I have no idea how it got into this state, or why, or how to get my icons and search results back. Since this is, I think, the only way to get to applications, this is kind of frustrating. It seems I now have to search round in Explorer to find the relevant EXE…
Update - Turns out the fix for this is the old favourite, a reboot…
After installing Windows 8, one of my AppPools in IIS kept stopping with the error ‘The Module DLL C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\rewrite.dll failed to load’ appearing in my Event Log. Since I’m not really using the IIS URL Rewrite module, I tried removing it from IIS, but this didn’t fix the problem. But uninstalling it via Control Panel did fix the issue. Not sure what the underlying problem was and obviously this isn’t a great solution if you are using the URL Rewrite module, but it worked for me!
I’d read a lot about what a bad OS Windows 8 is for desktop systems, since it’s all about adding features for use on tablets. So being the masochist I am, I thought I’d install it on my desktop machine, a none too modern Dell box with a couple of monitors. Several hours later, it was done and I hit my first problem. Windows didn’t like my mouse. This made navigating round the new user interface a little tricky. But after swapping out the mouse for another one, things got better.
So the big complaint about Windows 8 is that the Start button is no more. But move the mouse to the bottom left of the screen and a little Start popup appears. Click on that and most of your apps are listed. For the ones that aren’t, just start typing and a list of matching apps appear. And here’s the important thing about that search facility, it’s much faster than the same search functionality in Windows 7, which always seemed to hang for seconds before doing anything. The learning curve for this was about 5 minutes, although I have to admit I do occasionally mistakenly click on the task bar rather than the Start popup.
So the biggest issue seems to be a non issue, for me at least. The things that I like so far are much faster boot times, a task bar that stretches across multiple monitors and a much improved Task Manager. Nothing revolutionary but welcome none the less.
I then installed it on my laptop. Much the same experience, although Minecraft no longer runs due to my graphics card driver not supporting OpenGL. I am not popular with my daughter.
There are shedloads of new things in that Start screen, but as a desktop user I was more concerned about getting to all the stuff I currently use and that all works fine. So what’s all the fuss about?
In my day job, each of the customers running in our hosted environment have their own SQL Server database. As we develop the software that runs on top of these databases, we often need to update the schema of each database. I knocked together a little console application in C# to do the job and here are the interesting parts of it. First, we need to get a list of the available databases, which can be achieved quite easily.
List<string> DBs = new List<string>(); // get list of available databases SqlCommand command = conn.CreateCommand(); command.CommandText = "select * from master.sys.databases where DataBase_ID > 4"; using (SqlDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader()) { while (reader.Read()) { DBs.Add(reader.GetString(0)); } } DBs.Sort();
Next, we need to execute the SQL updates. This isn’t quite as easy as you’d think. If you want to execute multiple SQL statements with GO statements between them, SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery won’t handle them. Fortunately SQL Server comes with some assemblies that solve the problem. So you need to add references to Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo.dll, Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk.Sfc.dll and Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo.dll. Once they have been referenced, the following code should be able to handle any SQL you throw at it.
foreach (string database in DBs) { Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server server = new Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server(new ServerConnection(conn)); server.ConnectionContext.ExecuteNonQuery("USE " + database + "\nGO\n" + sql); }
It was five years ago. We’d driven down to Spain to see my dad and as we sat in his living room I was amazed to see my teenage nephew and his mate typing ferociously on their laptops as they chatted away on the social network du jour (I’m guessing Facebook but I might be wrong). I remember thinking at the time what would happen if we could harness all that energy into doing something productive.
What I hadn’t realised is that Facebook had already figured out how to harness that energy. Most websites (ignoring the ones that sell stuff) draw viewers in by producing interesting content and make their money through advertising on the site. Facebook works in the same way, but it doesn’t produce its own content, it gets its users to do that. In fact it’s a brilliant system since the content that is produced helps to decide what adverts should get shown, but I can’t help feeling there’s a better way. If I write some content, I want to have the chance to earn some income from it. I know from my experiences here that the chances of me making a reasonable amount of cash are pretty low, but I still think the system where the advertising network takes a cut and the content producer takes a cut is a fairer approach.
I think there are two approaches possible. The first is to build a competitor to Facebook, where the users take a cut of profits. I think this could have a few problems, how do you decide who gets what?, how do you stop fake users signing up just for a cut?, how do you stop click through fraud to increase earnings?
So here’s another option, we develop open protocols that allow different sites to hook up together and provide similar functionality to Facebook (and Twitter and Google+ and LinkedIn). There’s not a lot to it as far as I can see, the basic actions are add a friend, follow someone (that’s pretty much RSS), like something, send a message to someone and publish a message (that’s essentially a blog post). None of it is rocket science. And then we all have a choice. A geek like me could mash all my social networking stuff together on my own site and have the chance to earn some money. Ordinary users could continue to use the services they want, new services would crop up that aggregated all your social networks together. Everyone wins…
I started to write my own biking app for Windows Phone then found an app that was much better than I could hope to achieve. So here is the source code for my app, which might be useful if you want to do something similar, or just want to see an example Windows Phone app. Be warned, the code is not particularly pretty.
I’ve written before about the two bike apps I’ve found for my Windows Phone, MyBikeMap and MapMyRide. I was so convinced that they were the only two options available that I started to write my own bike app. I got quite far with it, then I noticed a new app, Cyclocomp. I downloaded it and was quite impressed but decided it had a fatal flaw, it lets the phone go to sleep, the same problem that MapMyRide had. Wondering if I’m doing something wrong or am using these apps in a way nobody else is I had a look around for a review of it. That led me on to another app Endomondo. So I thought I’d give it a go and was immediately impressed.
The user interface is simple and elegant, the displayed stats can be configured to whatever you prefer, the map takes up the whole screen and you can even receive pep talks (and you can turn them off!). And even better, the data gets uploaded to the Endomondo website where you can view the map and see lots of geeky stats about your rides. And you can even enter challenges with other users, challenges that I am bound to lose since there’s clearly some very fit, active people on there. My only complaint is the map occasionally seems to get confused and stops showing the trail of where you’ve come from. But for free, it’s pretty much perfect.
And it rather puts my feeble effort to shame, so I guess my bike app won’t be seeing the light of day…
You’ve probably seen the adverts where Phil Spencer, the man whose remarkable negotiating skills can sometimes get £5,000 knocked off a £500,000 house purchase, tells us about this remarkable website which can connect us punters with local tradesmen. To me this seems like a good idea for a website and I have some work that needs doing, so thought I’d give it a spin.
