Yes, a post is long overdue. I’ll see if I can get a blog entry up this weekend, but, in the meantime, if you’re wondering what I’m up to, I do post updates on Twitter. Just head over to http://www.twitter.com/amhulett.
//A
I used to have the video embedded here, but I took it out given it always started automatically (despite my telling it not to) when the page opened. If you’d like to see it, head over to The Onion [theonion.com].
From the National Weather Service again:
IN THE EAST PUGET SOUND LOWLANDS INCLUDING CITIES SUCH AS BELLEVUE…ISSAQUAH…NORTH BEND…AND BONNEY LAKE…SNOW IS EXPECTED TO PICK UP IN INTENSITY THIS EVENING AS A LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM SAGS SOUTHWARD. EXPECTED 2 TO 6 INCHES OF ACCUMULATION BY THURSDAY MORNING. TEMPERATURES WILL FALL FROM THE LOWER 30S TO THE MID OR UPPER 20S OVERNIGHT CREATING ICY CONDITIONS. SNOW WILL BECOME MORE SHOWERY THURSDAY MORNING.
We were in the mid to upper 30s Fahrenheit all day, but we hit 32 F when I came home this evening. There was moisture on the roads that I imagine will turn to ice overnight. I have tire chains if I have to drive somewhere, but I’ll most likely walk to work and not worry about it until I slip on the sidewalk or something.
Of course all this was supposed to happen during the day, but it never materialized. Massive school closures today, and for the north and south areas from us, it made sense as they did get quite a bit of snow, but for the Seattle area, we saw maybe a few flakes. Local weather reports suggest the Olympic Mountains to our west blocked it from heading over here, and it’s still doing so right now it seems. We’ll see in the morning what happens.
From the National Weather Service:
…WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM LATE TUESDAY NIGHT THROUGH LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT…
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN SEATTLE HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WATCH…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM LATE TUESDAY NIGHT THROUGH LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT.
HEAVY SNOW IS LIKELY OVER WESTERN WASHINGTON ON WEDNESDAY. FOUR TO EIGHT INCHES ARE POSSIBLE IN CERTAIN AREAS…INCLUDING THE EAST PUGET SOUND LOWLANDS…THE NORTHWEST AND SOUTHWEST INTERIORS…AND THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AREA. SNOW IN THESE AREAS WILL BEGIN IN THE NORTH LATE TUESDAY NIGHT AND SPREAD SOUTH WEDNESDAY MORNING. BY WEDNESDAY NIGHT THREE TO SIX INCHES OF NEW SNOW ARE POSSIBLE.
So here it comes, a giant snow event. And with temperatures set to stay at or below freezing until Saturday, that snow won’t be going anywhere. We broke a record today set back in 1964, the record was a low of 20 degrees, and today’s low was 19.
As long as the power holds things will be fine. It went out a couple times yesterday leading me to reset appliance clocks a few times. I do have some Duraflame logs I can burn in the fireplace to keep warm, but food would be reduced to peanut butter sandwiches and a handful of other things such as a couple apples and such. I don’t imagine that happening, though.
One thing I do know – I can’t wait to see my electric bill next month. Ugh!
I was up watching some of the Woot-off items while waiting for the laundry to finish drying, and just before I was going to call it a night, they had this thing on there. And no, I didn’t buy one. It was $9.99 + $5 shipping and called “Candi, the USB pole dancer” [woot.com]) Powered by USB – truly the lonely nerd’s dream gift LOL. (No, do NOT get me one!)
Here’s their demonstration video (and I love the laugh at the end).
Interested in some specs? From Woot:
- Powered directly from the USB port on your computer and possibly entertain you any time of day or night
- 30 second dance track
- Multi-colored disco lights, recreate an authentic night club atmosphere
- As music plays, the dancer spins around the pole, moving up and down as she spins
- Connect an MP3 player and she will dance to your favorite music
- No batteries or software required
This crossed my desk from a few sources, and given I enjoyed a few laughs, I’ll share it with all of you.
Website this is from is here [funnyordie.com].
So far, it seems the changes I made are working – a few people I talked with said the site’s loading quicker and without generating any errors. It’s nice to hear – while I did start fixing it at around 11pm last night after playing Halo 3 online, I didn’t stop until around 5am when I finally got the XHTML 1.0 Transitional check to pass, and I’m glad that work paid off.
What I haven’t mentioned here yet is I also did some background work on the server itself. It’s been emailing me for a while now saying it’s not happy, and initially it was just that and nothing else. Later on it started partially dropping off the web for 5 or 10 minutes and then would return. I say partially as things like web pages wouldn’t open from it (you couldn’t read this blog, for example) but other items kept working, such as email.
