Monday, March 23, 2009

asp.net crashes

I thought I would note some possible causes of the evil "server application unavailable" message when you try to view an ASP.NET application. It always helps to check your Event Log messages, too.

1) Cause: Incorrect file-system-level permissions. Solution: set the Windows permissions of your web site source code top-level folder to at least allow "Read & Execute", "List Folder Contents", and "Read" access for the following user accounts, where "MyMachineName" is your local machine's name.
- MyMachineName\IUSR_MyMachineName
- MyMachineName\IWAM_MyMachineName
- MyMachineName\ASPNET

2) Cause: Infinite recursion (stack overflow). Solution: fix your code so a method can't call itself infinity times.

3) Cause: Infinite memory allocation (heap overflow). Solution: something in your code is infinitely requesting memory. Check for a spot in your code where a new command is used in an infinite loop or some other situation where it's repeatedly instantiating objects.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Noonday seashore: a Haiku

...and now for something completely differenter. This is my first attempt at a haiku in Japanese. I provided fairly tight English translation which follows the meter.


昼の海
うるさい鴎
そよ風と

A noon-day seashore
Annoying, noisy seagull
With a gentle breeze



I think it has the greatest effect when you read on line at a time, slowly. I had in mind the shore of Lake Michigan in Saint Joseph, MI, where I grew up. There are lots of happy memories on those beaches. The seagulls can be really annoying, too :) . But please feel free to imagine any shore you like. I think Japanese can probably relate to this, since they are surrounded by ocean.

I used incomplete sentences, both in Japanese and English. I'm not exactly sure how it sounds to a native Japanese (please inform me!). So anyways, that's that. Please let me know what you think of either version! I'd appreciate critiques!