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Windows 7 64 bit VPN issues and using IE 6

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

Having used Windows 7 for about a week now on my new PDC Acer Tablet PC, I’ve discovered that Cisco VPN doesn’t work but there is a somewhat simple workaround. For whatever reason, mainly Cisco is a piece of Cr@p, their VPN client software doesn’t support 64 bit, even though a huge amount of PC’s ship with it everyday. (Nice job C(r)isco)

Testing your location with Google Loader

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

I’ve had some feedback wanting a working example of the Google loader location technique that I talked about in a previous blog post. So here it is:

danger

This example no longer works as described in 2009. If you are trying to use this in present day, I recommend finding another solution.

Quick and reliable way to get location information about your users

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts
danger

This example no longer works as described in 2009. If you are trying to use this in present day, I recommend finding another solution.

Just wanted to post this more for myself than anything else. The problem is this:

You want to know where your users are coming from. More specifically, you want their latitude and longitude, city, state, and country. Now I know there are a lot of ways to get this info using free or paid web services, databases, and even loading map api’s. But here’s a really dirt simple way to get at that info without much effort.

Analytical Queries using Entity Framework over Date Ranges using Linq

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

The other day I decided to start doing some analytics style queries purely in Linq against my existing normalized structure. Normally these types of queries are best suited on a Star Schema, but I think for what I wanted it was simple enough to do in the transactional tables, plus most sites don’t have a true “data warehouse” anyways.

First lets go over what I was looking to do.

For a given date range, get the total number of logins per day. Use only Linq in my EF model ( no stored procedures). Most processing should happen in the DB I know what you are thinking, that is super simple. I agree it is, but there are some hidden complexities that I think are worth sharing.

Really? Is it getting easier?

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts

I've been working on a "green" fields project building an e-commerce system with all the latest trimmings: (win 2k8, 64 bit, Asp.net MVC, Dependency Injection, Jquery)... The list goes on, but what I've discovered is that browser consistency is even worse than its ever been. I remember only 3-4 years ago, you made it work in IE and then you took on mozilla, but screw the rest of them. Now IE is the bastard, Firefox is the nice guy, and now Safari, Chrome, and mobile all are valid contendors.

Why can't this be resolved? Really, I mean why can't we kill off IE 6? I remember asking the team last year at PDC and they definitely understand, but said there is a MSFT pasture cycle and its not time yet. I think this is a bit of BS, especially now that Win 7 is on the loose. Please help kill this scurge. Make fun of anyone using this browser. If you own a website, make it apparent to users that their browser sucks, along with the user:)

Why do web programmers have to code like it's 1995? Maybe one day we won't.