Hannes Foulds

Choose to Be Happy at Work

2011-09-06T11:19:00.002+02:00

Happiness is largely a choice. I can hear many of you arguing with me, but it's true. You can choose to be happy at work. Sound simple? Yes. But, simplicity is often profoundly difficult to put into action. I wish all of you had the best employer in the world, but, face it, you may not. So, think positively about your work. Dwell on the aspects of your work you like. Avoid negative people and gossip. Find co-workers you like and enjoy and spend your time with them. Your choices at work largely define your experience. You can choose to be happy at work.

Know that how you react to a situation is up to you
Some people are happy with their jobs, while others are not. What's the difference? Is one group just luckier than the other? Chances are that's not the case. Those who are unhappy in their profession often feel dissatisfaction with a situation happening outside of their control (such as downsizing or a merger). But their unhappiness and stress actually began with their thoughts, fears, and perceptions about the downsizing. In other words, situations are completely neutral —it is our thoughts about the situation that lead to dissatisfaction. Hard to grasp and easier said than done? Sure, because fear can easily take over our thinking. As long as you believe you are a helpless victim you will not see a positive and effective response to every situation.

Do Something You Love Every Single Day
You may or may not love your current job and you may or may not believe that you can find something in your current job to love, but you can. Trust me. Take a look at yourself, your skills and interests, and find something that you can enjoy doing every day. If you do something you love every single day, your current job won't seem so bad. Of course, you can always make your current job work or decide that it is time to quit your job.

Make Friends
In their landmark book, First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman list twelve important questions. When employees answered these questions positively, their responses were true indicators of whether people were happy and motivated at work. One of these key questions was, "Do you have a best friend at work?" Liking and enjoying your coworkers are hallmarks of a positive, happy work experience. Take time to get to know them. You might actually like and enjoy them. Your network provides support, resources, sharing, and caring.

Ask for Feedback Frequently
Have you made statements such as, "My boss never gives me any feedback, so I never know how I'm doing." Face it, you really know exactly how you're doing. Especially if you feel positively about your performance, you just want to hear him acknowledge you. If you're not positive about your work, think about improving and making a sincere contribution. Then, ask your boss for feedback. Tell him you'd really like to hear his assessment of your work. Talk to your customers, too; if you're serving them well, their feedback is affirming. You are responsible for your own development. Everything else you get is gravy.

Make Only Commitments You Can Keep
One of the most serious causes of work stress and unhappiness is failing to keep commitments. Many employees spend more time making excuses for failing to keep a commitment, and worrying about the consequences of not keeping a commitment, than they do performing the tasks promised. Create a system of organization and planning that enables you to assess your ability to complete a requested commitment. Don't volunteer if you don't have time. If your workload is exceeding your available time and energy, make a comprehensive plan to ask the boss for help and resources. Don't wallow in the swamp of unkept promises.

Avoid Negativity
Choosing to be happy at work means avoiding negative conversations, gossip, and unhappy people as much as possible. No matter how positively you feel, negative people have a profound impact on your psyche. Don't let the negative Neds and Nellies bring you down.

Be proud of yourself and your work
It doesn’t matter whether you are a restroom janitor or a president of a multi-million dollar company. Taking pride in the work you do is the first step in job satisfaction. Give it your best. Always go for quality work. At the end of the day, knowing that you’ve done your best gives you a feeling of pride and satisfaction.

Create an attitude of enthusiasm
Believe it or not, you can be happy with your current just by changing the way you approach it. If you think that your job is so boring and monotonous, it will be boring and monotonous. So start thinking that your job is exciting and challenging. Your attitude towards your job is the product of your thoughts. And since you are in total control of our thoughts, you are in control of your attitude. This is your daily challenge: Create an attitude of enthusiasm to your work, no matter what you feel. By changing your attitude, you change your feeling. And when you have that positive feeling, you will be satisfied. Try this and be prepared for a big change.

The specialist
Of course you have plans of career advancement, right? Then try this on for size: Study the work you do by taking down notes and practicing it even for just one hour a day. In a short time, you could be the company’s specialist in that discipline. By genuinely being interested in your work, you get a natural tendency to be enthusiastic because of the learning you have gained.

