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Monday, July 30, 2007
VS2008 - Remove usings
Just catching up on some of The Moth's posts, and glad to see his post about Organising usings in VS2008 - its one of the things that I try to do but often slips off the bottom of the todo list so it'll be great to just do it from the IDE.
Labels: .NET, Visual Studio
// posted by Jane @ 11:51 AM 
Comments:
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner #5
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the latest Brighton Girl Geek Dinner. Denise Wilton presented on "Designing a web application with character" and whilst it was more fluffy and designy than I am, I still learnt and gained from the experience.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, girl geeks, photos, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:09 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
£5 App - November 2007
Last night was the 4th £5 app evening and the first one concentrating on a hardware project.
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Labels: Brighton, event, photos, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 10:05 PM
Comments:
dConstruct 07
Richard attended the first dConstruct, we were out of the country for last years (although I was an avid podcast listener) and I'm really pleased to have a ticket for this years event. It was impressive to see the speed with which the tickets sold yesterday - I think it was in the region of 6 hours. That's pretty impressive and goes to show that the ClearLeft guys have really hit a sweet spot in the conference market.
Labels: Brighton, dConstruct, event, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:02 PM
Comments:
SQL Puzzle
Mike just came to me with an interesting problem. One of the tables that he needs to query has some comma separated values. He needs to search for a specific value in that column. There was no time or opportunity to refactor the table into a joining table, so it needed to be based around the Like function.
His sample data contained a column Keyword with data like the following:
Sport
Transport
Sport, Transport
Transport, Media, Sport
He was looking for the keyword "Sport" and was matching all of the above 4 rows, rather than just rows 1, 3 and 4.
It took me a bit of head scratching, but I finally proposed the following solution:
SELECT *
FROM Table
WHERE ' ' + REPLACE(Keyword,',',' ') + ' ' LIKE '% Sport %'
So, prefixing and suffixing the data with a space, and replacing the comma being used for separation with a space, and then comparing it against our target word which is also prefixed and suffixed by a space.
This solution feels like a bit of a cludge, but less arduous than implementing a Split function. Opinions always welcomed
His sample data contained a column Keyword with data like the following:
Sport
Transport
Sport, Transport
Transport, Media, Sport
He was looking for the keyword "Sport" and was matching all of the above 4 rows, rather than just rows 1, 3 and 4.
It took me a bit of head scratching, but I finally proposed the following solution:
SELECT *
FROM Table
WHERE ' ' + REPLACE(Keyword,',',' ') + ' ' LIKE '% Sport %'
So, prefixing and suffixing the data with a space, and replacing the comma being used for separation with a space, and then comparing it against our target word which is also prefixed and suffixed by a space.
This solution feels like a bit of a cludge, but less arduous than implementing a Split function. Opinions always welcomed
Labels: SQL
// posted by Jane @ 11:40 AM
Comments:
SELECT keyword FROM Table WHERE Keyword LIKE 'Sport%' OR Keyword LIKE '% Sport%'
will select out the correct records from your example, but will fail on kewords such as "Sporting" or "Sporty"
SELECT Keyword FROM Table WHERE Keyword RLIKE '(^| )sport($|,)'
will filter out "Sporting"
-lincoln
will select out the correct records from your example, but will fail on kewords such as "Sporting" or "Sporty"
SELECT Keyword FROM Table WHERE Keyword RLIKE '(^| )sport($|,)'
will filter out "Sporting"
-lincoln
# posted by 
: 2:15 PM
: 2:15 PM
Monday, July 09, 2007
Brighton Bloggers Meetup
As mentioned the other day I put together a collage of blog screen shots for 279 of the sites listed at Brighton Bloggers. If you look really closely, there are some which are just directory listings, even a couple of blank pages. Anyway, this was produced on A3 and A2 paper thanks to Kirsty and James at Brightenup and taken along to the meetup. It was met with interest although a magnifying glass might have helped :-)
Labels: Brighton Bloggers, event, photos, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:24 PM
Comments:
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
.NET and Cookies
My project involves several front end sites, all looking at one database and using one admin system and code base. If you login to one of the sites, you don't automatically get logged in to the others. So, I'm using a cookie name with a prefix based on the site name. One of my sites has an & in its name - something like A&BSite. When I attempt to login to this site, I get no errors but neither do I get logged in. The code works happily for all the other sites, so I can only assume that either .NET, or the browsers (tried on IE7 and firefox) don't appreciate my use of an &. I've just updated the code to SiteName.Replace("&","") and all is happy and jolly once more. Weird!
A quick straw poll around the office revealed that only one of the developers had come across this before.
A quick straw poll around the office revealed that only one of the developers had come across this before.
Labels: .NET, cookies, Development
// posted by Jane @ 4:52 PM
Comments:
Monday, July 02, 2007
Screenshots from web pages
As preparation for the Brighton Bloggers meetup on Thursday I wanted to put together a set of images reflecting the blogs that are represented. Last time I printed out the list and had that. I will do that again, but I thought a collage or slideshow would be fun.
I came up with some alternatives:
I ended up using Webkit2png and generated 278 images based on the blogs listed on BrightonBloggers
The command line I used is /opt/local/bin/python /users/jane/webkit2png-0.4.txt.sh -D /users/jane/Desktop/Bloggers/ -o -C --clipheight=250 --clipwidth==250 for each of the 278 blogs.
Now I just need to stick them together into a collage.
I came up with some alternatives:
- screencapture - native to Mac OS. This works on the command line, but captures either the full screen, or a window. I couldn't find a way to direct it at a browser window. (I found this via osx screenshots (in png))
- Paparazzi! - I couldn't find a way to use this on the command line but then started wondering about applescript. Paparazzi is based on Webkit2png (see below) hence there are some similarities. I found Galarrhea which is an applescript that imports tags from del.icio.us, magnolia or a text file and produces full size and 200 x 200 cropped images using Paparazzi! (The 200 x 200 can be changed within the applescript). It took me a while to find out where these images had been placed but I eventually found them in /user/jane/Sites/galarrhea.
- Webkit2png - a command line python script that accepts a url as a parameter and outputs 3 png files - clipped, thumb and full. Webkit2png needs objective C to work properly used sudo port install py-pyobjc to download and install Objective C and Python 2.4
I ended up using Webkit2png and generated 278 images based on the blogs listed on BrightonBloggers
The command line I used is /opt/local/bin/python /users/jane/webkit2png-0.4.txt.sh -D /users/jane/Desktop/Bloggers/ -o
Now I just need to stick them together into a collage.
Labels: mac, screenshot
// posted by Jane @ 10:29 PM
Comments:
