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Archives / 2003 / March

  • Grand Slam Sunday !

    1 Comment



    I am a huge rugby fan, but a very small guy ;-)

    And a supporter of the Irish team, so Sunday is the big day for the green jersey against the English.

    I wish that we can win this time. Please mister we never have the grand slam since ... 1948.

    Go on Brian O'Driscoll, you're one of the best captain Ireland had never have !



    So Sunday will be also a good celebration day, because whatever the result of the match, as usual everything will finish in a pub.

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  • Dropdown menu

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    As Pascal discovered the hard way, Internet Explorer always stacks something like a SELECT drop-down list on top of a normal HTML element, regardless of what z-index you use for each of them.

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  • Macromedia Flash Player 6 for Pocket PC 2002

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    Macromedia Flash Player 6 for Pocket PC 2002 enables developers and publishers to quickly and easily deploy Macromedia Flash MX content and Rich Internet Applications for Pocket PC 2002 devices. Developers can deploy standalone Macromedia Flash applications using the Macromedia Flash Player 6 for Pocket PC.

    This release includes the Pocket PC 2002 Content Developers Guide, Interface Design Policy Kit, as well as a set of optimized Macromedia Flash MX UI components for Pocket PC. Macromedia Flash Player 6 for Pocket PC 2002 is part of the Macromedia Mobile and Devices initiative to make PDA's, phones, televisions, and other consumer electronics accessible to Macromedia Flash developers and publishers.

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  • A thing that puzzles me...

    2 Comments


    I know it's probably easy but I can't figure out the solution.

    I have a dropdown menu that running smoothly. the problem I have is that below the dropdown menu, done with a bunch of <DIV>, I also have a dropdown list.

    As everybody know, there is an issue with IE 4+ where the dropdownlist is always sitting on top of a DIV , whatever the z-index you choose.

    Obviously that's not the effect I want to achieve !.

    Coalesys apparently seems to have solved the problem, I tried it works, but for some other reasons, I don't want use their solution. I rather prefer to build mine.

    I know that I can use a simple trick: hide the dropdownlist when I activate the menu, but Coalesys control don't do that and I wonder how they achieve that.


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  • SQL Query - update

    1 Comment

    I am still fighting, since two days now with this bloody stats that I suppose to give next monday.

    Any help on that ?

    The only I found for the moment is to use a link that Marcie send on a mailing list recently, SQLDudes.

    Apparently a dead site, because they're talking about SQL 7 but with an interesting way of doing a pivot table.

    The other idea I work on is to follow Marcie thoughts (what can we do without our Datagrid girl ;-)) and write some datatable, like master-details kind of stuff.

    Whatever the solution, I swear I will give the solution to the whole world !

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  • H2200

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    Some Pics for the news upcoming h2200 with a 400Mhz Xscale processor, 64MB of ROM.

    This device will have as well SD SDIO (we expect this for long time and a update for the other device should be on soon), TFT Screen but a really low power removable battery with 900 mAh lithium ion for the BT users.

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  • Ineta Europe

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    I am not the official voice of INETA. Just an involved user group leader (oh, and a programmer) I'm just here doin' my own thing.

    Don't be so modest. Everybody, including myself, thanks you for the great value of your contributions in different mailing lists or others.

    For Ineta, I will have a look again, but I am a bit concerned, especially if I look at the recent Microsoft Developer conference, where I knew that they couldn't fill the room, so they invited a lot of people for free to make them coming.

    Roughly 70 people showed up, and I'm sure that half of them were not developer at all.

    And it seems that Irish Dev group was behind this event which the quality of the sessions was very poor.

    It was looking more like a marketing exercise where speakers repeat most of the time, buy my product, I promised to do everything with it, but please I beg you to buy it ;-)

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  • Ineta

    1 Comment

    I just have a look at Ineta website, thanks Julia and Roy. Not sure so maybe it's a dumb question, but is Ineta already there in Europe or is it only US based for the moment ?