Find happiness in the job you have now
Many people expect the right job or the right career to dramatically change their level of happiness, but happiness research makes it clear that your level of optimism and the quality of your relationships eclipse the satisfaction you gain from your job. If you have a positive outlook, you will make the best of any job, and if you have good relationships with people, you won't depend on your job to give your life a greater sense of meaning. You'll find it in your interactions with the people you care about. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire towards a job that will make you happier; it means you should understand that the capacity of your job to make you happy is quite small in comparison to your outlook on life and your relationships with people.

The grass is greener on your side
Most amateurs think that the grass is greener on the other side. And that’s what they will always be: amateurs. Being a professional, you know that the grass on your side of the fence is greener. You don’t have to look for opportunities on the other side when all of the challenges you need are in your own company. Again, be creative in finding them and stop looking at the other side of the fence.

Two legs and only one head

2009-06-22T09:26:00.003+02:00

People have two ears and only one mouth; I guess that means we should listen more, and talk less.

Hmm. Two legs and only one head. Maybe you should think less, and fuck off.

Jy Droom

2009-01-21T11:52:00.002+02:00

Somebody tricked you to visit this URL, go kick them in the nuts and then add me as a friend in Facebook if you like ;)

YouTube Virus

2008-09-26T08:27:00.001+02:00

Packman

2008-09-18T08:19:00.009+02:00

Large Hadron Particle Collider

2008-09-15T09:02:00.001+02:00

Making Mondays feel OK

2008-09-08T09:58:00.002+02:00

It's called (Project) Management

2008-09-04T08:24:00.003+02:00

The Website Is Down

2008-09-03T14:56:00.000+02:00

Black Sheep

2008-08-22T14:35:00.002+02:00

Pen Twirling

2008-08-13T15:03:00.000+02:00

Swimming

2008-08-11T09:10:00.001+02:00

I recently started swimming, I kinda suck at it and get tired very quickly. It's scary stuff :)

BMW 1 Series

2008-07-11T20:47:00.002+02:00

Kermit the frog just reminded me once again how much I love my car, now if only petrol wasn't as expensive...

Getting very little done!

2008-07-03T09:52:00.001+02:00

I'm only happy when it rains

2008-06-26T11:22:00.000+02:00

Good thing I stay in Cape Town where it rains most of the time...

Progress and Frustration

2008-06-25T11:48:00.002+02:00

Sometimes, like today, I return home after gym feeling very defeated and frustrated. Recently I attempted to follow the Mark Pilgrim's 12 week turnaround DVD, but following it to the letter is near impossible.

Sometimes I can't find the machine mentioned (glutes machine), some of the exercises I can't perform properly and give up on them after experiencing too much lower back pain (semi stiff leg deadlifts) and lately the Western Province rugby team has been hoarding the squat rack for hours on end, and believe me, I'm not going to mess with those guys :-)

Since I know I have bad posture and perform most of my exercises incorrectly I am playing around with the idea of getting a personal trainer, but I am not sure if this will be worth the expense? I emailed them to find out how much the sessions will cost, but I guess the Virgin Active blue shirts are simply not that into the email thing as I am still waiting on a reply...

As you can see from my before/after photo it hasn't been all bad, some progress has been made! Unfortunately it feels almost like it is impossible for me to put on some muscle. I know that you have to increase your calorie intake to gain muscle, and have done this since last week or so, but now the sad fact is that this is causing me to just revert to the photo on the left.

I am feeling very frustrated, don't know what exercises to do, don't know how to eat, don't know which weights I am supposed to use, and are not experiencing any strength increase at the gym, etc.

By the way, sure I have all the books and even a DVD, but like I said, these things are so hard to follow and I end up improvising so much that in the end I have no idea what I am doing.

Perhaps I should just do what Benjine & Christo told me and simply enjoy the journey and hopefully the results will come by themselves.

