Rough guide on manually setting up Git on Windows

  • October 6, 2013
  • James Skemp
For both machines I'm doing this on (running Windows 7 and Windows 8) I had already installed Github for Windows. However, since I've been converted to posh-git, I wanted to do an install that would get me away from continuing to use it. The below is roughly what I did, and may not be completely correct. Install the latest version of msysgit (currently 1.8.4). Set execution policy (run as administrator).Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Install posh-git(new-object Net.

Read More

Goodbye BlogEngine.NET

  • September 22, 2013
  • James Skemp
On July 13, 2007 I converted my blog over from WordPress to BlogEngine.NET (having previously used custom code written in PHP). It was a great switch, as I was beginning to really dig into .NET, and I've found there's no better way to learn something than actually doing something with it. While I don't think I did much with the beta, I was in on 1.0 and was fairly active at first.

Read More

Converting from Subversion to Git on Windows

  • February 9, 2013
  • James Skemp
With the news that Visual Studio 2012 will support Git out-of-the-box, and me deciding to stop storing my repositories locally, I decided to switch to Git this weekend. They say the best way to do this is via svn2git, which unfortunately uses Ruby. Since I'm on Windows, and haven't done Ruby development, I needed to download Ruby using RubyInstaller for Windows. Next I needed to have RubyGems support, which meant downloading from RubyForge.

Read More

Internet Explorer 10: Platform Preview 2 now available

  • June 29, 2011
  • James Skemp
Released earlier today, Internet Explorer 10: Platform Preview 2 is now available for download. Just the other day at work I had fired up IE10PP1 to see if a new version was available, so I'll just go ahead and assume Microsoft was zeroing in on my brainwaves with this. I definitely like the direction they've gone with these platform previews, so I hope to see that continue. And that's about all I have to say about that.

Read More

DD-WRT and my Linksys WRT54GL

  • April 23, 2011
  • James Skemp
I've been sitting on a Linksys (Cisco) WRT54GL for a long while now. A long, long, while. Originally I was going to replace my WRT54G (don't get me wrong, it still works great) and install DD-WRT for the additional features. However, I just never got around to it. Today I finally dusted off the box (I had opened it) and started getting it setup. Interestingly, the deeper I dug into DD-WRT the more confused I became.

Read More

How to easily clear the window.applicationCache on select browsers

  • April 2, 2011
  • James Skemp
While I was working on tweaking my video game listing, and creating my offline Web application manager, I kept running into issues with the cache manifest holding onto data much longer than I would have liked. After some research I found that Chrome's interface can easily be found by going to chrome://appcache-internals/. On Safari, on the iPod Touch and iPad, you can stop/close Safari (hold down the home button on the home screen, and close the application) and then start it back up to clear the data.

Read More

Interesting feature with parsing XML with jQuery on Safari

  • March 27, 2011
  • James Skemp
I've been playing around with HTML5 quite a bit recently, in particular with offline Web applications. My second experiment (my first is on pause) was with making my video games available, so that I can access the listing when I'm out shopping at used game stores. It's still in progress, but you can see my offline listing of video games now. My main intention is to make this available on my iPod Touch, so I was a bit dismayed when I found that the listing didn't display the title of the game.

Read More

Raw: Using OpenSSL to create a certificate authority and update IIS 7.5

  • December 29, 2010
  • James Skemp
A raw dump of information on how to create a certificate authority and etcetera. Step 1: Basic folder and file structure creation Directories: certs, keys, requests Files: database.txt (empty), serial.txt (01, then new line), openssl.cnf (based on OpenSSL file) Step 2: Create key "c:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\openssl.exe" genrsa -des3 -out keys/_ca.key 2048 Step 3: Create certificate authority certificate "c:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\openssl.exe" req -config openssl.cnf -new -x509 -days 365 -key keys/_ca.

Read More

The problem with installing SQL Server Express via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer

  • December 26, 2010
  • James Skemp
In the past I've talked up Microsoft's Web Platform Installer. With this tool installed you can easily get an IIS server correctly setup. However, as I work my way through Pete Brown's Silverlight 4 in Action I found myself needing to install AdventureWorks (something I had looked into in the past as well). Unfortunately, Web Platform Installer installs one of the 'lower' versions of SQL Server Express, without the advanced services, which is required for AdventureWorks.

Read More

Getting started with StatSVN (0.7.0) and CollabNet Subversion Server

  • October 31, 2010
  • James Skemp
This past week I was looking at advanced statistical information about a couple Subversion repositories we use at work. While TortoiseSVN has some basic reporting, the downside is that, out of the box, users must have access to the repository to access this information. StatSVN, seemingly the most popular solution, works rather well as an alternative to granting this access. The downside (or upside, depending upon your perspective) is that viewers of the report can see what files changed, and how many lines, but not what the actual changes were (outside of the logged message).

Read More