Chris May

I've been writing this tennis software for years now, and I'm just about finished with it.

But, I am still getting this problem using the CASL grid object in older Palms.

In OS4.x, any label that I have in a grid will end with "..." if it is too long for the label, but in my emulator of OS3.0, or on my old PalmIII, the labels overflow their grid cells, making for an ugly picture.

I thought I had resolved this problem by using Textboxes instead of grids, but the problem with Textboxes I found out, is that they wrap, and you can't keep them from wrapping. So if someone's name is long enough, you will only see the first part of their name. Not good.

Here are the images, with a 2 column grid with the 2nd col being a 1% col overflowing. The OS 3-2, image clearly shows the overflow problem.
OS 3
OS 3-2
OS 4

I saw The Matrix Reloaded again last night. On opening night I saw it with my brother, so last night I went with my wife, who couldn't stay awake for any of it. I must have had to wake her up, literally 20 times. We went to a 6:35 showing for christ's sake! I don't understand it.

Anyway, I was hoping that, after seeing it the first time, I would pick up some more on what is really going on.

There is a really interesting story on the Matrix, and its relation to different philosophies here, worth a read.

I have to say that, all the people that said that some scenes were too long, who I disagreed with at first, might have been on to something. I was definitely longing for a fast foward button during a few scenes (the dance scene for sure).

Unfortuntaly, I didn't really leave the theater with any extra insight. I noticed that the Merovingian frequently says something to Neo about his "predecessors". I didn't pick up on that the first time.

I also tried to pay extra attention to Neo's conversation with The Architect.

A couple of things...

If 99% of people accept The Matrix, and only 1% reject it, then if there are 10 Billion people on earth, wouldn't there be 1% of 10B = 100M people in Zion? Or maybe because they keep killing them off every now and then, they keep Zion to under 250k. What is with Smith copying himself over everyone? In the next Matrix, will everyone on earth be Smith? Just an idea.

Someone suggested that the Merovingian, was one of the earlier "Ones", and I noticed that his wife tells Neo "he used to be like you." But I don't think that is the case.

The Oracle is guarded by that chinese guy, who says he protects "what matters most". That seemed odd, so I wonder if we will discover some more meaning to that later.

The architect should want Neo to take the door back to the core, so that the Matrix can be updated, so that the process can start over, but he seems pleased that Neo's love for Trinity is going to force him into making the other decision. Why? According to him, that would send a shock wave through the matrix killing everyone. First, why would that happen? If Neo doesn't submit to the "restarting" of the process, why does the Matrix go offline? Doesn't make any sense. Second, if Neo's decision means that the machines are going to lose their most important power source, then why does the Architect seem to push Neo in that direction? Again it doesn't make sense.

The architect tells Neo that "Trinity is going to die, and there is nothing you can do about it", but Neo does in fact save Trinity, so what does that mean?

If Smith is against the machines as much as he is against Neo, then why did he sabotage the humans attack in the real work?

Is the "real" world just another level of the Matrix? When Neo realizes he has powers in the "real" world, that was my first though.

I really hope that the finaly move, which is going to be out in a few months (great idea by the way), doesn't kill this momentum with a stupid ending, like it turns out that Neo is the only human alive, or that the whole thing was some kind of experiment by some scientists on Neo, or whatever. Basically if the final movie ends with a "gotcha", or one of those "it's over but it's not really over" endings, then I will be seriously pissed.

Here is a little registry hack that I wrote. It will let you search important sites (at least important to me), from the IE address bar.

Sites include Google, Google Groups, MSDN, Dictionary.com, and WhatIs.com.

After you run the .reg file, you can have quick access to these sites by simply entering text into the Address box, such as "g tennis". "g" stands for google, so typing in "g tennis" will open a page with google.com searching on the term "tennis". Google Groups = gg, MSDN="msdn", Dictionary.com = "d", Whatis.com = "whatis".

You can add more using the same conventions that I did.

This page from DevGuru is their Quick References Index page.

It has lots of great reference info on (among others):

• CSS
• HTML
• JavaScript
• Jet SQL
• WSH
• WSH
• XML DOM
• XSLT

Excellent...