Flash RTS

2008-04-27T22:45:00.000+02:00

Flash with C#

2008-04-07T09:20:00.002+02:00

Mainsoft Grasshopper has been around for quite some time now and in case you don’t know what it is here is a quote from their website:

“Grasshopper is the freely available Developer Edition of Mainsoft, a Visual Studio plug-in that you can use to create server and ASP.NET applications, or port existing .NET 2.0 applications on Linux and other Java-enabled platforms, without having to re-engineer your code in Java. Grasshopper 2.x introduces support for the Visual Studio 2005 development environment, Visual Basic, and C# 2.0, including the generics language feature, the .NET Framework 2.0, and ASP.NET 2.0 controls. Use Grasshopper and the Visual Studio IDE to code, compile, debug, and deploy your application natively on the Java EE platform.”

Grasshopper is really cool, it allows me to use my favorite development tool (Microsoft Visual Studio) to create applications in my favorite set of technologies (ASP.NET) and then host these applications in a low cost Linux Based hosting environment.

Today I’ve found yet another great product that allows you to create applications with Microsoft C# which is compiled into standard Flash (SWF) files. Again this product allows me to develop in the comfort of my trusted Visual Studio IDE!

“GOA WinForms is an implementation of the standard System.Windows.Form .NET library for both Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. It allows .NET developers to write standard WinForms applications that will run on these two RIA platforms.”

Trading Card Game Blogs

2008-04-03T08:18:00.004+02:00

I’ve found some interesting blogs on free online trading card game clients:

The Stargate game are still in its beginning phases but already have an awesome looking user interface, the MTG Rates Magic game has an ugly user interface but allow game play with rules enforcement, and finally Magic Java Thoughts seems to be thinking of proper architecture.

Try Something Else

2008-04-01T12:29:00.002+02:00

I have been making significant progress since I joined the gym in November 2007 and lost 13.6 kg to date. According to the measuring machine at the gym I also went down from 24.1% body fat to only 14.9%. I always train 6 days a week, and March I did 30 minutes of swimming every day combined with strength training every even day and cardio every other day.

Although loosing the body fat is great and I now looks much better in a t-shirt, I have however not gained much muscle since November, in fact, I estimate that I actually lost about 4 kg of muscle…

I thus feel that it is time once again for a change in my gym program. On Sunday I tried out the super circuit at the gym, which basically is cardio training (running up and down stairs) combined with strength training (all machine based), and liked it quite a bit despite the fact that my legs still hurts today. This month I will do the super circuit on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and only swim on Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday while completely resting on Sunday with the hopes of building some muscle.

The program I will be following this month is a lot less work than I am used to and I am concerned that my fitness level will go down. Currently my Polar watch measures my OwnIndex as 68, I will monitor this and my body fat levels, and if these measurements are negatively affected I will just have to work on it again next month and go back to what I know works.

Date	BMI	Body Fat	Weight	Blood Pressure	Pulse
2007-11-16	26.8	24.1%	81.2 kg	136/89 mmHg	88
2007-11-23	26.5	24.4%	80.2 kg	120/79 mmHg	76
2007-11-30	25.8	22.8%	78 kg	112/79 mmHg	69
2007-12-07	25.4	22.2%	76.8 kg	115/71 mmHg	65
2008-01-07	26.2	22.5%	79.2 kg	119/68 mmHg	84
2008-01-11	26	21.8%	78.6 kg	121/82 mmHg	64
2008-01-18	25.6	21.7%	77.4 kg	121/77 mmHg	68
2008-01-26	25.8	21.4%	78 kg	111/67 mmHg	68
2008-02-01	25.8*	21.3%	78 kg*	111/75 mmHg	65
2008-02-08	24.4	20.3%	74 kg	117/68 mmHg	61
2008-02-15	24.3	20.5%	73.5 kg	111/71 mmHg	62
2008-02-22 **	23.7	18.7%	71.8 kg	119/75 mmHg	82
2008/02/29	23.1	17.5%	70	111/74 mmHg	76
2008/03/07	22.9	19.1%	69.4	124/69 mmHg	81
2008/03/14	22.2	16.5%	67.2	114/75 mmHg	68
2008/03/22	22.5	15.3%	68	110/67 mmHg	62
2008/03/28	22.3	14.9%	67.6	111/63 mmHg	80

* Gym Scale Broken
** Quit USN supplements & measurements taken in afternoon.

