If you enjoy doing volunteer work, like I do, you might be interested in a new web site designed to make it easy for volunteers to find organizations that can use help. The site is: http://www.allforgood.org
It is being managed and supported by Google.
Ten years ago today, I entered the world of online gaming for the first time, with my purchase of Everquest. I decided to go back and take another look at the game to see how it looks today.
One application I use is the GIMP. It’s a graphics editing program.
As a semi-professional photographer, I’m well aware that the free, Open Source GIMP application lags far behind Adobe Photoshop. The two biggest problems with GIMP are its lack of color management and support of only 8 bits per channel of color. Many complain about the user interface as well, though I’ve actually found GIMP to be just as usable once you get to know it.
While GIMP has serious shortcomings, I will say that I know professional photographers who do not use a color managed workflow and who shoot in JPG instead of RAW, and thus only get 8 bit color out of the camera. In addition, if your eventual output is the web, you’re going to drop down to 8 bit color anyway. So, clearly, it is possible to use GIMP to serve some useful purposes even as a professional.
One way to enhance your GIMP workflow is to add a set of over one hundred additional effects to it in a package called GIMP FX Foundry. Download the file and place it in the same directory as your other scripts and you’re good to go.
If you are getting an error like the one below in your ASP.Net application when trying to open an Excel or Access file, you may need to reset IIS.
System.Data.OleDb.OleDbException: Unspecified error
at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnectionInternal..ctor(OleDbConnectionString constr, OleDbConnection connection) at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(DbConnectionOptions options, Object poolGroupProviderInfo, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningObject) at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.CreateNonPooledConnection(DbConnection owningConnection, DbConnectionPoolGroup poolGroup) at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.GetConnection(DbConnection owningConnection) at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionClosed.OpenConnection(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory) at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection.Open() at
To reset IIS:
My situation was that I had code that had previously worked, but it just stopped working one day with the error mentioned above.
Hope this helps.
Previously, I have written about eyeOS which is an open source cloud computing platform. I’ve been using it for close to a year. It has some nice features, but it has been frustrating that is doesn’t have full support for my preferred web browser (Opera).
Hi loyal readers. I’m trying an experiment. I’ve made it so that you don’t have to be a registered user to post a comment now. I’ve also added a captcha to the registration process and it finally got rid of the Russian Linkbots that were registering accounts everyday.
Hopefully, the new setup will get rid of the registration spam, and allow folks to make comments while still blocking the Russian spambots.
So, I ran the Secunia Online Vulnerability inspector on my work PC and noticed there were over a dozen missing patches. I ran WindowsUpdate and had to reboot.
After rebooting, I reloaded Visual Studio 2008 and my ASP.Net project that I’m working on. I noticed that the designer was unable to render on any of my pages that had an updatePanel and the error I got was:
asp:UpdatePanel could not be set on property 'ContentTemplate'
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It seems like such a simple thing, I’m amazed it’s not part of Microsoft’s whole webform architecture. I would like to keep a user’s session from timing out as long as he/she is still on the web page. Just ping the server, so to speak, periodically, to let it know that this session is still being used, even if the user has gone to lunch, gotten interrupted by a phone call or coworker, etc.
I’ve tried numerous ‘solutions’ that I have googled (jQuery heartbeat plugin, other javascript based things, AJAX controls, etc), but the only one I’ve gotten to work, is also about the simplest one I could find. It’s by Thomas Kurek and posted on Code Project.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/session/Session_Defibrillator.aspx
So far, it has kept a session alive for over 16 hours. Keeping my fingers crossed that this one will be ‘the one’.
My latest order from Amazon:
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art
If you have read the book, I’m interested in whether you found it valuable or not. Were you able to apply what you learned? Did you improve your process and/or results?
Are you sure? How many times have you been asked that question by your computer when you wanted to delete something?
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For the most part, I’ve found it pretty easy to ‘AJAX’ify a web page, but there are a few quirks and gotchas. I’ll try to list a few of the ones I’ve stumbled across here.
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A list of handy VS2008 IDE tips.
