Category Archives: Computers

Apple Macintosh – Folklore

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mac_design_teamI missed this one, but for those of you who don’t know it was the Apple Macintosh’s 25th Birthday on January 24th. I love reading about the history of computing and in particular about the early days at places like Apple, much of what they were doing back then was new and uncharted and no one knew if it was going to work or how to do things.

I love reading Folklore.org which is written mostly by Andy Hertzfeld and tells the stories of things that happened at Apple while they were designing the Macintosh.

Disk Latency from Shouting

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Some guys from the Fishworks project over at Sun discovered something rather interesting, that shouting at a disk array while the array is in use can cause latency on the disks. This does actually make sense as any vibrations can make a difference to the disks as it causes the heads to move a bit and therefore they have to re-read that part of the disk.

Shouting in the Datacenter

I wonder if this will prompt people to make quieter server rooms? Found via this blog post and this one.

nPOP Mail Client

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npopI was looking for a mail client that would connect to a POP mail server and pull down the headers and then allow you to delete the messages you no longer wanted straight from the server. (Very useful if you have a giant email cloggy your mail.)

Alot of mail clients will do this, but they’re all rather bloated and need to be installed. Ideally I was looking for something small, that didn’t need to be installed. After a bit of searching I found nPOP, it does exactly what I wanted and has become an extremely useful little mail app. I’ve used it a number of times with my clients who have a habit of receiveing emails with 30mb mail attachements. All the settings are stored in a .ini file in the same folder as the .exe which makes moving it around or carrying it on a memory stick possible.

Works on Windows (including Vista) they also have a pocket pc version which looks interesting.

You can get it here. (Only a 94KB download, works on Windows including Vista.)

Wordwrapping Crystal Text Fields

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can-growPuting this up so that I don’t have to do as much head scratching next time around. To make a text field in a Crystal report wrap, Right Click the field, Select Format Object then tick the “Can Grow” field and you can then enter the number of lines you want to allow the field to grow too, in my case I set it to 0 then it’ll keep growing.

AJAX Loading Gif Creator

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ajax-loaderIf you use any AJAX based sites you’ve probably seen the spinning “loading” icons people use to indicate something is loading (like the one on the right). I’ve been looking for somewhere I can get one for a website I’m working on.

I wondered onto this site AjaxLoad via this Stack Overflow Entry which has a web based image generator, its actually very cool. Now I just have to work out how to get the image to work correctly in ASP.Net.

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.

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?