The Secret

2008-04-01T07:15:00.002+02:00

Did Hitler draw Disney characters?

2008-02-26T06:52:00.005+02:00

Everybody knows at least two things about Hitler, one being that he killed Jews and the other being his banning from XBOX Live. But did you know that Hitler tried to make a living as an artist before his rise to power?

A director of a Norwegian museum now claims that he found cartoons drawn by the führer in the back of painting he bought at a German auction for about $300. Do you think these are real? Time will tell, but I think this may be yet another forgery that will make a fair bit of profit.

Positive Changes

2008-02-25T07:16:00.003+02:00

The past week I’ve decided to make some changes to my diet & gym program. Firstly I decided to quit using USN products. Sure, the packaging is attractive, the marketing awesome, and the promise that it will help you lose fat and get ripped faster is so seductive, but the shocking truth is: I would have gotten the same results if I just followed the diet and exercise program, and then I would not have been running out of money every month because I spend so much money on something so unnecessary. If gym is a good habit, then don’t combine it with a bad one!

I have also been following the suggested USN diet blindly and through a moment of enlightenment I realized that this may not be the best thing to do. I found myfitnesspal which makes calorie counting so easy. I am now actively tracking my diet and exercise and, although I may be just kidding myself, doing this gives me a real sense of better control over my health goals.

The final change I made was to do at least 45 minutes of cardio exercises every day by rowing, jumping on the tiring stepper machine, and finishing off with some interval training on the stationary bike – I still do the strength training part of my gym program as I believe this is an important part to help me not lose too much muscle with the fat. The cardio exercises usually works out to a little more than 45 min, the reason for this being is that I set the goals on each machine to 150 Cal instead of 15 minutes. Although the calorie readout may not be accurate that is not the point, the point is that if I just set it to 15 minutes, it may end up being 15 minutes of really light exercising, using calories as I goal I know that I am forcing myself to more or less work equally hard every day.

You will note that my blood pressure is also different, but I am almost a 100% sure that this variation is simply because I am now exercising and measuring in the afternoons. Although it is better to exercise in the mornings I switched to the afternoon to avoid the ridiculous N1 traffic into the Cape Town CBD.

Date	BMI	Body Fat	Weight	Blood Pressure	Pulse
2007-11-16	26.8	24.1%	81.2 kg	136/89 mmHg	88
2007-11-23	26.5	24.4%	80.2 kg	120/79 mmHg	76
2007-11-30	25.8	22.8%	78 kg	112/79 mmHg	69
2007-12-07	25.4	22.2%	76.8 kg	115/71 mmHg	65
2008-01-07	26.2	22.5%	79.2 kg	119/68 mmHg	84
2008-01-11	26	21.8%	78.6 kg	121/82 mmHg	64
2008-01-18	25.6	21.7%	77.4 kg	121/77 mmHg	68
2008-01-26	25.8	21.4%	78 kg	111/67 mmHg	68
2008-02-01	25.8*	21.3%	78 kg*	111/75 mmHg	65
2008-02-08	24.4	20.3%	74 kg	117/68 mmHg	61
2008-02-15	24.3	20.5%	73.5 kg	111/71 mmHg	62
2008-02-22 **	23.7	18.7%	71.8 kg	119/75 mmHg	82

* Gym Scale Broken
** Quit USN supplements & measurements taken in afternoon.

How To: Counter steer a motorcycle

2008-02-15T12:50:00.000+02:00

CBS News 1994: Mugabe Reassures White South Africans

2008-02-12T14:34:00.001+02:00

Supplements

2008-02-01T09:04:00.000+02:00

I had a look at Health 24 to see if it will really be worth using some of those supplements so heavily advertised for getting into shape and building muscles.

Below a quick copy-and-paste summary of the information I found is provided. You will notice from this information it seems like these supplements is going to be a waste of your money and you sould rather just stick with a decent diet of real food and a good exercise program.

