Rick Strahl's Web Log

Last 24 Comments

re: Understanding how <% %> expressions render and why Controls.Add() doesn't work
Today @ 9:30 pm | by andy gee

re: It's usually something like "Because of limitation X and Y, for more info... [link to this site]" :-)

I've even seen professional level documentation refer to this blog/articles - Telerik do so, can't recall other...

re: SQL Server 2005 Support
Today @ 4:03 pm | by Rick Strahl

@Mike - I've added a SQL Packager file (wcfAjax.exe) for the database into the APP_DATA directory. If somebody can try this out and see if this works for getting a workable SQL 2005 database, please leave some feedback here. I currently don't have SQL 2005 installed as I'm travelling, so I have no easy way of testing this...

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Today @ 2:21 pm | by Jimp

Hey Rick,

As Markus said in a presentation I saw about a dozen years ago, problem solving is easy, what's hard is determining the actual problem. When the oil is gone we'll find a way around it. Oil wasn't use until about 150 years ago. History class told me that motor vehicles were the savior. At that time horse and cattle droppings were making city life unbearable. "Clean" automobiles were the solution!

Yes, oil is an issue that needs to be addressed. Another issue I want to toss out is fresh water. It seems to get lost in the periphery. 150 years ago people understood the precious treasure that is water. As they say around here, whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting. I bring this up in the oil discussion because having spent 10 years drilling shallow wells (2000 to 8000 feet) during the last crisis (late '70s and early '80s) I was witness to what can and does happen in order to make more money.

No one sees into the ground better than another yet we drill wells thousands, sometime tens of thousands of feet deep oblivious of what the consequences might be. Formations that have been separated by impervious stone now have been breached. Yes certain measures are supposed to be taken to ensure formations don't mix but decisions are made for profit not future problems. Once a freshwater formation is contaminated it's not fresh. May never, ever become fresh again. Artesian wells gather their water from sources hundreds of miles away and my take a thousand years from snow melt to well. Connecting that to a saltwater formation isn't something easily undone. Look at the recent incident in Tennessee or google MTBE.

Now there's talk of "Clean Coal" technologies. Uses a lot of water in an area where water is scarce, Montana and Wyoming, but coal is plentiful (roughly 200 billion ton.) Two places where the economies need a boost and short term thinking is looking good. Right now WY is mining like mad but most if the coal is being burned.

There's plumbing in most every building in the US. Just the other day my 15 year old said with surprise "water costs money?!" My grandparents used hand pumps and buckets for water, now my neighbors get upset if my lawn isn't lush and green. The annual rainfall here is rates the area as near desert and we are in a many year drought!

People have lived 99% of their existence with out petroleum products but CANNOT live at all without water. Keep the water clean and you'll have to address oil. Focus only on oil and the water will be too far gone. Probably enough off topic blather...

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Today @ 11:35 am | by RVBoy

Biofuels are cool enough, but wind and hydro generate electricity and can be used to generate hydrogen for burning purposes. Many governments (including the US government) are providing incentives for investment in these clean strategies. Some countries have it better than others: for example, New Zealand sits across the "Roaring Forties" and should be able to achieve its 90% clean/renewable energy target within 15 years.
Of course people who live places like Hawaii or New Zealand need to consider the carbon footprint of international travel- which would be measured in tonnes per person for a flight from Oahu to Europe or Los Angeles, fwiw. Not sure what can be done about that- except possibly traveling by sailing ship or planting a forest whenever you travel? Or traveling Air New Zealand using biofuel? Or using hydrogen as a fuel rather than a bouyancy agent for a new breed of zeppelins? Who can say. But it does seem certain that the days of gas-guzzling vehicles are drawing to a close. For those who haven't done it, now might be a good time to take a drive in a musclecar before they become toys for the super-rich or museum exhibits.

