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

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Archive for July, 2011

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WordPress Akismet needs some improvement

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/31

This week has been really busy, so only this weekend I found some time to go through the incoming comments.

I found quite a bunch of spam, which is unusual, because WordPress.com uses Akismet which is trying to trap this. Mostly it succeeds (like 99+% of the time), but sometimes it doesn’t, and this week there were more than normal.

So I marked them all as spam, and now the Askimet stats headline at https://wiert.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=akismet-stats-display still says “0 missed spam”, and a “100% accuracy rate” but the tables there clearly indicated a bunch of missed spam.

Just in case you wonder too: The spam this week was all about low priced installation guides on getting old software installing on new operating systems.

–jeroen

 

Posted in Power User | 1 Comment »

Lots of Changes: Matt Waddell – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/30

Last week, Google+ improved a lot; Matt Waddell posted a list, including a reference to the “What’s new in Google+” page.

–jeroen

via: Matt Waddell – Google+.

Posted in G+: GooglePlus, Power User, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »

Don’t forget to hug your System Administrator today

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/29

Don’t forget to hug your sysdadmin, as today is System Administrator Appreciation Day!

–jeroen

Posted in Opinions | Leave a Comment »

What was the last time you used a DVD drive? Apple updates Mac mini: Core i5 and i7, Thunderbolt, AMD Radeon HD, no SuperDrive — Engadget

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/29

Last week, this was big news in the Apple world: the new Mac mini will ship without a built-in SuperDrive DVD-drive leaving room for a 2nd HDD drive.

New Mac Mini has no SuperDrive, but room for a second HDD

New Mac Mini has no SuperDrive, but room for a second HDD - image courtesy of Engadget

This was in fact the main reason I bought a Mac Mini Server last year: it had 2 HDD drives built in and no SuperDrive.

The last time I used optical drives for storage media since was back when I bought a ThinkPad A20p early in 2000 (yes, I’ve lived in both the Mac and PC world for decades now).

One of the first things I did back then was buying an Ultrabay 2000 HDD Adapter, so I could fit in a second HDD and ditch the DVD-ROM player.
Since then, I loaded CDs and DVDs using ISO image files usingthe Daemon tools virtual DVD drive.

The Apple Mac lagged behind on this very much, I’m not sure at which Mac OS version they finally introduced support for ISO images in Disk Utility, no later than OS X in 2007 though.

Is this big news?

In the Mac world, apparantly so, but I have lived without optical drives for using data for over a decade now.

In fact, the only two reasons I still have DVD drives are:

  1. They are the only way to transfer recorded TV broadcasts from my Philips DVD/HDD and Medion DVD/HDD recorders to other platforms
  2. To help out foundations and voluntary organizations (like Stichting de Zevensprong that organizes activities for people with mental retardation) to distribute multimedia of their activities.

Looking around me, I’m certainly not alone.
Having two HDDs (or three, like the ThinkPad A31p in 2002, and the ThinkPad W70x in 2008) makes it so much easier to make backups or have more storage.
I’m glad I have being able to to that for a very long time, even on a Mac.

–jeroen

via: Apple updates Mac mini: Core i5 and i7, Thunderbolt, AMD Radeon HD, no SuperDrive — Engadget.

PS: Don’t forget to hug your SysAdmin today!

Posted in Apple, Power User | 1 Comment »

Excel XML Spreadsheet: Date.Type is mandatory :)

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/07/28

When you generate Excel XML Spreadsheets, and you load it in Excel, it will report some errors in your Temporary Internet Files directory.

For instance, when you forget to fill the Data.Type attribute, then you get a log file with a message like this:

XML ERROR in Table
REASON:	Missing Tag
FILE:	V:\export.xml
GROUP:	Cell
TAG:	Data
ATTRIB:	Type

Note that some errors won’t be reported. For instance if you forget to put your Data in a Cell.Data (and put it in Cell); then Excel just show empty worksheet.

There seems to be no XSD for the XML Spreadsheet format, so you have to get yourself familiar with the XML in Excel and the Spreadsheet Component documentation on MSDN.

You can view where to put your stuff in the XML Spreadsheet Tag Hierarchy. That list doesn’t have individual links to the tags, you need the XML Spreadsheet Reference for that.

To make things more practical for myself, I perfomed these steps:

  1. created a spreadsheet with all of the data variations I expected
  2. saved this spreadsheet as XML
  3. generated the XSD from that XML
  4. imported the XSD to generate wrapper classes and interfaces

Even with that, you will need to accommodate for many peculiarities.

Hopefully I will find some time to write more those down soon.

The first is ss:Data:

  • It contains the actual data of a cell
  • It has a required ss:Type attribute, which is an enumeration of Number, DateTime, Boolean, String, and Error.
  • When it is String, then x:Ticked should be 1 (meaning True) when the string can be parsed as non-String type (and you would type the value into excel starting with a Tick mark (‘ aka single quote or apostrophe)

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD, XSD | 3 Comments »

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