    Because the situation here in Ireland is that nothing really exist.

    Well not exactly since a bloke created Irish Developers some time ago.

    But I know well the guy behind this, ( I interviewed him two years ago for a job) and he's certainly not the most qualified to talk about .Net (nothing personal, I just know what I am talking about).

    No idea if he has some support from Microsoft, but this looks like more a PR operation for me. Sodo you know something serious here in Ireland, or do I need to wait if Ineta coming there ?

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  • New free HTML Text editor

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    Well it's new for me, and it looks great, just tested tonight.

    Delivered as a GNU initiative,     YNetEditor is very to install.

    Some bugs but some really cool functions. I like the table tool, but I also like the drag and drop applied to text or images.

    Good job

    Have a look yourself !

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  • Girl Power

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    Marcie so Julia and yourself should keep the pink for your blogs, and boys go on we need to go on some blue ;-))

    Anyway I hope that this blog site will be soon totally pink !

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  • Compact flash and other memory recovery

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    I am not used to make publicity for companies but there I make an exception with flash-card-recovery.

    I have a compact flash 64 Mb and for an unknown reason appeared suddenly empty on my PocketPC. So unable to fix myself the problem, I was really annoyed, thinking that this type of memory is reliable.

    So I did a usual tour on the web, and I said to myself why not trying this company, with all the fears that it could be another opportunistic bunch of guys in their garage building another bad website to attract gullible customers.

    Of course on my compact flash I stored all my precious password and different servers access, without any recent backup. I am sure that everybody has been facing this problem once. And more important, some precious holidays pictures !

    So after paying something like 60 pounds sterling, and after waiting only 6 days, my precious memory card came back today attached with a CD, and good surprise, everything has been restored, well as clusters folders, but I am happy, all the data I need is there.

    Conclusion: never trust anything in memory technology, including the so-known reliable one !

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  • New email worm pretends to have spy images

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    A new e-mail worm has surfaced that purports to show screensavers of U.S. spy satellite pictures of Iraq or animations that are either patriotic or that mock President Bush.

    The worm, dubbed Ganda-A, spreads by sending itself to e-mail addresses on an infected machine and tries to disable anti-virus and other security software and infect certain files on the hard disk, according to Sophos.

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  • Al Gore joins Apple's board

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    In a statement, CEO Steve Jobs noted that Gore is an avid Mac user who edits his own videos using Final Cut Pro. However, Gore's support of the Mac has not been unwavering, with the politician having said three years ago that he had switched from a Mac to a PC. Gore was chosen as a director at a meeting of Apple's board earlier Wednesday.

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  • Being googled

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    Interesting article on Herald Tribune website  with a critical point of view on Google:

    ...
    But the fact that Google won't say exactly how it does it raises some eyebrows. After all, the order in which a search engine presents its results largely determines where Internet users will look. Chances are that you click on the first links that are displayed and rarely if ever get down to the last page of results. The ability to direct where millions of people go on the Web puts a lot of power in Google's hands.

    Google's director of corporate communications, David Krane, demurs.

    "Google itself doesn't possess any power," Krane said by telephone from Mountain View, California. "We built a system that's totally automatic, so humans aren't intervening. We just have a knowledge of the Web. It's a very democratic system: What the Web determines should be the first one, two, three, four or 50th result is the result that we return to the user. Google says that the fairest way to determine who ranks at the top for a particular search query is to let the Web determine that as a whole."

    But Daniel Brandt, a Google critic who runs www.google-watch.org, complains that Google's method "doesn't work very well on sites that are atypical," particularly large sites that are generated from databases, where key information tends to be on a deep page, not the site's home page. Brandt's main Web site, www.namebase.org, has 104,000 pages of publicly available information on famous individuals, he said, but is undervalued by Google's search algorithm.

    "The problem with Google," Brandt said by phone from San Antonio, Texas, "is that they don't want to fix anything unless they can fix it by algorithm" - that is, automatically.

