Christmas Morning Math Pun

Mathematicians like talking about their former partners but they don't like talking about why they broke up.

It's a classic case of the ex over the why.

Feel-Good Education

I've always had an issue with "feel good education." You know, nobody fails, everyone always succeeds, feeling good about yourself is more important than results, and so on.

It is difficult to state the arguments against "feeling good" in a cohesive manner, but one rational mom has.

Cryptic clues...

Because of this...a start while I scribble the rest down.

Her pod split into four parts. One part was found in game, two were found elsewhere (one by Blade) and the fourth part was never found but the contents were in front of the player for a large part of the game. A single bullet was at fault.

There were two different substances for two very good reasons, but there were two of one separate people working at cross purposes.

Radek survived...again.

The Universal Language

During this Holiday season, we reflect on our lives, our families, our communities and our world.

Despite all of our differences, there is one thing that all humans share...the language and love of music.

WORKAROUND: ASP.NET "Response filter is not valid."

Problem:

ASP.NET 3.5 web site. You are trying to set the Response.Filter property and you are getting an HttpException with the message "Response filter is not valid."

Cause:

There is a bug in ASP.NET 3.5 where you cannot set the Response.Filter property unless you read it first. When the Response.Filter property is first read, it instantiates some internal fields in the HttpWriter class.

Workaround:

Just read the property first so that it initializes the internal properties accordingly.

In VB:
Dim f = Response.Filter ' Assumes Option Infer On
Response.Filter = New FilterStream(Response.OutputStream) ' Where FilterStream is your stream
In C#:
var f = Response.Filter;
Response.Filter = new FilterStream(Response.OutputStream);

The Schedule

I spent about three hours today doing a functional decomposition and schedule pass for a new project I have going on that is due on March 11, 2009.

I didn't have enough information left to properly estimate work on about 10% of the tasks, but I have good figures for the rest. I put in work estimates in for the other 90% in a column in Excel next to each work item and let it sum up at the bottom.

It worked out to just enough work to be done on March 11, 2009.

There is still 10% of the work unscheduled.

Eep.

That doesn't include testing time, stabilization, integration, dependencies on third parties, user testing and approval, documentation or training...just the development work necessary.

I have a feeling I'm going to be working a lot of overtime...a bit more considering that I'm also going to be moving next month.

Workaround: Ektron CMS400 7.5 Integrated Editing Breaks After Upgrade

Symptoms:

Your ASP.NET website is in a nested virtual folder underneath your Ektron CMS400 installation folder. For example, your Ektron 7.0 install folder is /CMS/ and your website is located at /CMS/Website/.

After upgrading to CMS400 7.5, integrated editing no longer works. You no longer get the green border or the white editing bubble.

Cause:

The session cookie for the CMS no longer matches the session cookie for the site.

Workaround:

Create a page on your site that contains three things. One, an IFRAME pointing to the login.aspx file in your Ektron CMS400 folder. Two, a button that calls in order in the code-behind the functions Session.Clear() and Session.Abandon() in that order. (I've tried them individually, but for some reason, it takes both of them for this to work in my testing environment.) Three, a link back to the home page of the site you want to edit.

Log into the CMS through your IFRAME.

After logging into the CMS, click the session kill button.

After clicking the session kill button, click the link back to the home page.

You'll have your editing environment back.