Lee Whitney III

DreamScene for Windows - Tropical Ocean Waves (HD 1080p)

DreamScenes are video wallpaper for Windows.  Most sites offering DreamScenes either want you to register, charge money, kill you with popups, or some other nonsense.

So I thought it would be good to provide one you can just download and use with no beat down.

The Tropical Ocean Waves DreamScene is one I created using Maya 2008 Unlimited. It took about 30 hours to render on a Intel Quad Core 3.2Ghz system.

Here's a screen shot, but it looks much better in full motion at 1080p resolution!  I'm already providing a lower resolution for those who don't have have 1920x1080 monitors.

 

Let me know what you think.

1920x1080 Resolution (1080p HD, 28MB) - NOT FOR a slow computer, max quality
Download Vista_DreamScene_Ocean_1080p.zip

1280x720 Resolution (720p HD, 22MB) - LOWER CPU Load, still looks good
Download Vista_DreamScene_Ocean_720p.zip

NON-WIDESCREEN monitors, 1200x800 and up (22MB)
Download Vista_DreamScene_Ocean_NOT_WIDESCREEN.zip

Linq DataContext and Dispose

A question many developers have with Linq and databases is this:

How important is it to call Dispose on a DataContext object?

Normally a quick web search gives an easy answer to common questions like this.  But sometimes Google fails us.  It turns out so many people have attempted to write about this with wrong or incomplete information that a web search returns mostly junk.

Here is a definitive answer, which I have finally learned after reading down to comment one hundred and twenty seven :) on a blog post by ScottGu, who runs the ASP.NET team at Microsoft.

Short answer:  It is generally not critical to call Dispose on Datacontext.

Longer answer: 
All objects in .NET are eventually disposed automatically by the automatic garbage collector.  The reason developers are paranoid about calling it explicitly is that if an object contains an expensive resource like an open database connection, then we can't afford to wait around for garbage collection, it would have a big impact on scalability.

The good news is that DataContext objects do not keep open database connections like some ADO.Net objects do, so it doesn't really hurt to let the garbage collector do it for you.

There is one caveat here though:  The DataContext does track change states for the data, and by disposing it you would release this memory more quickly.  In almost all apps this difference wont be significant.  However if you have a web site that is using all memory available this is one of many optimizations you could make.

Btw, a gigabyte of expensive ECC server memory is going for as little as 30 bucks now, so if your server is strained you can help it out pretty cheaply.

IP Blocker Updated version 0.84 (IISIP)

An update to the IP Block IISIP is available here.

The original blog post describes the app in more detail.

The change log is below.

.80 - Initial release
.82 - Added event log IP scanner to auto extract IPs from event log
.84 - More robust checking for duplicates and properly formed data
        Keep latest copy of downloaded feed data in txt file for easy inspection
        Allow for comments by skipping IPFeed data lines starting with #
        Misc small fixes

Firefox 3 RC2 Released, Scores 71 on ACID 3 Test

Firefox 3 is looking like it's going to be a great improvement over version 2, however as a developer I'm always interested standards compliance testing like the ACID tests because the better browsers do, the easier it gets for people creating web apps.

Just to keep track, here are how the latest browsers stack up as of June 5 2008 on the Acid 3 Test:

Firefox 3 RC2:        71
Safari 3.1.1:           75
Opera 9.5 Beta 2:   78
IE 8 Beta 1:            17

Firefox 2.0.0.14:     54
IE 7 Vista SP1:         5

By the way, various browses have private builds tucked away that score better in the dark of night, but these scores represent the very latest publicly advertised betas and released products.  If it's not good enough to highlight on their web site, it's not ready to brag about its score.

IP Blocker Updated (IISIP)

Previously I posted IISIP - an app that automatically downloaded known bad IPs and blocked them in IIS.

IISIP has been updated to version 0.82 and is available here (source code available optionally).

The changes include:
  - Some minor bug fixes
  - A new event log scanner.  This will scan the event log and extract a bad IP list.  It has a filter so you can extract IPs only from certain events (hacking attempts) if you like.

   If you use the SMTP service the scanner can also extract a list of failed delivery domains.  This was helpful to us for example in finding that *lots* of people send mail to yagoo.com when they mean yahoo.com.  By finding all the common mistypes we were able to check for these in the UI and prevent the problem before the user even submits an e-mail address.