Author Archives: Dale Nunns

About Dale Nunns

I live in Cape Town, South Africa with my awesome wife and cute cat Domino. I'm a software developer, hardware hacker, some time cook, wannabe writer, chief bottle washer and tamer of dust bunnies.

Online shopping done wrong?

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So I saw a bag (Laptop Bag not Hand bag) I really like at a Woolworths store in Cavendish Square, its part of the “Country Road” section of Woolworths (a new “up market” section of the store.) My problem is I didn’t buy it at the time because it was towards the end of my Christmas shopping and I was rather broke.

So this weekend I go online to Woolworths site with the crazy idea that I could perhaps buy it online… unfortunately I can’t. I can buy food, womens clothing and kids clothes but not this bag. Which makes me wonder if there is not something very wrong with the way we do online retailing here in South Africa. I would buy the bag if it didn’t envolve me going out of my way back to Cavendish and standing in long queues and paying a fortune for parking. I would guess that Woolworths already has all the info needed to put this item online in there various databases, I just wonder why they won’t put it online? Surely it doesn’t cost more to put these items online? I don’t think they would loose customers who suddenly don’t want to go into the store either, they might actually get a few new customers via the online store.

So they’ve pretty much lost a possible sale, unless of course I wonder back into that store sometime and they have stock and I have money.

Website for picking Servers

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dell-serverI’ve been tasked with the job of finding a new server for a client, normally I love this kind of job but today its really not going particularly well.

The problem? I know what the client wants/needs but explaining that to the companies with the servers is rather difficult. Either I have to sit on the phone with a sales droid who doesn’t know what they’re talking about or I have to go play with a website which doesn’t work the way I think it should or the worst, go through thousands of spreadsheets trying to puzzle out what goes with what.

So far Dell has the best website I know of for configuring servers, but it still doesn’t do it right because it makes you make decisions up front that if you’re “just shopping” you can’t really make upfront. Obviously this all depends on the way you will be doing your shopping, but let me go through the way I would like these stores to work.
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Fog Creek’s new Offices.

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dsc_1447nefI’m a long time reader of Joel on Software, going on +/- 5 years. I don’t always agree with his ideas and I don’t follow his every word, but he writes well and he does have a very successfull company that makes some very cool software. I am though truely envious of Fog Creek‘s offices, I have to admit as a programmer/developer that is the kind of office environment I would love to work in.

Fog Creek (Joel’s company) has had a few offices, if I remember correctly they started out in a little brown stone in New York, then moved into what Joel termed ‘The Bionic Office’ and now finaly they’ve got there new bigger offices.

Here is the post about the new offices, a link to his Picasa album with lots of photo’s of the new offices and finally a floor plan of the new offices on this post about the Fog Creek Open House day.

Warning: If you’re stuck in a cubicle working a horrible, soul destroying job these links may make you cry.

GridView DataFormatString not working in ASP.NET

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Was scratching my head for a few minutes when a bound column in a grid in my ASP.Net page didn’t format correctly, for future reference and in case it can help some one here is the solution:

Set your DataFormatString to the right format, for example I set mine to {0:dd/MM/yyyy} to show my date correctly and then (and this is the secret trick) you have to set HtmlEncode to false on the column and your column should display correctly.

Weird that I could only find this after a few minutes of Googling, its not in the help as far as I could see.

Debugging Crashes and Hangs using Visual Studio

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Found this via the “Start Page” in Visual Studio 2008, its a rather interesting blog post by one of the Visual Studio IDE QA Guys.

It goes into a lot of detail on how to debug application crashes and the same process can be used for hanging applications. For me the most interesting part was the “Load from Microsoft Symbol Servers” option when loading symbols, I didn’t know it was possible to get the symbols for Microsoft applications like that.

I’m not sure how often I’m going to need to debug other people’s applications, but it may come in handy next time I get a weird application hang or crash.

Best Job in the World

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Best Job in the WorldI’m probably a bit late about posting this one, but in case you’ve missed it here it is.

You could be the caretaker of a small island off the coast of Australia, the job requires you to feed the fish, clean a pool, go for long walks on beautiful sandy beaches, live in a luxury home, go hiking and snorkeling and picking up the mail delivered by plane. I wonder if it includes internet access? The pay for this job isn’t bad either $105000 (I assume Australian $’s) to spend 6 months on the island.

The site advertising the job www.islandreefjob.com crashed under the load of thousands of people applying for the position, but it is back up so you can go apply.

Google Analytics Report Back

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Since installing Analytics on the site I’ve been going in and checking the stats each day, mainly to see who is coming to the site, where they’re coming from and how long they’re staying.

It appears that about 40% of the visitors are from South Africa with the rest coming from mainly Europe and then a few from America. Keywords used on Google to find my site are (in order of number of visits) gliffy, Rachel Leigh Cook, “orange couch” +decorate and telkom verify adsl.

There are spikes in my visits everytime I post something new and it appears if I write something about a blog post someone else has made on there sites I get a few more visitors. I’ve only been running analytics for 9 days on the site so obviously its early days and I have been neglecting the site a bit so it doesn’t have the same readership I once had, but it is encouraging to see my readership slowly climb as I post more.

SARS Extends Tax Deadline

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SARS has extended the deadline for sub-mitting e-filing returns.

Additional time has been set aside for the submission of income tax returns, the SA Revenue Service has said.

Taxpayers using eFiling have until February 5 to submit their income tax returns electronically, SARS said. Until January 23 – the initial deadline – SARS will complete and capture returns electronically at any SARS office.

After that date all returns will have to be submitted electronically via eFiling. “Taxpayers who encounter problems are advised to go to a SARS branch office for assistance.”

From IOL – 15 January 2009

The reason given by SARS for the extension is that the e-filing website has been unable to handle the load of all the people submitting Tax returns. I do suggest that you check with your local SARS office and make sure that this news story is correct (assuming you can get through).

XPathMania

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Richard @ Owl Says Woot has a post about a tool called Visual XPath. I found a tool a while back called XPathMania its a plugin to Visual Studio 2005 (Don’t know if there is a 2008 version out yet.) that allows you do test XPath Queries inside Visual Studio and build them, has saved me many frustrating hours when I’ve been writing xslt scripts.

I’m going to give Visual XPath a try too… perhaps as a replacement for XpathMania in 2008?

Visual Studio 2008 – Custom Tool Error with a Dataset in a Web Project

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I’m busy tearing my hair out, I’ve got this problem in Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (Not sure if it’s SP1 or not.).

I’ve got a web project that I’ve created a dataset in and now want to add a table adapter too, I do this through the web interface and it appears to all work but I get the following error in the “Error List” window and it doesn’t generate any of the code behind the dataset.

Custom tool error: Failed to generate code. Unable to convert input xml file content to a DataSet. Requested value ‘Properties’ was not found. Requested value ‘Properties’ was not found.

The only hints to the fix that I’ve been able to find so far is this forum posting, unfortunately the fixes in the forum doesn’t fix my problem.

Anyone have any suggestions how to fix this problem?