My Life and Code

I recently picked up Your Shape Fitness Evolved for Kinect on Xbox 360. There aren't currently a lot of Kinect titles, but this one is one of the best I've tried. Having used Wii Fit, Wii Fit plus, and EA Active for Wii, I can safely say this game gives me a better workout than any of them, though it isn't perfect. The game offers 3 different types of workouts: a personal trainer guided workout (of which there are several regimens to choose from), fitness games (for example, Virtual Smash, which has you punching blocks that appear in front of you), and Zen workouts (Tai Chi). After messing around a bit with the games and zen stuff, I decided to get down to it with the personal trainer workouts. I thought I was in pretty good shape. Well, at least not bad shape. I'm relatively active, and do a lot of walking, including a daily lunchtime walk that lasts about half an hour which I've been doing for almost 10 years. So I was surprised when Your Shape decided to destro...

I recently subscribed to cable television and internet service with Comcast. I don't watch a lot of TV, so haven't had cable TV in years, but with the transition to digital TV from analog, and the poor reception I get over the air, I decided it was time to get cable again. Another reason for my subscription was due to my absolute loathing of Verizon. I've had DSL with them for years, and phone service with them since 1998. The phone line has never worked well, and every time I'd call, Verizon would blame it on wiring inside the house. Whenever it would rain heavily, the phone would go out altogether, which didn't sound like an in-the-house issue to me. After the last time a technician came out and found no problem, I traced the lines from the box and found that one of them was seriously frayed. I wish their professional technician would've noticed this. I ended up making the repair myself, and I'm not a professional phone technician. If it weren't for m...

A project I was working on recently made use of several WCF services, but we were having trouble sending large amounts of data to them (specifically, large integer arrays). We spent days trying to figure out how to resolve the issue, trying every config param imaginable (maxRequestMessageSize, maxItemsInObjectGraph, etc), but to no avail. Finally, at the 11th hour, one of the developers found the problem: IIS 7 was interpreting this large message as a Denial of Service attack and returning a false error message. The solution was to add the following to the web.config files of the affected services: < system.webServer > < security > < requestFiltering > < requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength = " 2147483647 " /> </ requestFiltering > </ security > </ system.webServer > Note that the value being used in the maxAllowedContentLength attribute is the maximum integer value and was used only for testing. In ...

I spent some time today learning about the Web Deployment Tool in Visual Studio 2010 and IIS, but despite having the tool installed wasn't getting the options to export or import packages in IIS. Finally, after much web-surfing, I stumbled across this excellent post which held the answer: if you install the tool via the Web Platform Installer, it doesn't install everything. The solution: either install it from the msi package to start, or, if you already have it installed, go into Programs and Features , right-click Web Deployment Tool , and select Change . Then, install the additional components you need (in my case, I selected everything that was not already installed). Alternatively, you could download the msi, run it, and select Change from the dialog when prompted; then choose any or all additional components. Many thanks to the author of the aforementioned blog post!