David Lari’s Blog
New and improved, more bloggier blog.
Categories: Happiness, Life, People | Add a Comment

If you enjoy doing volunteer work, like I do, you might be interested in a new web site designed to make it easy for volunteers to find organizations that can use help. The site is: http://www.allforgood.org
It is being managed and supported by Google.

Categories: Happiness, Life, Software | 3 Comments

Ten years ago today, I entered the world of online gaming for the first time, with my purchase of Everquest. I decided to go back and take another look at the game to see how it looks today.

Categories: Software | Add a Comment

One application I use is the GIMP. It’s a graphics editing program.
As a semi-professional photographer, I’m well aware that the free, Open Source GIMP application lags far behind Adobe Photoshop. The two biggest problems with GIMP are its lack of color management and support of only 8 bits per channel of color. Many complain about [...]

Categories: ASP.NET, Software Development, Visual Studio 2008 | 1 Comment

If you are getting an error like the one below in your ASP.Net application when trying to open an Excel or Access file, you may need to reset IIS.
System.Data.OleDb.OleDbException: Unspecified error
at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnectionInternal..ctor(OleDbConnectionString constr, OleDbConnection connection) at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(DbConnectionOptions options, Object poolGroupProviderInfo, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningObject) at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.CreateNonPooledConnection(DbConnection owningConnection, DbConnectionPoolGroup poolGroup) [...]

Categories: Software | 1 Comment

Previously, I have written about eyeOS which is an open source cloud computing platform. I’ve been using it for close to a year. It has some nice features, but it has been frustrating that is doesn’t have full support for my preferred web browser (Opera).

Categories: Web site | Add a Comment

Hi loyal readers. I’m trying an experiment. I’ve made it so that you don’t have to be a registered user to post a comment now. I’ve also added a captcha to the registration process and it finally got rid of the Russian Linkbots that were registering accounts everyday.
Hopefully, the new setup will get rid of [...]

Categories: ASP.NET, Software Development, Visual Studio 2008 | 6 Comments

So, I ran the Secunia Online Vulnerability inspector on my work PC and noticed there were over a dozen missing patches. I ran WindowsUpdate and had to reboot.
After rebooting, I reloaded Visual Studio 2008 and my ASP.Net project that I’m working on. I noticed that the designer was unable to render on any of my [...]

Categories: ASP.NET, Software Development, Visual Studio 2008 | Add a Comment

It seems like such a simple thing, I’m amazed it’s not part of Microsoft’s whole webform architecture. I would like to keep a user’s session from timing out as long as he/she is still on the web page. Just ping the server, so to speak, periodically, to let it know that this session is still [...]

Categories: Software Development | Add a Comment

My latest order from Amazon:
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art
If you have read the book, I’m interested in whether you found it valuable or not. Were you able to apply what you learned? Did you improve your process and/or results?

Categories: ASP.NET, Software, Visual Studio 2008 | Add a Comment

Are you sure? How many times have you been asked that question by your computer when you wanted to delete something?

Categories: ASP.NET, Visual Studio 2008 | Add a Comment

For the most part, I’ve found it pretty easy to ‘AJAX’ify a web page, but there are a few quirks and gotchas. I’ll try to list a few of the ones I’ve stumbled across here.

Categories: Visual Studio 2008 | Add a Comment

A list of handy VS2008 IDE tips.

While editing a document, you can force the IDE to re-indent the current document by pressing Control-K Control-D.