Web Junky Fevered Monkey

Window

2011-12-09T06:03:00.001-08:00

Not your typical office window

Lighthouse

2011-01-15T09:59:00.001-08:00

Izzy's homework

Snowman

2010-12-18T08:32:00.001-08:00

jwz of mozilla fame

2008-08-19T05:11:00.000-07:00

So I just read the entire contents of http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/ ... I kind of can't believe I'm admitting to this. Anyway it was a total time-sink, I'ts like I just eat too many cakes and I'm regretting it and feeling sick!

Information Overload

2008-05-15T02:19:00.001-07:00

The email server is refusing to get out of bed today, it's having a 'duvet' day :) Personally I won't be complaining about that. In modern times I often feel there are too many ways to demand my attention. Email, SMS Text, IM ...

Once upon a time you had to husband cattle and fish for squid before you could contact anybody with the written word. (Before paper, calf skin was used.) So nobody tried to get hold of you unless it was *really* important.

The Trouble With Programming

2008-05-13T14:31:00.001-07:00

Just random though really.

The trouble with programming is, it's a real pain in the ass! You can't escape this constant feeling that there's a better/faster/smarter way to do the same things and never quite finding it, but always feeling: "I'm that close...."

Grrrr....

Stackoverflow will it be buzz or horror?

2008-04-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

There's something going down in webland and it's called stackoverflow.com. It's a collaboration between a couple of the interwebs' better programming bloggers: Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame; and Joel Spolksey of Fogcreek Software. There's already a little landing page (Jeff must be busy because it's pretty lame at the moment it must be said) and a first podcast can be downloaded from there. I have been following the news on this and I really hope it is going to be something new. I have no idea how Jeff and Joel are going to make this a different experience from the likes of Code Project or the infamous Experts Exchange but I really hope they pull it off. What struck me most about the podcast was that Joel didn't sound at all like I imagined he would. The joyous wit so abundant in his blog articles lead me to expect something very different. Anyway what I liked the most was just listening to these two great names talking shop just like thousands of ordinary hackers passionate about their world. So good luck J and J we are all waiting with baited breath.

Taking better vacation photos

2008-04-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

Taking pleasing photographs is not actually that difficult once you have memorised just a few basic techniques. Modern digital cameras allow you to see instant results, and you can instantly erase and take the shot again if your not happy. This has got to be the single biggest advantage of digital photo technology...

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Password storage

2008-04-02T07:20:00.000-07:00

With all the hype about the amount of personal information people are allowing to be seen in there Social bookmarking profiles, It got me thinking about password storage. Particularly as I've been brushing up on secure password storage for a new project. At a minimum in your web application you should be hashing the users password and adding a salt before storing it in the database. When creating the 'Forgot your password' function I suddenly realised something. All those sites that email you your password when you forget it - instead of issuing a new one. Are almost certainly not hashing your password very securely, if at all !! you might want to think about that for a moment :)

Bounds Testing

2008-02-08T03:24:00.000-08:00

Who says testing can't be fun ?

A treeview control, the nodes are user configurable but they mustn't be allowed more than nine nodes. :)

Where did my IntelliSense go ?

2008-02-07T03:08:00.000-08:00

Sometimes on larger projects, or rather solutions made up of multiple projects it's a hazard that you might get your references in a twist. if you do VS will get it's knickers in a twist and put something like the following in the task list:

Warning: The dependency '[some.namespace Version=1.0.2959.19180, Culture=neutral' in project 'some project' cannot be copied to the run directory because it would overwrite the reference 'some.namespace', Version=1.0.2824.17691, Culture=neutral'.

One of the symptoms that will bring this to your attention, is IntelliSense for objects and their methods in a referenced class library project will stop functioning. Gah!

The golden rule I have found is when adding references between the projects in the solution, particularly if project A and Project B *BOTH* require a reference to project C. Make sure you add it from the Add a reference's Project tab, rather than browsing to the dll file. This way VS will see the circular dependency and sort it out, and IntelliSense will be restored, thank goodness, time for a cup of tea.

Retrieving data with SQL queries: An introduction

2008-01-24T00:56:00.000-08:00

Before we dive into the basics of SQL it is pertinent to give a little background on it's origins. SQL was originally coined SEQUEL by IBM in about...

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How to find out what's running on your PC (and why this is important)

2008-01-24T00:54:00.000-08:00

In order for modern, multi-tasking, PC operating systems to run in a stable manner. Every program that runs does so within it's own process, alloca...

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Web Writing

2008-01-10T12:44:00.000-08:00

I have often felt the call to write more stuff. I'm definitely not cut out to be a novelist or anything like that, but I do like throwing together the odd poem. Mostly I like to just get out ideas I have in my head or debrief myself over some experience I've had or some issue that challenged or got my interest at work.

I recently discovered Helium, it's a bit like myLot but more up-market. I haven't done a great deal there yet but I have published a handful of articles. The titles are preselected and I came across one that was right up my street "A day in the life of web developer" so of course I couldn't pass that up!