So I filled in my details, entered the job details and waited for a response. And then, nothing. OK, not entirely true, I received a couple of text messages and emails. A couple of days passed and I received an email telling me that I hadn’t had a response and maybe I should expand on my job description to get a response. So off I went and updated the description and hit submit and then I was presented with a 404 error (for the non technical, this means the website is broken). So I tried again and got the same result (definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results). And I gave up at that point.
OK, slightly annoying, but no worries, I’ll drop them an email and let them know and I’ll update the description later when it’s fixed. So I go to their contact page. I can ring them, but not at this time or I can send them a tweet or write on their Facebook page or add a comment to their blog. No feedback form, no email address. I didn’t particularly want to berate them on a public forum, maybe the problem is something specific to me, so none of those options appealed. Yes, yes, I see the irony, I am now berating them quite publically (hello my many reader), but I’m annoyed now.
So, so far, Rated People is something of a failure for me. I think if you’re going to be spending a bunch of money on TV advertising, quite a bit of effort should also be spent on the product…
Update – A funny thing happened today, I got a call from Rated People, specifically due to this blog post. I’ve ranted about a few companies on here and never got any response from the company involved, so it was a pleasant surprise to get some feedback. I should also say that I did eventually manage to update my job description and also got a response from an interested builder, who is repairing my pointing as I type. So it would appear my initial review of Rated People may have been overly negative. And what’s more, Phil Spencer is no longer doing the voice over on their ads…
I recently took possession of a new Nokia Lumia 800, thanks to work, and immediately thought it would make a great replacement for my Veloset GPS 600 bike computer. Hearing Windows Phone didn’t have many apps, I thought I’d have to write my own biking app, but it turns out there are already a couple available, both free.
The first is MapMyRide. This initially seemed pretty good, but it has one fatal flaw, it lets the phone go to sleep. If you want to look at the map as you ride it is pretty tricky. You really don’t want to be fiddling with your phone when you’re riding.
Next up is MyBikeMap, which has one big advantage in that it doesn’t let the phone sleep, so I can look at my map all the time during my ride. It’s also well designed, with a simple user interface and showing just the pertinent information on the screen displayed when riding. It’s not perfect, my main complaint is the lack of support for miles, but it’s hard to complain too much when it’s free and it does most of what I want.
The final piece of the puzzle is something to attach the phone to my bike. I went for this mounting, primarily because it came up first on a Google search. The phone fits it perfectly and I was pleased to realise I could leave the zip open slightly to still have access to the buttons and I was able to use the touch screen through the plastic cover. But it does have a somewhat major problem as I found out today. Although the coupling between cover and bracket on the bike is perfectly adequate when riding on a road, if it gets a jolt then the cover (and the phone) can go flying. And you might not even notice until you look down some time later.
The design of the mounting is kind of weird, the cover is attached to the bracket not once but twice. One of these couplings is pretty secure, but the other isn’t. So the solution I’ve come up with is to glue the weaker coupling and I’m hoping this solves the problem. But you may want to consider this issue before purchasing this mounting.
But other than the teething problems, I’m pretty happy with this set up. It’s great to have a map in front of me as I ride, since it gives me much more opportunity to try heading off down a road or track that I don’t know without worrying about getting completely lost. And it makes me think the market for high end bike computers may not last much longer. Why spend £200 on one of them when a smart phone can do the same job?
Two years ago I noted that the KmLayer in Google Maps didn’t provide an event to inform me if there was a problem when loading the KML. Things have moved on and an event has been added to the API at some point. Usage is as follows.
var kmlLayer = new google.maps.KmlLayer(url, { map: map });
google.maps.event.addListener(kmlLayer, 'status_changed', function() {
if (kmlLayer.getStatus() == 'OK')
$('#status').html('');
else
$('#status').html('KML loading problem - ' + kmlLayer.getStatus());
});
My proper website has been around for about 12 years. For most of that time it had very few visitors and the money I made from advertising was minimal. Then a couple of years ago advertising revenue started going up. It’s now plateaued but I earn a nice wedge of cash ever month, not enough to give up the day job but enough to add a decent amount to my income. So what’s my secret and how can you do the same thing?
Firstly, you can optimise the placement, colours and number of AdSense units. Now this may well improve your revenue but the problem is it is almost impossible to figure out if revenue increased due to changes to your ads or just due to random fluctuations. Take a look at my daily income over the past month.
There’s a lot of volatility in those figures. Admittedly you can slice the data in different ways which can produce better results but even with no changes to my ad setup, the daily numbers are all pretty volatile. And if you aren’t making a lot of cash from your ads, your figures are likely even more volatile. So I figure if you want to optimise you ad setup, then you need to be looking at weekly or monthly numbers, so the feedback loop on changes is going to be pretty slow. To be frank the limit of my optimisation of ads is to increase the number of ad units to three (the maximum allowed and also probably the maximum number that wouldn’t be too annoying to a user of you site).
So what did cause the increase in my income? Simple really, an increasing number of visitors. My graph of monthly visitors and my graph of monthly AdSense revenue are almost identical. So unfortunately the answer to the question of how to increase AdSense revenue is another question, how to increase the number of visitors to your site.
And the answer to that question is actually pretty straightforward I reckon. The first part is fully within your control - Produce a lot of content of a reasonably quality. i.e Content that search engines will consider to be of value and hence index. The second part isn’t completely within your control, gain some inbound links from reputable sites. I actually think this will naturally follow from producing content that people appreciate.
In some ways I can’t help thinking this is the business model that Facebook has adopted, get a shedload of content (although in their case its helpfully created by their own users) and shove ads on it.
The Big Bang Theory hasn’t been quite the same since the geeks started to pair off with girlfriends (since half the humour was about them failing spectacularly in their endeavours with the opposite sex), but Sheldon’s recent video podcast ‘Fun with flags’ was rather splendid.
I’m used to visiting a website and their adverts then following me round the web afterwards. It’s happened with Dell and some property website. They even seem to make an effort to show me relevant stuff (laptops I was looking at or properties in the area I looked at). Then after a few days they disappear. I find it a bit creepy and it’s a bit of an eye opener to realise what the ad companies know about me (or about the cookie that’s sat on my machine).
