GroundWorks Design

Embedded Flash z-Index

2009-09-10T22:41:00.001-07:00

Recently I was working on a web site that had embedded Picasa slide shows and YouTube videos. (No, I didn’t want to build my own out of AJAX and web services.)

I found that my embedded flash objects were over lapping my html elements. This was problematic in that I had my navigation disappear whenever the flash object was “scrolled” over it.

The fix was to add the attribute “wmode” with a value of “opaque” (wmode=”opaque”) to the embed tag. Voila, the overlapping z-index problem was solved.

In case you’re wondering messing with the CSS z-index value of the containing layers didn’t change anything.

Getting Virtual Server to Work on Windows Server 2008 running IIS7

2009-08-19T15:02:00.001-07:00

I was recently tasked to make my wife’s Palm Desktop software to work. It had been lying dormant, because we upgraded her machine. Her new operating system is Windows Vista 64-Bit, which is not compatible with the Palm/Access Hot Sync Manager.

So I decided to make a virtual machine (VM) that lives on my server. I installed Virtual Server 2005 sp1 r2. When I fired up the management console I found that the IIS 7 server didn’t know how to process VSWebAccess.exe.

I found this post that details how to set up the IIS CGI & and Authentication settings to run the interface correctly:

Getting Virtual Server '05 R2 Working on IIS7 in Longhorn Server : A Former Microsoft IIS PM : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

I’m mostly making note so I don’t have to remember where I found this, but this is a very good tutorial. The only vague part is adding the CGI & Windows Authentication component. If you have any questions or need any help with Virtual Server, leave me a comment.

Religious Programming

2008-12-17T06:41:00.001-08:00

I realized a long time ago that people, developers in particular, are fanatic about the way they practice their professions. Programmers especially tend to be religous or dogmatic about the particular tenets of their programming language or development methodologies.

This article kind of brings into focus, plus it's funny if you're a nerd.

Apples & Windows...

2008-09-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

I found this thread about a new product that allows one to boot OS-X on Non-Apple Hardware.

It takes a minute to warm up through the read, but from what I gather, it's a plug an play way to install even the latest Leopard retail release, and run on a Gigabyte (supported) or Asus (not supported) mother board.

This may boost Apples sales of OS-X. Too bad they'll never condone it.

Browswer Wars.....

2008-09-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've lately installed 2 "new" browswers.

Google Chrome & Microsoft IE 8 Beta 2.

I've been using Chrome for the last week as my primary browswer and I've enjoyed it a fair amount.

I'll gather more info/features and put a more extensive post soon.

IE 8 Beta 2 is brand new on my machine, and will take some time to assess. I'll get that out as soon as I can say I know it.

For now, you can try installing them, too and let me know what you think.

Marketing makes a difference...

2008-07-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

I don't like being the M$ cheerleader. But I've been using M$ stuff like Office, Windows, SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc., for years.

For the most part I've been pretty happy with their stuff. Sometimes there are bugs, sometimes it's missing something that I'd really like to have. If it's bad I go looking for an alternative. Usually M$ catches up with the curve.

I found this site today, and wanted to say that sometimes a product is as good as its marketing.

Little known trick....

2008-06-20T16:04:00.001-07:00

I'm publishing this entry to help some poor developer someday who gets a "System.OutOfMemory" error in .Net.

I kept getting mine when I tried to fill a data table with a large set of records. Around 1.9 million rows to be precise.

I looked around at a lot of articles and threads, but this one helped me the most:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=878282&SiteID=1

Although it's a little technical the thing that helped me the most was setting the MinimumCapacity on the data table that was receiving the data from the SQL Server.

You can do this by a simple select of the count of the table if you know it or at least make an educated guess. Because DataTable memory space is allocated contiguously, errors occur when you exceed it's initial size by a lot.

Apples or Microsofts?

2008-03-27T15:25:00.001-07:00

I generally don't like to get into arguments on which is better, Apple or Microsoft.

In fact finding religion in your OS or your hardware seems a little weird to me.

But, lately the Apple ads have been driving me up a wall. Not because they take swipes at MS, but because they over-simplify the way computers work, and then expect you to believe everything they market.

That seems wrong to me. People are smart. Why not market to people as if they were smart. Especially where computers are concerned.

What brought this on was an article that goes through the findings of how quickly Apple and MS patch security flaws.

It's quite interesting, and shows that just because Apple markets better, it doesn't fix it's bugs faster than the boring Microsoft alternative.

Microsoft vs. Apple: Who patches 0-days faster?

Never leave your computer unattended.

2008-02-22T07:15:00.001-08:00

Usually I am quite skeptical about the science fiction value of science reality. Teleportation, psycho kinesis, magic algorithms that can predict the weather and hack a government firewall are generally left to the imagination of Hollywood.

