210 Computing

Google Chrome Notifications

Chris Burkhardt — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:04:30 GMT

Today on the Chromium blog they announced a bunch of new features for google chrome

The one that really caught my eye was the new notifications API. With this API Chrome can set OS notifications to appear in your OS notification area

For this to work you need the newest version of Google Chrome.

I whipped up a quick sample that shows Google Chrome Notifications in action. Works only with Google Chrome and Windows. View source to see the example code.

System.Net.WebPermission

Chris Burkhardt — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:28:36 GMT

After getting some production errors I mad a small app to try and exaust the ports on my test box.

I was developing a pretty simple today that looped 1000 times getting the page from google, msn, and yahoo.

Everything was working, then I got the infamous "Works on my dev box but not the server."

When trying to open an httpRequest. I got a .NET exception System.Net.WebPermission.

The exact code was:

System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Net.WebPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=failed

Turns out I opened a network share from the test machine to my dev machine. I was trying to run the app right from the share.

Applications run from a share run in a different security domain, and it did not have permission to open the connection.

I moved the app to the local machine and everything worked out fine.

Excel 2007 Replace Values

Chris Burkhardt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:48:20 GMT

I was working on my fantasy football rankings when I ran into a quirk with excel.

I was trying to do a find and replace on a comma, and it would not let me.

1. I could see the comma was there.
2. I wanted to find it, and replace it with a blank.
3. Excel would not let me search the values, only the formulas.

When I did search the formulas for "," I got the message "Microsoft Office Excel cannot find the data you're searching for"

Now I was getting frustrated. I could see the comma, but I could not remove it. It turns out the comma really wasn't there.

1. In the formula bar you can see there is no comma.
2. Yet the comma is showing up in the cell value. It must be formatting.
3. Right click the column.
4. Format Cells.

Choose "Number" and set the decimal places to 0, and the comma is removed.

Unacceptable Microsoft: search.live.com is down!

Chris Burkhardt — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:32:30 GMT

This is unacceptable: search.live.com is down. I am getting a "We're sorry, this service is currently unavailable."

Here are screens, one if firefox and one in IE7 for added irony:

Look, I'm a MS fanboy. I program with their technology and run their OS. But that also means I depend on them not to suck.

When Google is kicking your ass in search, and you unveil a new search site that sucks, it helps if it doesn't go down. Especially if you are the biggest software company in the world.

Javascript document object is slow in IE

Chris Burkhardt — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:09:56 GMT

Accessing properties on the document object is slow in Internet Explorer. I used to use the document object as a place to store globals, ie

function onclick()
{

document.clicks +=1;

}

But this is slow in IE. Instead use:

var clicks;

function onclick()
{

clicks += 1;

}

Here is a full page that demonstrates this idea. I use onmousemove to simplify doing an action over and over, and you can also FEEL how slow it is by moving your mouse around the page.

And the code:

<!DOCTYPE
html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD
XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head> <title>Document Object Test</title>
<script type="text/javascript"> var totalObj = new Object(); var flag = false; function loaded()
{ document.onmousemove = useDocument;
} function useDocument()
{ document.total += 5; } function useGlobal()
{ totalObj.total += 5; } function flip()
{ if (flag)
{ document.onmousemove = useDocument;
document.getElementById('styleType').innerHTML = '&nbsp;document
object'; } else {
document.onmousemove = useGlobal;
document.getElementById('styleType').innerHTML = '&nbsp;global object';
} flag = !flag;
} </script> </head> <body onload="loaded();">
<a href="#" onclick="flip();
return false;">Click to flip styles</a><span id="styleType">
document</span> </body> </html>

Leaving Firefox

Chris Burkhardt — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:30:31 GMT

Today I downloaded IE7 and set it to my default browser, leaving Firefox after about 5 years of use. Firefox is still a good browser, but with IE implementing tabbed browsing I don't have to put up with the annoyances of Firefox to get tabs. Here are the 10 main reasons I am switching.

1. Tools-->Options-->Show Passwords-->Show Passwords WTF? I should have stopped using firefox when someone showed me this for the first time.

2. The real last straw was Firefox's support for EV(Extended Verification) certificates. I can't find any solid information if they will be supported in FF3, or even when FF3 is scheduled to come out. I found this post, but this kind of attitude of denouncing a decision after it has been made rather than trying to help the process really bothers me.

3. Auto update. I don't know why firefox updates in the background and then gives me a crap dialog box to "install now or later" nagging me every time I start it. Did they get bought out by Adobe?

4. Firefox still has memory problems. If I surf for 2-3 hours, opening a lot of tabs, and then trim down to 2-3 base tabs Firefox will still be around 200meg.

5. Buggy CSS. As much as firefox fans crow about how good their CSS is, there are still way to many bugs/inconsistencies.

6. Too many versions. There are too many versions and no clear road map. We don't really need 2.0.3, and all the versions give fan boys a crutch, "Well, have you updated to 2.0.3a? That will fix your problem"

7. Firefox crashes too much. I'm on my computer all day on XP and Server 2003 and programs don't really crash anymore. Sometimes I kill them, but Firefox crashes at least once a month.

8. Too much blame on extensions. Any problem with FF is shoved off to "its probably an extension". Extensions should not be allowed to crash the main program.

9. If I open a new tab and type the url too fast, it does not work. This, surprisingly, is my second biggest reason for leaving Firefox. I used to be able to Ctrl-T, and start typing. Now when I try the cursor is in the address bar blinking, but typing does nothing. I have to lose focus of the address bar and then put it back in.

