MPLS ALT .NET

Yesterday was the first ever MPLS ALT.NET get together at the Bulldog N.E Thanks Ira Mitchell and Jim Swanson for hosting. Judging by the turnout at the initial meet one can easily tell that there is a great enthusiasm for alt .net in Minneapolis.

Jim and Ira do a better job of explaining What ALT .NET is all about.

The folks at Redmond, WA do a great job trying to build awesome tools for developers but often times committing resources to every available tool in the open source community is not possible. Filling this gap is where a community like ALT .NET can help.

The state of Microsoft and the OSS community is better explained by Ayende Rahien.

I hope that this community becomes successful and brings in the best of the OSS, Java and RoR communities into the .NET world.

Update:

If you are using Fiddler 2 follow the instructions in the Fiddler FAQ

Why don’t I see traffic sent to http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1?

Fiddler does not capture packets sent to the localhost URL which makes debugging web applications hosted in your local machine painful.

Here is how I configured Fiddler to debug web applications hosted in your local machine,

Lets say your application is accessed using the URL http://localhost:8090/MySpiffyApp/default.aspx. To make fiddler capture the HTTP requests sent to this URL, all you have to do is edit the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Fiddler\ReverseProxyForPort and set the decimal value to 8090. This tells fiddler to proxy all traffic sent to HTTP port 8888 (default proxy port) to HTTP port 8090. Now access the application using the fiddler proxy port

http://localhost:8888/MySpiffyApp/default.aspx

and you should be able to see the packet trace in Fiddler.

If you see the page below instead of your application then try restarting Fiddler and make sure the registry key name matches exactly as above.

1. Set the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Fiddler\ReverseProxyForPort registry DWORD to the local port you’d like to route inbound traffic to
2. Restart Fiddler

Let me know if this didn’t work for you or if you have another way of debugging web applications hosted on your local machine.

A cool rap video about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) caught my attention and I shared it with some of my old buddies.

I received a few encouraging words mostly in jest about how I should be involved with something revolutionary like the LHC project and drew a few sarcastic comments too.

The email responses from my friends inspired me to write this post and made me understand the significance of the LHC project a little better and also made me realize how we may be overlooking great revolutions happening around us.

Here is my email response,

Dear XYZ,

Thanks for the encouraging words and I enjoyed the sarcasm too…

Revolutions don’t happen overnight… rather they reach a crescendo at the right moment or they erupt from their simmering state into an eruption almost overnight. The trouble with revolutions, too is that you don’t know when they are happening.

The point of sharing that video was to show, how serious research can be presented in a light manner.

And personally, it had a context to me since I recently read this article, Surfer dude rewrites Physics ?that made references to the Large Hadron Collider.
If you do not have the time to read the whole article , here is a snippet that references the Large Hadron Collider,

“…The ultimate proof, or disproof, could then come when the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, begins operating later this year in Switzerland. It is widely anticipated that the LHC will lead to the discovery of new subatomic particles, and string theorists are also betting on it to validate some of their ideas…”

In short, the assumptions we are making about how we are held together in one piece can be shattered by this collider.

This my friend is an example of a revolution in progress since it can explain among other truths the beginning(s) and the end of time…

-Senthil

Sometimes you should never understate the obvious. You have to overstate the obvious.

For example here are some obvious Smart people traps and yet they need to be overstated.

I particularly liked the following observations,

..in order to change the world through politics, you must gain power, and the game of gaining power will fuck you up for sure.”

“…They leave school thinking that the way to be useful and show your smarts is to point out why things won’t work, rather than using some of those smart to find a way forward.”

Can you think of more smart people traps like these?