CLA

Why you may consider using CLA
People who want to lose weight and use it for:

an increase in fat-free mass;
a reduction of appetite and improved feelings of satiety;
a long-term reduction in body weight

Verdict
You will probably waste your money. If you are considering the use of CLA supplements to help you lose weight, no one can be sure that they will work or not. The chances are that if you use CLA together with an energy-reduced diet and regular exercise, you will lose weight, but the latter two components would have produced the same effect anyway.

You need to decide if you want to spend extra money on a supplement that may, or may not, enhance weight loss.

Creatine

Why you may consider using Creatine
Creatine may help in increasing lean body mass during resistance training programmes. It may also assist the body in regenerating its own creatine stores after long sessions of intense physical activity.

Verdict
Contrary to popular belief, creatine is not the answer to getting a chiseled body. In fact, creatine will have little or no effect on the average person, even if that person goes to the gym regularly. Creatine is a supplement that primarily benefits elite athletes, who use the substance in conjunction with a scientifically mapped eating and exercise programme. Creatine will only aid the increase of muscle mass in athletes who do intensive muscle workouts on a daily basis.

Glutamine

Why you may consider using Glutamine
Glutamine might help in preventing the loss of muscle mass, and may effect muscle recovery times after physical activity. A diet consisting of a healthy amount of glutamine does effect the immune system positively during times of stress.

Verdict
As of yet, there is no concrete evidence that the the supplementation of glutamine enhances exercise or builds muscle. Though some studies may show a positive effect on the immune system, there is insufficient scientific evidence to support this.

Coffee? BAR-ONE

2008-01-31T10:48:00.000+02:00

The Truth About Six Pack Abs

2008-01-16T12:22:00.001+02:00

I had a great Christmas and an fun-filled new year all marked by an excessive daily consumption of chocolate, and as you can see from my first results of 2008 I have something to show for this...

I will be picking up the slack and will hopefully get rid of that belly fat so that at some point I will have real abs to show :)

Date	BMI	Body Fat	Weight	Blood Pressure	Pulse
2007-11-16	26.8	24.1%	81.2 kg	136/89 mmHg	88
2007-11-23	26.5	24.4%	80.2 kg	120/79 mmHg	76
2007-11-30	25.8	22.8%	78 kg	112/79 mmHg	69
2007-12-07	25.4	22.2%	76.8 kg	115/71 mmHg	65
2008-01-07	26.2	22.5%	79.2 kg	119/68 mmHg	84
2008-01-11	26	21.8%	78.6 kg	121/82 mmHg	64
2008-01-18	25.6	21.7%	77.4 kg	121/77 mmHg	68
2008-01-26	25.8	21.4%	78 kg	111/67 mmHg	68
2008-02-01	25.8*	21.3%	78 kg*	111/75 mmHg	65
2008-02-08	24.4	20.3%	74 kg	117/68 mmHg	61

* Gym Scale Broken

ASP.NET Date Picker

2007-12-14T12:41:00.000+02:00

If you are looking for a cool AJAX style date picker give the free date picker control from GrayMatterSoft a try.

It works very well, you get all your client side java script functionality you expect, and best of all deployment is as simple as copying a DLL file, no muching about with JavaScript libraries you have to copy all over the place!

By the way, this control also includes a time picker, to enable it simply set the EnableTimePicker property to true.

Still Fat

2007-12-07T08:06:00.002+02:00

Date	BMI	Body Fat	Weight	Blood Pressure	Pulse
2007-11-16	26.8	24.1%	81.2 kg	136/89 mmHg	88
2007-11-23	26.5	24.4%	80.2 kg	120/79 mmHg	76
2007-11-30	25.8	22.8%	78 kg	112/79 mmHg	69
2007-12-07	25.4	22.2%	76.8 kg	115/71 mmHg	65

How To Be A Hero To Your Girlfriend

2007-12-06T16:42:00.000+02:00

VideoJug: How To Be A Hero To Your Girlfriend

The Results Are In

2007-11-30T08:38:00.001+02:00

The past week marked the beginning of a new diet and a new gym program. If I look at the results below I must say that I am rather happy as it seems like a possitive change is happening.

You will note that my BMI is different from the figures I posted before as I am actually 174 cm instead of 172 cm - I will omit this column in the future as it just looks silly.

