May 2004 Entries
So while in NY, it came to pass that I would have to try to screen scrape a running application and get some data off of it to use in an external app (will explain later). Firstly, let me just say how annoying it is that I couldn't find jack about what I wanted to do out there in web-land. I found the world of info about scraping the web (like that's difficult) and scraping a mainframe app running in a terminal session (ditto), but nothing on scraping a Windows app.
So I started to look into the Windows...
So I was in New York last week. For those that don't know me, I work in Central Florida (Ocala) for a company that manages pathology labs. We have our primary medical administrative and clinical offices in New York (Mamaroneck), and a few of us went up last week to work on some stuff. Before I go too far into it, let me just say that, during the days, we got a crapload of stuff accomplished. Yay us!
So on to the nightlife. Wednesday and Thursday night, we went down to Manhattan to have some fun. After much wandering around...
Man.
So I said my auth method had changed. Then RSS was broken because somehow the Deny users="?" tag got in the web.config. That kills non-authenticated users, which made the RSS feed redirect to login, which broke it. Then once I figured that out, I couldn't log myself in. Then I remembered that, out of frustration, I changed my password to something....vulgar...and I had forgotten. So all is well now I hope.
For some reason, my feed isn't working. I'm trying to fix it. Will update when done.
So, been out of town in NYC the last week. More on that later. I was stoked to go up because I would finally have a chance to fly jetBlue. I have to say, I was not disappointed. Leg room was pretty good compared to some other airlines. I’m about 6-2, so if I can stretch out and be comfortable, I’m happy. Plus the seats were incredibly comfortable. And who can argue with your own personal television?
So all in all, good reviews on flying jetBlue. Check it out if you are...
Cripes. I was in NYC for a week, and I couldn't log into my blog. And I was drinking too much...I mean working too much...to figure out why I couldn't log into my blog.
Turns out that SOMEHOW, I don't know how, my authentication mode in web.config got switched off Forms Authentication to Windows Authentication. Fantastic.
So I'm back, and I have a backlog of things to blog.
This just in from the man who brought us .TEXT (which I would love to use..but alas no SQL). "Blog spam has to go."
Scott. You're right no solution will be perfect. A thought I had would be validating the email address used to post a comment making sure it's a real email...then I actually came to your blog to post a comment and saw that there isn't an email address field. (then my comment got too long and so I decided to just trackback it anyway). That one is out as a fix-all, but could be...
Thanks to Scoble for pointing me to this: Jon Stewart's Commencement Address
I wish Jon would do more movies. He's a funny guy. And what I like about him is that, unlike some others of his ilk (yeah Franken, I'm talking about you dumbass), he takes on all sides during his political comedy. And I can appreciate that.
Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I…I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a...
Continuing my earlier post about Webforms Directives, here's another thing I always forget when I don't use it: Connection Strings. Thanks to Mike Schinkel for blogging this (and for the free XDN membership!).
It seems like every job, every project, I only ever connect to one type of database. So after connecting to Oracle for a year, I forget how to connect to SQL. And after connecting to SQL in .net for so long, when I need to do a quick hack to an existing Classic ASP page, I forget how to do it in classic ADO....
Eric Lippert has posted an entry about the habit, which seems to be predominantly a VB/ASP habit, of setting things to Nothing, even if they are just about to go out of scope, at which time the garbage collector will free them anyway.
It's a good read, and his discussion is technically accurate, but some of the comments point to the real reasons programmers do this (hey, I used to). For one, especially in ADO, it was a good idea to release objects early and often so to speak. And a lot of code samples do it. I...
This is awesome. The inhabitants of the Blogosphere never cease to amaze me.
Basically, Mike is giving away a FREE XDN Professional Membership to those who blog about .NET frequently. To be eligible, simply blog about the giveaway and trackback to his blog. Then leave a comment there with Name and Email, and you're in, provided you blog .NET a reasonable amount of time.
Thanks Mike!
Continuing work on a game for The Bitters, I'm going to post a couple of pretty elementary but handy GDI+ snippets I've used in C#.
Load and Manipulate an Image from a Resource in C#
First, add the image to your project, and in the properties for the image, change "Build Action" to "Embedded Resource". Then:
using System.Reflection;using System.IO;using System.Drawing;Class MockLoad : Form{ MockLoad() { Assembly a = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); //Set Icon Stream imgStream...
Now this is intersting. (found via Lenn Pryor)
Now, this is a very intersting and thought-provoking article. But it begs the question: Is real-life product placement really so heinous? I guess it depends on your answer to the following; Is the average American consumer just a sheep waiting to be led, or can he think on his own and make informed decisions? Probably the former. But then again, maybe the sheep deserve what they get.
I know I am almost completely desensitised to traditional advertising, unless I am specifically in the market for a certain type...
I'm trying to throw together a game to go on the website of my IT Director's band, The Bitters.
I'm doing the game in C# using GDI+ for now. May go DirectX later, but GDI is just so easy.
At one point, I needed to capture the arrow keys being pressed. KeyPress doesn't cut it. When KeyPress fires, you don't get access to control keys. But I found out that you can override ProcessDialogKeys to get it done.
protected override bool ProcessDialogKey(Keys keyData) { switch(keyData) { case Keys.Down: { break; } case Keys.Up: { break; } case...