But there’s an advert that’s been following me around for months now, for LeanKit Enterprise Kanban. I’m pretty sure this ad can’t be getting shown to everybody on the web, since this is a pretty niche product, so I can only assume it’s appearing because I visited their site ages ago. This has gone beyond creepy, this is just plain weird. Is showing me the same ad for months on end actually effective? Are the advertisers paying a premium for it?
Internet Explorer has a non-standard method available in XML documents returned from AJAX calls called selectSingleNode. Pass in some XPath and it returns the first node that matches the XPath. Other browsers have ways of doing the same thing, but they are more long winded. So in short, I like the IE implementation and since I don’t fiddle with XML in JavaScript that often I often forget that selectSingleNode is not supported on all browsers (and if you’re wondering why I use IE as my primary browser, it’s because it’s still, just about, the most popular browser out there).
So here’s a cross browser version of selectSingleNode (not my own work, copy and pasted from somewhere I can’t remember on the web)
function SelectSingleNode(xmlDoc, elementPath) { if (xmlDoc.evaluate) { var nodes = xmlDoc.evaluate(elementPath, xmlDoc, null, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE, null); var results = nodes.iterateNext(); return results; } else return xmlDoc.selectSingleNode(elementPath); }
Update – This no longer works in IE10, since selectSingleNode has been removed from the XML document returned from AJAX calls. This can be worked around by setting the response type of the XmlHttpRequest, like so
xhr.responseType = 'msxml-document';
Update – There’s a more fully featured version of this now available
The blog of my employer Business Optix has gone live. We’ll be posting there as we roll out new features to our web and desktop products, along with tips and tricks to use the current software and any other company news. Keep up to date by signing up to the RSS feed.
My first foray into the world of bike computers was a Sigma 1609 device. I quite liked it, since it was simple to use with a clear display, big chunky buttons and a very low price. The only minor downside was a certain amount of faffing around required to get it configured initially since it needed to know how big my wheels were.
But one day on my ride to work, a driver decided it would be a good idea to pull out at a junction without looking to see if anybody was coming and knocked me to the ground in the process. As I dusted myself off at the side of the road I heard a crunching sound and realised me and my bike had successfully got to the road side but my Sigma hadn’t.
So it was time to get another bike computer, since they are quite addictive. Being a map geek, I thought it was time I bought one with GPS, so I could map my routes on my PC. The Veloset GPS 600 caught my eye, since it was probably the cheapest GPS enabled bike computer available.
And it when it arrived first impressions were good, coming in a nice attractive box. But firing it up was disappointing. For some reason it uses a butt ugly font to display text and since it’s only a small device it’s not only ugly but difficult to read as well.
Which can also be said for the bike computer itself. It’s not the prettiest device ever but it does what it needs to do, displaying current speed, average speed (this time accurately!), distance covered, altitude, journey time etc. I’m not particularly keen on the touchpad buttons, since it’s easy to press them by accident and it’s impossible to press them at all when wearing gloves. Also on occasion the GPS seems to take a while to switch itself on, so the starts of journeys are sometimes lost.
So in conclusion, it’s the cheapest GPS enabled bike computer available and it shows in the presentation. It’s not a device you’ll fall in love with, but it does do everything it needs to do.
I wanted to let users log in to our application using their Windows user name or their email address. In order to achieve this aim, I needed to get hold of a UserPrincipal from the user’s email address so I could then test the password they entered was correct. It took quite a lot of searching to find the relevant code, so I thought I’d post the pertinent part here.
PrincipalContext context = new PrincipalContext( ContextType.Domain, Environment.UserDomainName); UserPrincipal user = new UserPrincipal(context); user.EmailAddress = "test@test.com"; // create a principal searcher for running a search operation PrincipalSearcher pS = new PrincipalSearcher(user); // run the query PrincipalSearchResult<Principal> results = pS.FindAll(); foreach (Principal result in results) { // do something useful... }
If like me you find it hard to grasp how the tiny the tiniest things are and how massively huge the biggest things are, then have a look at this
I’m not sure our minds can ever fully comprehend these different distances and sizes, but maybe it’ll help…
The main argument for bankers earning vast amounts of money seems to be that in a global market, they’ll just bugger off somewhere else if we can’t match the money available elsewhere. But the odd thing is, for the rest of us, globalization has led to stagnating wages as jobs have been outsourced to countries with cheaper labour. Odd that the free market doesn’t work in the same way for the rich as it does for everyone else.
So if we assume that maybe this argument is a bit of a fib, and assuming we can find decent replacements in some far off land who are willing to work for a much smaller pay packet, can’t we just outsource all our bankers along with some of our well paid CEOs? That’s some offshoring I wouldn’t mind seeing.
A while back I had to interview some people for a developer role at work so came up with a few questions, combining a few from the web with some of my own. This is essentially a note to myself for next time I’m interviewing.
jQuery
What's a jQuery selector? How would you select an item by its ID? By its class?
Give some examples of JQuery UI effects and widgets and what they could be used for
.NET
What's an interface? Compare and contrast with an abstract class
How does memory management differ between .NET and a non-managed language? How can we make .NET behave more like a non-managed language?
What are generics? Why use List<> instead of ArrayList?
What's a virtual function? How does it relate to OOP?
Web
What is a RESTful web service? Why are they preferred to SOAP web services?
What are the common data formats returned by an AJAX web service call? Is one better than the other? What about if you wanted to call it from a fat client?
Name and describe several HTTP status codes
Name the various HTTP verbs and when they are used
General
Your application has a performance problem, how would you investigate the issue?
An error occurs in your web application but only in production and only happens occasionally, how do you go about tracking down the problem?
What are some of the issues around multi-threaded applications?
Discuss some ways of ensuring code quality remains high in a project
Embedded Analytics provide a nice service that will email you whenever somebody clicks on a new link to your site. I’ve been signed up for a while and it’s interesting to see who’s linked to my site. But I received an email last week informing me that my site had so many inbound links that I would have to start paying for the service. To be fair the amount they were going to charge me wasn’t a lot, but I couldn’t really justify spending money on something that is essentially just a way to waste a bit of time for me. And I also figured I could probably do the same thing myself through the Google Analytics API, since this is what Embedded Analytics uses.
