Bnpositive's Blog

The world has lost a comedic genius with the death of Harvey Korman. Most famous with his supporting and starring roles with Tim Conway and Carol Burnett, Korman recently lost his struggle with an aortic aneurysm in his abdomen.

LOS ANGELES – Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys for his outrageously funny contributions to “The Carol Burnett Show” and played a conniving politician to hilarious effect in “Blazing Saddles,” died Thursday. He was 81.

Korman died at UCLA Medical Center after suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm four months ago, his family said. He had undergone several major operations.

The video clip above is one of my favorites of him and Tim Conway performing on the Carol Burnett show.

Source: Comic powerhouse Harvey Korman dies at 81

After surfing through the Microsoft Live Labs website some more I’ve learned about a few different apps that are in the labs and being worked on as we speak.

Perhaps the most famous of them is the Photosynth application. This takes a collection of images from the same place and stitches them together into a sort of 3D virtual image of the location.

Another promising application appeared to be the Seadragon app. The goal behind this app is to be able to display information on any screen, clearly and almost effortlessly regardless of the screen size.

If this sounds a little vague, consider the following four “promises” of Seadragon:

1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

The other couple of apps didn’t seem like too much to get me that interested in them aside from Volta, which promises to develop into a valuable developer tool to allow the splitting of application code across development languages. I’m just cutting my chops on .NET and VB so my ability to really soak up all that’s available there is a little skechy at best.

One thing I did think about when looking at this website of apps, there’s just too few right now. I’m sure with all the employees working for Microsoft, there’s got to be some pretty slick ideas in the heads of people. Does the Google method of allowing 20% of your time to be devoted to your side project really make the difference? If you could take 1-day a week and work on your own “idea”; what would it be?

Images: Microsoft Live Labs

For those people who want to take the risk out of everything, they’re really taking the life out of it as well!

Risk. Fail. Learn. Succeed. Rinse and Repeat!

I was hanging out with a friend last night and he had a new mobile browser on his phone called Skyfire. It looked very similar to the functionality of the iPhone browser in allowing you to select an area on the page and then zoom into it as needed. That was in beta and I applied to get access but who knows how long that will take.

Then my friend told me about Deepfish from Microsoft. Why haven’t I heard of this? I obviously need to reduce my sleep further and expand my general searching for Microsoft news.

First let’s go ahead and jump to the naming of the application. Personally naming something related to a browser anything similar to “fish” sounds too much like “phish” as in “phishing scams”. Plus, to then include it as “Deepfish“, implies to me some covert intelligence spying plan. Again, relating this terms with an Internet browser just doesn’t seem smart.

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This is what a friend of mine just pulled out of his lake. Stupid responsibilities and commitments called “work”!

One thing I’ve done from the beginning of my days on the Internet has been to take advantage of free e-mail addresses from places like Juno, Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail. One of the newest providers I’ve come across is GMX and I’ve been happy with them so far, even though I still don’t use them as a primary provider.

One thing I’ve never done is relied upon the e-mail addresses provided by whomever is my ISP at the time. The problem with that is if you ever change ISP’s you’ve got to let everyone know your e-mail address changed as well. That’s just too much of a pain for everyone to keep up with when it does happen.

A feature I really like about GMX even though I haven’t started to use it yet is that I can consolidate all of my e-mail to that interface if I desire.

Another feature GMX has that I just recently saw though is a built-in, online file storage solution. They even have a File Storage Manager tool that you download to your PC to mirror and manage your online file storage on GMX’s servers.

One of the books I’ve been reading lately is “Managing Online Forums” by Patrick O’Keefe.

Patrick O’Keefe is the founder and force behind the iFroggy Network, which is a network of almost 20 websites and resources you can find online across a variety of topics. Given the topic of his book you can guess that many of these websites are forums for topics ranging from  Karate to Photoshop.

At first I started reading the book from a mind set of forums and discussion boards themselves. I have a client or two that have either used a forum in the past or have talked about the potential need for one in the future.

However, after reading on I found myself taking some of the tips and suggestions he’s written about and apply them to almost any of my websites. Perhaps even more keyed in on how to apply the strategies to improving how I manage and promote my various blogs.

