Mark's Tech Notes

Useful Visual Studio 2010 Extensions

mbentley — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:26:55 +0000

Scott Dorman posted a handy list of his Favorite Visual Studio 2010 Extensions. It is definitely worth checking out and is a good place to start after installing VS 2010. So far, I have downloaded several of them.

Auto Indent Visual Studio 2010 Code With Ctrl-K-F

mbentley — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:16:11 +0000

In Visual Studio 2010, hitting Ctrl-K, Ctrl-F will auto indent a highlighted section. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-F Ctrl-F will do the whole file.

Intel says their server diagnostics have limited support for servers with web pages

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:04:21 +0000

What the heck is he talking about you ask? I was recently told by Intel Server support, that they do not support (or intend to support) using the Intel server diagnostics (Intel® Active System Console) on servers that provide a website using forms authentication (a really common type of login authentication). I was told that [...]

How to get Session Parameters in an ASP.NET ASMX service.

admin — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:38:26 +0000

Session parameters get used a lot in ASP.NET pages and they work pretty well, but when you try to use them in an ASMX web service, you get errors. So, how do you get the session parameters? It turns out that it is really simple. Just add “EnableSession = true” to your WebMethod and it [...]

Add media files from your computer Fails in WordPress 2.9.2

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:15:36 +0000

I am having an interesting issue with my WordPress 2.9.2 blogs. On one of our computers, when I go to upload a file to it from my computer, I select the file and it says it is uploaded and says “Crunching…”. Then I just get a blank rectangle with no image. I tried “the Browser [...]

Tagfoot fines $5, but does not explain why…

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:20:53 +0000

I am always a little suspicious when people start trying to punish me without explaining why. I am even more suspicious when that punishment involves a fine. So, when I recently tried to use Tagfoot and got a message that my account was restricted and pointed to a help page that said “You have broken [...]

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly ‘VJSharpCodeProvider

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:35:06 +0000

I have been working on an ASP.NET website for quite a while and recently went to flip it onto a different server for testing. Like many before me, I was pretty baffled when I got a configuration error claiming that I needed the VJSharpCodeProvider. I don’t even use Visual J Sharp. Further research came up [...]

Garmin Expects Almost a One Year Delay Adding New Roads

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:45:15 +0000

Ever since using a relative’s GPS navigation system while visiting, I have been looking at getting a new Garmin navegation system. We bought one for my Mother-In-Law for Christmas since she is pretty bad with directions. It works great except for one HUGE flaw. It is missing a huge divided provincial highway nearby (Stoney Trail [...]

Google Maps Fail to Display on IE6

mbentley — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:44:45 +0000

I have a website that I work with that uses Google Maps to display some markers on a map for the user. It works great in the office. We tried Firefox, IE6, IE7, IE8… All good. Now I have a couple of users who all say that the maps do not display when they try [...]

Asus P4c800 Motherboard starts with “system fail cpu test”

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:55:54 +0000

The other day, I went to start my old Asus P4C800 based motherboard and got the dreaded “System fail CPU test.” After a lot of swearing and searching, I tried cycling power, replacing the CPU (luckily I had access to another), unpluging everything, and a variety of other things… Nothing worked. Several people suggested loosening [...]

Compairing Drupal and WordPress Maintenance

mbentley — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:58:21 +0000

I have used Drupal for a long time on all of our websites, but recently I needed to set up a simple blog for the Airdrie Cadets. I needed something that would be really simple for them to use and maintain. After looking around a bit, I decided to try out WordPress. Since then, I [...]

Delphi Prism 2010 Does Not Seem To Use Subdirectories

mbentley — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:30:27 +0000

When working on an ASP.NET website, I find it a lot easier if you put related sections in seperate subdirectories. For example: CSS and Javascript can be put in a directory with caching in order to speed up the page loads Pages that are only available to certain roles (i.e. “Admin”) can be put in [...]

Accessing Firebird from Delphi Prism 2010.

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:04:35 +0000

Here is a quick routine to read values from a Firebird Database into Delphi Prism. uses FirebirdSql.Data.FirebirdClient; method RunSqlCmd(sqlCmd: string; resultName: string; var FieldVar: array of string; FieldName: array of string): string; var conStr: string; count: integer; i,j: Integer; colName: string; val: string; dataType: System.Type; [...]

