February 2006 - Posts

26 February 2006
When Breaking Changes Actually Break Stuff
It’s funny how breaking changes actually…well, break stuff sometimes. I’ve had an issue on JK.com that I’ve been trying to track down for a while now: Search was completely broken and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. I won’t bore anyone with the troubleshooting steps I took, but long story short there was a change to the String.GetHashCode algorithm from .Net 1.1 to 2.0. It says it right there in the documentation: The behavior of GetHashCode is dependent on its implementation, which might change from one version of the common language runtime to another. A reason why this might happen is to improve the performance of GetHashCode . If you require the behavior of GetHashCode be constant, override the runtime implementation of GetHashCode with an implementation of your own that you know will never change. Eric Lippert further emphasizes this here : Finally, the string hash algorithm is not an industry standard and is not guaranteed to produce... Read More...
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25 February 2006
CoComment Script for Community Server Update
It’s the little things that keep you on your toes as a programmer. After my site upgrade to Community Server 2.0, Keyvan ever so politely pointed out that my CoComment script wasn’t working, i.e. coco enabled visitors weren’t having their comments automatically logged on the coco service. After a few minutes of digging around, I realized it was because in my original CS coco script I had hardcoded the commentFormName variable to always be __aspnetForm. Lo and behold my form name is different after the upgrade, so obviously hardcoding this value isn’t a good idea. Yeah, magic string syndrome. The problem with this is that due to either A) The way CS2.0 skins name forms, or B) The way the asp.net runtime works when generating form names (don’t know which of the the two is the guilty party), the form name was no longer __aspnetForm and had become aspnetForm. Apparently this isn’t a constant, so back to the drawing board to get this value programatically... Read More...
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23 February 2006
My Family Says I Don't Call Enough
So they read my blog to see what I’m up to, which is strange as I don’t really post about too much personal stuff. But when I spoke with one of them today, his first question was “so how did the site upgrade go?” What got me to thinking about this is I didn’t even realize that most of my blog was down for the better part of 18 hours today before I read Dave’s post about some issues he spotted early this A.M. on 2 sites he knows that recently upgraded to CS2.0. One of said sites was yours truly. As much of a vain blogger as I am you’d figure that I would have noticed, and while it’s true that at any given moment I usually have my site open in a Firefox tab, I don’t make a habit of reading individual posts (after all I did write them…maybe late at night when I need to quickly fall asleep I’ll browse over some old posts), which is where the error was occurring (technical details to follow in this post’s sidenote). The... Read More...
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21 February 2006
JaysonKnight.com Version 4 Released
After about a week’s worth of tweaking/tracking down obscure little upgrade bugs/etc (hence the deafening silence around here lately), I finally pulled the switch on JK.com v.4 earlier today; of course it’s running on Community Server v.2 RTM which was released yesterday afternoon . I’ve been playing around with CS2.0 since the early internal alpha builds, but the RTM feels so much more refined than previous versions, not to mention that the revised admin section is much more intuitive and simple to use. JK.com also feels quite a bit snappier on the new release. Ken Robertson’s neat Qgyen.ExtendedUrlMapping CS utility got me up and running in “single user” mode in all of 5 minutes, a huge improvement over the 1.x versions’ very tedious way of setting this up. For now I’m using the default CS “pistachio” theme, but will be rolling with a new theme once the community skinning folks start releasing new stuff…it’s actually... Read More...
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17 February 2006
CoComment Is Out Of Beta
According to the devs over at CoComment , their service is officially out of beta and open to anyone willing to sign up for it. They seem to have ironed most of the major kinks out of the system, and so far I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using it, namely for the fact that I can keep up with all of my comments (on coco enabled blogs at least) in one place. Getting your blog coco enabled is a snap, and now that it’s fully automated is painless for your users to take advantage of. They recently got a mention over on Wired as well, which should do quite a bit to fuel their success. Read More...
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17 February 2006
New CoComment Feature
The developers over at CoComment have added a new feature to the coco service: Total blog integration . It’s worth mentioning that there is a typo in the script mentioned in the post; the correct script to add is as follows (the full script for Community Server can be found here ): var cocomment_force = false; <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.cocomment.com/js/cocomment.js”></script> Voila, no more clicking the bookmarklet to have your coComments tracked! This will also add a CO image close to the submit button on your comment form; clicking this image will display information about what’s being submitted to coComment. Great stuff! Read More...
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14 February 2006
Very Cool Illusion
Not sure if this is old/new/whatever, but I just stumbled across it recently . Instructions from the site: If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink. If you stare at the black + in the center, the moving dot turns to green. Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating if you're lucky! It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see. I love stuff like this (yes, I was a huge fan of 3–d art back in the day). I claim zero responsibility for anyone having seizures and/or losing their eyesight as a result of this exercise. Now back to your regularly scheduled program. Read More...
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12 February 2006
Test Post From Performancing For Firefox
Performancing for Firefox 1.1.1 | Performancing.com Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs. This is a pretty cool little Firefox add-in; you can snag it from the link above. It won't replace my desktop blogging tool, but it's nice for publishing short snippets from websites, plus it supports Technorati tagging. Best of all, this version works with Community Server (previous versions did not). Neat! Technorati Tags: Performancing , Firefox , Blogging Read More...
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12 February 2006
More SQL Server 2005 Management Studio Woes
I posted earlier about some SQL Server 2005 Management Studio (SSMS) gripes I've come across; I recently came across another really big one that I really feel the need to air out: It's next to impossible to export an entire database to a new database on the same machine via the SSMS GUI. Sure, the option is there (right click a db, tasks, export data), and the wizard is pretty similar to the one we had via SQL Server 2000's Enterprise Manager, except for one glaring "feature": The only objects you can export from the existing database are tables/views, and their associated data. Want your sprocs/functions/roles exported as well? Ain't happenin'...at least not with this wizard. Copy database wizard? Only supported for moving databases between instances, no intra-server copying allowed. Script the entire database to a new query window, create a new blank db, run the original db's create script, and then try to import the data via the wizard? Nope. The wizard fails immediately stating that... Read More...
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11 February 2006
Top 10 Albums Meme
I saw this over on Dewayne Mikkelson’s blog , so I thought I’d do my part to spur it on. The top 10 albums (in no particular order, and I’m excluding electronica): Led Zeppelin – IV Miles Davis – Birth of the Cool Nirvana – Nevermind Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik Pearl Jam – Ten U2 – The Joshua Tree Depeche Mode – Violator Duran Duran – Duran Duran The Police – Synchronicity The Ramones – The Ramones A bit of variety in this list, but I feel that most of these albums helped define (or even invent) their genre of music. Read More...
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