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Today @ 10:00 am | by E.R. Gilmore

This is telling (think it was coincidental?):

"What sucks about the current situation is that oil has plummeted so low, so quickly just at a time when serious thinking about alternative energy usage and more importantly the viability of alternative energies was finally gaining some steam. "

re: Monitoring Household Electricity
Today @ 8:28 am | by Phillip

We use roughly the same gadget in the UK. Really useful. My house tends to have a "run rate" of about 0.3 kwh peaking at 2.4 kwh if the kettle is on for a cup of tea (very British). The really frightening thing is how much energy that actually is - I'm sure you've tried the high school experiment of trying to power a 100w lightbulb from a bicycle wheel (pretty much every science museum will have the same experiment) and its just about possible for a fit guy/gal for about 30 seconds. Our household is buring the equivalent of 3 of those just sitting and reading a book.

With regard to standby - its a pain but we've put in individually switchable plug blocks so we can turn off those bits and pieces we know were not using; watching TV without the DVD-R ? fine, watching a movie from DVD with home cinema, fine, we just have to remember to switch off the stuff we're not using. My dictum has been that I should be able to walk around the house after dark and see no little glowing lights anywhere. Only issue is with the DVD-R which takes a good 60 seconds to boot up, but I can live with that.

re: Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet
Today @ 7:49 am | by Richard Deeming

This is particularly painful if you download a zip file containing dozens of files, and extract it without unblocking it, as every file will then need to be unblocked individually. I got so fed up with it that I wrote a utility to recursively unblock all files in a particular folder.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/ntfsstreams.aspx

re: jQuery and ASP.NET Article Part 2 Posted
Today @ 5:45 am | by Mike

The article rocks and I very much appreciate your time on this. Your methods of explanation are outstanding, short and to the point.

I must say I was quite disappointed to get the code and find I need Sql 2008 to use it. I will still learn from it but not near as easily. It would be nice in the future to try and keep sample code usable by the majority and not littered with other new technologies.

re: The Controls collection cannot be modified because the control contains code blocks (i.e. <% ... %>).
Today @ 5:36 am | by Sudheer

Thank you ... :)

re: Non ASPX Extensions and Authentication in the IIS 7 Integrated Pipeline
Yesterday @ 4:56 pm | by W

I also found this problem too with other IHttpHandlers with no static content (http://blog.wdoenterprises.com/2008/12/aspnet-iis7-url-routing-ihttphandler.html). Any idea why the "managedHandler" precondition doesn't work for a managed code module? They choose a pretty bad name if it controls more then "managed code".

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Yesterday @ 4:50 pm | by Rick Strahl

@Brian - one of the problems of starting to exploit more 'expensive' technologies is that they have a much bigger energy deficit to overcome. It takes a lot of energy to retrieve tar sand oil for example, so while the cost may justify it the energy efficiency goes way down not even accounting for the energy inefficiency of our fuel burning technologies.

@Daniel - I have a real hard time with the "We don't need a road map to the future of energy it will happen on its own just give it time. hydrocarbons will be replaced when a workable solution is created." theory. The free market has gotten us into a mess, so it's hard to say that it will do anything sensible other than short term profit making. I'm not necessarily for gov't spending, but a start is to have incentives to a) make people aware of more energy efficient anything and b) try to drive more awareness into developing new technologies along with incentives. Honestly I don't think that private industry alone - in profit for one company mode - is as productive as a more united research efforts that follow a more open process. You're not going to see that through private business I don't think.

The first step should be preservation and making existing technologies more efficient. As you say there's tons of waste today in the way we build homes, cars, electronics in terms of inefficiency, partially because energy is so cheap and available. Heck think of the craziness of the wars going on right now - think about all the wasted energy going up in smoke everytime an Israeli attack helicopter launches or the tanks and hummers running around Iraq along with the airplane carriers shipping across the ocean to get there? Talk about monumental waste and for what? It's insane when you take a step back and look at it with a big picture view from species viewpoint beyond nationality. It's pure insanity if we really think how we are wasting finite resources even beyond immediate end-user consumption!

