Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson

I don't know what to say about Dust of Dreams. It is the first book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series that is only partially finished, only the first part of a larger story, spread over the ninth and tenth books of the saga. Since the last book from the series, The Crippled God, is not yet released, I have to wait for a year until I get to know what happened.

This being said, I don't really know what happened in this book, either! The Adjunct moves all her forces towards Kolanse, the last of the K'Chain Che'Malle are rising up, there is a group of undead Jaghut that work together, two pairs of Eleint blooded ascendants that have yet to betray each other, a bunch of semi-undead (they have their memories) T'Lan Imass, three pesky gods, a schizophrenic Icarium... the list goes on and on... One thing is for certain: I doubt the tenth book will be able to satisfyingly end the story. The huge number of storylines pretty much guarantees it.

So, I liked the book, but I feel I need to reread it to understand it, maybe just before the tenth one is released. Meanwhile, I am oscillating between the Vorkosigan Saga and the Discworld Saga... Whatever should I start reading? Considering they both have about 20 books each...

Update: It seems the release of The Crippled God has been delayed until 2011, even if there were hopes it would appear in libraries this autumn. Damn!

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Hidden Gems in ASP.NET 4.0

Here is a post from Phil Haack about extra extensibility options in ASP.NET 4.0. I would like to emphasize the third "gem", the one that lets you add an assembly programatically to the list of loaded assemblies (equivalent to adding it in the assemblies tag in web.config). I wanted this from .Net 1.0 ! Unfortunately it must be called during the Application_PreStartInit stage of the application, but maybe the first gem can help with that.

Of course, I haven't been using these things yet, so I may be saying stupid things. It is a distinct possibility... Quite distinctive... Oh, shut up!

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If this works, it could have an impact similar to the contraceptive pill for women

My personal opinion is that the freedom women now enjoy comes a lot from the humble contraception pill. Indeed, who would have the resources to pursue a career, fight for their rights or have a life of their own if only the men would carry the responsability for sexual protection? The pill allowed women to break the recursive loop, so to say.

Now, men have used condoms for a long time, with various degrees of efficiency, though. Sometimes they break, sometimes mysterious holes appear in them, sometimes they are so annoying they are not used. The search for a contraceptive pill for men is ongoing, but even if some progress was made, it is not yet a usable solution.

Here come James Tsuruta and Paul Dayton with "A Sound Decision", a method which would involve placing your balls into a liquid, zapping them with ultrasound and become sterile for a specified period of time.

Can you imagine the social impact this could have?

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Error installing the .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 Security update KB974417

First of all, check the WindowsUpdate.log file found in the Windows folder. It should tell you how the update failed. Look for something looking like this: WARNING: Command line install completed. Return code = 0x0000066a, Result = Failed and later on WARNING: Install failed, error = 0x80070643 / 0x0000066A.

If you have the same error, check this article out: Fix KB974417 Installation Failure—Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 Security Update for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP.

However, my problem was that I had NOT installed the KB976569 Windows update that the guy recommends removing before installing the new one.

I found this article: KB 953297 and KB974417 Fails to Update Through Windows Update that recommends a clean reinstall of the .NET Framework. Haven't tried it, though. I just didn't do the update. Probably when all hell breaks loose I am going to regret it, but at least I passed the message on :)

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Science of social networks

I am a great TED Talks fan, where most of the talks are impressively smart and useful and well presented, but this one I just had to embed. The title is a little misleading, if you ask me: The hidden influence of social networks. It is more about how statistical analysis on social connections yields all sort of interesting information about the human condition. Enough of this, watch the talk:

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Multiple controls, same ID, different containers!

I was minding my own business doing this ridiculous ASP.Net project and suddenly I am hit with: "Multiple controls with the same ID 'lbTitle' were found. FindControl requires that controls have unique IDs.". I was using this web control that contained two others, each of them having a lbTitle control.

If you think about it, it does make sense to throw this exception when the FindControl method is used in the parent control. Which control did I mean? But the error appears even if the FindControl is used inside one of the child controls, what is up with that?

As a secondary thought, I wasn't using any FindControl. It seems that what does is the AssociatedControlID property of the Label control. Therefore I will set the HtmlTextWriterAttribute.For attribute manually to resolve this. Pretty damn ugly, if you ask me!

Update: My fault! The controls needed to implement the INamingContainer interface. It's not that the ClientID was not different, but FindControl works by going to the NamingContainer control and finding then children by ID. Too bad that you can't just specify the ClientID and be done with it, but that's that.

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ASP.NET 4.0 allows CON, PRN, COM, LPT and NUL in the URLs

I don't want you to think that I started working on ASP.Net MVC, but this article about a 36 year trek through backward compatibility hell was really funny and needed to be linked. What is so funny, I guess, is that it is factual and the humour is in the situation more than in the article itself.

On a separate note, ASP.Net 4.0 fixed this issue with a web.config setting.

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