A Beautiful Morning
RadicalWacko April 23rd, 2008
I could get used to this as my morning view after a wonderful night’s sleep in a big four poster bed.
A Rough Start, but Still Loving It
RadicalWacko April 22nd, 2008
So, with short notice and good fortune, a chance arose this year for me to go back to New Orleans for Jazzfest after an extended absence. Also, owing to good fortune, this opportunity aligned with previously scheduled time off so as to allow me another of my grand road trips. Of course, you can’t have a good road trip without at least one good disaster. So far, this year it came in the form of a nasty sore throat which started early Sunday morning. It turned out to be a nasty case of Strep Throat. Thankfully, antibiotics still work and after after my first doctors visit in nine years, I was quickly on the mend.
However, the net result of the illness was that I got a very late start on Monday. So I spent most of the day speeding across central and eastern Texas with very little time for breaks. I slept at the beautiful Comfort Inn in scenic Longview, TX, soon to be featured in the upcoming essay “A short look at Longview”. (Thanks Mark)
This morning I got a pre-dawn start and made my way to Kilgore, TX, a down made and maintained by Oil and is darn proud of it. From there I wandered over to Jefferson, TX, a very well preserved 1870’s small town.
Northern Louisiana doesn’t offer much in the say of sightseeing opportunities. However, it makes up for that with vast stretches of open road where Dominique and I can frolic.
I made my way across the state and into Vicksburg in time to spend four hours touring the fascinating, if still very grim, Vicksburg Battlefield National Park. Tonight, I had dinner in the Cedar Grove Inn, an 1840’s estate which apparently survived much of the looting and destruction after the fall of Vicksburg due to the fact that it was build for General Sherman’s cousin by her husband. However, there is a cannon ball in the parlor wall that has never been removed, so it didn’t escape entirely unscathed.
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NOTE: Pictures are in a raw state and haven’t been cleaned up yet.
Odd Sculpture
RadicalWacko April 19th, 2008
Can’t quite figure out the meaning of this one . . .
Oklahoma Floodwaters
RadicalWacko April 15th, 2008
We’ve been getting some descent flooding down here during this spring season. My friend Jason caught an interesting shot of some of the flood waters:
Seems like a dangerous drive to me.
Police State Toys
RadicalWacko April 7th, 2008
Apparently, toy maker Playmobil thinks there’s a burgeoning market in toys for a police state including this roadblock setup. According to the description, they have stop signs, maps and pistols. Of course, if they were really going to do this right, I think they need black cloth bags, zip cuffs and truncheons. Via Hit n’ Run.
Rollerblading Cops
RadicalWacko April 7th, 2008
The French have come up with a way to finally improve the self-esteem of all of those bicycle cops:
About 3,000 officers were deployed on motorcycles, in jogging gear and with inline roller skates [my emphasis].
Seeking Suggestions for Reading Web.Config
RadicalWacko March 24th, 2008
I recently had a task in one of my current projects that required me to extract the authentication mode of the current solution’s web.config file. The only was I figured out how to do it was by parsing the XML of the file by hand as shown below (Yeah, I know, it’s VB.NET. I do what the client wants.):
Dim config As New System.Xml.XmlDocument() config.Load(Server.MapPath(“\Web.config“)) Dim authMode As System.Xml.XmlNode = config.SelectSingleNode(“/configuration/system.web/authentication/@mode“) Return authMode.Value
While that works just fine, it seems a little primitive and I figured Microsoft would have introduced a library to get that kind of data. Anyone know of any?
Setting Control Focus in an Ajax Update Panel
RadicalWacko March 23rd, 2008
I’ve decided to start posting the solutions I find in irritating little problems that take me forever to find. Some of these will probably be obvious, but hopefully it might save someone’s time. My current problem was that I had a DotNetNuke module that was sitting in a AJAX Update Panel. I needed to set the focus to a particular control based upon a post back click on a radio button. The standard focus() method didn’t work and neither did the old fashioned RegisterClientScriptBlock stuff with a provided JavaScript function. Turns out there is an extremely easy way to do this which is to use the ScriptManager SetFocus method using the base Page for the control as shown below:
ScriptManager.GetCurrent(Me.Page).SetFocus(txtApplicationDate)
Hope that helps someone.
Amusing Quiz
RadicalWacko March 18th, 2008
Apparently, I only rate as a Slightly Dorky Nerd King via the Nerd 2.0 test. Slightly disappointing . . .
Web Standards in the Spotlight
RadicalWacko March 17th, 2008
Joel Sposky, in his usual highly amusing style, takes on the new IE 8 controversy and points out the enormous gulf between the standards world and the world the rest of us really work in. I often compare this difference to the difference between open-source and commercial software developers. There are those who say that it must be done the standard way and there are others that say it should be done to make it easy for the user. And the rest of us poor suckers live somewhere in between. My favorite quote from the article:
The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You’d think they’re the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn’t, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America’s Toughest Sheriff. “YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don’t care if 80% of your websites stop working. I’ll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don’t care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law.”