Hairy Code

2008-01-04T03:27:00.000-08:00

I have been in my latest hacker post for a couple of years now. I am still maintaining one of the key projects there that I was introduced to on my very first day. Yeah my first day! A new post and I was reading code dating back to the 'Classic ASP' days, migrated to 'ASP.NET Framework 1.1.' It was already about three years old. So the code was big fat and very very hairy. I recalled in my mind someone mentioning that classic phrase "..hit the ground running." In my interview only a month previously. The relevance of that sentence was beginning to dawn on me.

The code violates just about every principle going! particularly DRY (Don't repeat yourself) There are, for example: a total of three Data Layer tiers each of varying complexity and each reflecting the tastes of it's creator. One is abstract, the second is just a light layer that executes in-line SQL and the third (my own contribution) sits somewhere between the two and shows my preference for stored procedures as opposed to concatenated SQL. This... 'thing' is a monster! But, it works it's been out in the wild for half a decade being battered by it's users everyday. It's been down just twice for a handful of hours in the last two years and that was due to network hardware issues not the application.

There are days when I hate the monster and can barely face it, then there are days like today as I bolt on yet another module/feature that I feal in awe of this mighty labyrinth of C# code. I have managed to slowly refactor large parts of this monster's code mop, combing wayward hairs of C# into neat re-usable classes. I read once on Joel Spolskey's blog throwing away code and starting again is something you should never do. My monster stands testament to that ethos.

Handy web designer tips

2007-07-23T04:25:00.000-07:00

1. Is your DOCTYPE being interpreted correctly?
Load the suspect page, then place this in the address bar:

javascript:alert(document.compatMode);

You should get an alert box stating 'CSS1Compat' if the browser is using strict compliant mode. Or 'BackCompat' if it's in quirks mode

ASP.NET DataTable.Select method doesn't return rows.

2007-07-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

You've got a small bug that only occurs on one particular server, that server is owned by someone else so you can't remote debug. You can't debug locally on your development machine, because there the bug is absent, everything works. So what do you do to diagnose the problem? Use the event log and or file system and print out your own debugging info.

So anyway the background. We have a large bespoke ASP.NET web application that manages recruitment for a large corporation. It's hosted on a private server that we have limited access to. A part of this distributed application is responsible for correspondence; email and letter merging for mass mailings. Within this component a couple of related DataTable objects are passed in along with an MS Word document template, and the data is merged. The first table contains a list of recipients, the other contains some repeating details (a list of required documents, or a list of booked courses for example) So it's a one to many relationship. The primary table is iterated one row at a time and pulls the related rows from the foreign key DataTable using the Select method of the that DataTable object. This returns an array of matching DataRow objects which are iterated into the template.

string filter = key + “ = “ + keyVal;

DataRow[] rows = detail.Select(filter);

foreach(DataRow row in rows)

{

//merge the data into the template.

}

The string filter argument for the Select method is a simple concatenation of the foreign key column name and the value to be selected. The key column is an auto identity integer column. The code was tested and worked perfectly on the development PC. However, on the staging server no rows were being returned even though we knew they existed. We couldn't debug on this server so we wrote our own debugging statements to the servers Application event log. So why would the filter return rows on the development computer but not another? We decided to serialize the table including schema information to an xml file onto the servers file system to take a closer look

detail.TableName = “detail”; //Without this the WriteXml method throws an exception.

detail.WriteXml(@“C:\Temp\detail.xml”, XmlWriteMode.WriteSchema, false);

And there was the answer.

<xs:element name="ApplicantId" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" />

On the development machine the foreign key column was being correctly recognised as being of integer data type:

<xs:element name="ApplicantId" type="xs:int" minOccurs="0" />

But, on the staging server it was showing in the schema as a string field!

The fix was to change the filter to use single quote marks around the foreign key value.

string filter = key + “ = '“ + keyVal + “'”;

As this works in both scenarios. So the rule of thumb would seem to be: To use single quotes around your criteria parameter. I often see single quotes in SQL statements for integer columns and it has always irked me (being a bit of a purist – typical of my ilk) But after today I have a new respect for it .I haven't figured out the exact reason for this behaviour as the .NET framework is exactly the same version on both machines. My gut instinct, and therefore prime suspect is: MDAC.

Facebook API

2007-06-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

So I thought it was about time I checked out Facebook. I don't know why I chose that particular site. There seems to be a new surge in web 2.0, in which it's now possible to program your blogs and sites. Integrating services that exist all over the internet, into little mini plugins. So I have spent an entire evening attempting the Facebook API tutorial. The hardest part was finding a free host that supported PHP version 5. I finaly found one at ByetHost2 The major issue was none of them specified which version of PHP they had installed so I had to sign-up all of them and upload a phpinfo.php file to discover nearly all are still stuck on 4.2 !!!

Anyway having finally got a host on the right version, I completed the tutorial. But, it doesn't work and I am disappointed. It is almost tomorrow and time for bed.

Site up and running

2007-06-05T04:39:00.000-07:00

I finally have my site up and running and a domain to call home. See 'Make the internet work for you' in My Links.