Barnaby's World » Software

What is this? I just hit F12 in Internet Explorer 8

Barnaby Jeans — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:00:05 +0000

As I’m sitting in meetings I just caught a tweet pointing me to a website by Pete LePage from the Internet Explorer team at corp. Pete has a great write up on the Developer Tools within Internet Explorer 8 (and IE 9). I won’t re-iterate everything Pete has written, but this is something that everyone should take a look at regardless of whether you are a developer, a manager, or just someone who is interested in seeing how a site is structured.

The good news is you can try this out right now if you are using IE8 without downloading any additional software.

So go ahead, hit the F12 button and see what happens…

barnabyjeans.ca goes IPv6

Barnaby Jeans — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:32:00 +0000

UPDATE: As I have changed hosting providers, the following information no longer applies, however, is left as a reference for others who may be trying to get IPv6 up and running.

A couple of months ago I got IPv6 up and running at home, now that I have that working, the next logical step was to setup a server that I could connect to using IPv6. Over the last few weeks I have been working on getting http://barnabyjeans.ca to not only speak IPv4 but also be accessible over IPv6. The good news is that this is now working and you can access this site over IPv6. If you are experimenting with IPv6, you should automatically connect over IPv6 as there are both A and AAAA records setup for that server. However, if you have IPv6 setup but name resolution isn’t working you may want to try accessing the site via the following http://[2001:470:1f04:39a::2] (depending on your operating system, this may or may not work). You should notice down at the bottom of the page (under the community server logo) is the IP address you are connecting from. If you are hitting the server over IPv6, you should see your IPv6 address down there, if not, you will see your traditional IPv4 address.

Now that I have that out of the way, how did I go about getting the server to talk IPv6? I’ll try to outline the steps below, but as with anything, you will probably want to try this out in a controlled environment before rolling this out more broadly.

Decide how you are going to get your IPv6 address. For this server, I decided to try Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker which you can find at http://tunnelbroker.net.
Once you have registered and signed into the tunnelbroker.net site, you will need to request a new tunnel and provide the current IPv4 address of your endpoint (server). As we are setting this up on an Internet facing server, you will likely have a public IP so this step should be pretty straight forward. If your server sits behind a firewall they you will need to use the firewall IP address and, very importantly, make sure that your firewall passes protocol-41 traffic.
After you have requested your tunnel, you will be provided with some important pieces of information, specifically:

Server IPv4 address:72.52.104.74 — note this isn’t your server IP address – this is the tunnel server endpoint

Server IPv6 address:2001:470:????:???::?/64

Client IPv4 address: aa.bb.cc.dd — this should be the public IP address of your server

Client IPv6 address:2001:????:????:????::?/64 — this will become the IPv6 address for your server
you will also notice some instructions on how to configure various operating systems to use the information above. In our case we’ll select Vista/2008 (this seems counter-intuitive as we are using Server 2003, however, this option provides you with the “netsh” commands that you will need to get this working.
Enable IPv6 on the server. In this case Windows Server 2003 so the following command should do the trick

netsh interface ipv6 install
once you have ipv6 installed on the server, you can make use of the commands as mentioned in #4 above. They will likely look like the following (I’ve replaced the actual values with $ClientIP, etc):

netsh interface ipv6 add v6v4tunnel IP6Tunnel $ClientIP $ServerIP
netsh interface ipv6 add address IP6Tunnel $ClientIPv6
netsh interface ipv6 add route ::/0 IP6Tunnel $ServerIPv6
once you have completed these steps, you may want to try the following commands to see if you are connecting via IPv6:

ping -6 www.kame.net and ping -6 www.sixxs.net. unless you have a firewall that is blocking ICMPv6, these commands should be successful
lastly, if you have any websites currently running, you will need restart IIS to have it listen over IPv6. The following article discusses IIS and IPv6 specifically: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/6ad3cff7-10f7-4499-8673-e866795607d1.mspx?mfr=true

There is a great page on Technet site that covers a lot of the background on IPv6 and is worth a read – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/network/bb530961.aspx

Life, Death, and Technology

Barnaby Jeans — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:56:31 +0000

The past few weeks have been a roller coaster of emotion as my Mother-in-law (Bernice) was flown home from her winter RV’ing in the US southwest and in Mexico only to find out that the health problem she was having was lung cancer and she only had months to live. Unfortunately the timing wasn’t nearly correct and she passed away early last week. The full write up and timeline is posted on my in-laws’ blog at http://www.whitesrvjournal.com/archives/2009/02/one_final_journ.html. Once you have read that, continue on with this post as I want to share the role technology has played over the past few months.

As I mentioned, my in-laws spend their winters RV’ing somewhere much warmer than Southern Ontario, so they spend a significant amount of time away from us. One of the main ways that we stayed in contact, and maintained a connection was to webcam with them. The tool of choice – Windows Live Messenger – quick, easy to use, and great video quality.

Now skip forward to early January, after flying home and being admitted to hospital, Bernice was transferred from Cambridge Memorial Hospital to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton. One of the first things we did was get her setup with a phone in her room, however, with her being in Hamilton and us being in Cambridge, she was going to have to pay long distance for every call to us. Fortunately we use Vonage for our home phone service and in a matter of minutes I was able to get on the Vonage.ca website and add a virtual number to our account to provide a local Hamilton number for her to call. As you can imagine, sitting in a hospital room in Hamilton with the family living in Cambridge, having a convenient, and free (for her), way to get in touch was crucial.