What do you say would be the driving factor to change perceptions about preservation? Scarceness? Sure, but once we get to scarceness it will be just THAT MUCH HARDER to actually start innovating because the resources and almost certainly the money to do so will start drying up. I don't think we can wait until we really need to worry about it - by that time it will almost certainly be too late. And preservation alone too is not going to help us out - it only prolongs the inevitable, but it does buy us some time to hopefully use more wisely. The process of preservation and finding alternatives started in the late 70's and even though a lot of people became aware of the issues it was aborted mainly because oil became dirt cheap again. The geo-political dangers of foreign oil dependence however never went away...

As to Peak Oil timing - yeah it's a big open question, because of the unavailability of reserve numbers. One of the first thing that should responsibly be done is take stock of what is really there, but nobody with a public facing interest likely has any interest in doing that. Instead we're all playing Russian Roulete trying to second guess if or when we'll have a serious problem.

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Yesterday @ 11:58 am | by Steve Smith

@Douglas Osborne - I too have GeoThermal and the cost savings in electricity are amazing. I don't have gas in my house at all and despite its square footage being much larger than my previous home (heated by radiant water heated by gas), my electric bill has been less than at the previous home. Less total, even given that I no longer have a gas bill *at all*. This is partially due to the lesser energy use but also due to the electric company providing a discount for people with geothermal that may or may not be available in all areas or at this time.

I definitely recommend geothermal over gas. We recently bought an office building with several gas furnaces and at least one of them needs replaced soon. I'm definitely going to investigate geothermal for this purpose.

re: Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet
Yesterday @ 1:26 am | by Jay

I've had this many times on network drives.
I navigate to a server/share where a piece of software is installed (as administrator) and attempt to open the help file. I see what you describe above. The software has been installed from disk and not downloaded from the Internet.
I usually copy the file to my desktop in order to be able to read it!

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Saturday @ 4:13 pm | by Justin

Rick

I am not playing Mr. Ostrich. I read a great deal on these subjects as the business i run produces parts for lots of Green Power start up companies.
(we used your software for our web site a product that was invented 110 + years is still the standard)

I am let the market decide. Green Energies got a kick in the ass now 2 times once in the 70's and now today but the alternatives just don't work economically or environmentally.

I love to pick on hybrid and electric cars because both are just flawed and overly complicated systems to start with. Waste more energy than they ever save during the years they are in service. Many of the hybrids cars will only work in certain weather conditions. Battery technology is very limited and has progressed very slowly and is greatly affected by weather. There are a couple of cool battery technologies in the lab but lab to production takes 5 to 10 years. Plus we have disposal problems.

I never disagreed with peak oil theory i just think it years and years out. I tried to make a bet back in 2000 with guy screaming peak oil was going to happen in 2005. I gave the guy 10 to 1 odds he put up a $1000 and i put up a $10000 in a escrow account plus the interest over 5 years. They guy turned me down. I'm willing to make similar bets with any one but it has to be enough money to get their attention.

Lots of people are real quick to spend government and big corporations money but not a dime of their own. Very few of the Greene Political Organizations like Green peace out there put their money where their month is. instead they have the tax payer fit the bill. Every proposal that comes down the pipe line involves the tax payers dollars. If these ideas truly hold water and work no government money would be required.

The common argument is big energy monopolies would kill any great idea. That is hog wash look at the amount of money GM has dumped in fuel cell technology in the past its in the 10's of billions . Look at the amount of money GE dumps in R&D into energy research. GE is working on air bearings to reduce friction and turbines that are 98% percent efficient. Big and small companies are working on all kinds of technologies . If these ideas are workable no company in their right mind is going to pass up an idea to boost profit margins.

We don't need a road map to the future of energy it will happen on its own just give it time. hydrocarbons will be replaced when a workable solution is created.

