There are days when ASP really lives up to its namesake and just completely kills you, or more accurately, kills your webserver that has previously managed to woo you as if it were Cleopatra herself.
Seriously. Microsoft needs to sort out this inter platform CLR bollocks. How is it that an application working perfectly on a local machine and a test server fails on a production server? Versions? Bollocks – all the asp.net versions are the same. I bet even they wouldn’t be able to answer it. Then to add insult to injury, all they give you is
Void System.Web.UI.WebControls.Parameter..ctor
Yah. Okaaaay……very helpful there Mr M$ ASP.Net. I mean, sure. That makes a lot of sense. I know exactly what to do now.
Thank goodness for the interwebs, otherwise I would be stuck trying to decode this nonesense myself. To the rescue this blog post. Thank you good sir.
If you jump between Linux and Windows XP like I do, sometimes you’ll pull your Rails app into the dreaded M$ platform, fire it up and be greeted with a lovely “Internal Server Error”. Naturally it goes on to say something like “You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it! You might have expected an instance of Array. The error occurred while evaluating nil.each” despite the fact that you’ve changed no code since last night when your app was running rather nicely in a Linux environment thank you very much. Sometimes you just need to hack your way out of a problem without worrying about the whys and wherefores – and that’s exactly what we are going to do here. So……open up config\environments\development.rb and find this line :
config.logger = Logger.new(config.log_path, 2, 10.kilobytes)
comment it out comme ça
#config.logger = Logger.new(config.log_path, 2, 10.kilobytes)and fire it up again. All good? Yes? Excellent. Fixed. Why? Um. Log rotation in XP apparently. Something funny about it. Don’t really know. Haven’t investigated it much further because there is no way in hell I’m going to run a production Rails app in Windows. Ever.
Yes indeed folks, I bring you the number of passports lost or stolen in Europe as recorded by the British consulates in said countries for the year 01 April 2008 to 31 March 2009.
Red = worse. From which we can falsely infer that we shouldn’t go to the red ones because you are more likely to have your passport stolen 
One of the blessings in WordPress is the vast array of plugins available. However, it is also one of the curses….because it makes us lazy. While this doesn’t seem to be problematic in the short term, in the longer term, large numbers of plugins can cause blogs to slow down, and even worse, the various plugins could start interfering with each other. So, whenever I can, I like to write my own code – the two advantages are that
1 – I can control exactly what goes in to the code, making it do what I need and no more
and
2 – I’ve written the code so if things start to clash, it’s going to be easier to debug.
So, let’s learn how to create a WordPress page to display every comment on our blog and just for fun, let’s also code up a quicktag which we can place into any page or post where we want the comments displayed.
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private Dictionary theThingThatWasNotUnique(){ blah blah blah; Dictionary aSetOfResults= new Dictionary(); foreach (DataRow dr in ds.Tables[0].Rows){ DateTime startDate= (DateTime)dr["dtStart"]; string activityName = (string)dr["sActivityName"]; aSetOfResults.Add(startDate, activityName); } }
Okay, the Dictionary object in C# is pretty neat. I mean it’s fast and light because it’s essentially a hash table and it really is nice to enumerate through. The gotcha is, it relies on unique values in the key. And herein lies the problem with the code above. In the application I was troubleshooting, the dates that were stored were not guaranteed to be unique. This is really a simple case of not understanding the data structure properly and making false assumptions. (more…)
Here’s a one column minimalist wordpress theme for you, based on my current blog’s look and feel. The theme is text based and probably best suited to people who want to actually write a blog rather than set up a bunch of advertising in their sidebars which seems to be the norm today. I’ve bucked the trend of having overly busy home pages and magazine style layouts. I mean really, you are not a magazine, and if you were, you would probably not be using a free theme . Widgets are displayed at the bottom in a three column footer.
True to tunaslut ideals, this theme is certified dolphin friendly.
Download In Brine WordPress Theme now hosted at wordpress.org
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