Date	BMI	Body Fat	Weight	Height	Blood Pressure	Pulse
2007-11-16	26.8	24.1%	81.2 kg	174 cm	136/89 mmHg	88
2007-11-23	26.5	24.4%	80.2 kg	174 cm	120/79 mmHg	76
2007-11-30	25.8	22.8%	78 kg	174 cm	112/79 mmHg	69

I can honestly say that I love going to gym in the mornings and will continue to do so hopefully for the remainder of my life while capable. I know that people say doing some exercise gives you extra energy, and I do feel this in the beginning of the day, but come night time and I am so tired I just want to pass out on my bed!

Tuesday Diet

2007-11-28T08:25:00.000+02:00

Below you will find our diet for Tuesday. You will see that Meal 5 have an egg white omelet. Now I am sure that if you can make a proper omelet this will be great for some variety, but I personally hate the resulting concoction and just eat the ingredients separate (eggs boiled).

Tuesday
Meal 1	Meal 2	Meal 3	Meal 4	Meal 5
225g FF/LF Yoghurt 3 - 4 Egg Whites	1 Health Bar or 3 Rice Cakes	½ -1 Can Tuna 1 Cup Mixed Veggies	Green Salad or 2 - 3 Rice Cakes 3 - 4 Slices Turkey or 2 - 4 Egg Whites	Egg White Omelet (4 egg whites, 1 Slice Turkey, 1 Yolk) 1 - 2 Cups Mixed Veggies

Gym Program - Day 1

2007-11-27T08:28:00.000+02:00

This week we also started our new gym training program that includes both weight training and cardio. Currently I am using 4kg dumbbells (4kg in each hand) for the exercises and only the last set hurts a little. Next week I will see how it goes with 5kg.

Day 1
Exercise		Reps	Rest	Sets
Warm Up
Shoulders	Seated Shoulder Press	8-15 RM	60 sec	4
Shoulders	Side Lateral Raises	8-15 RM	60 sec	4
Chest choose 2	Inclined Bench Press - Dumbbells	8-15 RM	60 sec	4
	Vertical Chest Press	8-15 RM	60 sec	4
	Flat Dumbbell Flys	8-15 RM	60 sec	4
Thighs choose 1	Leg Extensions	8-15 RM	60 sec	3
Thighs choose 1	Leg Curls	8-15 RM	60 sec	3
Abs & Core	Bent Knee Crunch	20	NONE	3
Abs & Core	Side Crunch	20	NONE	3
Cardio	Cycle (2min/1min)	20 - 30 min	NONE	Max/Easy

The New Diet - Monday

2007-11-26T08:51:00.000+02:00

Today we started our brand new diet and exercise program. This is what we have planned for today:

Monday

Meal 1

Meal 2

Meal 3

Meal 4

Meal 5

2 Tablespoons Grits
3 - 4 Egg Whites

2 Rice Cakes

½ -1 Can Tuna
Green Salad

If hungry: 1 Cup Mixed Veggies

Green Salad or
2-3 Rice Cakes
2 - 4 Slices Turkey or
2 - 4 Egg Whites

115 - 170g Fish or Chicken
1 Cup Green Beans or
Mixed Veggies

The only thing I did not recognize was Grits. Grits is ground up corn, in South Africa if you have mielie pap for breakfast you should be fine. Fortunately all measures in this diet are dry measures, otherwise I would have been very hungry right now.

The green salad referred to here are not only the green leaves you are thinking of, but also cucumber, tomato, and some onions.

I don't think this diet would be too though, I have tried it before and even lost some weight. This combined with the exercise should work well!

Strange Figures

2007-11-23T08:20:00.000+02:00

My results from the first week at the gym are here, check them out below:

BMI	27.1
Body Fat	24.4%
Weight	80.2kg
Height	172cm
Blood Pressure	120/79 mmHg

These figures are not at all what I expected, sure I lost a little bit of weight, but this is not necessarily good... If you look at the figures you will see that my body fat actually increased slightly while my weight also decreased ever so slightly.

