Writing sensible email messages

Writing short and to the point messages has become a somewhat lost art. At 43 Folders, there's a good article how how to get your message across as briefly as possible. Since most people only read the first line of the message, this one is worth reading.

RE: Stupid Registry Tricks

Jeff Atwood has a good set of registry tweaks to provide added functionality to Windows.

Converting a vintage cassette recorder into an external Hard Drive

This is a clever little hack. Some guy gutted an old cassette player and made an external USB drive enclosure out of it.

RE: The Pod Replaces Tripods (And has Nothing to do with iPod, Thank God)

This looks cool. I usually keep a mini tripod in my camera bag, but the Pod may work in places where the mini tripod wouldn't be stable

One of the worst hassles about having a tripod is that you have to carry it around everywhere. I don't know about you, but I don't have too much space in my messenger bag for a decent-sized tripod. The Pod, from the tripod experts at Bogen, aims to solve that by providing a simple and stable camera support without the use of a tripod. It looks like a tiny beanbag at first, but attach any camera or camcorder to its universal locking bolt, and you have an instant tripod replacement. It contains plastic beans, is Velcro-sealed, water-resistant, and has a non-slip base for additional stability when positioning the camera. And since it's only 5 x 2 inches, I could probably slip it in my bag, no problem. Now I can finally take a non-blurry evening shot with my dinky little camera. They come in yellow, red, and blue, and currently sell for $21 each.

The Pod [Bogen Imaging]

[Via Gizmodo]

Updating BrowserCaps to support "down level" browsers

One of my favorite features in ASP.Net is how pages are rendered in other browsers. It seems that ASP.Net thinks that there are two kinds of browsers in the world: Internet Explorer and the "down level" browsers. You can get a great looking page in IE, but when you view the page in FireFox (or Opera, or Safari, etc) it looks strange. ASP.Net 1.x treats down level browsers different and strips out the formatting code that really wanted to use. It uses a BrowserCaps section in the web.config and machine.config to identify the browsers and from that definition, which features will be used to render the page. And that BrowserCaps definition is heavily weighted to IE, most other browsers get plain HTML.

slingfive.com has updated versions of the BrowserCaps section to correctly identify most of the other browsers and the features that they support. Your pages will look better in FireFox and Opera and should load faster too.

10 Things You Shouldn't Do with SQL Server

I've seen and written too much stuff that violates these rules. Click the link after "Via" for the full article...

10. Add a Low Privilege Account to the Admin Role
9. @@IDENTITY vs. SCOPE_IDENTITY
8. Fetch Semi-static Data on Each Request of a Resource
7. Include SQL Data Manipulation Language in Application Code
6. Abuse SELECT *
5. Create Stored Procedures without Exception Handling
4. Prefix Stored Procedures with "sp_"
3. You Don't Protect the Database Connection String
2. Accept All Input
1. Access the Database from the Application with the "sa" Account

[Via dotnet junkies]

RE: Dynamic Behavior with the Decorator Pattern

Here's great example of how to use the Decorator pattern in C#....

The Decorator pattern is a means to transparently add responsibilities to another object on the fly.  In some cases it's a simpler solution than creating additional subclasses through inheritance.  A decorator is implemented by creating a class that wraps access to another class.  The decorator implements the exact same public interface as it's inner member.  That sounds like a lot of gobbledy-gook to me too, so let's jump into a code sample.

Click here to see the full article.

[Via Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer]