Hidden Easter Egg Game in Windows 7

I love gaming as much as the next guy and wanted to make sure everyone knew about this hidden gem in Windows 7. To play this game you need a Windows laptop, a docking station, and multiple monitors. The game is called "What Monitors Will Windows Recognize Today?" (WMWWRT, pronounced Wim-Wart). Whenever a developer walks in the office in the morning, we all gather eagerly around them as they dock their laptop and bet on "heads", meaning windows will recognize all the monitors - at the correct resolution from yesterday, or "tails" meaning the OS won't have a clue about yesterday's settings. This is a great team building activity. Often we try to correlate why it recognized the settings - was it the low barometric pressure, the phase of the moon, the price of Microsoft stock? Great hilarity ensues as we try to delve into the mystery that is Wim-Wart.

Natural Gas to Gasoline at Half the Price

Imagine if we could take cheap, plentiful natural gas, stir in some pixie dust, and turn it into gasoline.
A startup Siluria thinks they have the magic dust to make that happen. Siluria takes natural gas and through a process using proprietary catalysts, converts it to ethylene (C2H4) which can then be converted to gasoline at half the price of current gasoline.
If Siluria can make the catalyst cheap enough and it lasts long enough, it will change the landscape of the oil industry and political world. Then, with the additional oil from unconventional sources we will get the following:

1. The price of oil, of course, will fall a little. It will then slide quite a bit, as producers rush to sell their oil before the next guy. Think buyers market. Think $30 oil.
2. The price of natural gas will rise reacting to the increased demand. Currently, drillers don't go for "dry gas", that is gas wells without oil, but with the rising price drillers will go for even more gas wells.
3. Companies extracting expensive oil will start to suffer, like the tar sands in Canada.
4. Countries depending significantly on oil exports, will become unstable. Russia comes to mind - without the oil revenue to paper over their inefficiencies, the government will be in trouble.
5. The Middle East will cease to be such a focus of all the oil hungry countries.
6. Israel will benefit, since many of its enemies are oil-funded, and it has natural gas off its coast.

Many companies have tried this Gas-to-Liquids path and been unsuccessful. Many are trying right now.
I'm rooting for Siluria and hoping they will be able to realize its dream.
This will buy us some time until ultra-capacitors can be designed to power our electric cars of the future.

AppCmd: Cannot find APP object with identifier ...

I'm using AppCmd for the first time to automate installations for IIS7.0 for create an app.  I kept getting this error:

Cannot find APP object with identifier "CoinStacking".

My problem was not prefacing the identifier with the website, although the examples I found on the web didn't indicate the prefix was needed - probably not needed in some circumstances.

My final appcmd to create an App and set its application pool:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD add app /app.name:CoinStacking /site.name:"Default Web Site" /path:/CoinStacking /physicalPath:E:\Inetpub\wwwroot\CoinStacking

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD set app /app.name:"Default Web Site/CoinStacking" /applicationPool:MyPoolParty

To delete the app:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD delete app /app.name:"Default Web Site/CoinStacking" 

To reset a physical path:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD set app /app.name:"Default Web Site/CoinStacking" /[path='/'].physicalPath:E:\Inetpub\wwwroot\CoinStacking\v2

 Photo from www.CoinStacking.com

Where Are the Millionaire NSA Brother-In-Laws?

Seems to me with NSA analysts gathering all this meta-information on phone calls, some of them would be tempted to call their brother-in-laws and say something like, "Hey Ted, the head of IBM acquisitions has been placing a lot of calls to Acme Quantum, that California company that IPO'd two years ago. I checked their credit cards and Acme Quantum's executive team and the IBM team were in the same Vegas hotel last month for four days. For some reason, everyone traveled there on separate planes, never met in the same restaurant, and ate a lot of room service. I haven't a clue about what they were saying, since everyone knows the NSA doesn't record the calls, just the fact that the calls were made. I know this information isn't useful for anything, but I thought you'd find it interesting since you tell me you get bored sitting at the trading desk all day."

How to get your Firefox "Sync Recovery Key" (sort of)

I had an old test box running XP and it was upgraded to Win7. In the process I lost my Firefox Sync with my main development box. Firefox Sync is wonderful, but it makes Byzantine bureaucracy look like a Manual for Dummies. It's full of blind alleys and circular mazes. Going to "about:home" and clicking on the "sync" icon at the bottom put me in an Alice In Wonderland world where I needed my Sync Recovery Key to log in, but couldn't get those magic numbers until I was logged in. Hmmmm. My solution:
1. Delete your account at https://account.services.mozilla.com
2. Recreate it with the same username and password, but be careful to get the "Sync Recovery Key" from the "Manage Account". The interface is a little odd, because it's assuming you want to change the key, not copy it. On the panel select "Cancel" after you have copied the key to a warm, dry place.

3. Went to my new device and started the process to pair the device. Then it all worked. Good luck.

Visual Studio 2012 - Cannot evaluate expression because the code of the current method is optimized

While trying to debug my C# project, I kept getting the dreaded "Cannot evaluate expression because the code of the current method is optimized" message - meaning the compiler optimized away all the details of the methods to increase execution speed. To see if your library is optimized, start the debugger and then go to "Debug/Windows/Modules" and see if your library is optimized. My problem child .dll was optimized. Right clicking on the project and selecting "Properties", I looked at the "Build" tab. I made sure the "Optimize code" checkbox was unchecked, but that is not enough.

My missing piece was on the same "Build" tab, but further down under "Advanced". I needed to set the "Output / Debug to "full", it's not enough just to be "pdb-only".

Now the project compiles with full debugging info.

"synwinxt.dll is missing or invalid" error after 1.4.14 upgrade on Windows XP

After loving synergy for the last few years, I decided to upgrade since it had one minor annoyance: When ever my server machine got a new IP address, the client couldn't find it - I had to manually reset it by reentering a different version of the host name which caused synergy to lookup the IP address.
Well, nothing is as easy as it looks.
I upgraded my windows7 server to the 64 bit version and windows XP client to the latest 32-bit version, 1.4.15.  Didn't work.  My XP box keep getting "synwinxt.dll is missing or invalid".
I downgraded to version 1.4.14 on both machines and still couldn't get them to communicate.
I finally installed the 1.4.15 32-bit version on my Windows 7 server and it all worked beautifully again.
Synergy is wonderful for sharing keyboard and mouse across multiple machines.