Mark S. Rasmussen improve.dk
Oct 28
2013

I love presenting, especially so when it’s possible for me to do so alongside Powerpoints presenters view. Unfortunately I’m an even bigger fan of ZoomIt and I use it extensively when presenting. Why is that an issue? To use ZoomIt effectively, not just in demos but when showing slides as well, I need to duplicate my screen rather than extending it. Duplicating the screen means presenters view is not an option :(

Sep 23
2013

Mailgun has a very neat feature that enables you to basically convert incoming emails to a POST request to a URL of your choice, also known as a webhook. Using this, you can easily have your application respond to email events. However, as this URL/service needs to be publically available, verifying Mailgun webhooks is very important, ensuring requests actually come from Mailgun, and not someone impersonating Mailgun.

Jun 04
2013

Unfortunately, once in a while, computers fail. If you’re running Windows you’ve probably witnessed the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, commonly referred to as a BSOD. Once the BSOD occurs, some machines will immediately restart, before you’ve got a chance to actually see what happened. Other times users will just report that the BSOD happened, without noting anything down about what the message actually said. In this post I’ll show you how analyzing BSOD minidump files using Windbg will enable you to find the cause of the BSOD after the fact.

May 23
2013

Recently I’ve begun using New Relic, and so far it’s been an excellent experience. About two weeks ago I started using their .NET Agent API to customize some of the data reported by our application to their servers. This makes the data way more valuable to us as we can now selectively ignore certain parts of our application while getting better reporting from other, more critical, parts of the application.

May 21
2013

At our office, all machines are using a local Windows DNS server for their outgoing DNS queries. This allows us to make internal zones like .ipaperlan that points to all of our internal systems, while setting up the DNS server to forward all unknown queries to Google DNS. One feature I’m missing in the standard Windows DNS server is the option to partially forward individual zones. However, there is a workaround that will allow you to setup partial DNS forwarding using individual Windows DNS zones.

Feb 27
2013

At my job we’ve got a product that relies heavily on Flash. The last couple of days I’ve had a number of users complain that, all of a sudden, they couldn’t view Flash content any more. Common for all of them were their browser - Chrome. It would seem that, somehow, the native Chrome Flash player got disabled by itself all of a sudden.

Feb 21
2013

Seeing SQLSaturday events sprawling up all over the world makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Long have I been considering whether one might happen in Denmark, but to be honest, I didn’t think the audience would be big enough. I’m biased though as I’ve mainly attended events outside of Denmark, and thus most of my acquaintances have been non-Danish. But lo and behold, Régis Baccaro just announced that SQLSaturday #196 now has 101 registered attendees! And best of all, it’s held in Copenhagen on the 20th of April.

Feb 20
2013

Having been at it for almost 11 years, I’ve been through a number of blog revamps through the time. And here we are, once again.

Jan 17
2013

It’s been a long day, and I’m finally on my way home from Copenhagen to Aarhus. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the first day of the Warm Crocodile conference yesterday. Thankfully I was able to attend today, and even better, I got a chance to present my “Top X SQL Server Developer Mistakes” session today, and I’d like to thank everybody who showed up and helped fill the room to its limit. I got a lot of excellent questions during, as well as after, the session. If I missed yours, please do get in touch.

Jan 01
2013

Seeing as most of my presentations are rather technical, I like to start by pointing out the fact that I have no finished higher education (though in progress), no major certifications or recognitions/awards. This leaves a perfect opportunity for me to explain, from the ground up, why I still feel qualified to be standing in front of the audience.