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IIS 7 Worker Processes

richard — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:45:16 +0000

Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager 7 includes a very nifty feature called Worker Processes. This feature will allow you to see information about the Worker Processes (w3wp.exe) for the sites running on the server. If you’ve ever run Task Manager on your server and see several w3wp.exe processes killing your machine (high CPU usage), this is where you want to go. This feature will identify the Process ID of the Worker Processes and also tell you the associated application pool, very helpful in telling you which sites are killing your server.

You can also click into the worker process and view the current requests that are being processed, including the current requested url, client ip, and the time elapsed for the request. Again, very helpful information.

To access this feature, click on Start and then the Run command. Type in inetmgr to launch the IIS Manager Console. In the left pane “Connections” click on your server. On the right pane, you’ll have the feature view. There’s a section called IIS, and one of the last icons should be labeled, “Worker Processes”. Double click, and it will display all the current worker processes. Double click on a process and you’ll see the current requests. You can repeatedly click “Show All” to refresh.

World’s Smallest USB TV Tuner

richard — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:31:52 +0000

Living life without cable tv and a dvr for the past couple of months has been relatively painless. Mostly due to summer tv reruns. Now that fall is approaching with a slew of new shows (quality television!) I’m beginining to get a bit nervousous about missing out on shows that don’t fit my schedule.

Of course I can resort to Hulu or downloading tv shows… or I can get this marvelous little device:

It’s the world’s smallest USB tv tuner which allows you to view and record over the air broadcast television on your computer. It costs about $80 (which could easily be one month’s cable bill). Combined with the features of my new Windows 7 computer (post upcoming!) - I think this could definitely work!

Microsoft Fail

richard — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:12:46 +0000

Decided to keep a blog post on what I think are complete fails released by Microsoft. I’ll try to list it out in terms of the biggest beluga fail whales first.

FrontPage
Internet Explorer 6
SharePoint Designer
SharePoint 2003
Windows Vista
Windows ME
Windows 98
SharePoint 2007
Team Foundation Server
Office 97 / Office Assistant (aka Clippy & Bob)

Empty Div With Width Displays Height in IE

richard — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:01:48 +0000

I have a wrapper div that contains a user control that may or may not always display content. If it doesn’t have content, then the div should be empty and empty divs shouldn’t have any height right? Well, all the browsers agree with me – except Internet Explorer. Apparently since I’ve given this div a width, even though its empty, IE still decides to render height equivalent to the set font-size.

So can’t I just add a height:0; rule to my css? Well that will work – until the control within my div decides to render content and now its hidden.

So the fix? Add an html comment within the div. Yep, sounds crazy – but if your empty div is empty, save for an html comment, it will now not render any height.

Here’s how the fix looks like:

Yay Microsoft! Your rules for HTML parsing makes perfect sense!

CSS – Select adjacent element

richard — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:36:12 +0000

So, I had a table row with two table cells. The first cell had an class attribute, so I could style it easy enough, but the second table cell had no such class or ID and I need it to style it as well. It should also be noted that i had no means to change the generated html!

Search around a bit and found the CSS adjacent selector. This nifty operator allows me to target the second child within a specified parent. So in my case, the parent was the table row which had an ID, and the children where the two table cells (one with a class and another without). So to get to the second table cell I was able to do:

Viola!

Cost of Living Calculator

richard — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:33:37 +0000

Found this link via LifeHacker. Breaks down nicely your equivalent salary in other major cities in the US and where the increase will most likely be spent.

Link: http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html

Interesting to compare my salary to places where I will hopefully like to live someday.

Twitter or Facebook?

richard — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:41:20 +0000

My good friend over at Laksha.net recently asked the following question: “How do people decide when to post on a blog, facebook or twitter?”

I’ve been asked this question before so here are some of my thoughts…

Blog

Extremely heavy. Sort of picking up the phone to call someone.

Facebook

Somewhat heavy. Sort of sending someone an email.

Twitter

Least heavy. Sort of communicating via IM.

So just like the phone, email, and IM – all three will do the job of communicating with someone. Similary sharing thoughts and ideas using your blog, facebook or twitter are pretty much the same, but there is “appropriateness” for each. Only by using them – IMHO, will come to realize how to target your audience and choose the best means to express your self.