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Penny Pinching in the Cloud: How to run a two day Virtual Conference for $10

Submitted by admin on Thu, 04/25/2013 - 19:16

We've just finished Day One of "" our community-run free online conference for developers who love the .NET development platform and open source!

The Conference Platform

It seems funny to call the software our conference runs on a "platform" as that sounds very "enterprisey" and official. In the past we've done and with sponsors who helped pay for things. We used Channel 9 and had a studio and streamed either from Seattle or using Live Meeting.

However, this year we wanted to do it on the cheap and more distributed. We wanted speakers from ALL over in all time zones. How cheap? About USD$10ish we figure. I'll get a complete bill later, but we basically wanted to scale up, do the talks and scale down.

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Project-less scripted C# with ScriptCS and Roslyn

Submitted by admin on Wed, 04/24/2013 - 16:35
ScriptCS inside of SublimeText2 with the ScriptCS package giving SyntaxHighlighting

is working on something interesting that combines C#, NuGet, Roslyn (the new "compiler as a service") and his love of text editors and scripts. Now, with help from Justin Rusbatch () and Filip Wojcieszyn () they are having all kinds of fun...using C# as a scripting language.

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Exposed: A Blog Comment Spammer's Source Template

Submitted by admin on Mon, 04/22/2013 - 18:01

I've been getting a LOT of Blog Comment Spam lately, just in the at two weeks. I run all my comments through the , and I pay for it. However, this particular flavor of spam has been making it through consistently. It has a pattern, through, and I'd been trying to figure it out when this LARGE comment showed up.

Apparently while they were messing about trying to spam me, they posted their entire source template.

I'm embedding it below as a Gist, rather than copy/pasting it into my blog engine. It's so spammy, I'd hate to get delisted from Google looking rather like a splog.

Note .

One fellow says

"I used to do comment spam and this is not the most advanced one."

Really? Does one put Comment Spammer on their resume?

Another comment says that we're hating on spammers. We should embrace them because:

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Penny Pinching Video: Moving my Website's Images to the Azure CDN (and using a custom domain)

Submitted by admin on Mon, 04/22/2013 - 11:46

I talked about last week when I added jQuery lazy loading to . Next, I (in fact, they should have always been together!). Now, I'm moving all my show images to the Azure CDN. There's been ~370 shows, and if someone visits the archives page and scrolls around it's about 8 megs of pics.

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Setting up Two-Factor Authentication for your Google account AND Microsoft account

Submitted by admin on Fri, 04/19/2013 - 13:06

Two factor auth for Microosft and Google within the Google Authenticator app

I use Two-Factor Authentication for my Google Apps account and I use the Google Authenticator application on my iPhone to generate the second factor.

Microsoft Accounts (formerly Live Accounts) just launched Two-Factor Auth and you should set it up now. That means SkyDrive, Outlook.com/Hotmail as well as the Windows Azure Dashboard can now be fronted by two-factor auth.

If you already use two-factor for Google, you can ADD your Microsoft account to the Google Authenticator application on your Android or iPhone. That means I can use one Authenticator application for all accounts which is extremely convenient.

The process for setting up two step authentication on a Microsoft account is:

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Penny Pinching Video: Moving an Azure Website between data centers

Submitted by admin on Thu, 04/18/2013 - 19:26

I talked about last week when I added jQuery lazy loading to . I wanted to avoid paying any unnecessary bandwidth costs. The result was great and I'll be under my bandwidth this month.

I'm continuing to look for ways to optimize and pinch pennies in the cloud. I realized recently that while my Website was running in the West US Azure datacenter, the database (managed by ) was running in North Central US. This means I was paying for the bandwidth of my database calls. Not to mention, it was slower, not the best idea, plus I was calling into a SQL Server over the open internet (although I had opened the firewall to do so).

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Installing Helvetica Neue Fonts with Google Chrome on Windows considered harmful

Submitted by admin on Wed, 04/17/2013 - 18:07

A few days ago, I visited the Xamarin.com website and noticed this. The word "Pricing" looks like "Prioing."

The C looks like an O in Chrome

It's not an illusion. It looks wrong in Google Chrome. See this zoomed-in shot.

Here's the same menu in IE. Note the subtle"bites" that have been taken out of the g and s, but the c is OK. The hinting is OK, but the font is somehow "wrong."

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How to disable the On-Screen Touch Keyboard in Windows 8

Submitted by admin on Wed, 04/17/2013 - 03:38
image

It's lovely, isn't it. It's the Windows 8 on-screen keyboard, except I don't need or want to see it. I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch and it already has a keyboard. I will never ever want to use the Windows 8 touch keyboard. Unfortunately there is no checkbox or "just turn it off" way to disable the keyboard with a supported option.

However, there is a way to effectively disable the keyboard by stopping the service that controls it.

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Hanselman's Newsletter of Wonderful Things: April 3rd, 2013

Submitted by admin on Fri, 04/12/2013 - 16:03

I have a "whenever I get around to doing it" . Why a newsletter? I dunno. It seems more personal somehow. Fight me.

You can . You can sign up here or just wait and get them later on the blog, which . Email folks get it first!

Here's the MOST RECENT newsletter, delay-posted as I do.

Hi Interfriends,

Thanks again for signing up for this experiment. Here's some interesting things I've come upon this week. If you forwarded this (or if it was forwarded to you) a reminder: You can sign up at and the .

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Windows task manager shows wrong CPU Speed when using Hyper-V

Submitted by admin on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 20:02

My buddy Damian and I both recently bought the Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch. It's got Intel SpeedStep technology so it changes the CPU speed dynamically based on load. These two laptops of ours are identical. However, here's Damian's Task Manager when mostly idle.His speed is 0.60 GHz

Here's mine.

His speed is 2.49 GHz

What the heck is going on? His CPU is reporting 0.60 GHz of a potential speed of 2GHz, indicating that the chip has chilled out. Mine is reporting "full speed ahead!" at a speed that it doesn't even support, 2.49GHz!

We went around and around on this for a while until we realized that I had turned on Hyper-V Virtualization for Windows Phone Development and my Ubuntu VM. He hadn't.

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