I see Elisa Johnson and the Canadian crew are there and I think I saw Joel Semeniuk’s i.m. said something like T-17 since he’s flying there too as a judge.
Daily Archives: July 2, 2004
computer problems? “turn off your firewall!” – NOT!
You know it’s kind of a joke among those who really understand networks and system admin that people turn off their windows xp firewall in order to solve computer problems.
I’m probably going to spend a good part of my “weekend” trying to avoid being one of those people.
update: maybe I’m not so stupid – according to this kb article, at least
Tablet PC’s used for kids education program at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo
This is not even new news. But it’s new to me. And the best is that Jon Box’s company, Quilogy, is the one that wrote the software.
Here is a page with a description of the project and a great video about it.
Most notable is that the Zoo was honored with a 2003 InfoWorld 100 Award, as well as a Microsoft Best Innovation in Education runner-up award at the Public-Sector Partner Executive Summit in May 2004.
Jon Box & Russ Fustino do DevDays
Now this is an event I would love to have been at with these two clowns! Jon & Russ are smart, fun and great presenters and I hear there were ribs, to boot!
4th of July Outhouse Races … only in Vermont!
Yes you read that right. A 4th of July tradition in Bristol VT (which is the closest “real town” to where I live being 12 miles away) are the pre-parade Outhouse Races. SInce we used to live much further away, this will be the first time we have watched them. Apparently the rules are they have to be human powered and there has to be someone sitting inside (a “rider“) and there has to be a door (“for privacy, of course“)! The above link has the actual rules.
how a developer saves two minutes of their precious time
I had a new table to add to a sql server database. The table was already pre-defined in a dataset schema in vs.net. I thought”wouldn’t it be nice to create a table from an xsd as easily as I can create an xsd from a table?“
I could have created the table by hand in 2 minutes.
But instead I went over the XMLSpy website to see if they had that feature and it looks like they do. So I installed XML Spy Enterprise 2004 from my demo cd. I went to register for the 30 day trial and got a message that said it was an outdated version and I needed to download a new one. So I downloaded XMLSpy Professional latest version and isntalled that. Then I downloaded the software that integrates it with VS.NET. Then I waited while the help file updated. So now it has been over an hour. And let’s see how much longer it will take me to figure out how to do that task in XML Spy so I can save myself 2 minutes. Isn’t this typical for all of us, though?
Update: 10 minutes. That was only because there were multiple tables in the dataset with relationships and I had to do it over again so that I could get just the one table I wanted. Very nice and easy. Of course this is about .05% of XML Spy and the entire product is a bit overkill for just that but now that I finally have it installed, I will surely begin playing with its new features. This particular feature is not in the free XML Spy Home Version. The feature-rich Pro version is $500, which I would be hard pressed to buy unless I couldn’t live without it. I did pay $300 just for one XCeed component – the .NET Stream Compression tool. So it’s not that I’m cheap or unwilling. Although it did kind of kill me to recieve a few free licenses to raffle to my user group 4 months later.
Crystal Reports Error in Formula Record_Selection
This was a REALLY difficult problem to track down so I am adding it into the world for google to help someone else (or even myself again).
I used one cyrstal report as a basis for another. So I literally copied the report files to a new folder.
When running the report an error was thrown that I could not debug:
Error in File C:\DOCUME~1\Julie\LOCALS~1\Temp\temp_8c3aef3e-caf3-4214-99ee-6ff344a4c8a7.rpt:
Error in formula <Record_Selection>.
‘{MDTTests.fieldreportid} = {?Pm-FieldReportswithProject.fieldreportid}
This field name is not known.
What is strange about this error is that the namespace MDTTests is from the original report. So I knew that it was left over somewhere in this report. It took me over an hour to find it. Now it seems obvious and easy to find, I don’t know what took me so long to try this
Once in here, I could see the offending code that just needed to be deleted. This is related to linking a sub report but does not show up in the dialog for linking a sub report and it does not get cleared on it’s own for some reason. In fact you can see that each time I went to fiddle with this setting through the link sub-report dialog, it just kept adding to the list.
I removed all but the last of these lines and my report came up perfectly.