I found this pretty slick Date Picker Control from TrueGeeks.com. It uses dropdowns, and is smart on the client side to change the dropdowns so when you select Feb as the month, it will only show you 28 days in the Day dropdown, unless you are on a leap year, then it will give you 29.

Here are some pages that will convert C# code into VB.NET:
Asp Alliance
Kamalpatel.net

This page will go the other way, converting VB.NET code into C#:
Ellkay

My brother is going to go to the IHSA tournament today to hand out flyers for Tennis Charter Software.

I was going to do this last night but I fell asleep way to early. I have really not been getting enough sleep lately, and I guess it caught up to me. Now where did Kathleen put my old Palm....

I should have known it wasn't over.

I am still making steady progress, but I am still finding stupid problems along the way.

Someone told me that they thought my assessment of my security problem was correct, that I need to get the ASP.NET worker thread to have higher access, not the default IIS user account, by using impersonation. I havn't found a way to do impersonation on just 1 page, so I think I will need to move the login page to a different directory and add another .config file.

Some of the goofy things I am finding are:

1. When searching the directory for a user object, if you want to later call the .Invoke("SetPassword",agrs[]) then you need to specify the schema as "user" when doing the cnAD.Children.Find("CN=MyUser","user") method.
2. If you try to invoke the ADSI "SetPassword" and you try to use the same password that the account already has, it will throw an error.
   I'm guessing this is because there is probably something indicating that the user must change the password or something, to get around this, I am first changing the password to a GUID, and then changing it again to what I want it to be.
   Call cnNewUser.Invoke("SetPassword", New Object() {New Guid().ToString()})

Finally! I can't express how happy I was when I got this code to finally work correctly.

I was a combination of things that fixed my problem.

1. I changed my login to use the full domain login Domain\UserName
2. I changed the security context of the IIS account (IWAM_something I think) This might not have had any impact. After changing this, I was still required to supply my username and password when accessing the directory. After I stopped working I thought that maybe the ASP.NET worker thread was what I needed to change, not the IIS default user account.
3. When you create a new user through LDAP, they appear as "CN=MyNewUser", however, "MyNewUser" is not their username as one might expect. Instead it is their "SAMAccountName", or something like that, which is a property that you have to set, but that I didn't really pay much attention to.
4. The domain controller that I was looking at was never the one that was first updated, so there was often a large disconnect between what I was doing in code, and what I was seeing on the domain controller.

There really isn't enough documentation out there about the System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry class, but I managed, after a long struggle.

Here are some other links that I found useful when researching this problem:

Managing Passwords
Active Directory Hierarchy
Creating a User
.NET
newsgroup posting
MS Support Document
Creating ADSI Components

I have been fighting with this damn thing for a long time now. The internet is covered with articles like this one from CodeProject.com, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to be able to set the password of a user that I create through LDAP. It doesn't really help that almost all the example code is C#, and I am working with VB.NET. The conversion isn't a big deal, but when you don't know what the problem is, I would rather see a VB.NET example somewhere.

When I try to call the Invoke method, with "SetPassword" and a new password, I always get back "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password".

So frustrating....

This is one of the coolest video clips you will ever find.

It shows an F14 breaking the sound barrier during some very humid conditions. The increased pressure caused by the shock wave causes the condensation in the air to turn into a cloud that follows the plane. Very cool.

Check it out here.

My wife is having everyone from her side of the family over today for a little party. <sarcasm>Should be lots of fun.</sarcasm>

I don't really like having people over. I always hated it when my parents would have over company and we would have to clean up the whole house. Really my mom was one that was doing the majority of the work, but we would have spend a good chunk of time doing something boring.

Tonight I'm heading out to see the Foo Fighters somewhere downtown with my brothers. I havn't heard any of their new songs, but I really like their older stuff. I only saw them once before, at ISU, only a short drive from Bradley. They were pretty good, but the concert was kinda crappy because of the venue.

Sometime in the near future I will find something that I will actually want to post that won't be a "Misc" entry. But for now, that's all I got.

The start of the blog...