Example of really bad policy is ROHS. This European political hot potato has done far more damage to the environment than the substance it was to save us from.
http://www.rohsusa.com/

and Reach is just as ugly and damaging to us. Don't ever let facts get in the way of an Agenda.

re: Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet
Saturday @ 3:06 pm | by andrew websdale

I've had this happen to me occasionally - thanks for clearing it up.

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Saturday @ 2:14 pm | by Justin

Daniel
1: We have coal reserves in the US to last a few centuries which can be turned into Diesel and shell oil has not even been touched and is profitable @ $40 a barrel. peak oil will happen just not likely in my life time.

2: green sources (geothermal, hydro) hardly green power better do the math on the carbon footprint. Hydro electric dams have caused the extinction for many species. Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams in the US would never have been built due to Environmental impact is so large. Hardly green. Wind power requires massive amount of land as does solar.

3: Different strokes for different folks we will have to agree to disagree.

4: Under definition proposed here gasoline and most mediums used are nothing my than energy carriers. That just confuses the issue. Lets just skips this for the future

5: Yes its more energy efficient from Cradle to Grave for the good old internal combustion engine. Start running the math for the cost to benefit ratio. Hybrids also use more toxic substances than a standard car.

6: Most car engines of today are 25% to 30% the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency. Some are in the 40% But if we move to more efficient designs that been around for 50 years this number can be further improved to 60%. Think Turbine.
Electric cars have one major flaw the energy required to create and dispose of the batteries. Factor that in along with standard cars cost of disposal the electric loses. Hence why Hybrid cars cost $7K to $10K more than a conventional car once you throw back in government funding. The reason for such a big jump is because all the extra energy being consumed via , humans, equipment, mining, and manufacturing to produce these types of cars. Also note i build parts for the Tesla Roadster which is priced at $109K who can afford this bad boy. factor in cost to manufacture and disposal at what point does in compete? And it only goes ABOUT 220 miles on a charge. Most cars go 300 + per fill up.

Also note biofuels have less energy density. E85 fuels gets less miles per gallon.

7: I said read the source documentation to come to your own truth. Math is just an annoying constant.

But here is one resource where these guys are pragmatic and looking for solutions that work with today's technology not some kind of pipe dream.
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid106.php

8: i'm skipping this for now

9: We are discussing Science. If the math does not support the conclusion we have a problem.

10: last time i checked its a big solar system and even bigger galaxy and we still have the Universe. I think there is room to spare. Mankind is not to far away from really exploring the heavens. I have faith in the future generations to fix their problems. We have our own and the population problem is not one of them. I was offering this as contrast to past and current blown out of proportion problems many people say we have. Over population has been a none event as was the ice age we are suppose to be in according to math of the 1960's and 1970's.

11: To create biofuel requires lots and lots of energy just to start, its a net sum loss. To get a gallon of fuel for your car takes 26.1 pounds of corn. Now granted corn is one of the worst sources for ethanol but its what everyone has setup to use and all the infrastructure is in place. this means 1/2 an acre is needed to produce 138 gallons of fuel. Do you see a problem yet. How many millions of barrels of oil do we consume a year 80 i think it is. This is roughly 42 gallons to a barrel, 80 * 42 = 3.360 billion gallons /138 gallons to an half acres = 88 million acres to replace oil. Only a small portion of the land available to humans is farmable, plus you are now doubling all kind of nasty chemicals everyone wants banned. Do you See a problem yet. http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question707.htm

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Saturday @ 9:52 am | by Brian Abbott

Good post Rick.

Have you read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell? (http://tinyurl.com/a7uyxw). Science fiction - sorta - but, apart from being a damn good read in its own right, paints a pretty convincing picture of the dystopian future mankind might well face.

I do think the basic thesis of Peak Oil is a bit simplistic. As energy prices rise in the future, resources that are at present under-exploited (or not exploited at all) must come more into play (think Canadian tar sands). So we'll probably see a future where energy will still be available but high energy prices, a worsening environment and rising population will mean misery for the many but will not affect too much the minority with wealth.

