On a different topic today, I noticed something that, even as much as I played the game back in the early 90’s when it came out I never remember seeing or at least I don’t REMEMBER* remembering it…

Look, it is the Charlotte Skyline in there !?!

(Picture of the Amiga version of the found on GameSpot)

* Could be the 40 year old Memory Allocation Table getting corrupted, too…

I was asked to setup one of our Web Servers to only Restrict all but a certain subset of IP addresses to have access to the site since this is a server that sits in our DMZ, I have basically two sets of addresses to allow in; our internal subnet of addresses and the clients’ external IP address.

I always keep looking for this information because for some reason it never sticks in my memory.  So I figured I’d put it some place I could find it without having to search for it every time…

This is a great resource for basically figuring out every kind of path or URI reference you can with ASP.NET:

From Rick Strahl’s blog:  http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/132081.aspx

It’s been a few days since I attended the first (hopefully annual) MakerFaire:NC in Durham on Sunday the 25th…  I was very impressed with the whole affair.  I’ve have been following the whole Maker meme since I first ran into it quite a few years ago, and when I saw that there was talk of creating a magazine specifically aimed at the DIYer, I signed up for a subscription almost a year before they published the first issue!

I’ve been making my own things (and breaking other stuff) for as long as I can remember – its a knack that I picked up from my Dad who has built some of the coolest and most practical things I’ve seen – I’m mean, he built a car rotisserie for working on the bottom of old Mustangs he was restoring… I’ll have to get pictures…

Besides all the useful or off the wall things that people were demonstrating at the faire, the coolest things that I remember seeing while I was walking around were the kids with their parents. A father sitting on the floor with his son at the Chaos Machine describing how to put things together so the balls will keep moving, another explaining how the ShopBot works; A Dad and his daughter playing with the Beam bots from SheekGeek or the learning how to sew on the quilt…  It took me back to working with my Dad in his shop, sitting on the radiator support of the race car, pulling the intake manifold off when I was 6, when I should have been in bed asleep… He has always told me that I should work with my Brain and not with my Hands… but I’ve found ways to do both – it is hard not to make things when it’s in your DNA.

This didn’t start out to be a post about my Dad – but as I wrote it, I realized just how much of an influence he has been on me, my ability to solve problems, to build it if I need it and to fix it instead of throwing it away… So I guess my Dad is an original Maker, a builder of things… and that is why he is Awesome. And so are all the Parents that take their kids out to the NC faire, to San Mateo or Detroit or just to encourage them to learn and to Make instead of just buy and throw it away.

I ran into an issue today that I’ve hit before but never been able to solve – but since I really didn’t want to reformat the hard drive to fix it, I did a bit more research.

The basic issue was that I ran into a situation where a zero byte file has been created on a users Desktop (Running Windows 7) and when they tried to delete the file, it refused to comply, basically saying that the file didn’t exist.

I ran around a few ways, logging in as an administrator, trying to rename the file (same message) trying to cut and paste the file (same Message), trying to create a folder with the same name as the file then delete the folder (SAME MESSAGE)

I finally stumbled across this which, upon thinking about it some, made sense – I think the file was named with invalid characters and Windows Explorer couldn’t remove it.

This was the fix (from netfresco.com – http://netfresco.com/tech/item-not-found/default.aspx):

Solution for Vista's "Item not found" error when deleting or renaming files/folders
 

When you try to delete or rename a file/folder, you may receive a window that says:
"Item not found. Could not find this item. This is no longer located in [folder]. Verify the item's location and try again."
 

To solve, follow these steps:
1. Open up a command prompt (run cmd.exe from the Start Menu).
2. Navigate to the folder that the object resides in.
3. Run "dir /a /x /p" to display the contents of the folder, including hidden files (/a) and 8.3 filenames (/x).
4. Find the 8.3 filename of the object to the left of the regular, long filename.
5. Run "ren <8.3 name>" to rename the object, "del <8.3 name>" to delete it if it's a file and "rd /s <8.3 name>" to delete it if it's a folder.
Note: If renaming to a long filename, make sure to enclose the long filename in quotations. If that fails, temporarily rename it to an 8.3 name and then rename it to what you want outside of the command prompt.

Quick, simple and most importantly, Fixed.