The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for June, 2010

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Web 2.0 apps throwing away your user input #fail

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/30

It seems quite a few “web 2.0” apps too have the same glitch: they throw away user input when the first page finishes loading.
This is especially noticeable on slow connections (UMTS, DSL that is a long distance from the phone company, EDGE, GPRS, etc): the connection speeds that a lot of developers don’t seem to test on.

So, the sequence of events  goes like this:

  1. The data entry fields (in this case, from and to location) become visible
  2. You put the focus on the from field
  3. You type the from address (I do blind typing)
  4. You press the tab key to go to the to field (more and more Web 2.0 apps get their tab order right nowadays)
  5. You type the to address
  6. You wait until the “GO” button becomes visible
  7. The Web 2.0 app keeps loading
  8. It erases the “from” and “to” fields that you just typed

Or more general:
when you start typing in a Web 2.0 app which is still loading, almost all the times you loose your input.

And since there is usually no visual clue when the Web 2.0 app has finished loading, you have to wait until you feel comfortable not loosing your input.

Bad!

Examples that get this wrong:

Please add your own in the comments…

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Opinions, Software Development, UI Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »

small script to list SQL Server databases and their data/log files

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/29

For my own memory: a small script to list SQL Server databases and their data/log files.

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "select name from sys.databases"

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "select name,filename from model.sys.sysfiles"

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "select name,filename from master.sys.sysfiles"

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "exec sp_msforeachdb 'select ''?'',name,filename from ?.dbo.sysfiles'"

SQL Server maintains a list of databases in the system table sys.databases.

It also has an unsupported procedure sp_msforeachdb that you can use to investigate for instance performance issues.

In the above example, sp_msforeachdb just builds a statement (filling the ? with the database name) to execute.

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL Server | Leave a Comment »

Google Calendar – printing multiple months or weeks to PDF – URL parameter tips and tricks

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/28

Recently, I had to print multiple months or weeks from within Google Calendar.
The default UI does not allow that, but it is in fact pretty easy to do.

These are the steps to get PDF versions of a whole year.

Edit 20100714: thanks to Kilian Croese, I could explain a few more parameters, and cut out the steps for Fiddler, so it now works with most browsers on most platforms.
All text that is not relevant any more is marked deleted, so you can still read it if you want to use Fiddler.
It works from Google Chrome and Internet Explorer on Windows (FireFox works if you install FiddlerHook) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Fiddler, Google, Google Apps, GoogleCalendar, ISO 8601, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | 19 Comments »

Adding wordpress.com blog as connected site in Google Buzz (thanks Pēteris!)

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/26

Pēteris wrote about Adding wordpress.com blog as connected site in Google Buzz.

Thanks – that saved me a lot of time!

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Google, Power User, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress | 1 Comment »

SQL Server 2005 setup fails when MSXML Core Services 6.0 Service Pack 2 has already been installed

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/25

Recently, I had to configure a pretty up-to-date Windows XP SP3 VM with SQL Server 2005 for a proof of concept.

The SQL Server 2005 setup failed consistently on installing MSXML 6.
I tried making the XP VM really up-to-date.
But the SQL Server 2005 setup still failed at the same reason.

In the end it appeared that the MSXML 6 install that is included in the SQL Server 2005 install barfs when MSXML 6 SP2 is already installed. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL Server | 5 Comments »

Using a USB connected APC UPS with Windows Server 2008 and VMware Server 2.0

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/24

Recently I took over some system management at a client.

They run Windows 2008 Server x64 and a Windows Server 2008 VM under VMware Server 2.0 and a LAN with some client machines
A lot of things were not covered, backup, power outage, etc, so I’m implementing those step by step.

They now have an APC UPS connected through USB.
There are a lot of references on the internet about the APC software (well, more like UPS vendor supplied software in general) being crap.

Luckily, Windows Server 2008 (and 2003) have built-in support for APC UPSes.
Furthermore when Windows Server shuts down, VMware Server needs to perform some actions on the guests as well.

This post covers the configuration of both :-) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, VMware | 8 Comments »

Changing a NIC in a VMware VM from a dynamic MAC into a static MAC address

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/23

Sometimes you want to hava a NIC in a VMware VM to have a static MAC address in stead of a dynamically generated one.

This sanbarrow.com page explains what to change in the VMX configuration file.

From:

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:40:7e:22"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

To:

ethernet0.addressType = "static"
ethernet0.address = "00:50:56:3e:86:29"

VMware also has a few docs on this for workstation and ESX installs and a KB article for both.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, VMware | 1 Comment »

Porting old Delphi component packages – things I always forget

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/22

I always seem to forget the solution for the error messages about DsgnIntf or DesignIntf.dcu not found when porting old (D# projects) to new (D####) projects.

Googling for this always gets a few false hits at the top, so for my memory,
here it is: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Component Development, Delphi, Designer Development, Development, Package Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Bleeding Edge: version WordPress.com “edit link” broken in latest Google Chrome stable build – or is Vodafone causing this? #fail

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/21

One of the things I use most when writing blog entries is in WordPress the “Alt-Shift-A” keyboard shortcut (the “Insert/edit link” button in the toolbar).

This used to work fine in Google Chrome (my favourite browser), but now it fails, well sort of.

This is what happens: when you perform the Edit/Insert action, you see only a blank popup window, and a wait cursor for about 30 seconds, then you see the final Insert/Edit link popup window.

I’m not sure it is because of the new stable build of Chrome, changes in the WordPress.com engine or the Vodafone UMTS network (I’ll explain below why).

It does work fine in these current browser versions:

I have put FireFox last, as the WordPress.com engine does not always works nice (kinds of display issues).

So back to IE for editing WordPress posts for at least a while…

Finding the cause

The reason I’m not sure that I’m not sure what caused this issue is that both WordPress.com and Google Chrome recently got updates:

Since I could not find similar stories on the internet about my problem, I’ve played around a bit with Fiddler 2, and found that the difference between the Insert/Edit link feature in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer is that Google Chrome tries to load this link

http://1.2.3.4/bmi-int-js/bmi.js

That obviously fails, but I have not found out why it is loaded in Google Chrome and not in Internet Explorer yet.
It might have to do that I recently used the Vodafone UMTS network, and Vodafone runs a transparant proxy messing up with the HTML.
The odd thing is that it fails now, I tried both an ADSL (xs4all ADSL) and a Cable (UPC Fiber Power) connection.

To be continued…

–jeroen

Posted in Google, Power User | 3 Comments »

similarity: the symbols used for completely different products

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/19

Funny how two completely different products have very similar symbols:

Activia Symbol

Activia Symbol

Lactacyd Femina Symbol

Lactacyd Femina Symbol

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Opinions, Power User | Leave a Comment »

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