Derick's Life, Fitness & Code

There is no better time to write on your blog, I always say, then when you should be writing something else. I have friends who run a fishing blog. The should in this particular instance is a short paper I need to write for my Postcolonial Medieval literature class. I’m stalled on the first sentence of this paper, and not going anywhere fast. Ironically, I tried to start my old F-150 today for the first time in 5 months, in hopes to use it to help a friend move this weekend, and of course, it doesn’t start at all. In fact, it makes absolutely no sound whatsoever when you turn the ignition key. Attempts at jump-starting it with my Passat proved fruitless. It will have to be towed to my mechanic (who is of course named “Joe”) in the morning to try and resuscitate it back to life. Trucks are not easy to push — I learned this today. Who knew: you can really feel that extra 1,000-lbs of material.

The dead, black truck sitting in front of my house that can’t be moved, is a fitting metaphor for this paper that is going no-where (if you’ll allow me to return to it). I’ve since proceeded to Edgar Allen Poe’s choice remedy to lubricate the fused, stalled, an unresponsive neurons/dendrite connections in my brain. I must admit, it is helping — I think. Or, at least it’s making “other” writing easier.

Well, it was … I suddenly have nothing further to say.

Be warned, this is a somewhat technical post. It took me a while today to figure why my webserver running IIS7 was not loading up my website whenever the “www” prefix was not included. So for instance, “ariyam.com” was sending out a 404 error, while “www.ariyam.com” was working correctly. After spending a lot of time Googling my way to a solution I actually ended up in a dead-end and had to figure this out on my own. Others had suggested adding “redirect” rules, but that didn’t seem to work for me. Turns out the problem is incredibly easy to fix on IIS7. Here’s how you do it:

1. Firstly, open up a command prompt and make sure “www.domain.com” and “domain.com” are pointing to the same IP. You can either run “ping www.domain.com” or use “nslookup www.domain.com” to do this. If the IPs don’t match, you have a DNS issue which you need to resolve first (don’t ask me how).
2. Assuming the IPs match for the non-www domain and the regular domain, you can then proceed to your web server and launch the IIS7 management (inetmgr).
3. The issue is something called “binding”. All you have to do as add another “binding” entry on IIS for your website. It takes about 10 seconds. Once you have IIS7 open, click on your website and click the Binding link on the right, click add, then put in the domain name minus the “www” prefix. See the screen shots below.
4. And that’s it!

Once upon a time, churches used overhead projectors to display song lyrics on screen for people to follow. This was not bad for its time, but it did require a lot of work on the operator. It was tedious (and stressful) to search for songs fast under pressure; one needed nimble fingers to jump to different stanzas quickly, and strange cardboard-contraptions to obscure certain lines. And apart from rolling back the projector and re-focusing, adjusting the size and resolution or the background was difficult if not impossible. But thankfully, in this era such contraptions are a thing of the past.

After many long months of programming, I’m happy to introduce our latest software creation: Melodie. With Melodie, you can store your entire library of songs on a computer, and then quickly retrieve them, and have lyrics scroll down at a certain pace, and/or quickly queue up the next song or stanza at the direction of a song leader. The idea is distraction-free worship.

But if you need to add a little color or make a more dynamic song/bible presentation (for a youth choir, or Sunday School graduation for example) you can still do that with Melodie!

With the new Professional Edition of Melodie you can set dynamic backgrounds (picture clouds moving) via videos. The text, fonts, margins etc. are all customizable. In fact, Melodie Professional has a whole suite of neat features, such as:

• Dual-Screen Output
• Direct X-based text scrolling for enhanced smoothness and control
• Jump quickly to individual song lines as well as stanzas
• Supports wide screen output aspect ratios
• Easy to use (cliché-sounding, but it really is easy)
• Bulk import your song data from a spreadsheet
• Songs can be “tagged” by keywords to aid in searching.
• Video loop and gradient background options
• Advanced full-text song searching algorithm
• Quick Bible passage look-ups (comes with the KJV and ASV bible)
• Shortcut / Function keys make operation a cinch
• Melodie keeps itself up-to-date automatically

Check out The Melodie Professional Edition website to download and learn more!

It’s getting colder out, so I’ve hustled to finish my final woodworking project for the year. I put the last coat of poly last night. It’s called: The Mission Window Seat. It’s made entirely of Red Oak (my first time working with oak).

Twenty months. Imagine that. It’s been that long since I wrote anything on this site. It’s amazing to think I started this blog a little over 6 years ago, and almost two of those years was left without writing a single thing (at least on here). I’ve since upgraded my wordpress version to the latest one — the update to end all updates apparently. The new versions can automatically upgrade themselves without the need to FTP anything across, backup a database, and/or delete files manually. (At least that’s what I think I read.)

In the last two years, I’ve since discovered woodworking and how awesome it is especially if you have these Ariat Work Boots review 2016
. Most of my evenings are spent in the garage (which is now a balmy 1.6 C or 29 F) and is my new safe-haven. I can spend hours on hours in there getting lost in my work, forgetting to eat, and only stopping when I’m physically and mentally so tired I end up making costly mistakes. So far, none of those costly mistakes have resulted in amputation — thank God!

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There are times (many) that a .NET developer needs to use the web-iversal Hex code for a color as opposed to the pretty-named Microsoft palette. I can’t begin to count the times I’ve needed a simple Hex code for LightSteelBlue, or LemonChiffon, or one of my favorites, Gainsboro. Hence, provided below, I’ve made a little table of all the .NET colors alongside a reference to the web Hex code equivalent. It’s ordered alphabetically. Hope it’s useful! It sure makes for a colorful post.