However, this particular computer security breach is all of amazing, impressive, and scary rolled into one:

Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

You'll never take your eyes off of your computer again.

iTunes shortcut bug...

2008-02-20T08:49:00.001-08:00

I've been having a problem with my iTunes for some time.

Every time I used the short cut it installed to start up the program, the configuration dialog would pop up.

Every time. It was painful.

Then I came across this thread: http://forums.ilounge.com/archive/index.php/t-192809.html

The short of it is that you have to create a new shortcut and point it directly to the iTunes in your program files directory.

It's a little surprising that it worked.

Entry with a slide show style of set of pictures

2008-02-17T14:54:00.001-08:00

In my last blogging post, I showed you how to add a video to your blogger blog.

In this post, I want to show you how to put a slide show up.

The reasons for choosing a slide show vary. The biggest, in my opinion, is to conserve real estate in the blog. It also minimizes the amount of scrolling necessary to read the blog.

I mentioned in my earlier blogging posts, I mentioned that there are several outside utilities used for blogging. I also mentioned that I would only show the tools within Blogger. This post will be an exception to that. This is because without an external "tool" if you will, you can not earmark a set of pictures as a slide show.

There are many photo services that allow you to embed into your blogs and web pages slide shows. The one I will demonstrate this time is Picasa Web.

Picasa Web is another one of Google's subsidiaries. It is the online album storage of the desktop photo management tool Picasa.

I will describe how to use only the web application, because this does not require the installation of the desktop application.

If enough people request it, I will do a more full review of the Picasa desktop application, with pros and cons associated.

That being said, let's get to it.

Of course in order to use Picasa Web, you'll have to create an account. Since you had to create an account for Blogger, this should be an easy thing for you, and I'll just assume you can get to that point with out more input from me.

Once you've got your account, you should be in the Albums page that looks something like this:

You'll want to click on the new album button ( ) just above the place where your albums will be listed when you've got some.

This dialogue will appear:

Now, you'll notice that you can store some interesting information with your album. You can choose to fill out as little or as much as you'd like.

I'll only point out 2 particular fields of interest. The title, at the top, and "Public" or "Unlisted" down at the bottom.

The title is important, because it will appear with your slide show. So you'll want to pick something easily recognized and understood.

The choice between Public & Unlisted is also something you'll want to make note. If you choose not to have your album be public, you'll still be able to display your pictures in a slide show on other sites. Setting an album to a public allows it to be searched and viewed via different search engines and people who happen by your albums.

You can also choose to upload photos into an additional folder, if you've already got one, but be aware that any existing photos in that album will be part of the slide show.

Once you create the album you'll come to this screen:

From there you'll click on the "Upload Photos" link on the left and you'll see this dialogue:

It will allow you to upload 5 photos at a time. Which is a decent number of pictures at a time depending on the size of your pictures. As I mentioned in an earlier post, you'll wan to make sure the size of the pictures is web appropriate. Remember this is a considerably lower resolution than print, so a given picture should stay in the 250kb range for the even the largest of pictures.

Once you've uploaded your photos, back at the photo album page, you'll see new link on the left side, "Embed Slideshow"

Once you click on Embed Slideshow, you'll see this dialogue:

Here it will help you generate the HTML code needed to embed a Picasa slide show in any web page that you have hosted. Where your blog is concerned, you'll begin entering the post and switch to HTML view. Then you'll paste the generated code where you want it to appear in your blog. For example:

<h1>The Greatest Slideshow Ever</h1>

Shades of Me:<br/>

Would produce this when pasted properly into a web page or blog entry:

The Greatest Slideshow Ever

Shades of Me:

So, that concludes my blog posting basics series. You should be able to publish just about any kind of blog you'd like. If you have any questions or tool review/explanation requests, feel free to comment and I'll do my best to accommodate.

Entry with an embedded video

2008-02-03T13:43:00.001-08:00

So far I've written about a basic post, and a post about putting newspaper layout style images into a post.

This blog tutorial entry will be centered around posting a video entry.

The instructions for this kind of post shouldn't be too much different than the other two.

First, login to Blogger and select "New Post" from beneath the blog you want to make an entry for.

Second, Enter your title and any text that you want to go before the video appears in your entry.

Third, from the tool bar click on the insert video button ( ) .

Then this dialogue will appear:

As you can see it's pretty straight forward.

Choose the file from your computer that you want to upload. It lists the type of video files that it will accept.

As a side note about different video formats, there are a lot of competing formats. It's sort a larger topic and if people want I can go into more detail about it. But suffice it to say, the smaller the video file the better. If you have a short video clip around 1 minute, you can probably compress it to under a megabyte. If you need something of higher quality in either resolution or frame rate, it might better be saved as a file file that a person can download and look at in a different viewer, because a blog offers limited real estate to begin with.