For that one, I started around 8pm Friday night and wrapped up around 4am. After a few hours of digging, I pinned it down to two issues. First, up2date (a program that updates some of the software running on here) wasn’t reaching a valid update server, and second, the website managing software that runs on here also wasn’t reaching update servers. The second one was easy – I had an entry in the hosts file that aimed the update process at a specific server, and that server isn’t around anymore. I took that out and it started working just fine.
The first one, however, wasn’t as easy for me to fix, given that up2date is aimed at an update server at The Planet, the company that I have this server at. I opened a trouble ticket explaining that up2date was aimed at a specific server that was responding to pings (a.k.a. it was booted up and listening) but was returning “Internal Server Error” to my update requests. About an hour later they had it reconfigured with updated settings and things were working properly (Yay! Thanks The Planet :)). I spent the next few hours getting everything updated and I also adjusted the firewall’s settings a little.
All in all, I think we’re looking good, and it seems those I talked with agree. But do me a favor – knock on wood for me and hope we’ll be problem free for a while. I can’t keep staying up past 3am every night. 
Going off the post below, I made several changes to the site to help prevent the “Done, but with errors on page” / “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site…” message. There were two ‘problem areas’ that I discovered. First is the post about this year’s CoasterMania. The video I put in was very badly added in there. The second was the little graphic animation along the right that shows different groups I support. So what was the problem (hopefully)?
The code for both was not XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. For those that don’t know, there are different standards for placing information on the Internet. At the beginning of a website page’s code, there’s supposed to be information on what standard is in use so that your web browser can properly understand how to show you the web page you’re loading. It’s also designed to help a web page look similar (if not the same) across different web browsers. What happened here is that both the video and the animation parts were hand-coded in, and I didn’t follow this standard exactly right.
You can verify that I’m XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant by clicking this graphic that I can proudly display now.
But that wasn’t the whole problem. Back to that video. The way it was rendered (drawn on your screen) was first some text was placed there – the exact text doesn’t really matter (it was “Magnum XL-200 video” but again not important). Then, some JavaScript (it’s a way to program things, to put it simply) took that text and threw the video on top of it. It was this act of modifying text into an image that I think caused this. It would be ok normally, but again referring to the Microsoft Knowledge Base article on this, I was editing text outside of the child container (I think), which lead to running into the bug.
It is 5 am local time, so at this point, I could be completely wrong on any of this being the cause, but hopefully I’ve fixed things up.
Some, including myself, notice that when we visit my blog using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or 8 Beta 2 (I’m running the latter, I think… it’s whatever’s in this Windows 7 build I’m on) that it’ll load the page part way and then end with “Done, but with errors on page,” in the lower-left corner. Sometimes, it’ll flat out not load the page. Sometimes it works just fine. I looked into it a bit, and it seems we’re intermittently hitting this bug in Internet Explorer’s rendering engine:
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 927917
BUG: Error message when you visit a Web page or interact with a Web application in Internet Explorer: "Operation aborted"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917/
The gist of it is I’m putting containers in the page and they’re trying to modify outside the container – more specifically, there’s a container that has another container inside it, and that inner container is trying to modify the one it’s in. To put it differently, there’s this set of blog posts running down the page, which is a container, and then I embed videos into them (these are a container). These video containers are trying to do kung-fu of some kind on the main blog container, and hence, we hit the bug. If you hit the bug and only get part of my blog to render, you might notice the last blog post to show up has a video in it – I think Internet Explorer is rendering that video container and then hitting the bug.
I need to look at the code versus XHTML 1.0 Transitional and see what needs fixing. If you go here [w3.org] and see a bunch of errors, you know I haveb’t yet.
I’m approaching my 3-year anniversary here at Microsoft as a full time employee, and even in this short time, I’ve seen many changes, both on my direct team and as an entire company. I received word about this and thought you might be interested in this change in the pipeline. We’re announcing the end of Windows Live OneCare and our move towards a no-cost security solution, code-named “Morro,” that will be available the second half of 2009.
As a Windows Live OneCare user myself, one question that comes to mind is what happens to our current subscriptions. That’s just one of many questions I’m sure many are asking. Rather than try and reiterate information here, you can find out more via Microsoft PressPass [microsoft.com] and at the Windows Live OneCare Team Blog [live.com].
Interesting stuff indeed. 
This post is provided “AS IS” without warranty, and confers no rights.
