Most Recent Thoughts

First Time Watching Glenn Beck

Posted December 17th, 2009 at 7:04 pm by Matt Chepeleff

I’ve been watching Glenn Beck for the the first time for about ten minutes now and I’m speechless.  Knowing millions of people watch this seriously concerns me for a couple of reasons.  I just don’t understand the disconnect from reality and the massive generalizations they get away with.  Worse, they overlook such key components of issues in an effort to serve the points they’re trying to make that they actually distort reality.

Now I suppose from a pure entertainment point of view anything goes – but this program has the words Fox News spinning in the bottom left corner at all times – and I just don’t believe most people can separate what one part of the screen says from what the talking head in the center is preaching.  I say preaching very intentionally.  I think this is very intentional and calculated though.

Back to Beck though: So far he’s said that health care reform is unconstitutional.  He’s arguing that the government shouldn’t force anyone to purchase something from private companies.  Instead of discussing how this would be unconstitutional, shouldn’t we be discussing why the right to health care hasn’t already been added to the constitution.  How is this show and/or network getting away with arguing any individual in this country doesn’t deserve such a basic right.  I just don’t get it.  It makes me so angry.

Then he went on to complain that all the progressives (“communists”) want to import European ideals and how that’s such a bad idea.  But he’s generalizing so grossly when he says we’re creating a European socialist utopia by reforming health care or working on climate bills.  He went on to discuss the lack of stability in Europe over the last century and asked why we want that.  What in the world does stability have to do with health care or climate improvement measures?  No one is asking to bring that instability across the pond.  Some of us can accept that Europeans can develop better ideas once in a while.

I think it’s ironic that the instability he rails against is exactly what his show is creating by introducing so much fantasy and misinformation to millions everyday.  And back to by question about what stability has to do with health/climate reform….I think I can answer that, because if we do what these right wing nut-jobs want, health care costs will consume our federal spending.  Just don’t tell the right these rising costs might cut into defense spending one day.  That’ll be entertainment!

The most amusing part of the right wing and health care reform is that they’re being played by the insurance lobbies because interests are, for now, aligned.  The lobbies are truly only loyal to their revenue streams – and right now they’ve accomplished all their goals by stripping out any chance of a public option.  As this (non) reform bill stands now, the insurance companies stand to make a ton more money.  So much of this agenda has been driven through the right.

Now back to health care: I’d rather see a single payer system personally.  This current crap is really only good for one thing – and it’s not reform – it’s investment returns.  If this all goes through as it stands now I’d like to invest heavily in health insurance so I get something out of this.  I guess you could say it’d be joining the dark side, but at least I’d get a piece of the billions being raped out of consumers pockets…all for health care.  Thinking this way makes me want to correct a previous sentence and say that Wall Street is controlling the health care debate – because it’s their profit expectations and greed that is driving the insurance companies to lobby so hard.  They’re probably, even if indirectly, pulling the strings.

But since I’m on the other side of the fence from Beck and the right on health care, he’d call me a communist or socialist.

Alright, that’s the end of my ranting for now, I have work to get back to.  I just get so angry that this debate about reforming health care has developed into a situation where the Democrats are on the defensive from such illogical, politically self-serving, and often fantasy-based attacks.  I guess there’s another irony here now that I think of it:  I do think the far-right has good intentions at heart, but these tactics are more damaging to our beloved country than I think they’re aware of.

P.s. What’s with all the buy gold ads – that’s all I’ve seen for commercials!

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Sites.Local – for developers with too many local sites

Posted December 5th, 2009 at 5:28 pm by Matt Chepeleff

As an ASP/C# developer it’s key I work locally and save time wasted uploading files after every change to a page.  Then, when I’ve got a bunch of changes to share with a client and I want to update a staging/production environment, I can do it all at once.  Well, I resumed working on a project this afternoon that I haven’t worked on for a couple days – and I just couldn’t recall the local site address!

My laptop runs Vista Business and I use Internet Information Services (IIS) to run local apps.  To map the various apps and keep everything running on port 80 I take advantage of the Windows Hosts file to create custom urls for local apps.  For example, I can create an entry for clientname.localdev which enables me to setup and view a site at http://clientname.localdev/.  You can learn more about Hosts files here if they’re new to you.

Back to this morning: I couldn’t recall if I setup localdev.project, project.localdev, project.local, or local.project.  Only way to check is to open up the Hosts file and see what I had originally created.  That’s when I thought: let’s write a quick page to read all the entries in my Hosts file.  So I did, and I setup sites.local as my own, local directory of entries read directly from my Hosts file.  Check it out:

I figured I’d create some categories to group the multiple entries I’ve got in my Hosts file – and add a quick flag for showing a category collapsed by default (more on this later).  Here’s a modified (sample) Hosts file:

First, let’s look at a few changes to the Hosts file itself to make all this work:

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# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host
 
127.0.0.1       localhost	#ExcludeFromSites.Local
::1             localhost	#ExcludeFromSites.Local
 
#Sites.Local.Category: New Projects Category#
127.0.0.1       project1.local
127.0.0.1       project2.dev
127.0.0.1       anotherclient.devel
127.0.0.1       project3.local
 
#Sites.Local.Category: Other Category Here#
127.0.0.1       project4.local
127.0.0.1       project5.dev
127.0.0.1       project6.local
 