    Krane, the Google spokesman, acknowledged that Google's Web search, which uses a crawler nicknamed Google-bot, isn't perfect. But neither is any other, he said.
    ...

    The most intriguing and interesting part is this one:

    ...
    Another potential problem is privacy. Google deposits cookies on your computer that keep track of the search terms you've been looking for. What's more, this month Google bought Pyra Networks, the company behind blogger.com, which makes it easy to create blogs - a kind of Web journal - and post them on the Internet. The acquisition could make more personal information available to Google.

    Krane said Google's interest in blogs was simply to broaden its information base for Web searches. There is no evidence that Google has improperly used either its virtual monopoly over Web searching or the personal information it gathers. But there is potential for mischief - or worse.

    "Google is collecting a lot of information," said Brandt, the Google critic, "and they are not being required to say what their plans are for how long they keep this information or who they give it to. They are probably collecting this information for profiling purposes, to increase their advertising possibilities. As far as I know, they aren't using personal profiles for ad targeting yet. But I think that's right around the corner."

    Krane said, "We do not have plans to do this."

    Google has issued a statement on its use of cookies and the personal information they contain, saying, "Google does not share nonaggregate user information with third parties and we treat the integrity and security of user information seriously."

    Google uses the data to assess the quality of its searches, Krane said. Is the user satisfied with the first link that is provided? If not, do the search results need tweaking?

    Everyone should be aware that under the USA Patriot Act of 2001, anything you enter into a search engine can be obtained by the government merely by telling a judge "that the spying could lead to information that is 'relevant' to a criminal investigation," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There is no requirement for probable cause, and "the person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation," the foundation said.

    Krane said he could not comment because "this involves something that is beyond Google business." But complying with the law is "certainly something that we do," he added.

    So, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's words, "Be careful what you put in that Google search."
    ...

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  • Wrox

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    Today I found this note on top of C# Today site:

    The addition of new content has currently been suspended, we apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

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  • Suchen mit Google ganz einfach

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    No offence Ralf but can you write your blogs in English.
    Well because if everybody speak here their own language, it's going to be dotnetBabel ;-)

    And I really want to read your blogs, they are surely interesting.

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  • Internet Explorer with Office 11

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    After OneNote, I am more please by IE after installing Office 11.

    I didn't see anybody write on this, but IE has now a Thesaurus and Dictionary button !

    and on top of that a translation link, great !

    This translation works pretty well for most of languages, including chinese !

    If only I could find a way to link that with some of my web projects, that will be fantastic. But I believe this service is probably working as Web Service with some Soap behind the scene, so it should be possible to use it somehow.

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  • OneNote feelings

    2 Comments

    I just played with OneNote beta, and I admit it's probably a great tool.

    But I'm not so excited as before install it. It's surely a personal feeling, but I don't find the point to use this tool.
    The only reason I see is to have a Tablet PC otherwise with a laptop and a mouse it's quite akward.

    It's weird but I had the same feeling ,well, a long time ago, when I tried one of the first ever Macintosh produced on this planet with MacWrite and MacPaint ;-)

    You know this kind of sensation to probably use something great but without knowing what to do with it !

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  • Dog's dinner boosts broadband ;-)

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    A businessman in Derbyshire has come up with a low-tech solution to a hi-tech problem.
    David Taylor has used dog food cans to connect his home through the airwaves to the internet.

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  • Quiz source available online

    2 Comments

    Ok
     
    So I finally published online the Quiz I developed for my current project Scoilnet, a portal for Irish schools.
     
    You can download it at this link http://www.classoffers.net/quiz.zip
     
    If you have difficulties with that let me know. Unfortunatly no much comments in my code ;-)

    I included all files required for a simple Quiz. You will find also a screengrab of the data and their format.
    I used an old trick to store them, rather than using some relationships between tables, but feel free to do so if you think it's better.

    The questions and answers are stored all in a field with a separator, here $$$.