Finding the PublicKeyToken of a dll with .NET

mbentley — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:22:42 +0000

Here is a quick and easy way to find the PublicKeyToken of a dll using the Glabal Assembly Cache (GAC). In the command prompt, go to the folder with your dll. Install the dll in your GAC using gacutil.exe -i <assemblyName.dll> View the assembly info using gacutil.exe -l <assemblyName> If you do not want the [...]

Switching From Drupal To WordPress

mbentley — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:19:32 +0000

We have run several blogs for years and way back when I started, Drupal seemed like a good idea because it is so adaptable and powerful. Over the years, it has done okay, but I have never really fallen in love with it. I find that I spend far to much time working on maintenance [...]

Drupal Home Page Shows Random Characters

mbentley — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:02:57 +0000

I have been occassionally running into some strange errors on several of my Drupal websites recently (running on both Ubuntu and Windows Apache). I finally stumbled onto an interesting post on the Drupal Site about an error where Home page shows random characters which then led me to a thread about possible Drupal Cache errors. At least it is some idea...

HTML Color Codes

mbentley — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:59:12 +0000

Here is yet another handy list of colors with their names and color codes to help when selecting colors for layout.

How to convert between Delphi TDateTime and the Unix timestamp format

mbentley — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:44:35 +0000

I recently had to convert between Delphi TDateTime and Unix timestamps. The issue is that the two formats are quite different. Delphi uses a float where the integer part is the date, and Unix uses an integer count of the seconds since 1/1/1970.

After a bit of looking around, this is what I ended up using:

const

 UnixStartDate: TDateTime = 25569.0; // Sets UnixStartDate to 01/01/1970 
  SecondsPerDay = 86400;

My New Favorite Toy – A Quite Mouse

mbentley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:22:15 +0000

Recently, I have done a lot of late night work, and done a lot of time in hospital rooms with various family members. My wife asked me to find a quiter mouse after one particularly bad stay in hospital where she was trying to sleep and I was trying to work quietly. It turns out that the hospital has great wireless connections, but a mouse click can be a really loud cutting noise in a quiet room.

Find the best and most popular Drupal modules fast!

mbentley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:17:42 +0000

This site runs on Drupal, which gives me a huge choice of modules and configurations. Drupal can certainly do a lot, but sometimes it is a bit overwelming to figure out. This is especially true if you are just generally looking for ways to improve yoursite. I find that www.Drupal.org is great if you already know what you want, but if you are just window shopping, check out http://drupalmodules.com.

Age of Empires III – The Asian Dynasties expansion pack reboots my whole machine!

mbentley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:16:47 +0000

Well, my son got the "Age of Empires III - The Asian Dynasties expansion pack" for Christmas and was really happy about that until he tried to play it. For some reason, the game plays for a little while (about 1/2 hour) then reboots the entire machine! We were not at all happy.

The traditional 216 color palette for web design

mbentley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:15:13 +0000

Here is the hex values for the traditional 216 color color palette for web design:

Fun site for Geeks

mbentley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:09:50 +0000

Check out Geekologie at http://www.geekologie.com. They have a wide range of wild uses and abuses of technology and are just plain odd. It is a fun read!

Cool dictionary site

mbentley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:08:42 +0000

A friend of mine (maybe I wouldn't go so far as friend Shawn), happened to mention a cool site to me today. It's www.urbandictionary.com. It's a dictionary site where users can define slang words used by them. Definitely not appropriate for all audiences, but mostly pretty harmless (Kris don't even think about it!). Check out some of the definitions below: Yoink: An exclamation that, when uttered in conjunction with taking an object, immediately transfers ownership from the original owner to the person using the word regardless of previous property rights.

Online Plagiarism

mbentley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:06:09 +0000

Recently I discovered that some of the articles I had written on Triond.com had been stolen and republished on another online writing site called Associated Content. This person had copied and pasted my work and my name into another website to try to make money off of me. When I wrote and posted an article about it on Triond, the response from this community was huge. Through reading the article, many other users discovered that exactly the same thing was happening to them.

Color	Color Code	Hex Code
Snow	255 250 250	#FFFAFA
GhostWhite	248 248 255