Technology

A personal website has just been a thing I’ve never been able to let go of. I’ve been horrible about updating them, but I’ve always kept a site around. As such, I realized recently that I’ve had a website continuously for almost 30 years. I got my first website around 1995 or 1996 when I headed off to college. Let’s just say, none of us knew what we were doing. We coded our sites from hand and filled them with every animated gif we could find and no background image was too busy. The flaming logo still remains my personal favorite touch on my websites.

It’s with mixed emotions that I retire my home on the web for the last decade. When I purchased radicalwacko.com back in 2001, I was a young, aggressive Libertarian, who thought that he could and should change the world. In other words, I was an insufferable, young, recent college graduate that you wanted to avoid making eye contact with and save yourself from the pedantic lecture that would inevitably ensue.

Now as an older, crankier libertarian - who increasingly doesn’t give a damn - it starts to be embarrassing to give out a domain like radicalwacko.com. If you are over the age of 35 and still think of yourself as a radical or a wacko, you are either deluding yourself or you really probably should be on a watch list. I actually blush every time the Best Buy clerk asks me for my email address. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself why keep a domain name that you refuse to acknowledge.

Generally, I avoid joining protests, but occasionally there are ideas so bad that I can’t stay away.  Such is the case with the Protect IP Act (PIPA) which is coming up before the Senate next week.  The goal of protecting intellectual property is certainly a laudable one, but the means to achieve that goal must not come at the expense of the 1st amendment, nor should it fundamentally weaken the technological structure of the Internet.  The Protect-IP bill does all of this with a vague and poorly thought-out bill.

OK, I have to admit it, for a long time, Hipstamatic really annoyed me.  I think it was because I first learned photography several years before digital photography came into its own and as such, I learned how to do things the hard way.  The effects that Hipstamatic and similar pieces of software produce used to take hours in the darkroom and as such, I felt it was cheating.  I remember working for hours on creating and painting custom emulsions, doing large-scale negative to negative enlargements for special contact print effects and dozens of other labor intensive processes to achieve effects that can now be done in minutes.  Of course, all of that is really silly.  Art must, in the end, be judged by the final product not the process.  I know this may start an unrelated argument, but if I have to know how a piece of art was made in order to appreciate it, then the work is not complete.  In any case, I’ve been using Photoshop for years to fine tune contrast, perform burn-and-dodge processing and the like with no similar feelings of guilt even though even those changes would take several tries and a lot of darkroom time.  As I’ve seen more and more excellent photos coming out of Hipstamatic, I’m starting to get over my old fogey feelings about it.

For many years now, I’ve been using webhost4life as the hosting company for my various websites.  When I signed up they offered really top notch service and a reasonable price (especially for .NET hosting, which I was primarily using at the time).  However, over the last year or so, their service has become increasingly unreliable and even at the best of times, extremely slow.  Earlier this week, this site went down unexpectedly.  I contacted support and they told me it would be 24-48 hours for a response to the problem.

I just ran into an irritating little problem with using TryParse when assigning to nullable object.  The following is the code I was using to assign a value from a ASP.NET dropdown list to a nullable Int32 variable:

If Int32.TryParse(ddlExample.SelectedValue, testobj.TestNullableInt32 )Then testobj.TestDescription = ddlExample.SelectedItem.Text End If

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

I recently had a task in one of my current projects that required me to extract the authentication mode of the current solution’s web.config file. The only was I figured out how to do it was by parsing the XML of the file by hand as shown below (Yeah, I know, it’s VB.NET. I do what the client wants.):

Dim config As New System.Xml.XmlDocument() config.Load(Server.MapPath(“Web.config”)) Dim authMode As System.Xml.XmlNode = config.SelectSingleNode("/configuration/system.web/authentication/@mode") Return authMode.Value

I’ve decided to start posting the solutions I find in irritating little problems that take me forever to find.  Some of these will probably be obvious, but hopefully it might save someone’s time.  My current problem was that I had a DotNetNuke module that was sitting in a AJAX Update Panel.  I needed to set the focus to a particular control based upon a post back click on a radio button.  The standard focus() method didn’t work and neither did the old fashioned RegisterClientScriptBlock stuff with a provided JavaScript function.  Turns out there is an extremely easy way to do this which is to use the ScriptManager SetFocus method using the base Page for the control as shown below:

Joel Sposky, in his usual highly amusing style, takes on the new IE 8 controversy and points out the enormous gulf between the standards world and the world the rest of us really work in.  I often compare this difference to the difference between open-source and commercial software developers.  There are those who say that it must be done the standard way and there are others that say it should be done to make it easy for the user.  And the rest of us poor suckers live somewhere in between.  My favorite quote from the article: