Enter your search terms   Web www.northrup.org Submit search form

Tony on MySpace

Web northrup.org

My News Archive

(More recent news is on the home page)

12/1/06: I know I've been all about Google lately, but if you have your own domain, check out Google Apps for Your Domain. Currently, I use ZoneEdit to host my DNS, and I also used ZoneEdit to forward northrup.org e-mail to my ISP e-mail address. Out of nowhere, my ISP (Comcast) started rejecting mail forwarded form ZoneEdit as spam. So, I signed up for Google Apps, and within a few minutes I had my e-mail sent directly to Google's mail servers. I then download them from Google using POP into Outlook, just like any other mail server. I can also use a Web interface that's just like GMail. Unlike GMail, Google Apps doesn't change the "From" address to be from Gmail, so it looks just like it comes from my domain. And it's free with 2GB of mail storage.

11/28/06: Thanks to everyone who helped me name my unidentified animals. I know it may seem strange that I have pictures of animals when I don't know what the animals are, but hey, I take pictures of whatever I can and worry about the details later. Most of the unidentifies animals were marmosets, snow monkeys, scarlet ibises, and goldfinches. There are still a few unidentified animals left if you're good with birds.

11/27/06: So, I signed up for Google Analytics, which shows me stats about my website visitors. Up until now, I had been using Awstats. One thing that Google Analytics shows me that Awstats didn't is the screen resolution of visitors to my website. Surprisingly, 55% of you have a monitor that is 1024x768. Another 17% are using 800x600. I figured more people had higher resolution monitors, at least 1280x1024 (I'm running dual monitors each at 1600x1200). Well, I want my website to look ok on your monitors, so I made some adjustments to fit onto 1024 pixel-wide screens. You folks with 800 pixel-wide screens still need to scroll horizontally, though. It's tough to show pictures that look good on both small and big screens, so I'll just have to target the average user.

11/24/06: I added some seasonal pictures: Fall, Winter, and Christmas.

11/22/06: I've been reading a book, which I rarely do, because I spend most of my time writing them and the last thing I want to do in my spare time is look at words. Anyway, the book is Prioritizing Web Usability (which strikes me as a terrible title). It turns out, the layout of this website is awful. So, I'm going to start making some tweaks from time-to-time. The first thing I did was add an actual description to the top of this page, because apparently people will read that to figure out where they are. I also need to add better navigation to my picture and category pages, because lots of people land on those pages from search engines and they're probably baffled about where to go on this site. Well, it's just a hobby for me, so give it time, and it'll get better.

11/18/06: I put some time into cleaning up my pictures and categorizing them better. Just poke around some.

11/15/06: I've been making daily tweaks to the layout of the website. Even with the ads, I think it's better than it was before. I'm not really a layout guy, though. If you have feedback, let me know.

11/10/06: My 2007 New England Wildlife calendar is now on sale! Please buy several. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally decided to spend some time on the site today. I haven't worked on the site in more than a year, because when I upgraded to Visual Studio 2005, I lost the ability to edit the code (which is still based on .NET Framework 1.1, which requires Visual Studio 2003).

Anyway, I finally installed Visual Studio 2003 and made the changes necessary to sell a calendar. While I was at it, I fixed a problem with the comments to block out spammers. Oh, I have some new pictures of a white-tailed deer I found in the yard. I'm also experimenting with Google Ads. We'll see how it goes. If you find it annoying, let me know.

10/10/06: It's almost the one year anniversary of my last news update, but that doesn't mean I haven't been regularly updating the website. I constantly add new pictures in the photo album. Off the top of my head, some of the pictures I've added recently are of moose, a tiny baby turtle, Chicago, more Sandi pictures, Herons, frogs, and salamanders. I also have a couple of new books out... brace yourself for these titles: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation, MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-528): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Web-Based Client Development, MCDST Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-272): Supporting Users andTroubleshooting Desktop Applications on Microsoft(r) Windows(r) XP, and MCDST Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-271): Supporting Users andTroubleshooting a Microsoft(r) Windows(r) XP Operating System. Sorry if the site is unavailable at times; my Internet connection seems to die when it's sunny. I don't have a better explanation than that, and my ISP can't get it figured out.

