February 12, 2007
Netgear DG834G routers - LCP problem solution - I think!
Unfortunately I have to use one of these POS routers at work. Cheap bt not so cheerful. I always say - pay more, cry once.
ANyway, we were having the old Netgear 'Loss of Sync' and 'LCP' problems.
Some reading around the net suggested I change the Basic Settings > Idle timeout to anything but 0. I changed it to 99 and it seems to be rocking OK so far - early days yet...
Posted by dottie at 11:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 6, 2006
latest dia - installation issue on windows
If you have installed the latest version of dia on windows you may not be able to launch the application properly. If you are seeing a problem it will probably be some sort of an 'entry point' error, possibly in the xmlparse.dll.
The problem occurs if you installed GTK+ and/or Dia for windows and decided to not install the translations.
To solve the 'entry point' issue (sometimes even XML_SetDocTypeDeclHandler in xmlparse.dll) you will have to uninstall Dia and GTK+ and then reinstall them - including the translations this time!
All should be well.
This works for dia-setup-0.95-1 and the necessary GTK+ installation - gtk+-2.8.18-setup-1.
Posted by dottie at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2006
Tech books online
Fantastic! Altruism is alive and well
Online books / tutorials / instant karma
Posted by dottie at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
July 9, 2005
asp.net
I'm beginning to delve more deeply into asp.net - it has come to dawn on me that most clients will be using vb asp.net in their applications.
I have to say that most of it is very clever, but at the same time the most horrible abomination of a development framework - for the web at least.
It encourages you to use Visual Studio to develop your 'web application'. Even simple interactions with a database are now treated as if they are full-blown enterprise applications.
In Visual Studio you 'build' your page by dragging and dropping graphical elements onto your page. This then builds all the code in the background so you dont have to. Sounds great. One problem, well first thing - font tags and proprietary javascript.
Font tags - say no more. Speaks volumes in itself.
The usually great O'Reilly books have a Cookbook for ASP.net and there is one example of the code produced for checking a form on submission - it is an unholy mess for a start, depending on ASCII character code checking instead of checking for a browser event before smugly stating - 'the above only works in IE for Netscape other code may have to be written which is well beyond the scope of this book'. Worry. Worry hard.
These tools are designed by software developers to allow other software developers create 'web applications' quickly and easily. Apparently it is also the web developers job to create the web page, again quickly and easily. The only problem is that you end up with a bloated, ugly, unusable piece of crap that works only in IE5+ compatible browsers (in other words only microsoft browsers) and offers no fall back for users of other browsing technology including those with disabilities.
It allows this new madness called code-behind where you can remove the code form your page and place it in a VB script that is kept on the server. Usually it also means that all your code behind gets gathered into one application linked into your web pages and compiled into a nice big fat DLL.
This results in madness - if you change something on your web page, you will likely have to recompile your web site.
What the fuck were Microsoft thinking? This results in an unmanageable mess of code that is likely to break the moment a maintenance developer changes anything. It is the Jenga of code.
And unfortunately I have to use it on a clients site. Woe is me.
Posted by dottie at 6:13 PM | Comments (2)
March 10, 2005
Moving on...up?
I'm going to stop using Moveable Type for this blog and use WordPress instead. It'll mean having to reimport all my posts once again and I'm sure will cause no end of headaches but it should be worth it.
The administration end of things is much more powerful, allowing me to properly style the text as I enter it. And it produces semantically correct output which makes styling it a lot easier.
For those of you who didnt understand a word of that, it basically means that I will have more incentive to use this blog.
So there.
New design in the works as well...
Posted by dottie at 3:01 PM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2005
Roadmaps
I've been reading a lot of stuff about where the web is going, what technologies might be used etc. I'd love to see what is going to be the next bubble and gain some altitude with it.
I need to sit down and pull all the pieces together - AJAX, Web services, Social networks, convergence of communications (Skype, mobile phones with cameras and broadband connections), mobile music, sharing media, data networking, storage, meta tags - exciting times are on the way, some of us might get the chance to plant some seeds. One thing is sure that no-one will have a chance to chart or direct the growth for any appreciable time.
Posted by dottie at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
Note to self
Never try to learn a new scripting technology / development platform when you are up against a deadline and not getting paid as if you were the favourite nephew of a rich uncle.
Or, to put it plainly,tress, lack of sleep and the dubious thrill of mastering a new scripting language need to be balanced out by something!
Posted by dottie at 3:36 AM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2004
Colour wizard
Great little tool for getting complimentary colours etc from your colour choice.
Simple and gets the job done right.
There is a flash based picker (cant find the URL right now..) which was fantastic as it allowed you tweak to the colour you wanted rather than just entering static codes - but it never returned the HEX numbers for the other colours.
Posted by dottie at 2:56 PM
June 15, 2004
New email paradigms
Just thinking about the Google Mail offering and I suppose it also applies to the upcoming release of Longhorn (smirk).
The new paradigm I am talking about is of course meta data over folders.
I was thinking that it would be a very difficult task to swap from one paradigm to the other until I realised the following - folders impart meta data.
Its a very rigid meta data and usually void of the more meaningful name=value pairing of true meta data, but its still meta data.
The big problem is not adapting to a new mental model, but breeding new habits.
To make meta data effective it must be created along with its object - watever form that might take - a word document, a phtoshop file, a text file. This is really an issue for application developers.
Currently the only metadata that is saved with a file - at least on a PC - is a date stamp, some info about the file permissions (which is the same for all documents anyway...) and a little bit of 'hard-coded' meta data - the file extension.
Well OK. Most applications now make a stab at at least parsing out a title for the object. This will not be good enough for when the paradigm switch comes.
Pushing the idea of Longhorn file system to extremes would mean that all your files are esentially saved into one big folder. There will be no naming conflicts because you wont be naming your files (!). Meta data and a feck off search engine will be what you use to retireve your files.
Its a big step and once taken and everyone understands it we wont see how we could live any other way. Everything we do on the computer will suddenly have context. Excellent. This is what happens in real life anyway - its natural for us to associate objects - thoughts, feelings, people, situations, smells.... - with nebulous connections - again thoughts, feelings, people, sights, sounds... - that only become obvious when context is applied, its the very essence of sentience and hopefully bringing it to the world of computing will shine lights in deep corners of AI research and finally stimulate development of something that will be the great-grandaddy of a mchine that can help us answer the question - 'what is it to be alive?'
Or maybe I'm reading too much into this... :)
Posted by dottie at 8:28 PM
June 3, 2004
Developmental lassitude
More work avoidance stuff will be going on here.
Actually I will be evangelising CSS, Javascript, SOAP development, SQL and the like from here too.
Maybe.
If I'm not too busy avoiding work (http://www.webpusher.ie) by cleaning behind the fridge or something....
Posted by dottie at 7:18 PM