From Nathan's Nirvana to a New Lost in OK

From Nathan's Nirvana to a New Lost in OK

 Posted on February 22, 2024  (Last modified on February 23, 2024)

A personal website has just been a thing I’ve never been able to let go of. I’ve been horrible about updating them, but I’ve always kept a site around. As such, I realized recently that I’ve had a website continuously for almost 30 years. I got my first website around 1995 or 1996 when I headed off to college. Let’s just say, none of us knew what we were doing. [Read More]
website  technology  wordpress  Hugo  Mastodon  RadicalWacko.com  LostinOk.com 

A Digital Reboot

 Posted on September 4, 2012

It’s with mixed emotions that I retire my home on the web for the last decade. When I purchased radicalwacko.com back in 2001, I was a young, aggressive Libertarian, who thought that he could and should change the world. In other words, I was an insufferable, young, recent college graduate that you wanted to avoid making eye contact with and save yourself from the pedantic lecture that would inevitably ensue. [Read More]
facebook  instagram  me  radicalwacko  radicalwacko-com  Site Updates  twitter  wordpress  Life Updates  technology 

Internet Blackout Day

 Posted on January 18, 2012

Generally, I avoid joining protests, but occasionally there are ideas so bad that I can’t stay away. Such is the case with the Protect IP Act (PIPA) which is coming up before the Senate next week. The goal of protecting intellectual property is certainly a laudable one, but the means to achieve that goal must not come at the expense of the 1st amendment, nor should it fundamentally weaken the technological structure of the Internet. [Read More]
fb  pipa  politics  protest  sopa  strike 

Nik Snapseed

 Posted on September 17, 2011

OK, I have to admit it, for a long time, Hipstamatic really annoyed me. I think it was because I first learned photography several years before digital photography came into its own and as such, I learned how to do things the hard way. The effects that Hipstamatic and similar pieces of software produce used to take hours in the darkroom and as such, I felt it was cheating. I remember working for hours on creating and painting custom emulsions, doing large-scale negative to negative enlargements for special contact print effects and dozens of other labor intensive processes to achieve effects that can now be done in minutes. [Read More]
ipad  mobile  nik-snapseed  Photography  snapseed  software-review 

Hosting Recommendation

 Posted on July 2, 2010

For many years now, I’ve been using webhost4life as the hosting company for my various websites. When I signed up they offered really top notch service and a reasonable price (especially for .NET hosting, which I was primarily using at the time). However, over the last year or so, their service has become increasingly unreliable and even at the best of times, extremely slow. Earlier this week, this site went down unexpectedly. [Read More]
review  web-hosting 

TryParse and Nullable Types

 Posted on January 30, 2009

I just ran into an irritating little problem with using TryParse when assigning to nullable object. The following is the code I was using to assign a value from a ASP.NET dropdown list to a nullable Int32 variable: If Int32.TryParse(ddlExample.SelectedValue, testobj.TestNullableInt32 )Then testobj.TestDescription = ddlExample.SelectedItem.Text End If .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } . [Read More]

Seeking Suggestions for Reading Web.Config

 Posted on March 24, 2008

I recently had a task in one of my current projects that required me to extract the authentication mode of the current solution’s web.config file. The only was I figured out how to do it was by parsing the XML of the file by hand as shown below (Yeah, I know, it’s VB.NET. I do what the client wants.): Dim config As New System.Xml.XmlDocument() config.Load(Server.MapPath(“Web.config”)) Dim authMode As System.Xml.XmlNode = config. [Read More]

Setting Control Focus in an Ajax Update Panel

 Posted on March 23, 2008

I’ve decided to start posting the solutions I find in irritating little problems that take me forever to find. Some of these will probably be obvious, but hopefully it might save someone’s time. My current problem was that I had a DotNetNuke module that was sitting in a AJAX Update Panel. I needed to set the focus to a particular control based upon a post back click on a radio button. [Read More]

Web Standards in the Spotlight

 Posted on March 17, 2008

Joel Sposky, in his usual highly amusing style, takes on the new IE 8 controversy and points out the enormous gulf between the standards world and the world the rest of us really work in. I often compare this difference to the difference between open-source and commercial software developers. There are those who say that it must be done the standard way and there are others that say it should be done to make it easy for the user. [Read More]