Unfortunately Bernice’s battle with cancer was short-lived and she passed away on February 2nd, 2009. While there is lots of grieving to be done, there were also the details of the memorial service and celebration of life to take care of as well as sharing the news of her passing to friends and acquaintances. As you have already read the blog post, you know that they blogged about all their travels, so this was the easiest place to share the news broadly. In the past it had been Bernice who wrote the blog posts, so we needed a quick way to put together the announcement. As I use Windows Live Writer to author my blog, it was a simple matter to point it to whitesrvjournal.com and get setup to post over there. With the blog posted it was time to focus on the memorial service.

After meeting with the minister, one of the things my father-in-law was looking for was a version of Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. As I didn’t have it in my CD collection the quickest way to (legally) get a copy was to purchase one from iTunes, and after a quick search I was able to provide him with a version by Ian McGregor & Scottish Pipe Band.

One of the other things that we needed was a good photo of Bernice that we could position at the front of the chapel as well as use in the blog post. Trying to find photos of specific people can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, however, I had just finished tagging my most recent photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery. In doing so, I could quickly find all the photos that had Bernice in them. The photo that we finally selected is actually a crop from a much larger photo. In order to print it at the size we wanted, it was going to need to be resized. The tool of choice – Genuine Fractals. I was able to take a crop that was about 1000 pixels wide and blow it up to print a beautiful 10×14” print. Thanks to the folks at Print Three in Cambridge getting the printing done last minute after my Canon S9000 stopped working.

With the memorial service was taken care of, we turned our attention to the celebration of life luncheon that followed. The family wanted to have a slide show to share photos of Bernice’s life. After scanning all of the old photos, putting the slideshow together was quickly accomplished using the Slide Show feature of Windows Live Photo Gallery (specifically the Travel theme). Lastly, we needed to make sure everyone new how to get from the memorial service to the luncheon and a map and directions was quickly created using info from maps.live.com.

While this has been a very difficult time for the family, there have been the little bits of software and the services they connect to that have helped to accomplish what needed to be done quickly and easily and allowed us to focus on mourning the loss of a great woman.

Bernice White

1942 – 2009

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Sharing information visually

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:39:43 +0000

I have just found a very cool new application on the Microsoft site called Microsoft Tags (http://www.microsoft.com/tags). Basically what this does is allow you to encode either a vCard, a URL, or a phone number into a 2D image that can then be read and decoded with a camera phone.

If you visit http://gettag.mobi from your mobile phone (including Blackberry and Android) you’ll be able to download the reader that will decode this file and provide you with my vCard. For iPhone users you can visit the App Store and download Tag Reader.

If you want my work contact info, all you need to do is scan. I may just have to include one of these on my next business cards.

Tags: Microsoft

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

What’s eating up my disk?

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:02:39 +0000

I’ve just finished catching up on my RSS reader and came across the following post from Sarah on the Channel 10 site.

WPF Disk Space Finder | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

In summary this application gives you a quick and easy way to see what is using the disk space on your machine. What makes this even better is the fact that it is a WPF app and is deployed using ClickOnce deployment.

Direct link to Disk Space Finder: http://www.diskspacefinder.com

[Video] CP24 Popfly interviews posted

Barnaby Jeans — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:31:13 +0000

Over the last few months I have had the chance to visit the good folks at CP24 and appear on their Homepage show to talk about Microsoft Popfly.

For the first show I talked with host Ann Rohmer about Popfly and what you could do with it.

Barnaby Jeans on CP24 Homepage talking about Popfly

For the second interview I showed host Jee-Yun Lee how you can embed your Popfly creations into your Facebook profile.

Barnaby Jeans on CP24 Homepage (again) talking about Popfly and Facebook

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, and don't forget to try this stuff out. It really is easy to use.

Technorati Tags: Facebook,Popfly,Microsoft,CP24

Gizmodo: Slingplayer Gets Windows Mobile 6 Support

Barnaby Jeans — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:38:41 +0000

I just came across the following post over on Gizmodo about the new version of Slingplayer with better Vista support and Windows Mobile 6 support. Although I don't have a Windows Mobile 6 device yet, the updated Vista support will be nice. With all the traveling I have been doing, I love being able to access my TV regardless of where I am. Now all we need are better Unlimited Data Plans in Canada.

Software: Slingplayer Gets Windows Mobile 6 Support – Gizmodo

Technorati tags: Slingplayer, Slingbox, Windows Vista, Windows Mobile 6

[How to] Create a Windows Home Server photo album in minutes

Barnaby Jeans — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 19:35:50 +0000

I can't believe that I hadn't found this website earlier. This is a very cool way to use Windows Home Server to share your photos with your family.

How to create a Windows Home Server photo album in minutes » Andrew Grant – Live!

Writer Zone: Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Now Available

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 02:03:50 +0000

I've spent the last couple of days at MESH and listened to some great sessions and conversations on a variety of topics. One of the recurring themes that came up from some of the audience who were new to blogging was the question of a WYSIWYG editor to post to your blog. Well yesterday the Windows Live Writer team release Beta 2 of their product. If you have a blog and are looking for a tool to simply posting check out: http://writer.live.com.

The actual blog post announcing this is at: Writer Zone: Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Now Available

Technorati tags: MESH07, Microsoft, Windows Live Writer