Given the fundamentals of human needs (Maslow - http://tinyurl.com/kd3ok) on the one hand and, on the other, humanity's tendency to a) be greedy and selfish and b) procreate, I think the chances of avoiding the sort of future painted by Mitchell are probably not good. And given the elephant in the room - steadily rising world population - research into new/better energy sources, improved environmental awareness and the valiant attempts to limit individual human consumption will quite possibly just be putting off the inevitable. Which is not to say we shouldn't give it our best shot - just don't get too optimistic 8-(

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Saturday @ 9:25 am | by Huberto

I have always wondered if fossil fuels are being created all the time, even as we write this comments.
Is that known?. Is it all organic based?. How many millions of animals and trees must have
lived and died to create this huge reserves. The biosphere is so small compared to the size of
the planet. Why isn't it scattered all over the planet but only found in this huge deposits?.

Anyway it seems there isn't much left. There is, however, and endless source of energy from
which all other sources originated, and that is the sun. And I have no doubt that if we start
doing this and other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, we will
learn to harness enough from it. Plants did. We landed on the moon six times 40 years ago!.

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Saturday @ 6:04 am | by Rick Strahl

@Justin - I'm confused. What are you saying exactly? You say green technologies are weak and I agree to some degree although I don't take quite as pessimistic of a view as you do. It'll take time to improve efficiency and both in production and real output. But does that mean we should just give up and wait for Rome to burn?

You say we need to move forward, but you offer no hint of how you envision that? By sticking your head in the sand?

Peak Oil has already validated itself in regional declines including the most obvious which is right here in the Unites States (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mcrfpus1m.htm) which peaked in 1972 and has been following a picture perfect downward bell curve since. More aggressive production could probably spike that chart for a short time, but the long term that probably will be little more than a blip on the downward slope. You can find similar numbers for NorthSea oil (which is already in heavy decline), Russian and Mexican oil reserves and so on. The only big question mark is Saudi Arabia which has been the swing producer, but even they are starting to waver on their production numbers. Much of these official numbers are available online on the EIA site...

I do agree that it won't do to be overly panicky and pessimistic, but the consequences of inaction are going to be the end of our society as we know it.

I don't have any answers anymore than you do, but one of the first steps at least is awareness of the problem we are likely to face and change the mindset that at least results in energy aware lifestyles, which as a society currently we are not doing. Even if there is no danger of running out of resources (which I serious doubt) this still makes sense from an ecological point of view.

re: Calling JavaScript functions in the Web Browser Control
Saturday @ 2:26 am | by Sam

I would like to know how to get at data generated by a javascript function that doesn't have a return value. For instance when there is javascript that is used to show some data, but it doesn't have a return value.
In this case I'm getting a null value for the object variable (in your provided sample code).
How do I access the data that the javascript is displaying on the page? Is it in a frame? Or somewhere else?
Any help very much appreciated.
Thanks,

-Sam.

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Saturday @ 2:24 am | by Daníel

Justin:

1. Just because the boy cried wolf a few times didn't mean that the wolf never came. It came in the end. Just like Rick said: peak oil is common sense. It is just a matter of time when it occurs (if it hasn't already). We won't really know until a few years after it has happened.

2. No, not all green energies are net losers at the present time. Here in Iceland we get about 80% of our energy from green sources (geothermal, hydro), Brazil uses more ethanol than gasoline for its cars. Denmark gets about 10% of all its electricity from windmills. Just to name a few examples.

3. Feels like a generalization to me. Sure, there may be some governments somewhere who are screwing things up. So get rid of them and elect new people who can do the job. The private sector suffers from the same problem: people who don't know how to do things correctly are everywhere.

4. I'm not sure what your argument is. Rick stated that hydrogen is not a energy source but rather an energy carrier. I haven't seen anyone refute this statement with any proper arguments.

5. So, according to you, we should stop producing hybrid cars and go back go cars running gasoline? Like the cars made by GM, Chrysler, Ford.... oh wait....

