Year: 2012

ASP.NET ListView notes

I jump around between projects a lot, and I often don’t get deep enough into any particular thing to really learn it inside and out. I got a chance to work on a fairly complicated ASP.NET page recently, though, and I picked up a few new things.

The approach I took with this page, since it had a number of independent parts, was to try to keep them isolated and only spin things up when needed. So, in one panel, where I had a ListView, I wanted to get it working without using a declarative data source. This turns out to require a little bit of extra work. I found this article helpful in getting the DataPager working correctly. And this post had the best advice on how to control the visibility of the DataPager.

I think I could probably write up a couple of more posts with hints on the AsyncFileUpload control, but I’ll save those for another day.

Reading and Music

I’ve been having a bit of a problem at home lately. They play music on Main St. now, for most of the day. They used to just do this around Christmas, but now they’re doing it all the time. They’ve got one set of songs programmed into the thing. It’s all basically soft rock, with a little jazz mixed in. Stevie Nicks, Seal, Sting, Sade, that kind of stuff. Lots of artists whose names begin with “S”, for some reason.

A few weeks ago, on a Monday night, the timer went wonky on it and it kept playing all night. Even with all the windows closed, and earplugs in my ears, I could still hear the music, and really couldn’t sleep at all that night. I (and at least one of my neighbors) called the police, but they didn’t know how to turn it off, or have contact info for anyone who could. (Supposedly, that’s been fixed if this happens again.)

While the music was bothersome before, this incident has reprogrammed my brain so that the mere hint of “Sweetest Taboo” (for example) starts to make me shiver and feel slightly nauseous.

This isn’t much of a bother on weekdays, since I only have to put up with an hour or two of it, between whenever I get home from work, and 8pm, when the timer (hopefully) turns it off. I’m generally watching the previous night’s Stewart and Colbert after work, so that drowns it out.

On weekends, though, I often like to sit around and read during the day, so this is a problem. I need to find some music I can listen to that drowns out the Main St muzak, but doesn’t distract too much from what I’m reading. I’ve been reading Zero History by William Gibson over the last week or so. I’m almost done with it. Yesterday, I used Fugazi’s Instrument soundtrack to down out the muzak. Today, I’m using turntable.fm, specifically the ambient/chillout and coding soundtrack rooms. I’ve discovered that I can get pretty good sound out of my iPhone by putting it in an old dock that I friend gave me a few years ago, and connecting that to my receiver via a mini-stereo to RCA cable, into the “tape” input. Previously, I’d just been connecting it by inserting the cable into the headphone jack, but the dock makes a big difference, for some reason.

I’ve really been digging Turntable.fm lately, by the way. This is one of those things that the internet is great for, but that usually goes wrong after a while. Right now, you can fire up turntable.fm, go into the right room, and there will be a few people with impeccable taste playing great songs for a crowd of maybe 50 or 100 people. No advertisements. No jokers coming in and playing Rick Astley. No spambots coming in and DJ’ing ads for boner pills. I’m not sure why it works, but I’m glad it does.

Also, about Zero History: good book! I’ve found that a number of things in it, sometimes just minor stuff, has sent me off to the internet to do a little research. Node Magazine and the Zero History blog have some good links. I’ve also found myself looking into Saharan guitar music and other odd stuff like that.

Reading

I realized, a few weeks ago, that I hadn’t been reading much of anything this year other than Drupal books. When the Harry Potter series was released in ebook format, I took the opportunity to get them all and download them to my Kindle. I started re-reading them a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve gotten through the first three. The first few are pretty quick reads, and fun. I don’t think I’ve re-read any of them since I first read them, quite some time ago. Knowing how it all ends does bring a bit of a different feel to some things, especially in the first book.

I’m taking a break now, and I just started Zero History by William Gibson.  He’s one of my favorite authors, and has been since Neuromancer came out. I’m really enjoying it, so far. I’ve been reading it slowly and carefully. It’s the kind of book that rewards careful reading, and attention, I think.

Walking

It was a great weekend, weather-wise, so I did a couple of nice long walks yesterday and today. I’ve been using the Runkeeper iPhone app to track my walks. It’s kind of cool to see them on a map. Yesterday, I stayed local. Today, I took the train into NYC, then a cab up to the Met.  I wandered around the museum for awhile, then walked back down from there to Penn Station.

Harry Potter ebooks

So Pottermore finally started selling the Harry Potter books in ebook format this week. (And they’re selling the audiobooks too.) I signed up for an account there a couple of days ago, and I just went in and bought the bundle of all seven books.

Some things I like about this:

  1. They offer the books in multiple formats, including DRM-free (but watermarked) ePub.
  2. You can link your Pottermore account to your Amazon account, and push the books right out to your Kindle.
  3. You can download the books multiple times.
  4. The audiobooks are in DRM-free MP3 format.

And some things I don’t:

  1. Their web site forms are screwy. On most fields, you can’t use copy & paste, for some insane reason.
  2. Every time you log in, you need to enter a CAPTCHA. I can understand needing to enter one to create an account, but on every login? Overkill.
  3. It’s easy enough to transfer a book over to your Amazon account, but there’s no (obvious) way to transfer all your books at once. You have to do them one at a time.
  4. Similarly, when downloading the books in ePub format, you need to download them one at a time, and it takes a few seconds to “prepare” the download. I’m guessing that it’s creating a watermarked ePub file on the fly there, but why can’t they just have a background process that does that right after purchase, so the files are ready right away?
  5. For the audiobooks, they show both the US (Jim Dale) and UK (Stephen Fry) versions, and even show a price if you select the UK version, but you can only buy the US version. (I was hopeful that I’d be able to buy the Stephen Fry versions.)