Thanks to Lorenzo Barbieri for blogging this! Go Here for the fix!
Not doing a lot of VB these last couple of years, but it's nice to know its out there.
Build or Buy?
It's an interesting question. When is it better to build systems internally than it is to buy them on the market? Where is the balance line between cost to buy and cost to build, time to implement, control over functionality, and so on?
At my company, we are evaluating whether to build or buy a new lab management system. If we buy, we have narrowed it down to the best of breed solution on the market. The base product won't suit our very specific needs, and we would need the product extensively customized...
Scoble says we should pick either RSS || Atom and publish one and only one in lieu of waiting for a standards organization decision on the matter. I think this is the coward's way out.
It isn't hard to support both. Take a quick look to the right...I am not sure the extra links are "clutter", and they certiainly don't take a lot of space.
It's hard, oh so hard (so hard in fact that I'm about to do it) to keep from drawing the comparison to the days when IE was so far off the reservation on HTML...
I may be a bit behind the curve on this, but check out Gender Genie. It uses some sort of algorithm, whatever that is, to look at a body of text and determine if it is written by a male or female. It was two for two on my test of two of my blog entries. Check it out.
P.S. Really...what's an algorithm?
I don't want to make a habit of using this blog for politics, especially having listened to Lenn talking about he and Scoble talking about focus in blogging, and Heather talking about using your blog as your calling card, I plan to do a more "personal" blog to tackle issues of the day, and keep this one tech-oriented.
Having said that, I haven't made that personal blog yet, and I want to address this. There is a story in the New Yorker portraying the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as the extension of secret "black bag" ops in...
I should be doing marketing for this place, if it didn't market itself. From Wes Haggard. I was too lazy myself to figure this out, but he's gone and done it for us.
Under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Notepad2\Settings] you can add a new DWORD value with the name "ReuseWindow" and give it a value of 0. This will have it open a new window by default.
Thanks Wes!
If you haven't been reading Mark Cuban's blog you should start. The guy is quite amazing. He's a new-school Donald Trump for a younger generation (Trump, please don't sue me, I'm a huge fan). Rich, says what's on his mind, extremely intelligent, but unlike The Donald, not nearly as self-righteous about it all.
Anyway, his lastest installment, Why do people fall in love with stocks? makes a well-delivered point about the average "investor" and the love (hate) affair with the market. I like to follow stocks as a hobby, and I've done well enough in the market,...
If you are anything like me, you tend to remember the big picture on a lot of things, but the more granular details can escape you if you haven't put the information to use in a while. Like today, after having concentrated on WinForms for the last little while, I couldn't for the life of me remember the syntax for the @Register directive on an ASP.Net page. I knew I needed to @Register my control, but what were the attributes again? After a surprisingly annoying search (maybe I'm just Google-Stupid today) I found this quick reference from...
My buddy Billy pointed me to this, which he has on his site. It is by Cesar at Ars, and it contains information about WFP that is really handy to know, like, say, if you wanted to completely replace notepad with notepad2.
Tags: Windows
If you haven't tried Notepad2 yet, do it. Then once you have used it, add it to the context menu (via Steve Clarke. Thanks!)
Well, it's one of those nights, the Red Sox are getting it handed to them by the Indians, so what better thing to do than see: Which Nigerian Spammer Are You?
Which Nigerian spammer are You?
From Chris Johnson:
Actually, this is much easier. Go to your Acrobat\Reader folder and take everything from the "plug_ins" folder and move it into "Optional" except the following: Search.api, Search5.api, IA32.api, EWH32.api, EScript.api. Printing and search will still work, and it will load 75% faster. This is on Reader 6.0.
Which OS are You?
Brought to you by Jeremy Wright via Lenn Pryor (he's slackware, go fig!)
Reading Mark Meadows' post about Somnambulant Marsala got me going. So I thought of what I hoped would be a pretty good word, antedeluvian. And then I went from there. It's amazing how many words I went through, but then I tried Antedeluvian Tungsten. Only a handful of results. Hmm. Try a rarer element? Antedeluvian Palladium. Not many. I went through a few more, and decided that elements wasn't the way to go. However, I am looking forward to the opening of Troy, so I tried Antedeluvian Agamemnon. Bingo....
Thanks to Joe Gregorio for the Pascal String Challenge. The challenge? Write a blog entry that is exactly 255 characters, not including titles, permalinks, etc. Second challenge, make it mean something. I was going to blog about my new project anyway...so I fit it in. Third challenge, make it a haiku . Impressive.
Undertaking a new software project is always a mix of anticipation, excitement, and, if the project is big enough, a little bit of dread. I am about to get on my horse and kick off a rather large software undertaking at my company. I’ll keep you posted.
Okay, so this isn't about technology or development or anything of the sort, but, my God, I need to be heard on this issue.
Why the hell can't I get a burger medium/medium rare?
So I was at Bennigan's yesterday for lunch, and I wanted a burger. I don't really eat fast food, so every now and again, if I'm at a restaraunt, I am craving a big juicy burger. So I order the Big Irish. Medium.
"Sorry sir, we only do burgers medium well and well"
Do what? "No, I want it medium".
"Sorry, only medium well and well"
So turns...