    The final question must have 9999 as an ID to ensure that the Quiz stop at the end and give the final comments, themselves stored in Questions and answers.

    Feel free to ask if you need more help
     

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  • Quiz

    2 Comments

    I don't know if you search for a Quiz application, but I just sent the source to Robert Swiger who was searching for one through the excellent Aspnet maillist.

    So feel free to ask me if you are interested by such a little thing ;-)

    For the moment the code is not commented at all (lack of time ;-)) but if it's of some interest I will do

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  • Webcam from a Pocket PC

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    WebcamPda is really good.

    No fancy design, because it suppose to work from a Pocket PC, Palm or mobile phone with Internet access.

    It just list a huge collection of webcams around the world

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  • My first story

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    Well today, I will write my first story in this blog, and a first for me, writing an article on .Net !
    It's about strategy on how you can store in a database long forms with a lot of textboxes, checkboxes, and radiobuttons controls.

    This is coming from a real experience, where the basic model I built was not working at all, being very very slow, difficult to maintain.

    So I think this should be interesting for many of us (maybe not for the gurus ;-)).

    I will let you know when it's ready.

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  • Control check the revenge ;-))

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    UPDATED: read the end of the blog ;-)
    I start on a bad day today, with a nasty bug I can't figure out what's wrong.
     
    I loop through a series of controls using Typeof to populate a form with different values from the database.
    The control (D2) is embedded in another control D. This code is from my mainpage where I populate the forms.
    PageD2ctl is declared as a Panel, child of D2.

    The problem is that when the control is a Radiobutton, and I am sure it is(just checked in debug mode), my code enter correctly in the test, but it's going also in the Checkbox test, like suddenly my Radiobutton is now typed as a Checkbox.

    I spent sometime on that, but absolutly no clue about what's going on. I tried everything, transforming my nice ElseIf in If then loop, nothing at all.
     
    If anyone has an idea ?
     
     Dim MyCtl2 As Control
                        For Each MyCtl2 In PageD2ctl.controls
     
                            If Not (TypeOf MyCtl2 Is LiteralControl) Then
                                If MyCtl2.ID = dtr("id_q") Then
                                    If TypeOf MyCtl2 Is TextBox Then
                                        Dim ThisTextbox As TextBox = CType(PageD2ctl.findcontrol(dtr("id_q")), TextBox)
                                        ThisTextbox.Text = dtr("answer")
                                    Elseif TypeOf MyCtl2 Is RadioButton Then
                                        Dim ThisRadiobox As RadioButton = CType(PageD2ctl.findcontrol(dtr("id_q")), RadioButton)
                                        If LCase(dtr("answer")) = "true" Then
                                            ThisRadiobox.Checked = True
                                        End If
                                   
    '-- and there after succesfully finish the previous test if it's a radiobutton the code enter in the Checkbox one !

                                    ElseIf TypeOf MyCtl2 Is CheckBox Then
     
                                        Dim ThisCheckbox As CheckBox = CType(PageD2ctl.findcontrol(dtr("id_q")), CheckBox)
                                        If LCase(dtr("answer")) = "true" Then
                                            ThisCheckbox.Checked = True
                                        End If
                                    End if

                             End If
                           End if
                        Next
    UPDATE:
    I found this solution that I share now:

    This confirms (for me) that something going wrong there with the Controls. RadioButton inherits from Checkbox.
    Why this choice ?

    Instead of using an Elseif structure, I write a Select..Case structure like this (Myctl is the control to test):

    select case lcase(Myctl.gettype.tostring)
    case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.textbox"
    .. Mycode
    case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.radiobutton"
    .. MyCode
    case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.checkbox"
    .. Mycode
    end select

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  • .Net future enhancements

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    In answer to Slavomir blog, I accept that things are fixed for the version 2.

    But I regret that only MVPs were listened.
    Not that I have any doubt about their greatest Value, but I am worrying about the direction .Net going to take.

    Are we going to have more difficult and obscure classes and other strong features, or are we going to have a more 'friendly' model.

