"Proxy Authentication Required" for .Net Apps

The A/C in our office is out for the second day so we are all working from home. It's been a good break and I haven't missed the drive.
I've been working through an issue in our test farm with our .Net application. The error being trickier by the addition of our new domain at work and our new machines. I recently got this error:

System.Net.WebException Message: 
The request failed with HTTP status 407: 
Proxy Authentication Required. 

The problem was the .Net 2.0 application was not using the proxy exclusion list in my IE settings - for some reason. The problem was solved by the addition of this little wad of xml in the web.config:

<system.net>
<defaultProxy>
<proxy usesystemdefault="False"/>
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>

This forces .Net to not use a proxy by default, but to use a direct connection foregoing the need for authentication and making everything zippier.

Sweet new fuel for your car

A synthetic form of diesel called DMF (2,5-dimethylfuran) can now be produced from the sugar in plants . Ethanol is often the end product of energy from biomass, but ethanol as a transportation fuel has many drawbacks. Ethanol takes lots of energy just to create, especially in the distillation process. DMF takes only one-third the energy for distillation. Ethanol cannot be shipped via pipelines because it combines with water; DMF does not have this problem. Ethanol is not very energy dense, DMF packs more power in a gallon.
The sugar to DMF process is still experimental and DMF will need to be certified as safe for human contact.
DMF looks like a promising alternative to create a transportation fuel from biomass.

Amazon Unbox and Tivo

Tonight we watched our first video downloaded from Amazon Unbox straight to our Tivo.
The whole process worked great. Two unfortunate things about the experience though. I had to sit at my home pc to order the movie from the web (although it was very easy). Tivo says they will have "order direct from Tivo" ability in the near future. That will be great.
The other unfortunate thing is the price. It cost about 4 dollars to rent a movie for a day which seems a bit excessive considering the cost of NetFlixs. For the next 24 hours we can watch the film all we want, but after that it disappears.

Consola font from Microsoft Helps in VS

I downloaded the Consolas font for Visual Studio and really like it.

Venezuela's Banned TV now on YouTube

The Venezualian goverment shut down a major TV station for broadcasting anti-goverment news. The station has gone off the air and has moved to YouTube to get their message out.

Very interesting use of the internet to avoid censorship. YouTube's reach is too small in Venezuala to really be a viable network of information, but is a trend for the future.

Compressed Air Cars

In 2005 an Austrailian film crew produced this video on compressed air cars. It's worth watching. Compressed air cars have been around for a while. Early work on the concept was done in South Africa.



I'm skeptical about the cars because this was filmed 2 years ago and we haven't heard anything since. Also the claims of being able to drive across a continent on a single tank seems too far out.

Using compressed air as an energy storage device for our cars has numerous advantages:
1. We could stop importing oil from the Middle East. This would keep billions of dollars in our own country and stop funding regimes who hate us.
2. Our city air would be cleaner.
3. The design looks fairly simple and perhaps more reliable than current cars.

Some disadvangates:
1. Well, it's not here yet. Will it every be safe and profitable?
2. The demo cars were very noisy.

What do you think?

Are You Losing Interest In Your Bank?

I got a rude awakening to the adult world a few weeks ago. I checked the interest rate on our savings account. 0.3%, zero point three percent! "How can that be? Just yesterday it was 3.5%".
Well, my bank, who shall remain nameless, (OK, their initials refer to a snake) had slowly been lowering the interest rate. See Boiling Frog story. I went to talk to my local branch bank about getting into CDs to raise my interest rate or moving the money to Schwab. The bank guy said, "Hmmm.... let me see. I could put you in an affinity group and raise your rates to 4.7%. Would that be OK?".
I've lost lots of interest money just by not paying attention in the first place and not asking in the second.
Check you interest rates. If you aren't getting 4.5% go to Immigrants Direct or Electric Orange, or ask to join an affinity group at your bank.