Travels

Oh Fancybox, my Fancybox

admin — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:03:31 +0000

I’ve been getting a lot of face time with Fancybox recently, does some amazing things. Documentation is a bit….distributed. After learning the terminology, apparently my remote form needed “ajax” loading, I was able to open the form, amazing what a little “class” will do for you. (so that the reader isn’t kept in the dark, or more likely, I’ve forgotten how to do it and referring back here to remind myself, you can add a class to the element you are hooking with Fancybox, fancybox.ajax, in order to accomplish this action), apparently you can’t really close it after you’re done. I’ve found a couple of things that say it can, but they wouldn’t work when I tried them. So after submitting my form, again via ajax, I had to reload the page I was on. Not good, but serviceable.

A small tax proposal

admin — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 17:57:28 +0000

Well, it seems that corporations are people is the law of the land, also, one of the few things that seems to be consistent in the rulings of the Supremes’, is that there must be equal enforcement under the law. So if corporations are people, with all the rights and responsibilities thereof, why do they get special tax status, their own tax rates and rules? I know my financial status would change GREATLY if all my expenses had to be taken care of before I paid any taxes on my “profits”. My food, my living/”factory” area, all of that paid before Uncle Sugar gets a single PENNY of my earnings. Just like the “corporate citizens” do.

How would your life change?

SharePoint making my teeth ache

admin — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:33:47 +0000

I made the move from the world of Java, back to the world of Windows not too long ago, after a hiatus of about 12 years. Some things are good, I’m enjoying some aspects of C#, but others are driving me BONKERS! For instance, I work on a public SharePoint site, and we are using a SharePoint Calendar and/or Events list. You can query things from SharePoint lists with an XML based language called CAML, it lets you right SQLesque statements to select and filter data coming back from the list. Now because this is an Events list, there are a couple of extensions over ordinary lists, one of which is recurring events, this makes sense. When you get data back from these recurring events you don’t want to use the ID field of the item, it will be the same for every instance of a recurring event….ok, still kinda makes sense…a little… When you make your query, there are a couple of fields that you need to set in order for it to work right with recurring events, one is SPQuery.ExpandRecurrence must be set to true, this seems logical after all the other assumptions we’ve allowed, and you just set the date on the calendar list itself, ok, still good. So I set the query property of the SPQuery to properly select all the data I want to show, and everything is working just hunky dory. Well, everything save one thing. For all those recurring events, of which I have a TON, RecurrenceID is equal to ID, the whole recurrence magic just isn’t happening. So I look through everything, all the tutorials, StackOverflow, what have you, and nothing. The pages on MSDN are little more than what I would expect to see in an empty Javadoc, no help there. So I step back and try to figure out what might be inferred in all the articles I’ve found….well, they all have a line in their CAML query

No one really says what exactly this is supposed to do, but looking at it, knowing that this in basically in your queries “where” clause, it looks like its filtering the data by the current date, or some date or other.

Well, if it really did that I wouldn’t be having this rant. What this line does is make it so that the RecurrenceID field actually gets assigned the correct value if you’ve done everything else right. I didn’t really get a clue about this from any of the articles I read, and especially not from anything on MSDN, the only clue was from sitting quietly and wondering what was different…and AFTER finding out, wondering quite loudly WHO THE HELL THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!!???

I seem to be doing that a lot lately concerning SharePoint, and the new integrated inventory view on EveOnline…

Heavy sigh.

New game idea!

admin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:12:07 +0000

Angry voters! Angry birds with Congress people in place of the pigs, of course there may be problems telling the difference.

A possible avenue for campaign reform?

admin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 02:23:00 +0000

Ok, thanks to the Supremes in the US, money is a protected form of political speech, and corporations are apparently the only REAL first class citizens left in the country. So, we can’t restrict the amount of money a corporation donates to a campaign because we’d be restricting their guaranteed right. Fine. It occurred to me the other day that perhaps we’re going about this the wrong way. Maybe this is more a case for the “Activist Investors” to take a hand. So, publicly traded companies must justify their spending to shareholders, they’ve got to show how spending that money will help the company make or increase their profit. So, the next time I get a prospectus from a company, I want to see how much they donated, to whom, and how much money did I as a shareholder get by buying those politicians.