Make sure to give your video a catchy title, because video_5043.mpg isn't nearly as memorable as "The Last Man Standing".

Check the "I agree..." check box once you've read the "Upload Terms and Conditions". ;-)

Then click "Upload Video".

You will see this place holder while your video is uploading.

This is nice, because you can continue to edit your post while you wait for the video to process.

However, you won't be able to save your post until your video is done process. This is also a good reason not to put too large a video file as it will be a little painful to wait for something really big.

Finally, you can click on the "Publish Post" link and your video will be "out there".

As a special treat. What would a blog about posting a video entry be with out posting a video. Enjoy!

My next post will be post be about putting a slide show entry in place.

Entry with a single picture or newspaper style layout

2008-02-02T20:18:00.001-08:00

Building on my prior post I'll walk you through adding a blog with at least a single picture or many pictures in a newspaper style layout.

In my last post I showed you how to make a basic blog entry.

The steps are essentially the same.

Log into Blogger
Select "New Post" beneath the title of the blog that you want to post to
Enter the title and post text that you would like to include

Now you can add one or more pictures to make your blog post more interesting.

I the tool bar just above the body of the post, you'll see an image icon 3 buttons from the right:

A pop-up dialogue will appear that gives you some options on how your image will be inserted:

First, you'll notice that you can select an image from either you local machine or one that's already out on the web.

If you choose one from your machine, the image will be put on one of BlogSpot's servers so that it can always display your picture whenever your post is looked at.

If you choose to link to an image from the web, it is possible that the image won't be available if the originating server is down or removes that picture.

If you have rights to the picture, then I would recommend putting the picture on BlogSpot's server so that you can be sure your post displays correctly.

Second, you can choose the way your image lays out. Either Left, Center, Right, or None. You can also determine relative size of the image Small, Medium or Large.

You can upload as many images as you want, however, you'll want to be careful as to the amount of space you have available to store pictures.

At the bottom next to the "Upload Image" button, you'll see some text of how much space you're currently using as well as your max space allotted. So you'll not want to upload large high resolution maps of the cosmos or an image of every grain of sand on a particular beach you like.

Also, most digital cameras now-a-days take images in a much higher resolution than you would want to display on a web page. I recommend resizing your images on your local machine to sizes below 600x400 pixels. This size is plenty large enough for blog entries. You can always link to a larger version of the image stored somewhere else. This is a more advanced thing to do, so I may cover it a later date, if I have enough people wanting it.

You'll also see a checkbox for "Use this layout every time?". If you select this, the settings you pick this time will be your default options. If you post regularly and have a size or layout position that you like, this will save some time. Otherwise, feel free to mix it up a little.

If you choose to do more than one image at a time for upload, the layout choices will apply to all of the images. For example, if you chose "Center" and medium for 3 pictures that you want to upload, you'll get 3 medium sized pictures centered in a row.

For this reason you may want to upload an image, add text, and upload another image, so on and so forth. You may also want to vary the positioning of the image for variety, but that's mostly a matter of taste.

Third, click the "Upload Image" button.

The only really good way to see how your post will look with you image is to push it up (unless you use a 3rd party tool like Windows Live Writer) and see how it flows with the words.

Back at the entry edit page you can click on the "Preview" link in the tool bar and see what it will really look like in the browser you're using.

Keep in mind that different browsers, though theoretically standards compliant, will render things a little bit differently. So, the simpler you can keep you layout, the more likely your post will look good in more browsers.

Also, the way the image is laid out and sized is encoded into the html or web layout code. If you don't like the way the image appears in your blog, you can do one of 2 things:

You can delete the image and try uploading it again with different layout and size settings
You can click on the "Edit Html" link in the tab next to "Compose"

Depending on your comfort level with looking at code, the fast way to change things is using option #2. You'll want to be somewhat careful about what you change, as it make have some interesting effects your blog display.

It is certainly not a bad idea to delete the image and try again, if you want to ensure that the blog displays correctly.

That's the way you add an image to liven up your post. Next post I show you how to add a video.

A quick blogging how to...

2008-01-29T15:46:00.001-08:00

This post will cover the basic technique to enter a post on a BlogSpot/Blogger web log entry that has no images or videos. In later posts I'll cover an entry with a single picture or newspaper style layout, an entry with a slide show style of set of pictures and an entry with an embedded video.

These instructions are based on using the Blogger web site to post entries. There are a few tools that allow you to build posts offline.

1. Basic entry with no pictures or videos

The program I used to build this post is Windows Live Writer. I've also used Word 2007, and you can post pictures and video via Picasa. These tools make posting considerably easier, but they require you to install extra software. If I get enough requests, I'll make a post(s) about using these tools.

