Silverlight of Yesterday–Saves me today!

Silverlight is an awesome product. As Flash is awesome and it’s glory. Silverlight is nicer for me, as I think in C# v. Action Script. That said, at work, we use the Adobe plug in model for quite a bit, it’s just not something I am personally familiar with.

I have always been a fan of screen casts, and over the last few years, I have been using the http://looplogic.com screen recorder. ON a few screen casts, I wanted to record my printer printing, using my Desktop web cam. So I started looking for a web site, that simple turned on my web cam. There are  lot out there, but that meant I had to show that website, inside my screen cast, just to show my camera.

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Installing WordPress on Azure in 3 minutes

I recently moved ScottCate.com from my old hosting provider to Windows Azure Websites. It was so fast and simple, I wanted to do a srceencast showing just how easy it was. If you’re interested in blogging, or using WordPress for anything, you owe it to yourself to give this a shot.

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Azure CDN: A Valuable Lesson Learned

On October 21st around 6pm Pacific time, our Azure CDN was gone! It came back a few hours later, but I started digging into a solution that would help mitigate this in the future (this post). Instead of the CDN serving content, it was serving 400’s (Bad Request). When something like this happens, we call it an outage, though that isn’t always the case. There are millions of dependencies in Technology, and if Just one breaks, it can have catastrophic down line damages. So our goal in Cloud and Scalable software is to allow for failure, understand where/when it can happen to the best of our ability, and make backup, fallback routines to handle that failure. These could be automated, or manual, but the more you have in place, the faster your app will come back online when a failure happens. Notice I said when, not if. Plan for failure sooner than later, and you’ll be better prepared.

Technical folks, can skip to Technical Problem and Solution

What could make our CDN just go away? More on that later. How to solve the problem. We put our thinking caps on and …. come up with a solution.

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Windows 8.1 Improved Search Charm

I installed and started running Windows 8.1 a few weeks ago, and I started a new habit. Instead of hitting WINDOWS to launch the full screen start menu, I now just press [WINDOWS]+[S], to bring up the Search Charm. The nice thing about this is … it’s visually less movement, as the search charm will pop-out from the right on top of your desktop apps. I like it!

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Building a Stuffed Animal Zoo

Our children’s stuffed animal collection is out of control. They love them dearly. Each and every one have names, and a back story. Grandma loves Build-A-Bear as much (or maybe more) than the kids do, and with a combined 12 years of stuffed animal collecting … well you get the point. Here is the final product we built today, and below, I’ll step-by-step show you how I built Courtney built it.

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