10. If I have too many tabs open, copy/past breaks. That is, I cannot copy from Firefox to another app. I can copy from notepad to another app, but not Firefox. I cannot reproduce this on purpose, so I don't know for sure it is FF, but I suspect.

Firefox margin-top CSS bug

Chris Burkhardt — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:28:26 GMT

If you have floated boxes followed by a cleared box, firefox will not honor margin-top on that box.

Here is a page demostrating the firefox bug (pops)

I think Firefox is assuming that the extended margins of float left and right apply to cleared boxes, while the specs do not say or imply that. Here is the relevent section from the spec for the clear property:

left

The top margin of the generated box is increased enough that the top border edge is below the bottom outer edge of any left-floating boxes that resulted from elements earlier in the source document.

right

The top margin of the generated box is increased enough that the top border edge is below the bottom outer edge of any right-floating boxes that resulted from elements earlier in the source document.

both

The generated box is moved below all floating boxes of earlier elements in the source document..

none

No constraint on the box's position with respect to floats.

Here is a baseline html/css sample:

<!DOCTYPE
html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD
XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >

<head>

<title>Firefox css bug</title>

</head>

<body>

<div id="container">

<div style="background-color:
Orange; width: 100px; height: 35px; float: left">

</div>

<div style="background-color:
green; width: 100px; height: 35px; float: left">

</div>

<div style="background-color:
black; width: 100px; height: 35px; clear: both; margin-top: 30px;">

</div>

</div>

</body>

</html>

Connection with the server was reset with iis 5 and .NET

Chris Burkhardt — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:48:16 GMT

I just spent about 4 hours trying to debug this problem.

Here is the setup, a user with a slow connection was not able to view a .wmv on a site. The .wmv was 250mb and he was timing out at 11:34. Different browser, different computer, all that jazz. Our site runs on iis 5 with .NET 2.0 and the file is "hotlinked". That is, we are not using any kind of Response.Write to write to the stream, just linking to it and letting the client stream or download it.

I got a hold of dialup computer and account, and I was able to reproduce the problem, getting the server to send a RST about 15 minutes after starting to download the file. This looked like the .NET Connection Timout setting, which is set to 900 seconds, or 15 minutes, as a default in iis 5.

However, when I made a new site to test this theory, setting the timeout to 20 seconds did not affect it at all. In fact, in the test site, I was not even able to reproduce the error. Besides, why could the .NET Connection Timeout have anything to do with iis sending the file over the wire?

After a ton of debugging, I found the culprit, wildcard application mapping.

The wildcard application mapping was telling .NET to handle ALL files. Because .NET was handling the file, the 900 second timeout was coming into play. This was a requirement for another part of the site to function, so we could not turn it off. What we ended up doing was making the "media" folder, where the wmv lived, its own application, and removing the mapping from there.

This solution was a lot better than upping the timeout because we didn't not want abandoned connections sitting around for ever.

ScribeFire step by step

Chris Burkhardt — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:02:57 GMT

Yesterday I posted about how I got ScribeFire to work with dasBlog. Today I will go into a little more detail, complete with pictures.

To start, under the "Blog" section, choose Add.

Step 1 -- Choose "Manually Configure"

Step 2 -- Choose "Custome Blog"

Step 3 -- Choose "MetaWeblog API" and enter the url of your blog + "blogger.aspx"

Step 4 is login, you don't need an image for that, just enter your credentials.

Finally, you should see your blog added to ScribeFire:

Next, remove the auto-inserted ad "Powered by ScribFire". Click the "<<" in the upper left like so:

This will open the options. Choose settings and uncheck"Automatically insert 'Powered by ScribFire'", like this:

I really enjoy this firefox add-on. I added and edited this post from within firefox, and it seems a little snappier that the default editor in dasBlog.

Microsoft Live Search updated

Chris Burkhardt — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:55:29 GMT

According to the Live Search blog the live search I was complaining about before should be updated. Let's see if its fixed.

I guess the answer is, it depends...

Here is a shot on a search I just did for "your doing it wrong"

Look at the results, the #1 result is from 2003 and doesn't even include my search terms! The 5th result, and the 3rd site returned, is from 2005, and it is a forum post from some second rate hit counter. The post is 2 messages long! Here is what you see if you follow the webstat link:

That is what happens if I go to live.com and search.

However, it looks like I can access the new search if you append &FORM=PRESS. So if you use this query you can see the new and improved results. And they are indeed new and improved. The results are more topical, and they include my search terms. However, you have to either follow a link from a press release with the &FORM=PRESS or you have to know enough to put it on. Anyone who just types live.com, or live.search.com gets the old stuff. I don't know why, but it is typical Microsoft in the past 5 years. Shout about some new, cool thing and then it doesn't work or it is inaccessible.

By the way, here is a picture of the kind of thing I was searching for. I think its funny, and I guess so do the people at this site

Getting scribefire working with dasblog

Chris Burkhardt — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:07:10 GMT

I recently switched this blog to dasBlog and I had a nice little firefox addon called ScibeFire that I could not get to work with it. Thanks to Kelly Keeton for the tip that made the connection in my head.

My confusion was the end point on dasBlog is called Blogger.aspx, but the type (API) is MetaBlogAPI, so when setting up the blog in ScibeFire you have to choose Manually Configure-->Custom Blog-->MetaBlog API then put in <%yourBlogPath%>/blogger.aspx.

Then it works great. In fact, this is my first post from ScribeFire.

Edit: The only problem is ScribeFire appends an ad to your post. To disable the add/trackback, click the ">>" in the upper left, choose "Settings" and uncheck "Automatically insert' Powered by ScibeFire'"