I’m assuming that Embedded Analytics uses the source for visitors to your site to spot new links. There is a downside to this since it won’t spot links that have been added but have not been clicked on, but generally these won’t be that interesting, since they presumably are links on low traffic sites.
So to implement this requires a few steps. Pull out the data from Google Analytics and store this data somewhere (DB, XML file, whatever). Then next time we pull the data out of Google, check for new URLs in the returned data and send a notification of these new URLs. Embedded Analytics also goes a step further and validates that the links are valid and that the pages containing them are available from the web. I was only really interested in the first part of this solution so have written a piece of code to pull out the URLs using the Google Data API for .NET. The rest of the work is left as an exercise for the reader!
using System; using Google.GData.Analytics; namespace GoogleAnalytics { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { AccountQuery feedQuery = new AccountQuery(); AnalyticsService service = new AnalyticsService("DoogalAnalytics"); service.setUserCredentials("email", "password"); DataQuery pageViewQuery = new DataQuery("https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data"); pageViewQuery.Ids = "ga:202885"; pageViewQuery.Metrics = "ga:visits"; pageViewQuery.Dimensions = "ga:source,ga:referralPath"; pageViewQuery.Sort = "ga:source,ga:referralPath"; pageViewQuery.GAStartDate = DateTime.Now.AddMonths(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); pageViewQuery.GAEndDate = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); DataFeed feed = service.Query(pageViewQuery); for (int i = 0; i < feed.Entries.Count; i++) { DataEntry pvEntry = (DataEntry)feed.Entries[i]; string host = pvEntry.Dimensions[0].Value; string path = pvEntry.Dimensions[1].Value; Console.WriteLine("http://" + host + path); } Console.ReadLine(); } } }
It seems a little strange to me that at a time when banks are meant to be desperately trying to increase their balance sheets, they are offering such meagre interest rates. I dunnow but maybe offer some decent rates and people will shove their money in your bank? But it seems they have decided it’s better to offer crap rates and hope we are too stupid to realise we can get better returns elsewhere.
So for a few years I’ve been stashing cash in Zopa and getting a return that manages to beat inflation by lending money directly to people, with the caveat that there is a higher level of risk than having money in the bank.
But I’m obviously not the only person to choose this option and rates have been falling of late. And although I’m happy to finance personal loans, i did have a hankering to lend money to businesses, especially since this seems to be something else banks are failing to do properly*
Which is where Funding Circle comes in. This is peer to peer lending but the other party is a business. Interest rates are currently some what better than Zopa. Time will tell how bad the default rates are but I’m going to drip feed some money in there and see how it pans out.
*I always thought banking was pretty straightforward, take in money from deposits, then lend it out to other people and skim a bit of profit from the transaction. Simple and a bit boring. Maybe they should have stuck to this slightly dull job, rather than inventing, buying and selling insane derivatives that nobody understands and nobody can quantify the associated risk. Get back to doing what you’re meant to do and people might get off your back a bit…
A while back I picked up a copy of the Evening Standard and was surprised to see Facebook and Twitter logos at the top of every page, suggesting readers follow ES on these two websites. And this is just an extreme example of what I’m seeing more and more. Ads on the telly and in newspapers no longer show the URL of the company’s website, but the URL of their Facebook page instead.
But the thing that confuses me is why big companies would choose Facebook as their main point of contact with their customers? Sure, social networks are the big thing at the moment and getting users to follow you or like your product might have some benefit, but there seem to be a number of downsides.
First, who owns all the data being collected about your customers? My guess is Facebook. Can you extract that data if Facebook decide they don’t want you anymore or you decide to move? I guess it’s probably possible via the Facebook API but it seems somewhat risky. And even if you do extract it, Facebook will no doubt keep hold of it as well.
Then there’s the question of ads. The company pages I’ve seen on Facebook seem to have the same ads as any other page. I’ve found no indication that companies get any of the income from those ads, so why drive traffic to Facebook so they can make money from your brand? And what if Facebook decide to show ads for one of your competitors?
Frankly it all seems a bit odd. Big companies have big IT departments and generally have their own websites, fully under their control. It is pretty simple to add some Facebook widgets to your own site and get integration that way which seems a more sane approach if you want to get hooked into Facebook.
For a one man band kind of company, I can see the sense in putting you web presence on Facebook, it’s a lot simpler and cheaper than building your own website, but for multi-nationals my prediction for 2012 is that this is something they do much less of.
…with a somewhat larger waste line, somewhat smaller IQ and hopefully with less OCD tendencies.
I’ve been disenchanted with Google Friend Connect for a while. I only used it for commenting on my website but it has a number of weaknesses
For a long while I assumed Google would actually update the widgets but I’m not sure anything ever got changed after the initial release. It was released and then, nothing. Even a visit to the site shows a copyright notice from 2009, which suggests they haven’t done much with it for some time.
So I had been meaning to convert to some other system but just hadn’t got round to it. Then I noticed Google have decided to can it (which of course hasn’t been mentioned anywhere on the Friend Connect site itself), so I decided it was time to finally do something. Google’s suggested solution is to hook into Google+, but that seems like a pretty useless way to add commenting to a website. So my suggested solution is to sign up to Disqus, it takes about 10 minutes to plug it in to your website and looks pretty good straight out of the box.
I’ve seen one or two examples of using Google Maps in a WinForms desktop app, but the ones I’ve seen seem to involve loading image tiles from the Google server directly. There’s nothing wrong with that approach but I thought it would be a lot simpler to simply host a local web page using the Google Maps API in a WebBrowser control in an application. Here is a very simple example of this idea.
If you want to extend this example, it’s possible to call scripts in the page via the WebBrowser.Document.InvokeScript method and the application can respond to events in the page via the WebBrowser.ObjectForScripting property.
As an aside, similar ideas can be applied to hosting other Javascript web components, such as an HTML editor like CKEditor.
I received a bug report about my website. The maps that appear on my UK postcodes pages weren’t working in IE8. I hadn’t noticed since they were working fine in IE9 but when I switched to compatibility view in IE9 I started to see the same problem. This helped because I was then able to debug my JavaScript (much as I love IETester, I’d love it even more if I had access to the developer tools for each version of IE). And debugging the script revealed google.maps was null.
At this point I assumed this was a problem with my Google Maps script, so tried loading Google Maps asynchronously then tried specifying an older version of the API. Neither helped. I tried inserting the script in my HTML head but with no luck.
