I've been wanting to hook up a webcam, mostly so my PC can stare back at me while I work and partly so acquaintences I've made around the globe can put a face (mine even) with a name.
I spent the big bucks ($29.95USD) on a LabTec WebCam and installed it (and its accompanying software) on my Toshiba Satellite A35-S159 running Windows XP.
Immediately, Internet Explorer no longer could find the Internet. I eventually rebooted the machine, and then couldn't even load Windows properly. I was just stuck with a mouse icon that would hourglass when I passed anywhere over the Taskbar or Start Menu. I tried to uninstall the camera software, but the applications list wouldn't enumerate...it just hung there, and rebooting several times didn't help either.
Windows XP saved me with its Restore Points feature. I went in there the next day, and it had a point saved for the moment before the camera was installed. I ran the Restore wizard, and it worked like a charm. Thanks Microsoft!
It's kind of creepy for a computer to be able to see you anyway, right? I wonder if KMart will give me my money back...
Update: I'm not the only one with USB web cam problems...click here.
Plagued by yet another weird error...
Unable to create the web project “myProject”. Unable to validate that the file path ‘c:\inetpub\wwwroot\myProject’ matches the URL path ‘http://localhost/myProject’. A connection with the server could not be established.
I started getting this error any time I tried to open a web project in Visual Studio .NET...even projects I had opened successfully before. In searching around, someone suggested a firewall may be to blame. I turned off McAfee Firewall, and presto, it works fine. Who needs protection, anyway?
Jeremy took pity on me and had a glance at a sample project I was using to test eXist with SOAP. It seems Visual Studio .NET's 'Add Web Reference' Wizard wasn't setting up the proxy class for the web service correctly...
The web services are at http://localhost:8080/exist/etc... but VS.NET set up the proxy classes to use http://localhost/exist/etc... Manually adding the ':8080' to the web references' server name completely resolves the connection problems I was having.
I am working on a project that requires importing a large amount of data from 'text data files' that were originally created with QuickBasic (in the 1980's). One (not-so-quick) lesson I've just learned...that old text isn't written with ISO, UTF, or even ASCII encoding. It's windows-1252.
The problem showed up when trying to convert a two-bit string into an integer (the pointer to a related record) with the CVI() function. Those funny little non-usual characters don't come through correctly with any other code page...
With a simple line:
Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);
Everything works.
I ran across this great article that gives a quick, clean example of how to export a web page's DataSet to Excel. What's nice is that this example doesn't use a second web form for the export...it just re-uses the Response object in the current form. Very handy!
http://www.dotnetjohn.com/articles/articleid36.aspx
I'm running into weird behavior in the ASP.NET DataGrid's ItemTemplate element. Specifically, for an asp:HyperLink, the below code breaks...
<asp:HyperLink Runat="server" Target="_blank"
NavigateUrl='http://myserver/recorddetail.asp?recnum=
<%# Container.DataItem("recnum")%>'>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"recnum")%>
</asp:HyperLink>
The (HTML) output in the DataGrid looks like:
<A href="http://myserver/recorddetail.asp?recnum=<%# Container.DataItem("recnum")%>0400123</A>
Not exactly what I'm after...I've tried a number of variations, and any articles I've found online give examples that look just like mine.
Since I started using Visual Studio .NET, I've noticed that occasionally the 'Properties' window will not appear (when it is set to 'auto-hide') , even when you click 'Properties' for a control or hover over the collapsed Properties window icon on the right side (default location, anyway).
I finally broke down and looked for a solution...and found it in Knowledge Base Article 313899.
In posting to dasBlog, when an image file name contains a string that's in your 'Content Filters' list, the image's src attribute gets corrupted.
For example, whenever I enter eXist in a blog entry, the Content Filters pick it up and make it a hyperlink to http://www.exist-db.org. If I try to add an image to a post where part of the image's file name is 'eXist', I end up with a red X. Easily fixed ('exist'-with a lower case 'x'-doesn't get filtered), but it would be pretty neat if the filter didn't apply itself to stuff like that.
When trying to connect to eXist with SOAP from .NET, Jes tells me he and Manu use the following successfully:
QueryService service = new QueryService();
sessionId = service.connect(userName, password);
When I try this, I get:
An unhandled exception of type 'System.NET.WebException' occurred in system.web.services.dll
Additional information: The request failed with HTTP status 405: Method not allowed.
The developer documentation for eXist says the connection sequence should look something like:
QueryService service = new QueryServiceLocator();
Query query = service.getQuery();
String session = query.connect("guest", "guest");
This always results in an error that says QueryServiceLocator doesn't even exist in the namespace.
After yesterday's whining about how bad things were...
