Yearly Archives: 2006

The jowler… fun for all

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I might have forgotten this gem, but alas Phil just reminded me… over the weekend, I found out about a type of picture named the jowler.  There’s even a website related to jowlers…

All you need to do to make a successful jowler is to relax all of your facial muscles, shake your head, and have someone take your picture.  The result is a cross between amusing and scary.

Ah… feeling good

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It’s like a weight has been lifted now that Property Center has been publicly announced.  Up till now, I haven’t really told anyone other than immediate family and the landlords that I’ve been working with.  Developing this software has really sparked an excitement inside of me and I found (and still find) myself working many long hours because I was having fun.

Being a landlord myself, I was handling all of my financial information with Excel files.  It feels so good to be able to “dogfood” Property Center and use it to manage my own real estate information.  A nice little bonus is that I qualify for the free account plan 🙂

Property Center Launches!

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I am extremely happy to announce Property Center, an online real estate management service.  To compliment the Property Center site, there is a blog setup at Bia Creations.  I began working on Property Center shortly after leaving Edstrom and couldn’t be happier.  The Property Center service uses prototype and script.aculo.us to enrich the user experience throughout many parts of the site.  So please, have a look and let me know what you think!

Also, I want to thank Aeron Glemann for getting me started with portions of the site theme.

Beer commercial shelf-life

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In my estimation, the average shelf-life of a beer commercial is about 3 to 6 months.  By that, I mean that beer companies tend to go with a specific marketing campaign for about 3-6 months… sometimes it goes longer, sometimes shorter.  It doesn’t seem, however, that the beer companies recognize a previously successful marketing campaign all the time, though.  For instance, I recently stumbled across the Budweiser wassup commercials.  They made me smile.  It’s rare for any commercial to make me smile, but in this case, I smiled and wanted to watch more of them.  I remember smiling the first time I saw them too…

So what am I getting at here?  Not a lot…  except that now I’m curious what the rotation period rules are for beer commercials… Say they have a successful marketing campaign such as the wassup commercials.  Eventually, say after 6 months, the commercials get old and just aren’t as funny as they were originally… How long needs to go by until they could play the same commercials and get a nice response again?  I’m guessing 2-3 years at a minimum…  Tricky thing, though, playing older commercials.  Trends change and marketers need to be conscious of that.

Enough rambling… here our the links to the commercials that made me smile tonight:

Invalid character in Base-64 string error with ViewState

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Well, for some reason, I decided to test an obscure case today… I was happily greeted by an error page saying that my viewstate was fucked.  What?  I thought to myself… “This is awesome! Leave it to MS and their skilled button monkey to test viewstate issues, right?”  Sorry it’s been a little while since I ranted about MS… I have plenty of crap that’s been building up inside me (mostly related to the stinky pile they call Visual Studio 2005), and maybe I can unleash it all to the world some day in the near future.

Anyway… This issue has to do with asp.net 1.1 and I’m about 96% sure that this has to do with some recent security “improvements” that I made to my web.config.  I decided to use authorization elements in my main web.config to control who has access to various files/directories in the system. 

My web.config looked something like:

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <authorization>
            <deny users=”?” />
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
    <location path=”Default.aspx”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path=”login.aspx”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path=”Themes”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
    <location path=”js”>
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users=”*” />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
</configuration>

What this basically says is that everyone can access default.aspx, login.aspx, the Themes directory, and the js directory.  Everything else is limited to logged in users.

Now, for some reason, I decided to add the control I use to log in on to my default.aspx page as well as the login.aspx page.  When I tried logging in via default.aspx, I got the lovely viewstate error (Invalid character in Base-64 string). 

Allowing access to all files fixes the error… but as an alternative, I just removed “everyone” access to the default.aspx page for now.  In the future, I’ll remove the login control from that page, but it doesn’t really matter right now.  You have to be logged in to see anything useful right now.

Finding any information related to this was a bitch.  Actually, to be completely truthful, I didn’t find anything just worked it out on my own.  Thanks MS.  If there is a plus side to any of this, I guess it would be that I got to enjoy rebooting my box.