Finally I had a look at the google object and saw the only thing defined in there was friendconnect. Now my suspicions moved away from Google Maps to Google Friend Connect. my Friend Connect stuff appears at the bottom of each page and the script reference for it was also down the bottom of the page. So I thought I’d tried moving the Friend Connect script reference to the html header. And voila, the maps started working again.
So the conclusion? I’m not really sure, although I suspect Friend Connect is removing the google.maps object, although it seems odd that it only happens on IE8.
For a long time I’ve shown the most popular pages on the home page of my website. I did this by logging every page that was viewed to the MySql database on the back end. This kind of worked but had a few problems. First, it wasn’t very clever since it couldn’t tell the difference between a real visitor and a search engine bot. Second, since I’ve started to get quite a few visitors (no, really), it was writing a large amount of data to the database.
So I thought there must be a better solution. Figuring that all the information I needed was already being collected by Google Analytics, I thought I could grab this data and dump it into a much smaller with just the page URL and the number of visits (rather than adding a row for every visit). So I coded up a solution using the .NET wrapper around the Google Analytics API. And this is what it looks like (with the database access code removed for clarity). You’ll need to provide your own email address, password and Google Analytics account table ID to get this to work, for obvious reasons.
using System; using Google.GData.Analytics; namespace GoogleAnalytics { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { AccountQuery feedQuery = new AccountQuery(); AnalyticsService service = new AnalyticsService("DoogalAnalytics"); service.setUserCredentials("email address", "password"); DataQuery pageViewQuery = new DataQuery("https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data"); pageViewQuery.Ids = "Google Analytics account table ID"; pageViewQuery.Metrics = "ga:visits"; pageViewQuery.Dimensions = "ga:pagePath"; pageViewQuery.Sort = "-ga:visits"; pageViewQuery.GAStartDate = DateTime.Now.AddMonths(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); pageViewQuery.GAEndDate = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); DataFeed feed = service.Query(pageViewQuery); for (int i = 0; i < 20; i++) { DataEntry pvEntry = (DataEntry)feed.Entries[i]; string page = pvEntry.Dimensions[0].Value.Substring(1); string visits = pvEntry.Metrics[0].Value; Console.WriteLine(page + ": " + visits); } Console.ReadLine(); } } }
If you’ve ever looked round for a profiler for XSL transformations then chances are you’ve found the Microsoft add-on for Visual Studio, which looks like it’s just the ticket, if you happen to have Visual Studio Team System. But if you don’t happen to own that version, then it might look like you have to upgrade your VS license or buy some other XSLT profiler.
But if you happen to own a .NET profiler (I highly recommend AQTime) then there may be another solution. Visual Studio comes with the XSLTC tool that can be used to generate an assembly from an XSL transformation. Once we’ve got an assembly, then we can build a small wrapper application that loads up the assembly, passes it to an instance of the XslCompiledTransform class and calls the transform. And once we’ve got that, we can use a standard .NET profiler to find bottlenecks.
And as I understand it, the XSLT profiler add-on for Visual Studio works in just this way so profiling using this technique should be just as effective as the Microsoft version.
Apparently I’ve been using Spotfiy for over two years. Funny, it seems longer than that. It was the perfect music service for me, unlimited music of my choosing on my PC, which is where I listen to music most of the time, with the only minor downside being some adverts that play occasionally between tracks. But it looks like it won’t be quite so perfect anymore. Free users can only listen to a track a total of five times and total listening time will be limited to 10 hours a month.
As a frequent user of Spotify I can see why they are doing this. First, it’s obvious that advertising revenue is not what they were hoping for, most of the ads are still for Spotify itself. Second, using it has had a perhaps not unexpected effect on my music buying behaviour. First example, U2 put their last album up on Spotify before its official release. I had a listen and realised it was rubbish, so as a marketing exercise I doubt it was a huge success. Second example/s, quite a few new releases are put onto Spotify Premium upon release. On a couple of occasions I’ve then purchased the album before it’s become available on the free version (Elbow, Arcade Fire if you’re wondering). I’m guessing this isn’t what Spotify wanted me to do, they were presumably hoping I’d pony up the Premium version. And then when those albums did become available on the free version (generally only a few weeks after release) I was hit with a mild feeling of regret for spending money that I didn’t really need to and deciding to think twice before making another purchase. Again, probably not what the music industry sponsors of Spotify were hoping for.
So now I’ve got a choice, sign up for a tenner a month and continue on as I am at the moment or spend that tenner on a CD every month. I guess the music industry don’t care too much which way that ten quid gets to them, so it’s purely a personal dilemma. But the people who can’t or won’t spend a tenner (teenagers, students mostly I guess) will probably rediscover the skill of searching for pirated albums on Google. The music industry is still caught between a rock and a hard place.
Some time ago I imported the Ordnance Survey Code-Point postcode dataset into MySql. It looks like there’s a new version of that dataset available which includes new postcodes so I wanted to update my database. I guess I could just empty the table and re-import the data, but since it takes some time import and the data is live on the web, this wasn’t the ideal solution. Fortunately, MySql has a useful IGNORE keyword which will ignore failed inserts so any old postcodes will be ignored (since the postcode is used as the primary key on the table) whilst new ones are inserted. Of course, this assumes that the latitude and longitude of old postcodes doesn’t change, which I’m hoping is a reasonable assumption. So my new code looks like this.
