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?
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.
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.”
Martian Headsets - Joel on Software
RadicalWacko August 13th, 2005
Hey, I’m game. Everyone link to the J-Walk blog . . .
[Via: The J-Walk Blog: Attention Bloggers!]
RadicalWacko June 8th, 2005
RadicalWacko March 2nd, 2005
Finally, a theme for all you Mozilla Pimps out there: Pimpzilla
[Via: Photo Matt » Firefox Theme]
RadicalWacko February 28th, 2005
I’ve signed up for a neat dual purpose service called AudioScrobbler. Essentially, it tracks every song you play on your local machine, uploads them to their server and builds a musical profile of your taste. They then use that information to sell to record companies to help them market their new music to the appropriate listeners. They do that through a great little radio station tied in called last.fm which, once you have a nice profile built up it really does a great job of introducing you to new music that doesn’t drive you completely nuts.
The other side advantage of the service is that I can now provide you another tool to track this boring computer nerd. You can now see the last 5 tracks that I’ve played on the right hand frame. So for all of you that have way too much spare time, stalk away. BTW, I’m really disturbed by a few of you people who watch the webcam for hours on end. Trust me, nothing exciting will ever happen there. ;)
Update (02/28/2005, 6:00PM): The moment I announce this little change, the feed goes down. I’ll update when the song list is back up and running.
Update (03/01/2005, 5:50 PM): OK, looks the server is back up and running. Enjoy.
RadicalWacko February 17th, 2005
Thanks to the excellent help of the guys over at WordPress, the feeds are back. Besides this little set back, 1.5 is a great product. The theme system alone is enough to make it worth while. I’m still evaluating looking at a .NET product, such as DasBlog, so that I would be in a better position to edit the system, but for the time being I’m shelving any conversion for the time being.
All problems aside though, if you are a PHP developer, I would highly recommend using WordPress 1.5. It’s a great product.
RadicalWacko February 17th, 2005
Sorry folks, but there are some blog issues I’m working through right now. While the upgrade to WordPress 1.5 seemed to go fine, all of my RSS feeds are returning 404 errors. My php skills are very poor so it may take me awhile to get them back up and running. If I can’t, I’ll have to switch of a .NET blog engine where I can understand the source code. ;)
I hope to have everything back to normal by this weekend.
RadicalWacko January 18th, 2005
This is kinda amusing to me because my buddy Peter and I were just talking this morning about how it was inevitable that Google would have to weigh in on the comment spam plague. Today they announced on their blog that they will be implementing an “nofollow” tag that will allow you to block links on your site from being used for ranking purposes on Google. The same rule applies to MSN and Yahoo searches. From the blog post:
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
[Via: Google Blog]
All I can say is thank goodness. Maybe it’ll at least slightly reduce the 300+ comment spams this site gets a day, although to keep beating a dead horse, the great product Spam Karma has been blocking them all. I’m also glad to see that my blogging engine, WordPress is already on the case.