10/12/05: Check out my new puppy, Sandi. I just picked her up on 10/9, so we're still getting used to each other. She's learning, though. I'm sure I'll have hundreds of pictures of her before long.10/7/05: Northrup.org is back after about a week offline. Sorry about the unexpected outtage. I was moving, and had carefully orchestrated getting broadband installed in the new house and then moving the Web server so as to minimize downtime. Unfortuantley, the Comcast guy who did the install determined that my house was too far away from the street, and they needed to call a different crew in to run wire underground to the house. All-in-all, Comcast was great, especially Jody Gaudet who coordinated the in-ground work. Being offline for a week was tough, but it could have been several weeks or even months. I'd also like to plug Verizon Wireless' EVDO service. Even though I had no cable or even a phone line, I was able to connect to the Internet using EVDO through my mobile phone. That, and Windows XP's Internet Connection Sharing, got my home network online with about 125 kbps bandwidth--about five times faster than dial-up. If you're choosing a new mobile phone, definitely look for EVDO compatibility. I had to special-order a USB cable to connect to my computer.

9/23/05: The second of my DIY Tech videos will soon be available on the MSDN Coding4Fun website. This video builds on the first video by showing you how to control lights with your computer. Basically, with the right X10 hardware, you can control any light with an application. In the video, I mix in Web services to build a lamp that glows red when a stock goes down, and green when a stock goes up. You can download two versions of the sample source code: C# and Visual Basic.

8/9/05: For the first time since I won that silly contest a few years ago, I'm available on video. The MSDN Coding4Fun website just published the first installment of a series for do-it-yourself videos that I directed, edited, and starred in: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/diy/usingx10/. The first video shows you how to use X10 to remotely control the lights in your home. Cool stuff, and not too technical. You really don't need to be a geek to find this video useful, but later videos will be more technical. If you ever wish that you had a light switch in a different place, or that a light switch could control lamps or different lights, this video has cheap-and-easy answers for you.

5/14/05: 7 entries in two years. Not so good. So, my blog is doomed to failure. I'm going to give it a shot, though.

3/27/05: It's been on my to-do list for years, but I finally had time to enable instant download of purchased pictures. Before, if you bought a picture from this Web site, I would get an e-mail and then e-mail you a link. It only took me a few minutes, but it was still a pain. Now, after you checkout, you can click a link to copy the high-resolution picture to your computer. Next, I need to stop using the PayPal shopping cart, and then setup a real merchant account so people don't have to go to PayPal to pay me.

1/18/05: I have a live webcast tomorrow, January 19th at 10AM Pacific time/1PM Eastern time. You can listen to me live, discussing How to Listen to Digital Music in Your Car. I'll discuss the best ways to connect portable audio players to your car stereo, as well as techniques for listening to digital music that don't require a portable audio player. If you missed the live webcast, you can use the same link to watch the recorded webcast.

4/17/04: I've got a couple of new books out. Home Hacking Projects for Geeks, from O'Reilly, has been a long time in coming but is now available for pre-order. I've got a Web site set up for that book, if you're interested in home automation, home security, or home theater. On a completely different topic, Implementing and Administering Security in a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network is also out and seems to be getting good reviews. For those of you looking for pictures, I've got hundreds that I need to add to the site... soon, I promise.

10/17/03: I switched from Comcast to RCN, and upgraded from 256 Kbps upstream bandwidth to 800 Kbps. I turned thumbnails back on, and my connection doesn't seem to be getting bogged down.

