Mason Lyngby

Google's announcement of Google Gears is getting a lot of attention around the blogosphere today.  I don't need to rehash what the technology delivers.  You can get Scott Hanselman's take on it here and follow the links on his post for more information.

However, I was reading a post by Lazycoder that calls into question whether having online apps go offline is all that cool or useful:

See, taking a web application offline isn’t as neat as it sounds. Why would I want to work with my document using Google docs offline when I could just edit it using MS Word and upload it later? Why would I want to use Google Reader offline when I have NetNewsWire or RSS Bandit? If I’m going to work with data offline, I sure don’t want to use a browser interface. I want something that’s snappier, richer, and mo’ better. I want a desktop application.

I wanted to leave feedback on his blog, but comments were disabled, so here is my forum. 

I can see that point of view, but for my personal situation, having web apps available offline would be very useful. 

Let's consider Google reader first, since I have a stronger use there.  I use reader because I find myself at multiple computers each day,so I don't want to be tethered to a single machine just to be able to view my news feeds.  However, since I use my laptop frequently and since I occasionally find myself in places with no Internet access, the offline capabilities of reader would be handy.

Same goes for Writely docs/spreadsheets.  Granted, I have used Writely only for simple tasks and it has a long way to go to catch up to MS Office.  However, most of the things I do with docs/spreadsheets are simple tasks, so I find Writely handles almost everything I need to do.  And, if I can access them offline without having to buy a license for office and get plugins, perfect!

Since I am online 99% of the time I am at a computer (including my laptop), I find myself using desktop solutions a lot less than I used to.  If a web app gets the job done and now can be available the 1% of the time I am without Internet access, it is yet a more compelling reason to use them over their desktop counterparts.

As far as desktop apps having a snappier, richer interface, that gap is narrowing.  I find Google Reader's interface to be superb.  The keyboard shortcuts allow me to navigate quickly and the Ajax functions built in gives it a nice feel.  Once Adobe Flex and MS Silverlight get more exposure and more developers become familiar with their capabilities, that gap could close even further.

On the Today Show this morning, Bill Gates demoed a "new" technology called Micorosoft Surface.  This technology consists of a table with a computer and cameras + sensors embedded within that allow for a unique user interface.  This makes it possible to draw pictures with your fingers and arrange photos with your hands.  OK, cool, but this is not new.  In face, it looks like a complete rip-off Jeff Han'ss multi-touch displays.

Next, follow this link and watch the video (I don't have a direct link to the video clip) from this morning's Today show featuring Bill Gates and Microsoft Surface. 

It drives me nuts that NBC makes the comparison to Minority Report.  If NBC would have Goggled "Minority Report Interface", they would see embedded Youtube video above as the first result.

OK, Microsoft has a few original ideas here.  Setting the digital camera on the table and having the photos appear in the computer (WIFI only), that's cool.  The credit card being read by the computer, simply by placing it on the table, that's cool.  I have no use for it in a home environment, but it's cool.  But the guts of Microsoft Surface appear to be a complete rip-off.  Please let me know in the comments if Microsoft did work with Jeff Han on this.  As far as my Googgling can tell, it is a rip-off.

Links:

• Microsoft Surface Homepage
• Jeff Han's Home Page
• Today Show Article/Video
  

Well, I had my spinal fusion surgery about 8 days ago now and I am learning to live with my brace.  The brace's function is to support my spine at all times and prevent me from bending in a way that would hurt me as I recover.  I need to wear this for 3 months post surgery.  

Putting it on
There are 2 ways, first I place the brace over me while lying on my back (the brace opens in the back) and roll left to tuck the right edge under my back.  Then  I roll all the way onto my right and hook the straps together to tighten it by reaching as far as I can with my left hand.  The second way is to sit up on the edge of the bed, put the brace over my front and reach behind and pull the straps together.  The second is a little easier, but also feels a bit like cheating.  But, my doc said both methods are ok.

Comfort
As you can imagine, it is not the most comfortable thing in the world to wear, but it isn't too bad either.  It is custom fitted to my body.  I bought a set of tall size t-shirts that cover my butt so the brace won't contact bear skin (and incisions, ouch).  One downside to having the surgery done in May, is that the warmer days cause quite a bit of sweat while wearing this thing.  I'm not looking forward to the dog days of summer for this reason.

I even have to wear it in the shower, so the doc was not joking about wearing it at all times.  It is kind of a pain to live with, but seems like a small price to pay for fixing a serious problem I was having.

Recently at work, I ran into a problem where a page appeared to be hanging the whole asp.net process.  Being a person with very little patience, I ran the handy dandy iisreset after about 1 minute.  As it turns out, it wasn't actually hanging, it merely was taking 3-5 minutes to load a page!  So, I dropped into debug mode and hit the pause button on the debugger.  Behold, the Regex object was the culprit.

We have a complex web app that parses the links of each page and appends certain querystring variables.  The page that was bombing out appeared to have some characters that was throwing the regex object off. 

I put my detective hat on and went Googling.  An excellent post here by Scott Hanselman lead me to a clue.  It appears Scott's application didn't like the absense of a missing bracket in his regex.  However, my problem seemed a little more difficult to diagnose.  My string to parse was an entire page worth of HTML!  I looked through the code and found that it is supposed to strip off viewstate first.  Makes sense, why match on that stuff.  A co-worker sent the html output through the HTML Tidy app at the W3c.  Well, that was no help since our HTML had a LOT of issues.  We obviously don't run strict mode within our pages.