#Sites.Local.Category: Archived/Past Por {start:collapsed}#
127.0.0.1       project7.local
127.0.0.1       project8.dev
127.0.0.1       client23.devel
127.0.0.1       project9.local
127.0.0.1       project10.local
127.0.0.1       project11.dev
127.0.0.1       clientname.devel
127.0.0.1       project12.local

This obviously is not my Hosts file – I created a sample file for demo purposes.  But either way, there are a couple things to note here – most of which will make sense as you look at the upcoming .aspx and code behind:

  • Adding “#ExcludeFromSites.Local” to the end of the line will (you guessed) prevent the line’s display on our page
  • You can group entries by adding “#Sites.Local.Category: categoryname# to a line above that group, where categoryname is some text you’d like to refer to this category by
  • You can “{start:collapsed}” to a group name to display this group collapsed initially (each group can be collapsed/expanded by clicking the group name

Now onto the code – I made comments throughout the code behind to make things easy to follow.  The code could certainly be simplified, but for the sake of clarity I expanded some of it.

First, the .aspx page:

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<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Inherits="siteslocal_default" %>
 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
    <title>Local Site Addresses</title>
    <style type="text/css">
        * {
            font-family:Arial;
            font-size:13px;
        }
        body {
            background-color:#dfd;
        }
        div#centercontent {
            width: 800px;
            height: 500px;
            text-align: center;
            position: absolute;
            left: 50%;
            top: 50%;
            margin-left: -400px;
            margin-top: -250px;
        }
        div#header {
            text-align:left;
            font-size:23px;
            font-weight:bold;
            height:30px;
        }
        div#content {
            border: 1px solid #000;
            padding: 30px;
            text-align:left;
            height:360px;
            background-color:#fff;
            overflow-y:scroll;
        }
        div#footer {
            text-align:left;
            font-size:12px;
        }
        div.category {
            margin-bottom:15px;
            margin-left:10px;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div id="centercontent">
        <div id="header">Local Site Addresses</div>
        <div id="content">
            <asp:Literal id="litHosts" runat="server"></asp:Literal>
        </div>
        <div id="footer">The contents of this page are being read directly
             from the hosts file in C:WindowsSystem32driversetc</div>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

And for the meat of the page, here’s the code behind written in c#:

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using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.IO;
 
public partial class siteslocal_default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        StreamReader reader = File.OpenText(@"C:WindowsSystem32driversetchosts");
        string line = string.Empty;
        while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
        {
            if (!line.StartsWith("# ") &amp;&amp;
                !line.StartsWith(" ") &amp;&amp;
                line != "#" &amp;&amp;
                line != "" &amp;&amp;
                !line.EndsWith("#ExcludeFromSites.Local"))
            {
                bool show_collapsed = false;
                string showhidecode = string.Empty;
                if (line.StartsWith("#"))
                {
                    /******* Append the HTML for the start of a new category *******/
                    if (litHosts.Text != "")
                        litHosts.Text += ""; //only append if we're not on the first category
 
                    if (line.Contains("{start:collapsed}"))
                        show_collapsed = true;
 
                    string catText = line;
                    catText = catText.Replace(" ", "").Replace("t", "");     //remove spaces and tabs
                    catText = catText.Replace("{start:collapsed}", "");       //remove from display
                    catText = catText.Replace("Sites.Local.Category:", "");   //remove category prefix
                    catText = catText.Replace("#", "");                       //remove any stray #'s
 
                    //prep the javascript onclick code and div id
                    string id = catText.ToLower();
                    string js = string.Format("document.getElementById('{0}').style.display",id);
                    showhidecode = _
                       @"onclick=""if({0}=='block'){{0}='none';}else{{0}='block';}""".Replace("{0}", js);
 
                    //append the &lt;div&gt; for this category's name
                    litHosts.Text += string.Format(@"&lt;div style=""cursor:pointer;"" {0}&gt; _
                    &lt;b&gt;{1}&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/div&gt;", showhidecode, catText);
                    //append the &lt;div&gt; opening tag for this category
                    litHosts.Text += string.Format(@"&lt;div id=""{0}"" class=""category"" _
                         style=""display:{1};""&gt;", id, show_collapsed ? "none" : "block");
                }
                else
                {
                    /******* Append the HTML for each item in the current category *******/
                    //first let's isolate the host name (assumes we don't need to display the IPs)
                    //so...let's the find the index of the first space or tab
                    string url = string.Empty;
                    line = line.Trim();
                    int spacer_location = 0;
                    spacer_location = line.IndexOf(' ');
                    if (spacer_location == -1)
                        spacer_location = line.IndexOf("t");
 
                    //display from the spacer to the end
                    url = line.Substring(spacer_location, line.Length - spacer_location);
                    url = url.Replace(" ", "").Replace("t", ""); //remove any spaces or tabs
 
                    //write out this line
                    litHosts.Text += string.Format(@"&lt;a href=""http://{0}/""&gt;{0}&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;", url);
                }
            }
        }
        litHosts.Text += ""; //close out the last div
        reader.Dispose();
    }
}

The only other things to note are:

  • I setup this page to run at http://sites.local and site this as my home page in Chrome – in IIS I changed the anonymous user to my own username (to ensure the code has permission to access the file)
  • Be sure to not to start an entry in your Hosts file with a Tab – the code allows preceeding spaced, but would need to be changed to allow preceeding Tabs

That’s it, hope you find this useful and a bit of a timesaver too.  Only took about 30 minutes to pull together, and I think you ought to be able to set it up in less time than that.

Happy coding!

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