A real site has opened

As part of my long and over-extended process of getting my contracting career back in order I have started my own domain and posted most of my older portfolio items to the site.

As I get some free time I will be posting new material there as well as creating new portfolio items for work I have done over the last few years. So you may want to change your bookmarks and/or change your RSS feed URLs as there won't be any new posts to this blog in the future.

I heart Automator

One of the things I really do dislike about Director is building projectors. Especially if you have a lot of external casts that need to be protected. I was recently working on my Windows 2000 machine (a PC so old now that it gets a Social Security cheque) and was having to manually copy/protect/move casts to create a projector.

A pain it the tush if I ever saw one.

Now that the Windows specific bug is fixed and I can move back to my Mac I took a moment to open up Automator and create a quick workflow that would:

1) Select a movie, duplicate it and then rename it
2) Select all the casts and copy them into a "protect" folder
3) Activate the "build" version of MX 2004 that is running.

In order to keep my workspace saved I have two versions of MX 2004 running and one is used only to build projectors and protect casts.

I'm not sure how much time this will actually save me buts its nice to be able to automate some of the tedium out of the build process.

Laptop nightmare

So I recently purchased a Compaq Presario V5000 laptop. Its a nice machine but the keyboard is rather poor and has been having keys pop out of position.

In order to rectify this problem I have been in contact with HP's Customer Support both in the US and in Canada. It appeared as if there was a solution last week when I was told by the Internet support staff that they would be sending me a new keyboard to replace the existing one. This was a bit of a relief as I wasn't looking forward to their other option; sending the machine across the country to a service centre to get them to replace it.

It appears that since I didn't spend $300-400 more for a "business" model laptop that there is no local person or company that HP trusts enough to send a keyboard to and therefore since I bought a consumer model their preferred option to replace or service the machine is to send it to Toronto.

Since this is a work machine you can imagine how reticent I was to do this since it would mean that I would be unable to work on the laptop for at least a week.

So imagine my joy this morning to receive a call from HP Canada telling me that they can't send me the keyboard. And that despite what I was told previously they will need me to ship the machine to Toronto for service.

And imagine my further joy when it appears that no-one at HP cares that this is a total and utter inconvenience and not really an option for me.

And to make my morning even better I was then told by a manager there that I wouldn't have had this problem if I had bought a "business" class machine.

Well its nice to know that now.

So some suggestions for buying a PC laptop.

1) Don't. Buy a MacBook and dual boot into Windows with Boot Camp.
2) If you do want a PC laptop then make sure you buy a business model if this is for work and also make sure that there is a local service rep or service department
3) Don't buy from Future Shop, Best Buy etc as these will all be consumer model machines and you will be SOL if they need repair
4) Don't buy HP or Compaq. They don't seem to give a shit about making you happy as a consumer and they don't seem to even know what their own company policies are

Aesthetics in software

One of the interesting things about working on my Windows XP laptop for the last month is that I have been assaulted by a wide range of quite ugly software.

And not just ugly software but software that creates ugly end results for me as a user.

I have two examples.

The first is an application I use on m PC to determine if websites have new content. It works like a charm (most of the time) and it has become utterly invaluable. I now check over 100 websites for changes on a whim. I can't imagine how much time it has actually saved me.

But it looks ugly as sin. And in that "biblical, evil is hideous way" and not in a post-modern "evil as beautiful seductress but morally ugly" way. The icons are shit. The layout of the app is hideous and the tables it presents to me are a disaster.

Frankly the only reason I use it is because it does the job very well and no-one has written one in Cocoa yet.

My second example are the charts in OpenOffice. Now I will be the first to say that I have been spoiled by the Mac. Pages and Keynote can create some incredible looking line charts. OpenOffice produces charts that are not only impossible to edit but look like they were designed by someone's dog. And not a particularly visual attuned dog either.

Now I don't want to generalize but when I run my XP machine I don't get the same visual feedback from the OS and the applications I use when I use my Mac.

Is it just that no-one seems to care what Windows apps and visuals look like?

Why MS is MS

Wired has a story about the unveiling of MS's Origami mobile computer.

Now here is the reason that MS is such a stupid company.

The computer, however, won't be called Origami — the name used in Microsoft's cryptic web-based marketing campaign that led up to the unveiling.

Instead, the company is calling it the "Ultra-Mobile PC," said Mika Krammer, a marketing director for Microsoft's Windows mobile unit.

So they have a damn cool codename and instead of using it they are going to call the computer "Ultra-Mobile PC".

Idiots.

ASP.Net for CF developers

I've been taking part in some webcasts that Microsoft is holding for ASP.Net v2.0. They have developed a series of presentations for PHP, JSP and CF developers that look at moving from your current fave development environment to ASP.Net. I can't imagine that the PHP presentations had many viewers.

I really have no interest in ASP of any type to be honest but this is simply a cynical market driven move on my part since CF jobs in this part of the world are in short supply but ASP.Net work is readily available.

I am rather annoyed at the format of the presentations. Basically they take a small sample app written in CF in a manner in which no serious developer would ever use and then rewrite it in ASP.Net again in a manner that no serious developer would do.

So I got to see shit CF code rewritten in a poor manner in ASP.Net.

I'm not sure what I learned.

The response from the presenters was that this was done for time constraint reasons but it still strikes me as a bad idea. Why not write a good presentation, make the source code available online and then split it into a set of one hour presentations instead of showing people bad code?

The presentation tomorrow might be better since it is about writing reusable code.

One thing that I did find interesting was that despite all the work MS did to create smart data bound controls they appear to have done next to nothing to build smart form components. I loath building forms. And since the vast majority of your work in a website consists of building data entry and editing forms it has always seemed to be a large gap in ASP.Net's toolset.

If I can drag a datagrid to a page and link it to a query and get the IDE to build a pageable list view then how much work is it to do the same thing to create a smart component that will build a form for you?

Mind you I may be prejudiced by my recent CF work.

netDone() != done

There are times when having programming skills and tools at your command is a bit of a double edged sword.

Yesterday I was stuck with a slight dilemma. I wanted to get some images from a Typepad blog. They don't allow FTP access to your files and so I had to find some way to get 200+ images from their server without having to manually save them all.

Enter Director MX 2004 and the ever handy downloadNetThing() command.

So I take a moment to write two functions. The first will take the mass of text crud from the file listing on the Typepad website and remove everything except the JPEG file names. The second will then take that list and download each file to a local directory.

This is where I run into a problem. It appears that netDone() doesn't ever return 1 for any of the download process that I initiate. The files do successfully download but between downloading the file and trying to save it there is some sort of issue that results in the files never making it to the correct location on my hard drive. If I run the code again the file is immediately marked as done (netdone(netID) = 1) and the file is saved on my hard drive.

So after some monkeying around I change the code to use getStreamStatus() instead and compare the bytesSoFar property to the bytesTotal property and this seems to solve the issue.

While I haven't been able to trace the issue any further it appears that there is some issue with saving the files locally on Windows that stops Director from thinking that the downloadNetThing() process is not finished. Perhaps Windows is the culprit. Either way there was a quick and easy fix to enable the code to work correctly.