9/22/2003: I'm glad people are getting use out of my photos. Unfortunately, kids at school are getting so much use out of my pictures that my poor cable modem is getting overloaded. Now that I work from home, I need to be able to use some of that bandwidth to do my job. My current ISP (Comcast) doesn't have a higher-bandwidth offering, so I'll need to switch to a different ISP (probably RCN) to get the bandwidth I need during the day. It'll be at least a few weeks before I have time to deal with that. In the meantime, I made some adjustments to the site to conserve bandwidth. I reduced the size of all the pictures, and cranked the JPEG compression up really, really high. The pictures look blurry, but they're about 40% smaller than they were. Also, between 9am and 6pm, there will be no thumbnails when you're browsing pictures. You can still see the actual pictures, though, by clicking on the picture title. More than a few of you have asked where the comments went. I'm only showing 20 comments per page, now, because those comments were chewing up the bandwidth.

7/15/2003: I made a few updates to the site. I added a whole mess of C# code to do the image resizing and conversion to JPEG format that I had still been using Arles Web Page Creator for. While I was at it, I added a copyright notification to the bottom right of the images. The images are noticeably sharper using the C# libraries--Arles actually made the small JPEG images look blurrier than the full sized images. I've added a bunch of images since the last update... Mostly wildlife pictures that I've taken in the woods near my house. Lots of new pictures of birds and chipmunks. It's easier to add pictures ot the Website now that I've moved the conversion over to C#, but I still have a bunch of pictures that I haven't gotten around to adding yet. I added a link to let you buy the original image high-resolution if you want... I get lots of requests from people who want the image, but we'll see if people are willing to pay. I also reduced the number of comments on each page to 200, because some of the pages were getting way too big. And yeah, I do read the comments, and find much amusement in them.

6/3/2003: The Web Site Police  just told me that the date on my previous update had the wrong year. Also they told me that I should set the HTML background color to white.

5/11/2003: It has been six months since I added anything because I've been a bit overworked. Well, I bought a new camera body (digital, finally), so I took some pictures and added them, and a bunch of old pictures I never added, to the photo album. There are categories for bluejays, cardinals, chipmunks, coyotes, doves, racoons, red foxes, robins, and woodpeckers. I moved to a house that borders on conservation land, so there's lots of wildlife around my house. The new camera should make adding pictures much easier, because I won't have to scan film anymore.

10/12/2002: I visited the Stoneham zoo and took a few pictures of their jaguars, eagles, llamas, falcons, columbus monkeys, lemurs, cougars, owls, and artic foxes.

10/3/2002: Not a huge leap forward, but I added categories with my best, worst, and most recent pictures. I had this functionality in the previous version of the photo album software, which was based on ASP 3.0. This time around, though, it's .NET and object-oriented! I guess that's better. Well, at least you can browse through the best pictures like it was a normal category.

9/27/2002: More changes nobody will ever notice: To learn about .NET Web custom controls I converted the three main objects on my site into custom controls.  The listings of categories and pictures in the photo album were ASP.NET DataList objects before.  The comments at the bottom of every page was a DataGrid object.  Creating my own custom controls improved performance by about 300-600%... a pretty huge difference.  The comments datagrid was the worst problem--the datagrid object is very complex and slow, and I was using an actual ASP.NET server-side form.  That's a bad idea if you need your site to be efficient.  Anyway, pictures are now rendering between 0.02 and 0.06 seconds, and categories are rendering in less than 0.15 seconds.  Before the changes, the pages with lots of comments were taking as much as 0.6 seconds to render.  Performance aside, using custom controls will let me do some other fancy stuff.

9/5/2002: I've taken a couple of short trips recently and posted the pictures: Provincetown and Quebec City.

8/5/2002: I really hadn't touched the site for a long time. Then, after weeks of preparation, I did pass my CISSP exam in July. Since then, I've had more time to make changes to the website. Unfortunately, most of them are completely invisible. The code for the photo album is now more object-oriented, which will make future updates easier. Everything is faster, with most pages rendering in less than 1/10th of a second. I added a bunch of pictures, mostly in the flowers and animals sections. The page that shows the latest pictures seems to be broken right now, though, so I can't refer you to that. Traffic is about 1000-1100 visitors per day .

