Friday, January 28, 2005

Some days I depress myself...

Instead of Impress... Okay, Century Color Online forms, has been the bane of my existance in some regards. Never enough, always updating, never easy to work in. I was ready to hate ASP .Net simply because I never wanted to look at it again after working on these forms.

That's because I was being idiotic. (No, I'm not an idiot, just naive.)

For example, our Review order page. Basically, it was a simple page that used this:

Dim objRequest As System.Net.WebRequest = System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(url)
objResponse = objRequest.GetResponse()
Dim sr As New System.IO.StreamReader(objResponse.GetResponseStream())


Now, do you follow what that did? It did an HTTPWebRequest into a StreamReader. Then I stripped out all the form tags and other undesirable tags and other bad tags, and dumped the resulting huge string into a label control. At the time I thought it was pretty ingenious. Until of course I wanted that form to do stuff.

Today, in 2 lines of code, (and removing everything outside (and including) the form tags) I turned this page into a Usercontrol, I don't need to pull it through the HttpRequest string, and now, I can put functionality into it.

The only trick, and the reason I original went the way I did, is I want to be able to e-mail that form, and I was able to e-mail it just the way it was. Now I'll have to create a form that has this new usercontrol, and e-mail the new form. It'll still be easier than what I was doing.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Another link

Added another link, don't know why I didn't have it before. It's an article on the 4 Guys from Rolla site. Enjoy.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Stuff and stuff...

I knew that user controls couldn't be that difficult. They aren't. I'm working on simplifying code. I have several forms I work on, they have slightly different layouts, depending on what type of order the user is placing. But some of the controls, and therefore code, get duplicated. I am working to unify the code, making it easier. Therefore, I have added a link on my Technical Links page.

One other point... who's idea was it to so tightly pack coffee filters together! You really think they're useable after separating them first thing in the morning, with bleary eyes and fumbling fingers?!?!

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Creeeepy!

Yesterday, about 5PM I went out to get groceries. Got back about 6 and noticed footprints in the snow. I looked around, cause I'm a little suspicous of footprints, and they went around the house, so I figured they were the landlord's.

Went to my book study at about 7:15, and came back about 8:45PM. At 10:30, as my wife was covering our bird, she looked out the window. This was the living room window. Since we just moved in, it just had sheer, lacey, curtains, so she could look right out. She asked me if I had walked up to the window. I hadn't. So I go out and look, and realize there is a new set of foot prints, similar to the first set, coming right up to and looking in our window. Definetly not our landlord.

So, needless to say, we were creeped out. The worst part is, my wife was home alone while I was at the book study. Thankfully nothing happened, except that we didn't get to sleep until after 1AM. We called the police and left a report, barricaded the front door, and locked our bedroom door. We also hung blankets over the windows so that nobody could peer through the sheers.

This morning, we realized that the footprints came to all the windows, even the ones surrounded by bushes.

Friday, January 14, 2005

Arrr matey!!!

Please click the link below to vote for the type of pirate I am.
Just to help you vote:


Okay, the two people who bothered to vote have voted, and I have decided I'm just a regular, run-of-the-mill, Jimmey Buffet kind of pirate.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Created a class to save User and App settings

In my previous post I mentioned how I needed to save some settings. I found this article on MSDN that helped me to write a class that reads and writes app settings to the CommonApplicationData area. It's pretty slick. I added on to what they had by checking for the path first, and if necessary, creating the directory and file.

Saved myself from a big mistake

Whoa boy... Thanks Ian for your help.

I wanted to save user settings for my app, in this case, the path to another app that they would need to use. That's no problem', I thought, figuring it I'd just dump it into the app.config file with the deployment settings. Ian posted this great article that taught me otherwise.

Instead, I'm going to roll my own AppSettings class, and save it in the users ApplicationData folder. Check it out... It's a good idea considering security is tightening everywhere.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

I'm a nerd...

Ben Mawoo gota 56. Here's mine:
I am nerdier than 68% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

Funny article

This article made me laugh, a feat no article had done in quite some time. This is what I thought was funny:
"I don't even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere," Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters on Wednesday.

"We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them -- they elected a moron."

And then there's this one. Reminds me of this video clip.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Best FTP software I've used

Ace FTP might be the first FTP software I ever buy. It's so simple, but has so many powerfull features. This FTP software let's you drag and drop, auto queues files, and will even give you a throughput graph for starters. And, if you're on dial-up and need to save some bandwidth while it transfers in the background, you can throtle the throughput. Check it out here.

Monday, January 03, 2005

Arthur Kenyon...

Saturday my grandfather passed away. Here is his obituary.

Saturday, January 01, 2005

New phone #, cable hassles, and sad news

I have a new phone #. I still don't have a cable jack in my office. And my grandfather died this evening. Now I am on the phone with Netzero who made unauthorized withdrawels from my account. Fun day.