Chris May

This is pretty cool. Its an example of how to pick out motion detection on a video stream.

Coming soon: "How to find John Connor" :)

We are getting these stupid errors every now and then on our site.

I still have no idea. I think it is a combo of the fact that we are: 1) using frames, 2) using smart nav, and 3) dynamically loading controls, probabaly in the wrong spot in the life cycle.

Some dude posted that he fixed the problem with an added closing "/" on some of his server control tags, but I don't think this is our issue:

basicly the problem arises when you fail to in sert the closing "/" in custom component tag for instance <mynamespace:mycomponent > will produce the error but <mynamespace:mycomponent /> will not. Despite the fact that this error is so simple it held me up for some time and the error message produced was of course useless in finding the solution.

I will investigate this though.

I posted some of these before, but this one does a bunch of different languages and has source code available.

I was having a problem with some textboxes that I was adding to my control dynamically not retaining their value across postback. These textboxes were of course the ones that I was attaching a whole bunch of code to for a lookup control I am writing, so there was a bunch of stuff going on.

In testing I added another textbox and it DID retain its viewstate w/ no problem.

More debugging and testing and whatnot. In looking at some of the tracing from the postbacks and posts, I saw that it was naming the form element for the newly added test textbox as a generic name "cntl_1" or something like that, whereas the textbox I cared about was "TextField", the ID I was assigning to it programatically. I found that you HAD to give a webcontrol an ID in code in order for it to assign ANY ID to it in the code, which kinda sucks. I really don't care what it's ID is in the HTML, but it would only assign a NAME to it, which doesn't help me in all my javascript programming.

So long story short, I was assigning the ID value of the textboxes in a method that was being called from the prerender event. I guess what was happening was that, in the page lifecycle, it was trying to load the viewstate back into the control, and b/c I hadn't hit the prerender event of course, my textbox didn't have the ID value that was expected.

I moved the ID assignment to the constructor and everything is working fine... so far.

While I am at it, this article talks about composite server controls, which is what I am doing a lot of work with.

I haven't linked to this page on MSDN yet, so I might as well so I don't have to go searching again next time I need it.

This article from CodeProject looks pretty slick. It shows how to create an XP panel bar, and I guess it would use javascript to dynamically hide / show the important areas, but I didn't look really hard at the code.

Every now and then I want to decompile a dll and I want to use ILDASM instead of the Ankrino app I downloaded.

Of course it is buried in an obscure location: ( C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\ildasm.exe ) and I can never find it.

Here is some code that kinda works. It could still use a little tweaks, but it's a good starting point:

       function IFrameHeight(){  
                     if(document.getElementById && !(document.all)) 
                     { 
                           h = document.getElementById('iframename').contentDocument.body.scrollHeight; 
                           document.getElementById('iframename').style.height = h; 
                           w = document.getElementById('iframename').contentDocument.body.scrollWidth; 
                           document.getElementById('iframename').style.width = w; 
                     } 
                     else if(document.all) 
                     { 
                           h = document.frames('iframename').document.body.scrollHeight; 
                           document.all.iframename.style.height = h; 
                            w = document.getElementById('iframename').document.body.scrollWidth; 
                          document.all.iframename.style.width = w; 
                     } 
       }

Ok. I'm trying to buy a house, but I don't want to pay someone 3% just to show me a few places and show up at the closing.

This place looks like they give you back 1000 per every 100,000 in home value. This site does the same thing, but they state 1% of the house, not the 1000 per 100,000 thing.

I think I used Seremak before, and they are now offering full buyers commission - $3000. Which isn't really a "2% Rebate" as they state... but its the best thing I have found so far.

On the topic of robots in our society in the future: Marshall Brain talks about his thoughts on this in an article called Robot Nation (and parts 2 and 3) , and the opportunity this presents out society. I'm betting on the darker side of options (more extreme seperation of the haves and have-nots). "Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050?" is the slashdot discussion of the first part of the article, and "Distribution of Wealth in a Robot-Driven World" is the discussion of the 3rd part.

The idea is that, as robots and technology in general, take over more and more jobs, what will happen to the workforce, and to our society? It's an interesting and troubling question. A lot of people might not think this is a big deal, and follow the assumption that it will work something like this: "Well, if 90% of all fast food workers, and janitors are replaced by robots, then there will be additional jobs working for the companies that support the robots." This is clearly flawed. You don't replace humans w/ robots who required the same number of displaced humans to support them. Otherwise there would be no economical reason to replace them.

So if you can make these giant increases in efficiency, that COULD result in a giant increase in quality of life, and also less need to work. That would work like this: Jack likes to eat a McDonalds, so he works 40 hours a week to make enough money to eat every meal at McDonalds. McDonalds replaces all humans w/ robots and is able to cut the cost of their food to 1/2 its current price. Jack now only needs to work 1/2 as man hours to pay for his McDonalds, so he can enjoy an extra 20 hours of his life each week. But, I feel the way it probably would work is that Jacks employeer would suddenly have all the fast food employees begging for a job, and thus Jacks salary would drop as his value to the company will have decreased.

This is a basic economic question. Over the last 40 years many would argue that our quality of life has increased, and in some ways that is plainly clear. But 30 years ago someone working in a labor job could support a family and own a house. Factories NEEDED people. Now they don't, or they need a lot less people as robots and automation have continued to replace jobs.

DotNetJunkies has this article on the Ent Lib's DAAB and ConfAB (you basically have to use the Configuration App block if you want to use DAAB). They say they are going to have follow up articles on each of the app blocks.

This article shows how you can programatically alter the columns in your SQL Reporter reports.

I can't find much information aboiut this stuff. It looks like maybe he is enabling you to call public methods on a webpage code behind, and not really designed to consume web services.

Even though I really don't wan to use anything MS specific, I don't have the time to code what is provided by the Webservice.HTC file, and I know that supporting non-IE is not at all important where I work, even though my main concern is with being locked down to ANYTHING, not just MS stuff. Here is a good walkthrough of using the behavior.

The AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) framework on this guys site is impressive. With little coding I was able to return a string from a webservice into javascript, but I am not sure how it will deal with complex types but I guess it now can pass down an XML doc, which you could pass to an object constructor in JS. The dropdown is sweet (source).

This control is free, but it doesn't do any out of band lookups.

The methods discused in this article won't really "protect" your images, only make it a pain in the butt for someone to get them. So I guess that is a level of protection. The article references the free program HTMLEncrypt which encodes your HTML and uses javascript ( I assume ) to dynamically write it out. With this method, you would have to use a tool like the accenture Rainbow frame that I worked with one time to get the dynamically generated content.

The W3C Validator section has lots of cool tools that run online to check your documents. The header has a link to the link checker which will scan your website for bad or broken links.

This tool from Microsoft will help you analyze your current server configuration and help you migrate to SQL Server 2005.