6/18/02: Okay, I think the performance problem is solved.  The problem was related to the database design.  Pictures take about .15 - .2 seconds to render now, which is acceptable.

6/16/02: Thanks to the rainy weekend, I got the photo album ported over to C#. My poor coding is showing--it has some performance problems. Pictures take about .3 - .4 seconds to render, which is way too long. So, now I need to go back and implement SqlDataReader wherever possible, and minimize the massive number of database queries I'm making.

6/5/02: Breaking my photos into different categories seems to have really helped people find pictures. So, I broke them into a few more categories: goats, giraffes, deer, dolphins, leopards, small mammals, turtles, and zebras . Most of these are not good pictures at all, but based on people's comments they're not terribly interested in quality.  Oh, and I set up these new categories using an ASP.NET application I wrote for managing my photos.  Good practice.

5/18/2002:  I migrated the site over to C# and ASP.NET--everything except the photo album . Ideally, you won't even notice a difference except for the comment formatting at the bottom of the pages.  The logos at the top of the page, the toolbar to the left, and the comments at the bottom are all separate user controls now.  The site should run more efficiently, because the controls will only have to be compiled and stored in memory once, regardless of how many pages use them.  Previously I had used ASP includes... Of course, everything worked fine before, so there's no real benefit for me upgrading, except to gain more experience with deploying Web applications with ASP.NET.  It will probably be several weeks before I finish migrating the photo album over, because that application is much more complicated, and because I want to make a bunch of changes to it at the same time.

5/16/2002: I added an 'inane' property to my comments so I could filter out all the random stuff that didn't relate to my site.  Okay, so maybe everyone else in the world would have expected that to happen when I added the 'Add an anonymous comment' thing at the bottom of every page... but it was going just fine until last week.  Anyway, inane comments still amuse me, but I'll have to filter them out because I get a lot of kids looking for animal pictures.  Yes, I'm providing a public service now.  Since Google has started to recommend my pictures, I'm getting about 1,000 visitors per day.  I was trying to put off any changes until I finished porting the site over to C# and ASP.NET, but I don't have much time to dedicate to coding, so it's going slowly.  Well, if you also enjoy randomness, you can still see people's inane comments. 

4/18/2002: After hours of searching for a program that monitor my Web site and notify me if something fails, I ended up writing yet another perl script.  I used the Watchdog library.  Couldn't be easier.

4/17/2002: I added a page showing all my newest pictures on the off chance that someone comes here besides random googlers.  I had to edit one of my scripts to add the date information to my database.

4/8/2002: I added a page with links to and descriptions of all my source code. A few people have asked me for different pieces of my code (only because they hadn't seen it yet).  My code is really a mess.  Seriously. As evidence, I recently had to set my server up to reboot every other day because ASP scripts would stop executing.  I have no pride.

3/25/02: Another update with no new content! I did break my animal photographs into some new categories: lions, tigers, koalas, kangaroos, monkeys, birds, lemurs, pandas, wolves, my worst animal pictures page 1, my worst animal pictures page 2.  Also, when you look at a picture that exists in more than one category, it'll refer you to all the categories.  That'll help the many random people who come here through Google.

3/3/02: No new content, but I improved the site in a couple of ways.  The photos ratings pages now use ASP sessions to make sure nobody rates the same picture more than once.  The ratings engine now sends you to the photo in the current category with the fewest ratings that you haven't yet rated, instead of just sending you to the next picture incrementally.  If you've rated all the photos in the current category, it sends you into the rejects folder for the category, and bounces you back up one level if you've rated absolutely everything in that category.  Also, I have cranked up the compression on the smaller (default) images and thumbnails, which should make the site seem much faster.

