To Whom It May Concern...

It's the little things in life! Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggg! Okay, so it's not as important as Ctrl-Alt-Del. But this one little feature means a lot to me. Why does it have to be so obscure? The feature I want is ImageButtons for your DataGrid commands! You can have regular buttons, or text buttons, but NOT IMAGE BUTTONS! Umm... DUH! Wouldn't that make things easy? Well... I haven't looked into the classes, so maybe I'm asking for a lot, but boy... you'ld think somebody out there would write or post something warning me. 4 hours wasted! How do you do it? Here's how: <asp:TemplateColumn HeaderText="Remove">  <ItemTemplate>   <asp:LinkButton id="lnkbutDelete" runat="server" Text="<img border=0 src='images/remove4.gif' alt=delete>" CommandName="Delete" CausesValidation="false"></asp:LinkButton>  </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateColumn...

I'm back! So, let's recap. There are way to many passwords in the world. That's the long and the short of it. Started reading Rory Blythe's blog( www.neopoleon.com/blog ). Funny stuff. I heard about it from .Net Rocks! The internet talk show for .Net developers. Some more funny stuff. I'm going to put a link up for it, but you can check it out here: www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks Be sure to tune into the live show. Anybody got some good questions for me to ask? I'm hoping for Visual Studio Enterprise Architect myself.

Ran into this little problem on TheImageConnection.com. I wanted the studios that work with us to be able to customize how their customers see the pages. I figured that by letting the studio set a logo image at the top of the page, a background image if they choose, and the background, text, and link colors, they would have enough flexiblity to get our site to look more like theirs. So I figured storing those settings in a table and programatically changing them. But it's not that easy. The logo image was simple. I gave the image an ID of img1, and put our Image Connection logo as the default. Then in the load_prefs method I simply checked to see if there was a logo saved, and if so: img1.ImageURL = "logos/" & prefsRow("Logo") 'prefsRow being the row in the preference table cooresponding to that studio. However, the background image an the colors was tricky. That is set in the body tag. The body HTML tag has no class associated with it specific...

PDAs... screens are too small. Tablet PCs... too big. Can't we have a book sized computer? 5x6 screen maybe? Doesn't have to be a tablet PC, but if they could, that wouldn't be bad. But let's take a look at PDAs. I was given a Clie T665C. What a wonderful device. I carried it everywhere, read on it, played on it, tasks, dates, addresses. Even pictures, music and some short movies. It was only 66MHz and ran very smooth. Now a co-worker has a Dell Axiom. It's a 400MHz she got after her Palm died. She moved one of her Palm Reader books over and tried to use Palm Reader for PocketPC devices... boy, was that miserable. Clicking to scroll down to the next page took 20-30 seconds. I just read that Microsoft is dropping Smart Displays. ( http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&ncid=738&e=8&u=/pcworld/20040105/tc_pcworld/114093 ) You know, I would love to have my computer's power portable. If they were already streaming image data to d...

Okay, after a long week off... I'm back. Now where did I leave off. I wasn't completely free from work. We moved our servers to the center of the building. You wouldn't believe how much cable we were able to get rid of. Even some old WANG cabling. Now we have to troubleshoot the cables we missed... Only 1 out of 58. Not bad if I do say so myself. And a couple of shorted network cards. Guess they left the systems on even tho we said not to. Oh well... We're back up and running, 'cept our website. We are switching ISPs and so our DNS entries need to be updated.

Still having trouble with the javascript, but I posted the final query for my 'month' issue. SQL is such a powerful tool, yet not easy to understand alone. Thankfully there are friendly people out there who will help. One book I use frequently to help me with SQL is listed on my page in the books section. Take a look, it's worth having if you are going to be doing any ammount of SQL programming. If you are getting data from SQL for your apps, get comfortable with Stored Procedures and queries. Let them do the work, so your code doesn't have to. I had to just take the plunge and do it. It was easy for me to just build my query strings on the fly and load down my apps with code just to get some data out of the database, but as I go on, I am trying to unload my app, and use the tools that are at your fingertips in SQL. Jump right in and have some fun. It's worth it, and another feather in your cap as well!

My website is having lots of Javascript errors. I am not sure why since the problems seem to lie in the ads that Geocities tacks on to my page. But I am trying to keep it updated. I want to use that site to post chunks of code that I feel should stay available. I posted my final code for watermarking. It's nice because it watermarks one image at a time as it is called for, leaving the original image alone. It's very quick. I am now working on getting a drop down list with only the months that have orders visible. This is tricky. The SQL query that gets them is on my page (see link in Tuesday's post). It gives me numbers for the months. I also want text.

Okay, I've updated my website with bits and pieces of my current projects. I currently have an issue with my Wedding Site project, The Image Connection. Here's the link straight to that project's page. http://www.geocities.com/qwert231/_webImageConLog.htm I'm having trouble generating a JPEG stream. It works, but gets very grainy. Also, does anybody know how to do text effects? Like changing the opacity?

So, for all you following my adventures, I am currently working on my Windows Service. I am attempting to have a windows service that monitors a certain folder, checking it using a timer every x seconds. When the folder is populated with files, the service moves those files and enters data into our business system and our production system. I am hoping to make this service flexable enough so that it can be used at other photo labs and even with other business and production systems. (Or none at all.) To be able to do this I want to allow the user of the service to be able to select the database of each of the systems. But I want to make it easy. I may need to cut out the flexibility for now, but we'll see. This is my first Windows Service.

I am going to begin dedicating my site and this Blog to new developers. I myself view .Net (VB) as my first programming language and feel that I am still a beginner. So I will chronicle my educational path as I progress through the learning process. Please feel free to view my website for tips and books that have helped me along the way. I will be continuing to update this page as well.

