Let me start off by saying that I love Gmail's Spam Filter. In the words of Tony the Tiger, "It's greeeaaat!" That said, I got my first piece of spam today that somehow made it through Gmail's filter.

Here is the content of the email:

新しいメールアドレスをお知らせします



新しいメールアドレス：mr_isaac_caleb1200@yahoo.co.jpI am isaac caleb bank manager of BOA Bank in Burkina faso.I would like you to indicate your interest to receive the transfer of 10.5M Dollars.I will like you to stand as the next of kin to my late Descease customer whose account is presently dormant,for claimYours faithfully,mr isaac caleb- Mr Isaa a Caleb



Does this sound familiar? To me it sounds like the Nigerian schemes that went through the world a few years back. I only think this because Gmail's spam filter made sure that crap never reached me.

Anyway, in case anyone is wondering I regard this as spam because:

If I'm a bank employee, I'm not sending my bank related emails through Yahoo! If I'm going to send email from...

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I'm in the middle of researching for a presentation I'm giving at a seminar on using Social Media for Businesses, and I'm thinking to myself, this is going to be a really hard topic to talk on, especially since I'm not a consultant. Social media (at least to me) is a buzz word, much like e-commerce was in the late 90's and early part of this century (can some tell me what to call this decade?).

And then I stumbled on this link. Social Media Myths that Irk Me. First off, it's an awesome title to a blog entry. At the time of this post, I looked up major social media networks and it's the fourth...

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Today, I was presented with an interesting problem. How can you use the same content for two different website, but account for some very minor changes in your DotNetNuke skin? After thinking about it for a little bit, I decided to override the base Skin class. Turns out, with an RESX or XML file, this is a pretty darn elegant solution.

First, let's take a look at the code. In order to do this properly, the class being created needs to inherit from DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin. This enables the class to pick up all of the appropriately used public properties and methods and provides the ability to add overridden/custom properties. In my particular case, the driving force behind the customization in the skin development was the URL name. I probably could use any PortalSetting (name, ID, etc), but I chose to go with the URL. It's easy enough to get. Here's what my code started off looking like:

public class MySkinDefault : DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin{

    public MySkinDefault()

{...

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So tonight, I decided to upgrade my personal sites to DNN 4.9.3. What could go wrong? Upgrading between 4.6.x versions and greater is easy since the XmlMerge functionality was introduced.

Wow! I was wrong!

I backed up both the database and the file system (which should always be done no matter what type of upgrade), downloaded the upgrade files from dotnetnuke.com, unzipped the contents over my current site files and upgraded. So far so well.

BAM! Did not even make it to the upgrade screen. Big fat yellow ASP .Net exception screen stating Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.

Not exactly the most straight...

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So it has finally happened! I'm going to be presenting at the Look At Me! seminar on June 11, 2009 at Caito's in Glendale, MO. I will be presenting a session titled Integrating Social Media Into Your Business Culture. A lot of interesting topics will be discussed, with the keynote being presented by Carolyn Shelby.

During this presentation I'll be illustrating how any sized business can take advantage of social networks and the concepts they represent. I will be using MySpace,...

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So lately, I've been clowning around with DotNetNuke's scheduler engine. I'm in the process of creating a Twitter module for DNN for my day job. Apparently, the day job's website and intranet are pounding the "hell" out of the Twitter API, causing none of the updates to show after a specific amount of API requests are passed (probably between 65 - 100).

How do I resolve the issue? Well, I decided to cache the requests in a database that I control via the RSS feeds that twitter provides. Doing that, and creating the corresponding user interface, enables me to "pound" my database as opposed to the Twitter API, which then ensures that content is always being displayed.

That's all great, but it stinks if I have to manually update the cache myself, which is where the DNN Scheduler comes into play. I created a scheduled task (I will do my best to post a blog later about it), and my life should have been hunky dory. Unfortunately, if you don't set up the scheduled task using the exact class name and assembly...

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Helping to resolve mismatched keystrokes (backspace not working, arrow keys don't work appropriately, etc) in vm guests hosted by Linux VMware Workstation 6.5.1 hosts.

* Please note this only pertains to version 1.02 and I have to do some code skimming to vlaidate.

While at work today, i was dorking around on the customer extranet and I noticed something peculiar.  Even though auto-login was enabled on the AD provider in DotNetNuke, users were still being redirected to the login page.  To make matters even weirder, Autologin by IP was enabled and I was in the appropriate IP range.

So my first step in troubleshooting this issue was to verify that the ~/DesktopModules/Authentication/ActiveDirectory/WindowsSignin.aspx was still authenticating correctly, which it was.

Ok, then my next step was to check the Windows Credentials.  Yup, NTFS was set to allow corporate users and Anonymous Access was unchecked in IIS.  So scratch that off the list.

Now I'm starting to shake my head.  I've used this version of the provider successfully for the past year or so.  At this point, I start checking the IIS logs.  Maybe (and this a huge maybe), it's not picking up on corporate users in the Reponse Header.  Nope, IIS logs are showing what they need to show.

...

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So I was bouncing around on a project I'm working on for my "day job," and I noticed a tremendous number of Text/HTML modules being used as a summarization for the function of the page.  Using the Text/HTML module in that function is fine, but it's not taking advantage of linking to other pages on the site or token replacement, it's kind of a waste.

How do you get around that though?  Well, every module in DNN has an advanced setting where  you can specify header or footer text.  In the case outlined above, this works perfectly.  One of the benefits of using this is with less modules on the page, page loads become a little more efficient.

I have a few ideas on some new topics that I'm going to post about later this week.  With that in mind, I really don't want to relay on just the search engine's spidering my site to provide the content.  So, I've joined Technorati!  Hopefully this will provide a boost in helping other IT folks get the information I've provided through my years of experience.