2/2/02: I finally did something with the photo rating information that I've gotten from the feature I added on 1/20/02.  You can now view my 20 highest and lowest rated photos!  I've gotten about 1,000 ratings so far, which is far more than I expected.

1/22/02: My ugly cat is not freakish genetic mess! The horrible combination of crossed blue eyes, freckled nose and lips, and irregular orange stripes was intentionally created by breeders! He's a cream point 32c according to this Web site!  Or maybe he's a flame point.  If you can tell what he is, please tell me.

1/20/02: As long as I'm running a database to store the end-user comments, I might as well tack on other dynamic features.  I added the ability to rate my photos from 1-5. (Update: now 1-10!)

1/19/02: I added the ability to add your own comments to any page of my site.  For example, if you notice that this guy is not actually a marmint, or that the word is correctly spelled marmot, you could tell me I'm stupid right on my own website, for everyone to see!  SO MANY FEATURES!  You can see all the comments people have added here.

1/5/02: Couldn't sleep, so I added some ASP code to my toolbar and photo gallery.  Now I have written code in javascript, perl, and VBScript just to make this stupid page work.  Oh, and a couple of days ago I replaced the FrontPage search engine with a perl-based search engine.  That's better, because I was able to make it only show one result per picture in my photo gallery.

1/1/02: This crap in 33 languages.  Pick from the drop list right below my ugly mug in the upper left, and this meaningless text will be poorly translated into some language that (presumably) other people can read.  Thanks TrãnsLìngö!  (Note: It strikes me as odd that the names of the languages are all written in English.  You'd think they'd say Espanol, etc.)

12/31/01: What I did on my Christmas break: I made this AIM-bot that allows any mobile device with an e-mail address to use AOL instant messenger.

12/19/01: Festive holiday pictures of my cat.  I'm not really a big fan of cat pictures.  Mostly, I just like taking pictures, and he's the only subject who will sit there while I take pictures.

12/17/01: Wallpapers.  Why anyone else would want a picture of my cat on their desktop, I can't imagine.

12/16/01: I added perhaps the most useless page here.  It's a perl script that translates English to Spanish, by sending an SOAP XML request to the VelociGen Babelfish Translation Server, which in turn sends it to babelfish.  Or, you could just go to babelfish.  Proof-of-concept and nothing else.

12/13/01: I added a presentation and an article.

12/2/01: I made some subtle changes to the photo gallery to make it more usable for the people who pop into some random page from Google.  That's like 85% of the people who visit this site.  You no longer have to select low-bandwidth, high-bandwidth, etc., before viewing pictures.  You do have the chance to jump between photo galleries at any time, without loosing your place.  I also changed the toolbar around some to see how that changes people's browsing habits.

11/29/01: My website is now FESTIVE!!  Also I redid the usage and attack logs pages by editing the awstats perl script for each.  The attack page is much more useful now.

11/28/01: I moved my website from the laptop to another non-laptop system.  Check out the performance!  OH SO EXCITING.  Now I can install more complex applications on it, like maybe some database-driven stuff.  I'm not sure why I would do that, though.  Oh, I also added a search page.  I'm still screwing around with it, though.  There are some new pictures of my cat, too.

9/20/01: I've been researching the Nimda worm and I feel that it, and its successors, are the first real threat to the Internet as a whole.  They are capable of stopping the Internet.  I added a couple of pages to convince people to get antivirus software.

9/16/01: I added the magazine section, with text and graphics from four articles originally written for the Windows 2000 Experts Journal.  They're out of business, so I wanted to make the content available online. Hope it helps someone.

9/15/01:  I added two new things.  The photos from my honeymoon, a 10-day trip through the Meditteranean, are now available under my Photo Album.  Or, jump directly to them.  I also added graphs showing CodeRed activity at my site.

9/12/01: I added camera equipment reviews with sample photos.

9/3/01: I'm not sure why, but I completely redid the site.  In an effort to keep it looking as sloppy as possible I made navigation bars with my own handwriting.