Another co-worker suggested I save the output of the page and put it in a sandbox.  I wrote a local winforms app that took the source of the page, opened the contents in a string reader and applied the regex expression on each line of text.  It immediately shot my processors to 50% each.  It hit pause to find that the culprit was VIEWSTATE.  What??? I thought that was stripped out!  The web app uses a proprietary framework used by all of our software for common tasks.  In this case, it uses a class written originally in 1.1 to format the links.  In the step where it strips out the viewstate, it was matching on this regex pattern: 

Dim rgxViewState As New Regex("<input type=""hidden"" name=""__VIEWSTATE"" value=""[\w\+/\s=]+""")

As it turns out, ASP.NET 2.0 adds an extra Dim rgxViewState As New  id=""__VIEWSTATE"" to the hidden viewstate field.  Thus, viewstate was not stripped out.  Something about the viewstate on this particular page was causing the viewstate to puke.  I added the id=""__VIEWSTATE"" to the pattern and that solved the problem. 

Just passing along a thank you to spine-health for great customer service.  I lost my login information and had no option except to send an email to the administrator.  I rarely do this, because I feel my email will go into the Internet abyss.  You know, it will land in someone's bit bucket and never be touched again.  But, not 5 minutes after sending my email, i got a response and resolved the problem.  Thanks!

It is 2 weeks from my surgery date, so I wanted to write this post to explain how I got into this situation. 

History: I was wake boarding (or attempting) when I was about 24.  My low back starting hurting pretty bad a few hours after and by the time I got home, I could barely walk.  I missed a whole week of work due to that incident.  But, I recovered until a year later, when I was moving some heavy furniture, the same thing happened again.  I was out for a week again, but this time I didn't feel like I recovered 100%.  This was in the summer time, so by fall, my general doc put me in a physical therapy program.  After a few weeks, the PT wasn't working, so I had an MRI and went saw an orthopedic surgeon.  He told me I needed surgery because my disc at L5/S1 was herniated and was pressing on my sciatic nerve which was causing pain in my right leg all the way down to my feet.

So, I had a laminectomy and discectomy to remove a little bit of the bone on the back of my spine to gain access to the damaged disc.  That was the laminectomy end of it.  The discectomy is where the surgeons take the part of the disc that is ruptured out and leave the rest of the disc in place. 

About 2 and a half years passed by when I started to feel the sciatic pain in my right leg again.  I had a new health plan and a new general doc at this point, who sent me to see a neuro surgeon.  My latest MRI showed my disc was ruptured again at the same place and he recommended a microdiscectomy.  This is roughly the same procedure as a discoctomy, only a much smaller incision is made (about 1 inch vs. 4 inches with the Orthopedic).  Tiny cameras and advanced technology make it possible to perform the surgery with a much smaller incision and a quicker recovery period. 

So, after 2 surgeries, I was feeling better than when my disc was rupturiung, but I continued to experience some general back pain and discomfort.  It was managable most of the time, unless I was doing something very active like a lot of yard work or home projects.  I knew this was probably going to be the case because my neuro surgeon did a great job explaining the realities of doing the micro-discectomy.  A spinal fusion was brought up at the time, but I opted to try one more shot at seeing if this disc could settle down.

Well, in June of 2006 is starting acting up again.  This time, it was a more central pain, sometimes going down the right leg, sometimes going down both sides into the buttoch area on the left.  Lots of PT and medication helped get it to a managable.  I saw my neuro surgeon again after getting another MRI and this is when he recommended the fusion.  The policy he likes to use is typically a "3 strikes and you're out."  However, I started feeling better shortly after seeing him so I decided not to go with the surgery.  He did give me the option to try epidural shots, which really helped for a while.  That was about 7 months ago.  The problems have been lingering to some degree since then, but recently started flaring up again.

So, I took the plunge this time and schedule my fusion for May 14th.  I will write another post explaining the brutal details of the surgery soon. 

Well I am a younger guy (32) with a lot of back problems. Problems I never expected to deal with at this age. I am at a point where they are really flaring up again, so I am going to use my blog as a pain journal. I am scheduled for surgery on May 14th, so this will also catalog the events leading up to the big day and the experience of post-op.

I read a lot of message boards/forums with people who are going through back troubles and often the information is discouraging. I have a theory there are more people whose experiences have been negative are posting than people whose situations have worked out. Now, there are certainly a lot of good people out there who I have gleaned a lot of great info from, but I often get depressed reading these forums. I think the people whose situation have worked out move on with their lives after their surgeries and aren’t heard from again. A few common types of postings I see:

“It’s been [number] weeks/months/years since my [fill in blank] surgery and the pain in my leg/back/hip is worse than ever.”

Or

“I’ve tried everything and I just give up, so I take x drug x times a day and live with it.”

I feel for these people. A lot of them have been dealing with problems for a long time and are in a much worse situation than I am. I read a lot about people going in for spinal fusions being fused at multiple levels. Ouch.

Anyhow, I’ve joined a back pain support message forum and I am seeing a lot of great advice from them. I hope to stay involved with that community and post a lot more information here about my situation. 

Yep, the few places on the web where I have left my mark all had the link "blog.masonlyngby.com."  I had a different web host at the time... I was playing around with Ruby on Rails (never really got into it, but that is for another time).  So, I signed up with a traditional asp.net hosting company and I am much happier.  Yes, I suppose I'm lame for leaving the flare of ROR and opensource, screw microsoft crowd, but I truly love .NET. 

I may be just an idiot with this, but it does not appear my webhost will allow me to have any subdomains unless I kick in another $5 per month.  No thanks.  Google will catch on soon enough and blog.masonlyngby.com will be a distant memory.