So, a few quibbles, but nothing that bothers me that much. I actually haven’t read any prose fiction at all yet this year, so I think I’m going to sit down with my Kindle and start into the first book. I haven’t re-read any of the Potter books since I first read them, with maybe one exception. I feel a little guilty that I’m going to re-read these relatively easy-to-read “YA” books, when I have plenty of unread “adult” novels lying around, but hey, they’re great books!

45th birthday

Yesterday was my 45th birthday. It was a pretty low-key birthday. I strayed from my diet and had a couple of slices of pizza for dinner, and I allowed myself a buttered roll in the morning, but I didn’t go overboard with anything. I had the idea today to look back on what I might have been doing on and around my birthday, since I started this blog. So here’s a pretty random list of stuff, assembled by looking back at my Blogger archives.

2003

  • I went to Comic-Con that year. (I was making reservations in March. I’m going again this year, after skipping it for a few years.)
  • I was reading Sinfest, which I haven’t been following lately, but is apparently still around (and still funny).

2004

  • I was reading “His Dark Materials“, and listening to Rum Diary.
  • I had just gotten the 90,000 mile service done on my 97 Civic. (I got my 2008 Accord inspected yesterday. It’s got about 45k miles on it.)

2005

  • Windows XP was giving me grief.
  • I was listening to Warren Ellis’ “Superburst Mixtape” podcast. (That’s long gone. He has a new one named SPEKTRMODULE now, which I’ve been listening to recently, and is quite good.)

2006

  • I was watching Samurai Champloo on Cartoon Network. (I have it on Blu-Ray now, but I haven’t gotten around to re-watching it.)

2007

2008

  • I got my first Kindle. I’ve since traded that in for a new one, but I still haven’t read some of the books I loaded onto that first one (and later transferred to the second).

And that’s about where I feel like I should end this. I’m feeling weirder than usual about my birthday this year, for various reasons. But I can’t complain. I’ve been able to spend time with several really good friends over the last couple of weeks, and I think I’ll likely enjoy this coming weekend too, so that’s all I can really ask for.

another Drupal 7 book

I just finished reading Drupal 7 Business Solutions, by Trevor James, a Drupal e-book that I got from Packt. I finished another Drupal e-book, titled simply Drupal 7, by David Mercer, about a month ago. The one I just finished goes over a lot of the same ground as the Mercer book, but I think it was still worth reading. The author uses a web site for a bread bakery as an example throughout the book, adding functionality to the site to demonstrate various features of Drupal. It’s full of functional, quasi-real-world examples. I think it would be very helpful to anyone looking to get a good grounding in Drupal basics.

I mentioned some time ago that I was working on a new documentation site, in Drupal, for the REST API to my company’s product Bullseye. That site is now in production, and you can see it at http://api.bullseyelocations.com/. It’s a simple enough site, but I think it turned out well. I’m using the “book” module to organize the content, the CKEditor module to allow me to easily enter nicely-formatted text, and the GeSHi Filter module to format source code examples.

I’m still not great at the theming stuff, so I just created a fairly simple sub-theme of Bartik for this site. The only really major thing I did with it was to change it to use a Google font (Droid Sans, which is what we’re using on our new marketing site for the product). I think it looks pretty good.

(And yes, I wrote nearly all of this documentation myself. To a large extent, it’s based on the documentation for our old SOAP API, but it’s evolved enough that I think it’s mostly mine now.)

San Diego 2012

I haven’t been to San Diego Comic-Con since 2008. I was thinking about it, and I may not have even left the NY/NJ area since then. I’m going this year though! I had to buy four single-day tickets, since they were sold out of the full four-day passes by the time I got to the head of the “line”, so no preview night.

And I booked a hotel in Mission Valley, so no walking back and forth to the convention center. We’ll see how the convention shuttle situation works out. I remember it being a bit of an issue in 2008. It’s always inconvenient to stay far enough away that you can’t go back to your hotel mid-day to drop stuff off.

But hey, it’s Comic-Con! How could it *not* be fun?

Hulu Plus

I blogged about Hulu Plus a few days ago, and the issues I had getting it run smoothly on my PS3. I e-mailed support about it, and they gave me a few things to double-check, so I did all that and the audio/video sync is still off by a bit, but it’s mostly tolerable.
Meanwhile, after not using my Wii for about six months, I decided to turn it on last weekend, and it wouldn’t work. I tried a few things, couldn’t get it working, and gave up on it. I even offered to give away all my games and peripherals on Facebook. I was going to pack them all up today, and get the main Wii box ready for recycling, but I decided to give it one more try.  Long story short, it’s working again.
So I decided to try out Hulu Plus on the Wii. It only became available for the Wii recently. It works pretty well though. The video quality is a bit lower than on the PS3, of course, but it’s watchable, the audio/video sync is good, and it’s pretty consistent (no jaggies). So I may decide to keep the Wii largely for the sake of Hulu Plus.