February 2004 Entries
I recently wrote about how I fixed the PNG support on this .Text system by using PNGHack.
The thing is... This is an “IE Only” problem and “Only IE” really supports Behaviors (not for long, see this)
So wouldn't it make perfect sense to use Behaviors to Fix and IE Only problem, then everything else can just ignore the behavior and IE's problem goes away.
I have been using OneNote daily for about 2 months now, I Love it and Hate it at the same time.
For Organization of Notes, it's pretty close to Ideal.
For Pen Input, its pretty close to awful.
I have tried every way possible to take accurate notes (I'm dealing with formulas and graphs right now) and it not only is difficult to make things line up correclty or recognize my handwriting, but besides that-- It has several times turned a page of notes into utter jumble with no way that I have
Today I am launching DigitalDreamshop.com
This is where all my official code is going to be stored unless its just some small example in this blog.
I will version track everything there with AnkhSVN and Subversion. I am still working on several aspects of the site.
The site is completely run by 2 independent copies of DotText, I plan to add some functionality to the Repository later, but it's up and functioning now.
It only took a small amount of tweaks to modify DotText to work this way. I basically have a Multisite blog set up for the repository so each program area has its own Area. I wanted a site to track each program and allow for lots of comments, articles about how things work and all in the same style. I did some odd things to get the Aggregation to work the way I wanted it to, but overall I think it has turned out to be pretty nice and would love to hear your comments about it. I need to overhauls a few aspects of the CSS, but I am getting there. DotText Rocks. This demonstrates there are more things than traditional Blogs you can do with this great piece of code.
I have to try this, but it looks promising.
I recently spoke at length about Behaviors and Webservices at AZDNUG. One of the big questions was how to make it work in Gecko based browsers, Flash 7 Buttons are one way and it looks like this is another for:
- Mozilla 1.4+
- Netscape 7+
- Firefox 0.8+
- Firebird 0.7+
In addition, I am working on Server Controls and User Controls that take all the pain out of doing this, and I hope to add the SOAP wrappers to the Server Control to make it work in Mozilla, I don't know if there is a solution for Opera other than Flash yet.
Something of really important note was how this can work exclusively by adding tags in CSS and offering the .htc file as a url, no embedding of javascript or direct tags necessary! It's my understanding that you can make all your wrappers for a Webservice directly in the .htc so there won't be any need for an additional .js file, but I have to play with this next week to understand it more completely.
If you do Any of these you can't work for me :-) Actually there are a few on there I am guilty of recently, but will pay penance and reform immediately.
Great list to reflect on when you are trying to slam out something quick, then remember you shouldn't do things quite so fast when you take shortcuts that cause potential problems.
Originally I intended this for use with just grabbing what is in Query Analyzer and making an XML file out of it. It works well enough now that I use it for alot of other tasks too.
I had to get pretty elaborate in the way it does a few things, so I put them in varibles at the top that you can change to the way you like things to be. Just getting stuff from the clipboard in a VS Macro is really bizarre.
Pasting didn't work in an XML document because it just did wierd things and was really slow, this is super fast.
Since I am on the subject, XMLCooktop is a nice little freeware utility for working with XML/XSLT
It has some quirks, but just pasting raw XML into the source editor and clicking the format button is rather nice.
I have to figure out what that regex is that it uses so I can adapt my macro to format like that :)
I normally use Ultra edit for this, but heck, Why not do this in the VS.NET IDE... Since someone was asking me about how I was doing it, I decided to create a utility to make it even simpler.
Create a NEW Macro, then paste this into it:
This question seems to come up every now and then so here is a Solution I am using to accomplish the task. This article was the one mentioned to be posted last week, so here it is with Cut & Paste ready code.
Active Reports really is a GREAT tool, I have been an overjoyed user for many years, I simply refuse to use any other reporting tool. The staff is Top Notch and the support is excellent.
Ever need to redirect a few pages from one server to another and only had access to raw html left on that old server?
Try this:
I'll be speaking at AZDNUG - the Arizona Dot Net User's Group on February 17 from 6pm to 9pm.
I just updated some skinning stuff while I was doing the PNGHack. I'm not sure I like the rss.gifs everywhere, but i'm going to leave it for now. I did manaqe to get them all right justified with a little css trickery.
update - 02/11/2004 I finally got it down to a single pixel width difference between mozilla and IE, boxmodels really need to be the same, this is frustrating. I had to add a <div> in all the <li> elements so width='100%' calculated the same on all browsers, still
I decided to get PNGHack working today, lovely!
This easy to use control is a God send for anyone who want to use images with transparency. Most of us already know that PNG files are far superior to GIF files when transparency is concerned. This control fixes the NASTY way IE treats PNG files so their inclusion in your page works properly.
I was most pleased to see the FINE WORK Robert McLaws did on the Freetextbox Control. Everytime I posted code in this Blog I had to actually edit it on the SQL Backend to retain the formatting, this was miserably annoying. Fortunately it's now fixed.
I am going to be cleaning up some of my older blog posts that were supposed to be articles and move them into the articles section this weekend.
This is long overdue, but I have been horribly busy lately. In addition to cleaning up the old ones, I have at least 2 new ones coming at the same time -- One more in depth about Webservices and another about ActiveReports.
Today I was looking at a report I need to change to use XML as a dataset which is retrieved from SQL Server.
“So What, Big Deal”
Yeah? Try it with a GROUP BY in the Select... You can't... or Can you?
Officially, it's NOT SUPPORTED, but fret not my friends, here is a fairly simple solution.
Have I mention AnkhSVN lately? If not there is a new version 0.4.1 available.
Also, added Arild's Blog to links.
Added Chris Pratley's weblog. He is the Program Manager for the Office Team and the weblog seems to be mostly about OneNote.
Speaking of OneNote, despite my praise in previous post it really frustrates the hell out of me. I think it's a great app, just not very well implemented in some areas. See http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/31/65647.aspx for a little explanation of the OneNote/Journal differences. This is Frightening. I like Journal alot for drawing math functions
Anyone posting links to Viagra and Adult material in a comment will just get it removed, so don't bother.
Pity I even have to check for these things.
Just upgraded to .Text 0.95, not too bad of a task, things seemed to have gone smoothly, if you seen anything broken, please tell me.
one thing I have noticed is that the time posted seems to be strange... We need a timezone offset as a configurable option.
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Copyright © 2003-2004 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.