he was checking into the specific transaction you were wanting to make. I'm sorry for the mix-up.

I'll also pass on your feedback concerning offering phone support.

Thank you for using Amazon Payments.

Please …. (standard footer followed)

Best regards,

JoEllen M.
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
http://www.amazon.com/your-account

Thank you JoEllen M, for providing the very first email from Amazon Payment Customer Support that sounded like it was written by someone who had read the case history, and who was willing to take the time to write a non-form-letter reponse. If this had been done last week (or back in Oct/Nov when it first happened) you would have saved me and Amazon a lot of time (and bad blog-press).

Rant: Amazon Payments customer support still poor

I had to take a breath there, before I chose to go with the word “poor”. I was very tempted to go with an alliteration.

Got the following email from Amazon.Com Customer Service this morning, 3 days after the issue was resolved. Some numbers and addresses have been altered.

Greetings from Amazon.com.
Sometimes a credit card number will experience one or more failed attempts before a charge is ultimately successful. In this case, I've checked your Amazon Payments Business account affiliated with austxxxxx@gmail.com and found that your credit card was successfully charged on April 26, 2009, by Jungle Disk, Inc..
Transaction amount: $1.02
Transaction ID: 253FAROT22PMHJ3P5GJ1PABCDEF12345678
As always  please feel free to contact us should you have future questions or comments. If you need to contact us back, you can do so by using the secure form at the following specialized link to ensure we receive your next message:
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/contactussend
Thank you for sending us your question to Amazon Payments.
Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:
If yes, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=wyeewufg5555555555
If not, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=wyeewufg5555555555
Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.
To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.
Best regards,
Donny
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
http://www.amazon.com/your-account

This was in response to my rather angry request from Friday – 4 days ago (my account id has been changed for my protection):

*** DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL WITH THE "We have taken this action because it has come to our attention that this account is related to a previously closed account." FORM LETTER ***
Please review previous correspondence for Customer ID: B37NK34KABCDEFGH
I am writing this from my amazonpayments account, which shows in the header as an active business account.  I have no interest in this being a business account.  All I want is SOME account tied to austexxxx@gmail.com that can process payments to JungleDisk.
If I try to access this same account through JungleDisk's Amazon interface (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/ssop/index.html?....) I am told that "Access to Your Account Is Temporarily Disabled".

Gee, thanks for checking, Donny, and for not using a form letter response. But if you had bothered looking into the case history you would see that your response was a) not at all correct and b) three days too late.

As I said before, Amazon Payments customer support needs the permission to deal with customers directly by phone to avoid wasting everybody's time. 

PS! And in response to all the vendors who’re coming out of the woodwork suggesting their own alternatives to JungleDisk – this is not about JungleDisk – JungleDisk is great.  I’m happy with JungleDisk.  This is not even about Amazon (the store) which I  am also happy with.  This is about Amazon Payments Customer Support, which I am still unhappy with.