We actually were able to catch the guy who stole my wife's rings...and convince him to give them back...all in about 1/2 hour's time.
It turns out my inability to delete dasBlog entries was a 'permissions' problem...it seems pretty obvious (now) that the worker processes used by the application would need 'delete' permissions on the file system before I can delete entries.
Today sucks. Any code that I've touched is broken; I still can't access eXist with SOAP via .NET, or find any hints anywhere that might point out the problem.
I also can't seem to get rid of two pesky blog entries (probably right below this one) because deleting entries is somehow not allowed in my configuration. They were tests of the emailToBlog feature of dasBlog, but they didn't import properly in the first place anyway.
We also just learned that someone stole my wife's rings...wedding band, engagement ring, and a wrap for the engagement ring.
WTF, I give up.
It looks like Cory took advantage of his government-mandated Presidents' Day holiday to load up the Rainbow v.Next web site with content. I was just there a couple days ago to view the skeleton, but it's really fleshing out now.
It's cool to see someone as re-charged about this project as Cory is. Check it out!
I worked a little on a development Rainbow site, rebuilt it, and tried to view it. I got an error...
Configuration Error Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: Access is denied: 'Esperantus'.
Source Error:
Line 256: <add assembly="System.EnterpriseServices, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/>
Line 257: <add assembly="System.Web.Mobile, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/>
Line 258: <add assembly="*"/>
Line 259: </assemblies>
Line 260: |
Source File: c:\winnt\microsoft.net\framework\v1.1.4322\Config\machine.config Line: 258
Assembly Load Trace: The following information can be helpful to determine why the assembly 'Esperantus' could not be loaded.
It took some time to find a link on MSDN that looked similar and recommended to turn off the Indexing Service.
That worked, but why it was necessary now and not the 1,000 other times I've worked on this app., I don't know.
OK, so I signed up for I2K's DSL service around Christmas 2003, and I love it. I hope I never have to see dial-up again. But here's a weird thing some network-savvy guru might be able to explain:
The IP address I2K assigned me (the public one) is 192.168.XXX.XXX (no, not with the X's). I can resolve web sites on my box using that IP from inside my LAN at home, but I can't get them from work (or seemingly anywhere in the wild). I found some documentation that explained that 192.XXX addresses don't route, which explains that issue. I confirmed that with I2K and other sources.
The kicker is that my parents, who live 40 miles away (and thus are not on my LAN) can resolve sites on my machine. The only explanation I can think of is that they use the same ISP (though they use a dial-up account), and somehow my address routes ok inside I2K's internal network.
Jeremy Esland has convinced me that XML is the answer to many of the data problems I am encountering in a variety of projects. The more I learn about XML, the more I'm sure it's the answer.
In a related side-note, Jeremy also introduced me to the eXist project. eXist is a powerful XML storage and retrieval solution that can be run and accessed in a variety of ways.
Now if I could just get my .NET code to retrieve some documents from eXist...
When the IBuySpy portal was released along with ASP.NET 1.0, I pretty much used it to teach myself programming with .NET. In January 2002, Cory Isakson convinced me that I should abandon the enhancements I'd made to it and join the Rainbow Portal project, even though this meant learning C# along the way.
More than a year later, I can't believe how Rainbow is growing. As I type this, I'm listening to the second hour of a broadcasted meeting between Cory and a handful of Boise, Idaho area developers using (or considering, I think) Rainbow for various reasons.
If you're new to .NET (or software development in general), Rainbow is an excellent place to start. The learning curve is steep (meaning “challenging, but short“), but the rewards are many.
It's exciting to be (even a small) part of a project that really has HUGE potential. Join Rainbow, and you are welcome to be a part of that, too!
At my day job, I've been working to update an old quickbasic-centered data storage system to something a little more 21st century. Along the way, of course, I've had to learn a great deal about QuickBasic and how it stores/retrieves values in text files.
Our data solution uses fixed-length text records for storage. One 'quirk' about that is that it also uses QuickBasic's CVI() and MKS() functions to store 16-bit Integers in a 2-character string (so any integer will still fit into our happy little fixed-length string).
The problem is that Microsoft's .NET doesn't have any functions that resemble CVI(), MKS(), or a number of others that were found in QB (like MKD, CVD, MKI, MKL, CVL). There are plenty of examples out there for VB6, but not .NET!
Anyway, I've searched pretty hard for a .NET version of CVI(), and finally found one that would work:
Here's the link to the original article, and I'll attach the code for download in case that article goes away some time in the future:
I hope this helps someone else with the same problem. CV and MK Functions.txt (4.85 KB)
I've been looking for a way to record (and hopefully later retrieve) some semi-random thoughts, so I thought I'd give this blogging stuff a try...I found dasBlog because Cory sent me a link.
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