Internet Blackout Day

Jan 172012
 
strike-paper

Generally, I avoid joining protests, but occasionally there are ideas so bad that I can’t stay away.  Such is the case with the Protect IP Act (PIPA) which is coming up before the Senate next week.  The goal of protecting intellectual property is certainly a laudable one, but the means to achieve that goal must not come at the expense of the 1st amendment, nor should it fundamentally weaken the technological structure of the Internet.  The Protect-IP bill does all of this with a vague and poorly thought-out bill.

So tomorrow, January 18th, this site will join larger organizations such as Mozilla, WordPress and Wikipedia in a general internet blackout.  I strongly suggest that you contact your Senator and express displeasure at this heavy-handed approach to IP protections.  For some general background on the bill, please check out the video below:

Nik Snapseed

Sep 172011
 
Martian Lake

OK, I have to admit it, for a long time, Hipstamatic really annoyed me.  I think it was because I first learned photography several years before digital photography came into its own and as such, I learned how to do things the hard way.  The effects that Hipstamatic and similar pieces of software produce used to take hours in the darkroom and as such, I felt it was cheating.  I remember working for hours on creating and painting custom emulsions, doing large-scale negative to negative enlargements for special contact print effects and dozens of other labor intensive processes to achieve effects that can now be done in minutes.  Of course, all of that is really silly.  Art must, in the end, be judged by the final product not the process.  I know this may start an unrelated argument, but if I have to know how a piece of art was made in order to appreciate it, then the work is not complete.  In any case, I’ve been using Photoshop for years to fine tune contrast, perform burn-and-dodge processing and the like with no similar feelings of guilt even though even those changes would take several tries and a lot of darkroom time.  As I’ve seen more and more excellent photos coming out of Hipstamatic, I’m starting to get over my old fogey feelings about it.

However, my other complaint about Hipstamatic that still remains is its lack of flexibility.  The limited number of lenses, flashes and film mean that at you end up with a lot of similar looking photographs.  I’ve been looking for a tool that can deliver similar levels of high quality effects but with a lot more flexibility and with Nik Snapseed for IPad, I think I’ve found it.  With this tool you can layer multiple effects out of the hundreds of possible filters.  Additionally, this product provides a wonderfully simple and powerful mechanism to perform burn and dodge effects with its Selective Adjust feature.   Finally, with use of the Apple Camera Connect Kit, I’m able to use high quality photos from my various cameras in the tool.  This tool really brings real photo editing to the IPad.  Additionally, this tool treads well between ease-of-use and professional levels of control.  If you are looking for a photo editing tool for your Ipad, I don’t think you will be disappointed.

Below are a few more sample photos that I quickly created with this tool:

Ships Without a Sea Bar JJ's Alley Office Window

Hosting Recommendation

Jul 012010
 

For many years now, I’ve been using webhost4life as the hosting company for my various websites.  When I signed up they offered really top notch service and a reasonable price (especially for .NET hosting, which I was primarily using at the time).  However, over the last year or so, their service has become increasingly unreliable and even at the best of times, extremely slow.  Earlier this week, this site went down unexpectedly.  I contacted support and they told me it would be 24-48 hours for a response to the problem.

Well, I know I’m not a big client, but that was a bit much, so I started hunting for a new hosting company.  After scouring the web, I decided upon inmotionhosting.  So far the experience has been extremely pleasant.  The setup process was less than an hour and the sales personnel were very helpful.  Transferring the sites was a breeze and the performance has been spectacular.  Additionally, their business class hosting allows you to host multiple domains under a single account which will save me a considerable amount of money.

Of course, it’s only been less than a week, but so far the experience has been extremely encouraging.

TryParse and Nullable Types

Jan 292009
 

I just ran into an irritating little problem with using TryParse when assigning to nullable object.  The following is the code I was using to assign a value from a ASP.NET dropdown list to a nullable Int32 variable:

If Int32.TryParse(ddlExample.SelectedValue, testobj.TestNullableInt32 )Then
     testobj.TestDescription = ddlExample.SelectedItem.Text
End If

 

Apparently, TryParse actually attempts to access the value of the object to which it attempts to assign the parsed value which can cause an InvalidOperationException when it attempts to retrieve the value of the nullable object.  So make sure to assign the parsed value to a regular type before assigning it to a nullable object.  Oh yeah, I know it’s VB.NET code, but I do what the client wants. ;)

New Web Site

Nov 222008
 

Staring at trucking regulation software code had started dissolving my brain as of late.  I’ve got way to much to do and too little time. And yet, I needed a project to take my mind off of it.  As many of you know, I’ve really gotten back into cycling lately (no spandex jokes necessary) and while I love riding around town, there’s not much in information about resources for Oklahoma City cyclists.  So, I’ve started OKCBicyclist.com in hopes of someday fixing that problem.  There’s nothing there yet, but you’ve got to start somewhere.  I figured a few of my local readers might be interested.  Oh yeah, before I forget, I know that  I’m no graphic designer. ;)

A One Blog Guy

Aug 042008
 

For all six readers I’ve got out there, some of you may have noticed that my site has been down for the last few days. My long neglected Tom Waits blog got hit by a massive number of spam bots to the point that my hosting provider was forced to bring my site down for an overabundance of CPU usage. I was forced to bring down the Tom Waits blog in order to get my service restored, which was not too much of a hurt since I haven’t found any time to really start that site back up. In any case, I’m back up and running now . . .

Seeking Suggestions for Reading Web.Config

Mar 242008
 

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

Mar 232008
 

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.

Web Standards in the Spotlight

Mar 172008
 

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 4.0

Feb 262007
 

DSC_0086_edited-1Well, I toiled and toiled to make a completely personal design for the new RadicalWacko.  It turns out that CSS is a pain with so many tricks, hacks and caveats that it makes me truly wonder about the value of table-less layouts.  Take, for example, this “simple” explanation of the so called “Holy Grail Layout“.  It almost seems that tables aren’t such a bad thing after all.  However, who am I to buck popular opinion?

So, instead of trying to redesign the wheel with simple stone tools, this design is based upon a great fluid layout called FallSeason.  In the end I’m glad I started with some expert advice and I’m pretty happy with the results.  So, I hope you like it, because I’m not redesigning it again for awhile. ;)

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