Embedded Flash z-Index

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

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

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...

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.....

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...

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....

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.