Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
My blog site is really under attack! I thought I had it at bay after implementing AngryPets’ ReverseDos and not seeing any more of these since yesterday. ReverseDOS is doing an amazing job, but I do have to keep up with adding the domains into the config file. Only about 4 would have done the trick here. It’s amazing. Clearly there is a list of a number of my blog posts somewhere and they just run that list against their own list of urls that they want linkbacks to and keep republishing some page with that list on there or something. It’s becoming a full time job and I’m getting more than annoyed. Sadly I have “trackback services” turned off in my dasblog settings, but all of this stuff still shows up on the post’s pages.
I got a ton of referral spam yesterday, then left the house at about 2pm. When I came home our power was out and I didn’t boot up my computer until this morning.
Outlook has been downloading email for over an hour! It’s all referral spam on my blog. Thousands upon thousands. I have never seen anything like it.
Quite insane.
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
I have an ancient FoxPro DOS app that churns out reports in a way that can’t be done too easily (not worth a rewrite) in Windows. It used to print these on an HP LaserJet II (back in the days when we listened to music on those big flat round discs with a needle) and has been printed on a LaserJet 4Si for about 12 years or so. I just got a sweet little LaserJet 1320t and expected all of this printing (which is done in PCL) to continue to work. But it didn’t – at least not without some sweat and tears – and I had a few lessons to learn.
1) The new printers are very special and create their own ports on Windows for printing. I finally realized that to print from DOS at all, whether a print command from the DOS prompt or from within FoxPro, I needed to change that to LPT1. (And have to remember to switch back for all of my other printing.)
2) Somehow my application was communicating enough to the printer by saying “legal paper, please” that the printer would find the right bin, even if I moved the legal tray to the upper bin or the lower bin. With the new printer, I needed to explicitly send the PCL code for legal paper and lower bin (esc&l3A and esc&l4H)
3) My reports were printing out based on 117 lines per page (legal) . I could no longer get that to work (two hours was enough time spent on that problem, wouldn’t you say?). So I had to accept sticking with 102 lines and 8 lines per inch. I literally print this report using line and column #s for positioning, so this is a big deal for me. Of the 400 reports that get printed (one per entity), not too many of them needed that full length, so I will just have to keep an eye out for those and make sure the two page functionality I have built into this program works properly.
Hopefully this will help some other dinosaur who is moving partially to the modern ages (funny that I have one foot in the dark ages and the other dipping into the bleeding edge with the rest of my work). As long as Raymond Chen and team continue to allow me to use this reporting tool on Windows XP and beyond, I have no incentive to try to duplicate the process in windows.
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
I know I know. I have told many people that you can run vs2003 and vs2005 side by side. But I have this honker application to port and I don’t want to do it on the same machine where I need to be able to get at it (in vs2003) in emergencies. Plus I wanted everything super clean. The solution has many many assemblies and references a lot of 3rd party tools. Plus I had to move everything from WSE 2.0 to WSE 3.0. Too much for side by side if you ask me. Some of those 3rd party tools will be getting upgraded, like Janusys (finally moving to 2.0) and others.
So for the time being, I have taken my beautiful dual monitor setup and dedicated one screen to my other computer (until I find a solution as sweet as my VGA KVM cables that will work on DVI and isn’t a $200 switchbox). I’m still feeling the dual monitor vibe though. I’m coding on one screen and emailing, etc. on the other.
I could do this as VPC, but I had a whole computer just sitting there…begging for new bits!
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
I don’t have the patience that Sam Gentile does (or the knowledge to get around wierd problems) so if you are downloading the newest hottest tastiest bits (such as the latest build of Vista, which I did download last night), check his blog for problems and solutions!
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
It would be really handy if the compiler could tell when you have written code to access UI components in one of the external thread processes of the BackgroundWorker component, such as DoWork. (Yes, the debugger tells you when you messed up… just not the compiler.)
Luckily at least some of these are caught in runtime.
I will have to write myself a little reminder comment in these methods NO UI ACCESS HERE, DUMM-DUMM! I think that I will get over this very quickly though., as I get more and more used to working with asynch processes.
You, too, can write asynch processes (almost) easily in VS2005 now with the BackgroundWorker component. But you still have to know what you are doing and pay attention. You don’t need to know threading inside and out – but have an awareness of it.
Things I have done in my own office to reduce some time waste and also a huge time savings payoff for a client thanks to a little $40 utility….[read more …]
[A DevLife post]
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
Sam says “software is nothing like construction.”
My husband, the carpenter, has this poster from Milwaukee tool that definitely agrees. (And boy does he love to tease me about that!)
Okay, it’s not really related to Sam’s point about the old software/architecture analogy, but it was the first thing that happened to pop into my mind. 🙂
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org