So, first you'll need to go to the Blogger web site. It will ask you to log in with your credentials. One of the options you have is to stay logged in. I personally would choose this. This way, whenever you want to get to the blog or post, you won't have to log in again. Unless you clear your cookies or don't visit either the authoring site or the blog itself often enough.

You should see a list of blogs that you participate as an author. From beneath the blog you would like to post to you click on"New Post".

The next screen you come to looks like the screen shot above.

You'll see a place for the title of the post, and the body of the post. Here you can format in a similar way that you would use a word processor. There is also a "Preview" link that shows you what the final output will look like in the browser.

Once you've entered your post title and text, you can either click "Publish Post" or "Save Now". Publish post will immediately post to the blog, and the world will see what you've got to say. If you click on Save Now, your post will be saved as a draft. You can come back to your post later and edit it until you're ready to publish the final version.

It is also good to note that even after you publish your post, you can come back and edit a post later on, if you find that you missed something and need to fix it.

My next post will cover posting an entry with a either a single picture or newspaper style picture layout.

Developers are designers, too!

2007-12-21T08:53:00.001-08:00

Microsoft lately has been advertising the divorce of the UI from the underlying development and code.

I think this a very erroneous and poor way to market their latest suites of technology; namely, XAML (presentation markup) & Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). In the presentations/training that I've attended, it was reiterated over and over that developers don't know how make UI's or lay things out that a user would want to see.

I believe UI's haven't been as imaginative or laid out well because the development tools for UI's haven't been that flexible or good.

By moving the "good" UI tools out of the Dev tools, developers will now have load up yet another environment to do their jobs, or the default way of laying things out will continue. Companies won't find it worth their while to hire a graphic designer for every tool or project. In fact, very few of the projects will ever go through a professional designer's hands.

I think it's nice that Microsoft wants to give a tool to the designer that they can do fantastic things with. But they should include at least a useable set of design manipulation tools to the developers who understand the process and logic of the program/application. They should actually allow the developers to prove they have no idea how to lay things out before they assume developers aren't capable of doing it.

LINQ to SQL Row Add/Remove

2007-12-02T05:51:00.001-08:00

I was trying to add and remove records to my database tables. I couldn't find anything that designated that these kinds of changes be made to the database.

Then I found this blog that cataloged the changes in methods from Beta 2 to the RTM version:

http://chakkaradeep.wordpress.com/2007/11/22/linq-to-sql-beta-2-to-rtm-changes/

I should have been able to figure it out quickly myself, but sometimes it's the obvious things that you need a sign for.

LINQ Tips

2007-11-30T13:51:00.001-08:00

Composite Key

I was looking for the syntax for a composite key join. I could only find it for 3 tables that were chained to gether by mutiple columns. Here's the join syntax for two tables that have 2 columns in column:

var vResult =

from t1 in table1

join t2 in table2 on
new {t1.Key1, t1.Key2} equals

new{t2.Key1, t2.Key2}

select
new {t1.Column3, t2.Column4};

Interesting Syntax

I also found the syntax for a "shaped" return of data. Here's some pseudo:

var vResult =

from t1 in table1

join t2 in table2 join t1.Key1 equals t2.Key1 into Shape

select {t1.Key1, Shape};

I hope these help someone, as I was looking around for a little bit to find these simple nuggets of truth.

.Net Framework v1.1 sp1 Install Error

2007-11-29T11:38:00.001-08:00

I was trying to install the .Net Framework 1.1 service pack 1 (sp1) and kept getting an error (code 80070002). Unfortunately the fix described by the code doesn't work.

I went looking around on the net and found this post from someone who was trying to get the service pack to play a particular game.

Here's the link I came across that has a pretty well document procedure for installing the service pack:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?p=733941

WCF IEnumerable Problem

2007-11-27T05:05:00.001-08:00

I was working on a WCF service/client application when I decided to make a change to one of my service contract operations.

I changed a property type in one of my data contract data members from List<CustomObject> to IEnumerable<CustomObject> Of course I was making several changes at the time, and didn't realize until a fair amount of time later that this would not serialize correctly.

I have a theory that adding "[ServiceKnownType(typeof(CustomObject))]" right after the ServiceContract declaration will allow the service/client to serialize and deserialize correctly, but I'll have to wait test it out when I have time.

If anyone gets a chance to test it out before I can, please, comment below and let me know how it worked for you.

An Interesting Article…

2007-11-21T14:35:00.001-08:00

I hope not to need this advice any time soon, but I came across a good link to this article:

"Bloggers beware: You're liable to commit libel" by Steve Tobak

It describes your rights as a "publisher" and what kind of burden of proof would have to be presented if you publish defamatory statements.

It's a nice simplified synopsis of the laws surrounding libel suits.