using System; using System.IO; using DotNetCoords; using LumenWorks.Framework.IO.Csv; using MySql.Data.MySqlClient; namespace ImportCodepoint { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\Users\Doogal\Downloads\codepo_gb\Code-Point Open\Data"); foreach (string file in files) { ReadFile(file); } } private static void ReadFile(string file) { using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(file)) { CsvReader csvReader = new CsvReader(reader, false); using (MySqlConnection conn = new MySqlConnection( "server=server;uid=username;pwd=password;database=database;")) { conn.Open(); foreach (string[] data in csvReader) { string postcode = data[0]; // some postcodes have spaces, some don't if (postcode.IndexOf(' ') < 0) postcode = data[0].Substring(0, data[0].Length - 3) + " " + data[0].Substring(data[0].Length - 3); // some have two spaces... postcode = postcode.Replace(" ", " "); double easting = double.Parse(data[10]); double northing = double.Parse(data[11]); // there are some postcodes with no location if ((easting != 0) && (northing != 0)) { // convert easting/northing to lat/long OSRef osRef = new OSRef(easting, northing); LatLng latLng = osRef.ToLatLng(); latLng.ToWGS84(); using (MySqlCommand command = conn.CreateCommand()) { Console.WriteLine(postcode); command.CommandTimeout = 60; command.CommandText = string.Format( "INSERT IGNORE INTO Postcodes (Postcode, Latitude, Longitude) " + "VALUES ('{0}', {1}, {2})", postcode, latLng.Latitude, latLng.Longitude); int count = command.ExecuteNonQuery(); if (count > 0) Console.WriteLine("Added"); } } } } } } } }
Update – I now realise this post is kind of pointless, there is a module for compression of dynamic content, called unsurprisingly DynamicCompressionModule… But the approach described may be useful for someone somewhere…
I couldn’t find anything that will GZip all the content returned by ASP.NET. There’s a module for compression of static files but nothing for dynamic content. There may be a good reason for this, perhaps the overhead of GZipping content on the fly can kill your server, but since my current project has no static content I thought it would be useful to give it a go. The solution is pretty simple, register the following module in web.config and you’re good to go.
using System; using System.IO.Compression; using System.Web; namespace MyNamespace { public class GzipModule : IHttpModule { public void Dispose() { } public void Init(HttpApplication context) { context.BeginRequest += new EventHandler(context_BeginRequest); } void context_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e) { HttpApplication app = (HttpApplication)sender; if ((app.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"] != null) && (app.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"].Contains("gzip"))) { app.Response.Filter = new GZipStream(app.Response.Filter, CompressionMode.Compress); app.Response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "gzip"); app.Response.Cache.VaryByHeaders["Accept-encoding"] = true; } } } }
Registration is as follows
<modules> <add name="GzipModule" type="MyNamespace.GzipModule" /> </modules>
It took me a while to figure this out. Routing is meant to be baked into ASP.NET 4 but when i tried to set it up, all I got was 404 errors. I did a lot of Googling but couldn’t find anything. It turned out all I was missing was this in web.config
<system.webServer> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"></modules>
The OS Code-Point Open dataset is great, except for a few omissions. It doesn’t include data for Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands. It turns out that the Northern Irish postcode data can be found here. Unfortunately that data is in ESRI and MapInfo formats, which I’m not sure how to read. Fortunately Jamie Thompson has converted it to CSV, which is a little easier to deal with.
From that CSV file, it’s quite simple to import the data into SQL Server or MySql using code slightly modified from my Code-Point examples (SQL Server here and MySql here). The only thing to note is that the CSV file uses Irish grid references rather than OS grid references.
Now to figure out where to get hold of the Isle of Man and Channel Islands data…
Every .NET developer loves Reflector, since it gives us a chance to see inside assemblies that we don’t have the source for. And I’ve even read bloggers showing off the code that has been reverse engineered by it as evidence of poor coding practices at some organisation or another (“look, these guys use gotos!”). But though Reflector is a brilliant tool, its reverse engineering skills are not perfect. See this fairly innocent looking switch statement from some code I’m working on
switch(type) { case "gateway": SetValue(component, "@type", "decision", true); string xml = component.InnerXml; xml = xml.Replace("gateway", "decision"); component.InnerXml = xml; break; case "deliverable": case "dataObject": SetValue(component, "@type", "document", true); break; case "annotation": SetValue(component, "@type", "note", true); break; }
And this is what Reflector shows from the compiled assembly
if (CS$4$0001 != null) { if (!(CS$4$0001 == "gateway")) { if ((CS$4$0001 == "deliverable") || (CS$4$0001 == "dataObject")) { goto Label_00B0; } if (CS$4$0001 == "annotation") { goto Label_00C5; } } else { this.SetValue(component, "@type", "decision", true); string xml = component.InnerXml.Replace("gateway", "decision"); component.InnerXml = xml; } } goto Label_00DA; Label_00B0: this.SetValue(component, "@type", "document", true); goto Label_00DA; Label_00C5: this.SetValue(component, "@type", "note", true); Label_00DA:;
Which I think proves my point…
For a long while I’ve been debugging a .NET service using the recommended approach. Whilst this works, it’s kind of painful. the steps are something like this
There had to be a better way. And a bit of Googling brought up this approach. But I didn’t really understand how it worked. I guess I’d assumed the error shown in Visual Studio when you try to debug a service was actually coming from Visual Studio, but I now realise the error is coming from .NET. So by having a different piece of code run when in debug mode, the service is treated like any old application.
My solution is slightly different so I can also test the service starting and stopping. My service implementation has StartService and StopService public methods, which are called from OnStart and OnStop. And my Main method looks like this.
static void Main() { #if (!DEBUG) ServiceBase[] ServicesToRun; ServicesToRun = new ServiceBase[] { new MyService() }; ServiceBase.Run(ServicesToRun); #else WorkflowService service = new MyService(); service.StartService(); service.DoStuff(); service.StopService(); #endif }
Us software developers have had to live with offshoring for years. And I can understand why companies do it. If software isn’t your raison d'être then why not outsource it, and if you’re going to outsource it, why not send it offshore where you can get probably the work done cheaper?
But there are problems with offshoring. There are the time differences and cultural differences that may make it not go as smoothly as hoped. But I’m not one to think there’s any reason why software developed in another country should be any worse than software produced at home. I’ve dealt with many developers, at home and overseas and there are good and bad developers everywhere.
But now things have changed again. The UK government introduced a scheme, the intra company transfer visa, which is intended to bring in people to the UK to fill skills gaps that can’t be filled by the UK population. But big business have found some sweet loopholes in this scheme that means they can pay pretty much minimum wage to their developers whilst claiming back their expenses and not paying NI for them. I can understand why this is attractive to companies, it saves them money after all, and why should they care about the greater good? I doubt Henry Ford would survive very long in the modern world. But I can’t see it’s particularly good for the country as a whole, with lower tax revenue and higher unemployment being the obvious outcome. So what the hell was the government thinking of? I’m quite happy to compete with anybody on a level playing field, but when the playing field has been slanted like this, I’m pretty baffled about what’s going on.
Yesterday we had students smashing up the streets because they think it’s unfair that they are going to be in massive debt after they complete their degrees. In the past, graduates would be the people going into these relatively low paid jobs. How are they going to react when they get out of university to find there are no jobs available for them, due to this wonderful scheme?