    I'm not a rookie, but I find some daily tasks difficult to achieve in .Net.Like as I said in my previous post, I enjoy every minute the painful process of looking at the controls arborescence to find the right item or value, for some basic tasks like finding a web control value.

    It's not obviously(well to my humble knowledge) a standard approach in every classes.

    Does anybody know an equivalent link of the     C# changes for VB ?

    So can we talk about .Net 3.0 ;-))

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  • .Net 2.0 request list

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    Is it too early or can we start to build a list of important requirements for .Net 2 ?

    Not only bugs to be fixed (be positive ;-)) but improvements in VS.Net, language, etc...

    One of my first request will be to simplify, not sure how ;-), the hierarchical acces from the page throught the controls.
    It's quite hard to find a particular value in debugging, so much childs and keys !

    Another one will be Edit and continue in debug mode but Scott confirmed that it will be there.

    More GDI+ also , with (I just dream) access to the same facilities I have in a Windows application replicated for my Web application.

    An idea could be a kind of '.Net applet' like you have a Java applet embedded in IE. doing this, we should be able to develop some funky applications, why not windows games in a web page ;-)

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  • Nasty bug !

    I start on a bad day today, with a nasty bug I can't figure out what's wrong.
     
    I loop through a series of controls using Typeof to populate a form with different values from the database.
    The control (D2) is embedded in another control D. This code is from my mainpage where I populate the forms.
    PageD2ctl is declared as a Panel, child of D2.

    The problem is that when the control is a Radiobutton, and I am sure it is(just checked in debug mode), my code enter correctly in the test, but it's going also in the Checkbox test, like suddenly my Radiobutton is now typed as a Checkbox.

    I spent sometime on that, but absolutly no clue about what's going on. I tried everything, transforming my nice ElseIf in If then loop, nothing at all.
     
    If anyone has an idea ?
     
     Dim MyCtl2 As Control
                        For Each MyCtl2 In PageD2ctl.controls
     
                            If Not (TypeOf MyCtl2 Is LiteralControl) Then
                                If MyCtl2.ID = dtr("id_q") Then
                                    If TypeOf MyCtl2 Is TextBox Then
                                        Dim ThisTextbox As TextBox = CType(PageD2ctl.findcontrol(dtr("id_q")), TextBox)
                                        ThisTextbox.Text = dtr("answer")
                                    Elseif TypeOf MyCtl2 Is RadioButton Then
                                        Dim ThisRadiobox As RadioButton = CType(PageD2ctl.findcontrol(dtr("id_q")), RadioButton)
                                        If LCase(dtr("answer")) = "true" Then
                                            ThisRadiobox.Checked = True
                                        End If
                                   
    '-- and there after succesfully finish the previous test if it's a radiobutton the code enter in the Checkbox one !

                                    ElseIf TypeOf MyCtl2 Is CheckBox Then
     
                                        Dim ThisCheckbox As CheckBox = CType(PageD2ctl.findcontrol(dtr("id_q")), CheckBox)
                                        If LCase(dtr("answer")) = "true" Then
                                            ThisCheckbox.Checked = True
                                        End If
                                    End if

                             End If
                           End if
                        Next
    UPDATE:
    I found this solution that I share now:

    This confirms (for me) that something wrong there with the Controls.

    Instead of using an Elseif structure, I write a Select..Case structure like this (Myctl is the ontrol to test):

    select case lcase(Myctl.gettype.tostring)
    case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.textbox"
    .. Mycode
    case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.radiobutton"
    .. MyCode
    case "system.web.ui.webcontrols.checkbox"
    .. Mycode
    end select

    Read more...

  • Database Challenge

    1 Comment

    I have to do some coding for Scoilnet this week-end, but I have to complete another database challenge for another project.

    Ok , basics elements first:

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  • I am a green

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    I am not sure how to take this one, I don't feel really being an ecowarrior, maybe hippie a little bit man ;-)

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