Threre, got commenting going. Please, place comments. Even if it's just a 'I read your BLog.'

So, we've had our first snow storm (Alec) and it was a doozy. Snowed in for two days. Saturday I didn't do much of anything, tho I did get my wife to try Kielbasa and cabbage. Sunday I was able to visit my bible study and go over some scriptures with him, so that was good. But I didn't do much else. Trying to fix my wife's stereo but that's another story. On the work front, I am going to try to get a book on software project management. I gotta get myself together, I have 3 major projects (2 web apps and 1 windows app). I have one person working with me on the web apps and I gotta clean things up and put them in order so that it's easier to bring somebody else up to speed as well as having all my files in a logical order. Friday and Today I've been cleaning up our main site ( www.centurycolor.com ) codewise as it is about to get a major face lift. One nice thing about .Net is that I can do all the code behind the scenes and have our web designer do the...

Now to anybody who is a major programmer this may not be a big deal, but it was somewhat exciting for me. I was published! The Feedback was published in the November 2003 issue of .NET Developer's Journal http://www.sys-con.com/dotnet/article.cfm?id=452 I've been published before, in a poetry compilation. But this is exciting because it seems that some thing I have said has been taken seriously by part of the programming industry. Very exciting. Now, back to my project. I created a variation of the Stored Procedure from Monday's post for the administration portion of the website. I could have used that SP by adding in more code, but it was already getting bloated. I actually took out the if statement, since I will not be needing to select only from certain groups and added some fields I would need. I may post some of this on the dotNetJunkies site or at least a comment that points them back here if they would like more. I am going to be looking at allowing the var...

Back from a long weekend. Had some in-laws up, Clint and Beth Shrom. Had a wonderful, fun, weekend with them. But now it's back to work. I'm working on our wedding site here at work. For any who would like to see the current version, it's www.theimageconnection.com. I am working on some enhancements including the introduction of grouping for pictures as well as paged image viewing for previews. I am using a SQL stored procedure for this which gets passed the order number for the images to view, as well as the current page requested, number of images per page, and the group to show. It also has logic in it that if the group is All, it shows the next page of all the images. Kinda tricky, complex, yet delightfully functional. I got this from another page and enhanced it. Here's where I got the stored procedure from (Dot Net Junkies, of course. The easiest to navigate and search.): http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/Tutorial/70E24E50-C179-4563-B053-2742516BF05B.dcik And...

We're back from Florida! When can I go back! It was wonderful! Warm weather, no rain, beaches, swimming in the ocean. (For those of you who don't know, I am a swimming freak. Dream trip: Scuba in the Caribbean!) My cuz Nick is now married. Congrats to him and his wife. So, as far as work goes, I got the go ahead to update our wedding site www.theimageconnection.com ! Alright! I've been looking forward to this. Right now it's pretty basic, ASP classic. I'm gonna jazz it up with ASP .Net and improve the features of it. Upgraded the database to MSDE for better development efficiency. And I hope to introduce some new features. So, let's see where this takes us.

Ciao'! Gotta put this in here: http://jpbrown.i8.com/cubesolver.html Somebody built a lego Robot that solves the Rubix cube. Man, what will they think of next! In other news, I have put my Windows service on hold for now, in lieu of digging deeper in to the DP2 (Kodak's Digital Production Software) API. It's language is KPL which is a C deriviative. This should prove useful in using some of their render engine's capabilities in our online forms. I found a hunk of code (well, an ASPX page with now HTML) that will pass an image from one address out as a stream. This is great for using images stored behind a firewall. I may eventually use this code to serve up other files that reside behind the firewall, but for now it returns a jpeg stream. So my image tag looks something like this: <img src='thumb.aspx?Order=xxxxxx&Roll=xx&Frame=xxxx'> Here's the page for that code: http://www.aspalliance.com/cookbook/ViewSource.aspx?Filename=Recipe2215...

Catching up on news, friends, and the world. Working on a thumbnail project now. Trying to see how I can get a JPG stream so that I can have dynamic JPGs on my site. Thumbnails of live images, to be exact, hiding behind my firewall. In other news, for those that know me... I am still working on Italian. Trying to learn it as best I can. However, I was invited to learn Chinese. Hmm... well, there is a need here for that. We'll have to see. I updated some of my links. I have a few friends (GASP) that have sites. Hope they don't mind my posting their links, but it seems that they are public. Let you know more later.

Okay, changed the template I was using. It Bluebird was koosed, though I want to go back to it. Some funky stuff going on with this BLOG today. I also added some other Tech BLOGs. Now that I'm getting used to these, it's going to be my morning paper. If only I could take it to the Cafe with me... But my Clie is koosed as well. Needs a new screen. Donations are welcome.

Okay, so today I resolved the issues with DataMatch Labs reports. Stupid really. I was setting the data adapter's query string after I loaded the table. That comes of quick fixes for un expected uses. Resolved some Web Forms issues, and have another. Getting info into DP2. So we will work on a DP2 script tomorrow. Also worked some more on my Windows Service to get Montage into DP2. Learning a lot here.

Okay, now it is for real, this is what I shall do. Today I will be working on DataMatch Lab. DataMatch Lab is the Lab end of the software I have written for the Photographic comunity. DataMatch is the Studio end. DataMatch is an application in which you can enter Student/Subject information and then link that information to Order data. So for instance, you can Import a database of Students, print camera cards, and then after photographing the students enter in the Package information for each student very quickly. From within DataMatch you can send your order to us at Century Color via the web. DataMatch Lab helps us to take those jobs, integrate them with the system, and print reports about your job, such as a total list of all the students that have ordered, or Package Labels so that we can correctly assign each student their package of pictures. I will be working on some other projects today, but I should get to work... it looks like DataMatch Lab has compiled.