Last time, I built a simple app to get the number of visitors to a site using the Google Analytics API. So the obvious next step is to get that data displayed on a web page. The simplest way to do this would be to add some server-side code to an ASP.NET page. But if you’ve run the code in the previous blog entry, you’ll notice it’s pretty slow, generally taking over a second to get the data back from Google. Adding a second to every page load isn’t such a good idea, so this is my slightly more complicated solution, which loads up the hit count via AJAX.
First we need a generic handler, looking something like this
<%@ WebHandler Language="C#" Class="visitorCounter" %> using System; using System.Web; using Google.GData.Analytics; public class visitorCounter : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest (HttpContext context) { AccountQuery feedQuery = new AccountQuery(); AnalyticsService service = new AnalyticsService("DoogalAnalytics"); service.setUserCredentials("email", "password"); DataQuery pageViewQuery = new DataQuery("https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data"); pageViewQuery.Ids = "ga:103173"; pageViewQuery.Metrics = "ga:visits"; pageViewQuery.GAStartDate = DateTime.Now.AddMonths(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); pageViewQuery.GAEndDate = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); DataEntry pvEntry = service.Query(pageViewQuery).Entries[0] as DataEntry; context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write(pvEntry.Metrics[0].Value); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } }
Then we just need a bit of jQuery magic to show it on the page.
<p> Visitors this month: <span id="visitorCount"></span> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $.get('visitorCounter.ashx', function (data) { $('#visitorCount').html(data); }); }); </script> </p>
With a little work this could probably be wrapped up as an ASP.NET control, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
So if you want to create your own version of Embedded analytics, the first thing to do is figure out how to use the Google Analytics API. If you’re wanting to use the .NET API, then this little snippet might help you get started. It loops through all the registered sites and shows the number of visits to each site over the last month.
class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { AccountQuery feedQuery = new AccountQuery(); AnalyticsService service = new AnalyticsService("DoogalAnalytics"); service.setUserCredentials("email", "password"); foreach (AccountEntry entry in service.Query(feedQuery).Entries) { Console.WriteLine(entry.Title.Text); DataQuery pageViewQuery = new DataQuery("https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data"); pageViewQuery.Ids = entry.ProfileId.Value; pageViewQuery.Metrics = "ga:visits"; pageViewQuery.GAStartDate = DateTime.Now.AddMonths(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); pageViewQuery.GAEndDate = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); foreach (DataEntry pvEntry in service.Query(pageViewQuery).Entries) { Console.WriteLine(pvEntry.Metrics[0].Value); } } Console.ReadLine(); } }
I’ve been working on a website for somebody and they wanted to show some information about the number of visitors to the site on the site itself. Since we already had Google Analytics installed, the obvious solution was something that hooked into that. I knew there was a Google Analytics API which I could hook into, but being lazy I hoped somebody else had already implemented something for me.
Luckily for me, there is a company called Embedded Analytics that do provide this kind of service. There are various free tools available although it does cost money if you want to use it for multiple sites. But the free service was good enough for my current needs.
Setup was simple, although you do obviously need to let them have access to your Google Analytics data. If you don’t feel comfortable with that then this isn’t the service for you. If you are OK with that, then you can quickly knock together a chart showing the number of visitors or page views in the recent past. Another nice little tool is the ability to get email alerts when somebody has linked to your site.
And now I think I might want to add this to other sites, but it’s going to start costing money to use on more than one site. When my laziness is confronted by my tight fistedness, my tight fistedness always wins out. So now I have to go back to that API and figure out how to do all this and more myself.
This was new to me so I thought I’d share. If you want to generate a file name based on some text, but that text may contain characters that aren’t allowed in file names, what to do? In the past, I’ve fumbled around, replacing invalid characters as bugs have presented themselves. But there is a much more robust way, once I noticed the Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars method. That led to this very simple method.
private string ReplaceInvalidFileNameChars(string fileName) { foreach (char invalidChar in Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()) { fileName = fileName.Replace(invalidChar, '_'); } return fileName; }
Styled Google Maps but I haven’t found a use for them up until now. But I had a desire to view urban areas in the UK and realised I could do that with styled maps, so here it is.
The .NET API for Google Docs is a strange beast. First, it has a DocumentsRequest class and a DocumentsService class. Sometimes you’ll need to use one class, sometimes the other and it’s not clear what the distinction is between the two. And I’d assumed the .NET API supported everything you could do with the raw HTTP API and hence I thought uploading a file or folder to a specific folder wasn’t possible. This led to further confusion when I tried to move a folder and it did move but left the original folder behind and I couldn’t figure out how to delete that folder. And as with most things from Google, the documentation is somewhat lacking.
So I eventually figured out I’d have to do a little work myself and came up with a couple of extension methods, one to create a folder and one to upload a file, but both accepting a parent folder. When I say I needed to do a little work, what I really mean is I used Reflector to see how the current methods worked and employed some copy and paste…
public static class GoogleDocsExtensions { public static Document CreateFolder(this DocumentsRequest docsRequest, string folderName, Document parentFolder) { Document doc = new Document(); doc.Type = Google.Documents.Document.DocumentType.Folder; doc.Title = folderName; if (parentFolder == null) return docsRequest.Insert<Document>(new Uri(DocumentsListQuery.documentsBaseUri), doc); else { return docsRequest.Insert<Document>(new Uri(parentFolder.AtomEntry.Content.AbsoluteUri), doc); } } public static void UploadFile(this DocumentsService docsService, string file, Document folder) { FileInfo info = new FileInfo(file); using (FileStream input = info.Open(FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite)) { Uri uri = new Uri(folder.AtomEntry.Content.AbsoluteUri); string str = info.Extension.ToUpper().Substring(1); string contentType = (string)DocumentsService.DocumentTypes[str]; docsService.Insert(uri, input, contentType, info.Name); } } }
I had a bit of fun upgrading my Windows 7 machine to PHP 5.2 the other day. There’s an installer available that goes most of the way but didn’t quite work for me (there’s also an installer available on www.php.net, I’m not sure how they differ).
The first problem was that my installation of IIS didn’t have the FastCGI module installed. This was pretty easy to rectify, in the IIS administrator go to Modules and then click the ‘Configure Native Modules’ link and then click the ‘Register’ button. The FastCGI module will live somewhere like ‘C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\iisfcgi.dll’. Then I manually added a handler for PHP files, although if you add the module with the correct ‘FastCgiModule’ name, a re-install should correctly add the handler.
