Crippled Black Phoenix - 200 Tons of Bad Luck
A Love of Shared Disasters prepared us for the apocalypse and 200 Tons of Bad Luck is the traveling carnival you visit on the way out.

Isis - Wavering Radiant
Still drone-y, but Isis have added a few new instruments to their toolbox (organs!).

Japandroids - Post-Nothing
If No Age were more tuneful or if Death From Above 1979 stuck around long enough to record new albums, they might sound like Japandroids. Fuzzed out and catchy pop songs.

Junior Boys - Begone Dull Care
Synth pop minimalists just got a little less minimal.

Metric - Fantasies
Every Metric album up to this point has always sounded like something to kill the time in between Broken Social Scene albums. Now that BSS is on hiatus, Metric has finally recorded a full-fledged album with all the trimmings.

Silversun Pickups - Swoon
Rocks with the familiarity of Carnavas but with the expected sophomore album touches like overdubs and strings.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz
It's Blitz has me chair disco dancin' in my cubicle.

Canada is a fairly laid-back country when it comes to almost everything, but if there's anything that can be determined by the existence of RuinediPhone.com, it's this: don't fuck with our mobile data plans! MacLeans' latest issue contains a lengthy article comparing Canadians and Americans (aside: compare us to a different country like Denmark or Australia for a change please and thanks...sigh). It turns out that when compared to our US neighbours, we have greater wealth, carry less debt, are healthier, live longer, have more/better sex, enjoy better beer, blah blah blah. We're still getting screwed on the cost of things other than greeting cards and books. Car and electronics companies have finally begun adjusting their pricing for the strengthening Loonie. Even Apple themselves, who I lambasted last year, have finally come around: base config on a MacBook Pro now only results in $100 difference between the US and Canadian online store - yay!

O2 in the UK and AT&T in the US both offer unlimited data plans. In fact, O2 offers nice 'n' short 18-month contracts and will even throw in the iPhone for free if you sign up for either the £45/month or £75/month plans. Rogers, on the other hand, give you fewer daytime minutes and the most data you can transfer in any given month is 2GB with their $115/month plan - no unlimited plans to be found. Go over your monthly data limit and you're slapped with $0.50/MB for the first 60 MB, $.03/MB thereafter.

Time will tell if Apple will put the pressure on Rogers before the iPhone launches ten days from now.

This is for any ASP.NET coders out there Google-ing "There was an error processing the request". I recently came across this issue, so I wanted to share what I've found to resolve it. You've probably written an awesome web service with public methods that do awesome things and are so meticulously coded so as to adhere to all the hip programming concepts and best practices. I'd bet that you're doing the right thing in your web service's public methods by capturing code that's prone to throwing exceptions like this:

 
namespace FooService
{
    [WebMethod(EnableSession=true)]
    public void Foo()
    {
        try
        {
            // Dangerous method alert
            MyWildMethod();
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            // Handle with grace.
            CleanupWildMethod();
 
            throw new Exception("Something happened - no worries.");
        }
    }
}
 

Perhaps you're calling this web service method via AJAX on your presentation layer pages and expecting this to come back in get_message():

 
function UseMyWebService()
{
    FooService.Foo(SuccessCallback, ErrorCallback);
}
 
function ErrorCallback(error)
{
    alert('Whoa: ' + error.get_message());
}
 

And it does in your development environment. Then you deploy this to production and your lovely and friendly "Something happened...no worries" message turns into the user-unfriendly "There was an error processing the request" message. What gives?

There's a good chance that you're using custom error pages in your project. Your Web.config might have something like this in it:

<customerrors mode="On">
      <error statusCode="403" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=403" />
      <error statusCode="500" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=500" />
      <error statusCode="501" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=501" />
      <error statusCode="502" redirect="~/error.aspx?eid=502" />
</customerrors>

If you do, you've successfully determined that users should see friendly error pages rather than cryptic ones that only programmers would understand. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't figured this out yet and instead of allowing the user-friendly message in your exception to propagate back, they replace it with "There was an error processing the request". There is a solution. You could set the customErrors mode to "Off", but that would defeat the purpose. Instead, ensure that your web service ASMX files are in a folder of their own. Then, inside of that folder, create a basic Web.config that looks like this:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>

<configuration>
    <appsettings />
    <connectionstrings />
    <system .web>
      <customerrors mode="Off" />
    </system>
</configuration>

That's all it takes to correct this oversight on Microsoft's part.

In the conference finals, I managed to successfully predict victory for the Pens, but mistakenly thought Dallas would have more jump than they did - you can't blame Marty Turco, though. So who will actually win it all now? The Red Wings seem to have a lot of momentum, even if their fans don't actually go to the games to cheer them on; do people in Detroit even care about their team or is the economy that bad that people can't afford the price of playoff tickets? Either way, the knock that Detroit has against them is the “Captain Canuck” factor. The question is whether Nicklas Lidstrom can break the "Captain Canuck" factor, but he has a lot of history working against him. The Pens, on the other hand, are a youthful bunch, might have the edge in the goaltending department (let's face it, Osgood looks good because he faces a mere 15 shots per game) and are probably the most entertaining team in the league to watch. For the sake of boosting weak TV ratings in the US, the NHL needs Sid Crosby hoisting the Cup.

My choice? Pittsburgh - in six games, if they steal at least one of the first two games in Detroit.

Dena's a fan of the Las Vegas series; possibly because, in her words, "William Petersen is pretty hot for an older guy". I watched the show with her for the first couple of seasons, but there came a turning point when CSI's cheese factor, specifically regarding the use of computer technology, was too powerful for me to ignore and lose interest in the show.

It all began with an episode where our ridiculously good-looking team of criminologists deftly identify the episode's suspect from a reflection in the victim's sunglasses. At first, the reflected image was blurry, but with a few clicks of the mouse, software was able to extrapolate a crystal clear image of a very bad man from a blob of pixels. The algorithms used in the software to perform this feat would probably make your head explode, should you even begin to try to understand them. These algorithms' inventors could teach Donald Knuth himself how to write a serious computer science book. I don't know what software or computer has that kind of intelligence and processing power, but sign me up! Anything's better than the shitty interpolation on my camera phone's digital zoom implementation, so this hardware and software that the Las Vegas crime lab is privy to would be welcome.

Following this episode, there have been numerous other examples of defying what technology is currently available. Usually, this involves matching smudgy fingerprints in an instant. Why the CSI series will remain true to accepted scientific facts from the worlds of biology, chemistry and physics all the while living a magical world of computer technology is beyond me. What really takes the proverbial cake is this clip from the New York City series:

She's going to what?!? What will the "GUI interface" be used for? Developers have used VB for a long time as a tool to quickly prototype user interfaces for Windows applictions, and some people even [gasp] build entire applications with it. But the GUI is simply what the user will use to interact with the software's intended functionality. They appear to want to track the location of somebody who is posting all crazy-like on a blog. I'm not sure how her app will accomplish this. I suppose it could search the web server's logs for requests for the blogging software's posting pages and check the refering IP address, but I don't think you need to create an application just to do that - that's what CTRL+F or F3 or some other "find" functionality found in most text editing/word processing/spreadsheet applications are for. Unless she wants to build a visual sort of Ping or Traceroute utility, but that seems like a waste of time. Where's the functional specs for her application!?!