6. The energy efficiency of electric cars is about 40%. The energy efficiency of the internal combustion engine is about 8 - 10%. Which one do you think is a net loss?

7. What other books do you suggest that contain more truth?

8. By all means say this to the scientists that are investigating the problem, such as David Karoly. Watch these videos for instance, where David and others discuss the problem:
http://www.youtube.com/v/lIjGynF4qkE
http://www.youtube.com/v/goDsc9IaSQ8
http://www.youtube.com/v/yoyqFNCoDRY
http://www.youtube.com/v/y5gUd6y3zKU
http://www.youtube.com/v/SIsX5I6mVWo
http://www.youtube.com/v/_RY_qEyHbj0
http://www.youtube.com/v/YRnyHIheR0I
http://www.youtube.com/v/I24QOvMUUyw

9. And what about stuff that we cannot calculate like 2+2? Is everything either black or white in your world?

10. If the population will continue to grow like it does currently, then in 700 years there will be 1 person for each square meter of the earth. Obviously we must stop growing at some point. Does that mean we will be dying from that point on? I don't think so.

11. Now you are simply contradicting yourself, because in your last point you said "We grow enough food to feed every person on this planet twice". So shouldn't it be possible to take half of the land we use for food, and use it for biofuels instead? Besides, who says the land cannot be used for both? Do your own research, for instance watch the video on video.google.com I mentioned in another comment above. Don't just believe the propaganda.

Regards,
Daníel

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Friday @ 11:36 pm | by Stein Goering

Good post, interesting responses. The whole area of energy conservation tends to get lost in these discussions. It may not be that glamorous, but it's something we can do now, using available technology, and the ROI is excellent. It's almost always cheaper to save a BTU than to produce it, regardless of what the energy source is. In the 70's, we undertook a nation wide conservation effort in response to the oil embargo and cut our oil consumption by 17% - at the same time our GDP grew by 27%. We've done it before, we can do it again, and it's one way to buy time to deal with whatever else is coming...

re: Oil's cheap again, but can we afford to be careless?
Friday @ 8:16 pm | by Houstonmom

I think there is a lot of validity in the peak oil theory. We live near downtown Houston. I got a taste of no power during Ike. No power equals no water pressure. No pressure means no sewer. We could not survive without power in the city. Even if you have food, the disease from lack of sanitation will kill you. And garbage will be huge. People will have to burn it, so we'll have a lot more house and apt fires.

It is hard being a Christian in this situation. Do you go into self protection mode? Do you "trust God" to take care of you? Do you stay in place to help others with your stockpile while it lasts? I've read about people who are moving to remote locations and developing a self staining lifestyle because they believe today's lifestyle will be over and they want to be ready. But that would not be fun either. Most in your country could be dying and you'd be in your pocket holding down until a vast number of people perish. What will life be like after that? And what if the next pandemic hits during all this......WOW. We're up for a serious strain of flu.

YIKES! I think I'll go put my head back in the sand:)

re: ASP.NET ListBoxes, SelectedValue and ViewState
Friday @ 6:29 pm | by Barbaros

I hate struggling with Dynamic controls, it's a total headache.

For example,
It is easy to get posted values after postback by the help of Request.Form except CheckBoxList control. Instead of this you can use CheckBox.

and what about a dynamically created requiredfieldvalidator for a dynamically created textbox or dropdownlist in a webUserControl(.ascx)

which one is get fired first, the aspx page's onInit or ascx's onInit (the answer is, ascx's OnInit :)) and where to create validation controls ? In the OnInit or OnPreRender, and what if all these controls are nested in a table. I meant MasterPage > WebContentForm > UserControl > Table.

It is really hard to understand the viewstate in the begining and hard to apply things about what you have learnt.

I get really bored all of this, and still i couldnt create requiredfieldvalidator dynamically to a dynamically created textbox in a <asp:Table control inside a usercontrol, inside a master page. I have override UniqueId and ClientId already, but i still get couldnt reference to controltovalidate, bla bla bla...

pofff