After this was set up, I was able to load up PHP pages but they weren’t being rendered properly, because it looked like the PHP code wasn’t being evaluated and was just getting outputted as plain text. This confused me for a while and I thought the installer hadn’t done its job. But after firing up Fiddler, I saw this header in the response from the server – X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.14, which suggested the file was getting handed to PHP which was doing something with it. So I guessed there must be a problem somewhere in the PHP config file, php.ini. After searching around in there, I discovered this setting - short_open_tag = Off. This means any PHP files that use <? as their opening tag instead of <?php will not get evaluated, and turning that option on fixed my problems. One other thing to note is that an IIS reset seems to be required for any changes to that config file, since when using FastCGI the PHP executable stays resident in memory rather than restarting for every request.
Update – I’ve fixed the flickering
Update 2 – It now picks up the text colour from the ForeColor property
Update 3 – Should now work on Windows XP
Update 4 – Now lets you specify the font used for the text
using System.ComponentModel; using System.Drawing; using System.Windows.Forms; using System; namespace WinFormControls { public class TextProgressBar : ProgressBar { protected override CreateParams CreateParams { get { CreateParams result = base.CreateParams; if (Environment.OSVersion.Platform == PlatformID.Win32NT && Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major >= 6) { result.ExStyle |= 0x02000000; // WS_EX_COMPOSITED } return result; } } protected override void WndProc(ref Message m) { base.WndProc(ref m); if (m.Msg == 0x000F) { using (Graphics graphics = CreateGraphics()) using (SolidBrush brush = new SolidBrush(ForeColor)) { SizeF textSize = graphics.MeasureString(Text, Font); graphics.DrawString(Text, Font, brush, (Width - textSize.Width) / 2, (Height - textSize.Height) / 2); } } } [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Always)] [Browsable(true)] public override string Text { get { return base.Text; } set { base.Text = value; Refresh(); } } [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Always)] [Browsable(true)] public override Font Font { get { return base.Font; } set { base.Font = value; Refresh(); } } } }
We’re all looking for people to blame for the current mess we are in and apparently there are 38 causes of the current financial crisis. I’m not sure where to get hold of the original report so I’m not sure of what’s on the list but it made me think again about what I learned during my brief time working in the world of high finance a few years ago. I was there for a couple of years, so I'm clearly not hugely knowledgeable but the assumptions made when concocting the financial models used by many investors in the city always seemed a little fishy to me. Here are some of the main assumptions made and the problems I think are associated with them. Almost every financial theory will use one or more of these assumptions.
The market is efficient – All information about an asset is known and priced into the cost of that asset. Peston says this is one of the 38 causes. There are several issues with this theory, my favourite being this paradox – if the market is efficient then there is very little point in trying to play the market, since the market will always be priced accurately so there will be no opportunity to beat it by buying low, selling high. But if there are no players in the market, then it won’t be efficient. Which suggests it can never be perfectly efficient.
Another problem with the efficient market theory can be seen with something like the dot com bubble, where prices bore no relation to their underlying value, how is that sensible? The fact is share prices often bear no relation to the true worth of the company, because people think their value will continue to grow so they will be able to sell them on to a greater fool.
Investors are rational - Given two different assets with the same risk, investors will choose the one with the highest return. Clearly this isn't the case, otherwise bubbles would never happen. Another problem is that even a rational investor may not know the true risk/reward relationship. Shares may fall in value, making their dividend yield look very attractive, but there may be a good reason for this, like the economy is hitting trouble. Finally, some investors are just taking a punt, with no rational thought behind their trading.
Finally, if we decide that not all investors are rational, then we have another reason why the market will not be efficient.
There are no transaction charges – This may be nearly true for large institutional investors but for the man on the street this is very much not true, meaning any kind of investment strategy that involves a lot of trading will incur huge transaction costs, which will eat away at any profits made.
The market is liquid - This assumption basically says if you want to buy or sell, then you can. Whilst this holds true for most shares most of the time, it falls over at the most vital point, when markets are crashing, because everybody is trying to sell and there is nobody willing to buy. It is also not true for quite a few asset classes, as anyone who's tried to sell a house will know.
Normal distribution – A lot of financial theories use the normal distribution for the distribution of volatility/risk. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case. The black swans seem to occur a lot more frequently than a normal distribution would suggest. For the banks out there, this doesn’t seem to be such a problem, since they take the profits during the good times and get bailed out when those once in a lifetime occurrences strike a little too often.
And it’s the combination of all these flawed assumptions that caused at least some of the problems. They were used to build mathematical models that seemingly abolished risk or certainly incorrectly measured it.
I downloaded the IE9 beta a week or so ago. Though it looked pretty good, the performance was less than stellar. When I looked at the options dialog, I saw that ‘Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering’ was checked and also disabled, which made unchecking it quite difficult. Apparently it will be disabled if Internet Explorer decides your graphics card isn’t good enough. I’m not exactly sure what the minimum requirements are, although I have heard rumours that the card must support DirectX 11.
Anyway it seems my old Radeon X600 wasn’t up to the job so I purchased a Radeon HD5450. I have no idea if it’s a good graphics card, but it’s pretty cheap and it does support DirectX 11. After installing that, IE9 was still pretty slow. Until I remembered to uncheck that checkbox…
Before the advent of .NET, Windows development involved a lot of fiddling around with COM interfaces and trying to figure out HRESULT error codes. One prime example of this is the interfaces used to access structure storage. Structured storage is a strange beast itself, providing a way to stitch together composite files, sort of like a seriously complicated version of ZIP files. Of course this was a solution in search of a problem, it turns out ZIP files are pretty much adequate for most situations, which is probably why Office now uses them.
But these technologies have a habit of sticking around (I guess Windows will continue supporting structured storage for the rest of time or until Windows no longer exists, whichever comes sooner). So I was faced with writing some code that had to interact with structured storage. .NET wisely doesn’t have any support for it, so I was faced with dealing with the really horrible COM interfaces. And I was even thinking I’d have to write a little application to let me see inside these composite files, so I’d have a clue what was going on. But fortunately I discovered somebody had already done the job for me, and I finally get to the point of this post. If you need a structured storage viewer, download it from here. http://www.mitec.cz/ssv.html