Google defense fund?

admin — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 20:02:28 +0000

Not that I think that Google is going to be reduced to a pauper by the Oracle suit, but personally, I would like Google to counter sue, and sue Oracle totally out of existence.

Net neutrality – market forces

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:42:41 +0000

I would like to believe in the efficiency of market forces, but at least in the wireless markets today, where the market consists of a couple of types of shit, (verizon and att), contrasted with a couple of pieces of crap, (sprint and tmobile), most of the “force” in the market is expended in shoving it down our throats!

sigh.

Windows 7 Battery problems – data point

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:15:52 +0000

I think I discovered a data point on the on going battle as to whether windows 7 is eating batteries on laptops or not. I’ve had my laptop since July, one of those “free upgrade to Windows 7″ deals, (but lets not get into that, its a rant for another day), so I did the upgrade over this last weekend. Now for a long time now, I’ve used one of those cooling pads, with the USB powered fans under this, as well as my last 2 laptops, and found that they can help performance quite a bit. Yesterday when I shut down my laptop I noticed that the fans were still running, even after the laptop had been shut down, but ONLY when the power was unplugged, that’s right, with power the fans stop, unplug it and they start running again. I’ve been using this pad with this laptop since I got it, and I never noticed this under Vista, even though my shutdown procedure is exactly the same every day, shut down the laptop, close the lid, unplug the laptop, pack it up and go home.

Anyone else seeing this sort of thing? Its an HP dv7, and I can’t find a feature anywhere for it saying, “Will run power even when shut off”.

Update, contacted HP and got a bios upgrade that took care of this issue.

Droidites

admin — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:44:48 +0000

I’ve had my droid for a week or so now, overall I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I’ve used the turn by turn directions twice for real now, it worked pretty well. The synthesized voice can be a little rough, and if you’re used to Neverlost, or the one built into my Prius, which give a little “bing” before giving you the next advice, it might even be a little startling. The second use was a bit less satisfying though. Not a problem with the phone itself, more one with Verizon. I was traveling through Utah to Moab. Since I started out in Salt Lake there was no trouble in the beginning, and everything was fine until we stopped for lunch in Price. There doesn’t appear to be a “suspend” mode for the directions, only an exit. So, I exited, had lunch and got back in the car. I tried to pick the map up where I left off, but I guess when I exited it deleted whatever it had stored, and as it started to download it let me know that there was no 3g coverage, so it spent the rest of the trip downloading the directions again. Ah well, live and learn. The funniest part about it, Price is considered a largish town in Utah terms, and it wasn’t important enough to have good coverage from Verizon. A couple of days later I’m hiking in Arches National Park, out to Delicate Arch. So, I’m there taking pictures with my Droid, and I notice, I’ve got 4 bars of 3g coverage!! So, in a “city” I can’t get coverage, but there in the “wilderness”, 4 bars? Do they have a map for that??

How much longer must we all suffer?

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:50:50 +0000

I was looking at Steve Souder’s blog this morning on high performance web sites, he has an entry talking about how in IE6 when its behind a proxy, reverts to HTTP 1.0, and drops the Accept-Encoding header that tells a server that the browser will be able to handle compressed content. The article includes a link to a site that will test and see what your browser is sending, and sure enough, when I tried Firefox 3.5, it got it right, IE6, as noted, did not. According to the article, this can add enough overhead to slow down even the mighty Google by 25%, that’s right, the leanest, sparsest pages out there take an average of 2 seconds in IE6 through a proxy, vs 1.6 seconds in any other browser. So basically, anything WE might do, probably doesn’t stand a chance. But, being ADD ascendant today, I started noticing other tests on the site. Ah, an Acid3 test. This should be good. Well, FF3.5 gets a 93%, IE6 gets 12%, hm, IE8 should do pretty good….no, wait, 20%, wow, that’s disappointing! And it apparently is giving the same results as IE6 going through the proxy for compression, meaning that it looks to your average server like it doesn’t support it. How much longer are we going to be forced to support these tools that make us right code and UIs that are not standards compliant, and much harder to make work in a way that is accessible, as in Section 508 accessibility? As in, we might get SUED if we don’t support it!! Man, hate to admit it, but there are days when I miss green/amber screens. Just don’t tell me I have to write COBOL again!