The book has nine chapters that focus on the following topics:

• Chapter 1 – Laying the Groundwork
• Chapter 2 – Developing Your Community
• Chapter 3 – Developing Guidelines
• Chapter 4 – Promoting Your Community
• Chapter 5 – Managing Your Staff
• Chapter 6 – Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos
• Chapter 7 – Creating a Good Environment
• Chapter 8 – Keeping It Interesting
• Chapter 9 – Making Money

As you can see from those titles, it wouldn’t take much to think about how you could apply some of the strategies to any business venture you may have.

Managing Online Forums is way more useful than for just managing forums!

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The folks over at Engadget are live blogging the Microsoft launch of Windows 7. It’s weird to think about the next version of Windows already. Vista only seems like it’s been out for a little while. I guess it’s mostly because there was so much time between Windows XP and Windows Vista.

There’s some really interesting coverage of interview with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates:

7:08 – Swisher: Do you still get veto on company decisions? Gates: “No.” Says he’s become the junior partner when he swapped roles with Ballmer. Mossberg asking about Bill’s participation these days and going forward. “It’s a very different role” he’s taking on. Ozzie and Mundie have stepped up, and he’s looking to Steve to help pick and choose his future projects.

7:12 – Ballmer: “I want to know what [Bill] thinks.” Swisher wants to talk Yahoo! Ballmer gives the quick rundown of events to date. “We are not rebidding for the company — we reserve the right to do so, but it’s not on the docket.” Swisher: What are you interested in, in Yahoo? Ha, they’re wheeling out a whiteboard for Ballmer to diagram his explanation. Swisher: “This is like crack for him.”

Be sure and check-out Engadget’s full coverage because there’s lots of information about the early days of Microsoft and Bill and Steve sharing some of the thoughts and ideas of how things all started and what they were thinking and going through at the time.

Why in the world can I not get the built-in authentication controls to work in my installation of ASP.NET?

I’m running SQL Server 2005 and using the aspnet_regsql command tool to register everything. It appears that the aspnet_regsql works as it should, but when I try to configure the settings through the ASP.net Web Site Administration Tool nothing is working.

When I run the register command I’ve told it to use my local instance of SQL SERVER and the default database. I’ve tried both Windows Authentication and SQL Login. Nothing different. It appears to run fine, but then my site won’t register that they’re available.

I’m really trying to develop and rely more on CSS for all of my formatting and colors for pages. I’m still teaching myself more on how to use it for positioning and layout, but I know that will come as I force myself to use it more.

One challenge I came across this morning with Visual Web Developer Express 2008, is that I wish it would show me a preview of ALL the CSS formatting that I have setup in my style sheet.

I’ve got some formatting setup for my H1, H2, H3 tags but I don’t see a preview of them in this list.

That’s kind of annoying don’t you think? Is there something I’m not doing or some setting I don’t have configured properly to see them?

If anyone has a tip, let me know.

The other thing I was thinking about is that I’d like a little CSS initial setup wizard that would let me build the basics of my stylesheet visually.

This would let me organize and come up with a nice color palette and font size collection that really compliment each other.

Does that exist? Let me know what you do and how you use CSS for your websites.

For some reason I missed these videos when they first were shown on the American Idol finale on Wednesday night. Don’t get me started on that as our DVR cut off literally right before they announced the winner!

The video portray the American Idol finalists air-guitaring with Guitar Hero a la Tom Cruise in the movie “Risky Business”.

Uncovered by Linda Sharp at “Don’t Get Me Started” who’s making a little bit of news herself with her fandom of David Cook.

With all the news of just how popular the Nintendo Wii is and all the problems that have been experienced by Xbox 360 users like myself, you might wonder if the race to be the top console was going to be as close as the race of the Davids on American Idol.

You can now rest easy though and know that the Xbox 360 has won that challenge.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that Xbox 360® has sold over ten million units in the United States, making it the first current generation gaming console to break the ten million mark in the U.S., and contributing to global sales of over 19 million.

What I think is more interesting though is the size of the Xbox LIVE Online community. I don’t think many people would argue that Xbox’s online features far outweigh what’s currently available from Nintendo Wii or Sony PlayStation 3.

Just how many are of us out there are there on Xbox LIVE?

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