This means that I lost a bit of muscle after a week at the gym, but there is no reason for alarm yet, as the amounts are so small. This week we have however been following a new diet I got from Virgin Active and I suspect this may be the culprit as Lize gained even a little more than me while following the same gym and diet program.

Next week we are going back to our old tried and tested diet, so hopefully the figures will look a little better when next I post about this.

As a side note, I am really enjoying the time we spend at the gym and especially like the rowing machine!

I am Fat

2007-11-19T09:01:00.001+02:00

After looking at the pictures from a very enjoyable weekend at the beach I came to realize that I am actually carrying around quite a bit of unnecessary fat (I am the guy on the right if you haven't guessed).

I am very motivated to get rid of this and get into shape and to this end I joined the Tygervallei Virgin Active Gym.

This is actually the first time ever I joined a gym and I am naturally a tad “afraid” of all those machines standing on the floor, but one machine I really like is the one that measures your blood pressure, weight, and body fat. Here is what I got:

BMI	27.4
Body Fat	24.1%
Weight	81kg
Height	172cm
Blood Pressure	136/89 mmHg

As you might see from these results I am not necessarily the most active person around, but I really intend to change that for the better. To help keep me motivated I will try to post these results every week and hopefully there will be some progress :)

UNISA LLB Student Group

2007-11-06T12:09:00.000+02:00

After being to the Facebook Developers garage I really warmed up to Facebook and really see it as a wonderful opportunity and a nice portal to host any wild and crazy applications I can come up with. I have to admit that I have not yet taken the plunge and developed a real world application, but I definitely plan to.

I am a law student at the University of South Africa, and is enjoying every minute of it. UNISA is a distance education institution which means that you basically study though the “post” and never interact with your fellow students save for the odd occasion during exams at the end of the year.

Having studied full time at the Technikon in Bloemfontein a few years ago I do feel that this lack of interaction does create a bit of a void in your “student” life. I thus plan to bring my fellow LLB students together with the aid of technology and especially with the portal Facebook provides us with. To this end I have created a LLB group specifically for UNISA students, if you are one of us click on the link below and join!

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18386374360

During the course of the year in 2008 I also intend to write little Facebook applications as the need arise that will better facilitate collaboration between my fellow students. I can’t wait for 2008, it will be an interesting year!

Facebook Developer Garage Cape Town

2007-10-31T00:14:00.001+02:00

I am now home after attending the first Cape Town Facebook Developer Garage. I saw some people there I recognized from Microsoft events, and Eben de Wit in particular that flew in from Johannesburg to represent Microsoft :)

I must say that I was very impressed with the event and really enjoyed the talks. Right know I just want to sit down and create my killer Facebook application!

Free HTML Editor

2007-10-03T08:58:00.000+02:00

Telerik makes a really cool WYSIWYG editor for ASP.NET, but the problem is that if you are doing small projects you may not necessarily want to purchase it.

A good alternative may be FreeTextBox, it has the Office UI which users will already be familiar with and contains all the essential features of the telerik product, including spell checking via NetSpell.

Cipralex

2007-09-22T15:09:00.000+02:00

An effective therapy for depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

The most frequent adverse events reported with Cipralex are nausea, insomnia, problems with ejaculation, somnolence, increased sweating, fatigue, decreased libido and anorgasmia.

http://www.cipralex.com

Lorwyn: Planeswalker

2007-09-11T09:59:00.000+02:00

It seems like the game of Magic is going to change slightly with the release of Lorwyn and the new Planeswalker card type. Check out some of the Planeswalkers below and read this to find out what the new rules will be, it looks very exiting!

I have also included three of the preview cards here, Dread and the Timber Protector are definitely two cards that I want!

My New XBOX 360!

2007-09-04T09:01:00.000+02:00

I am so happy! Yesterday I managed to exechange my bricked XBOX 360 for a brand new one due to all the effort from Lize!

More details to follow...

MVPs are the best!!!

2007-09-03T11:26:00.001+02:00

I get so worked up when somebody leaves for the weekend, do not check all their code in and leaves behind a solution that does not build, then arrive at 12 in the afternoon at work on Monday.

The dedication of a MVP

2007-08-24T16:41:00.001+02:00

A little background: We have a project with a hellish deadline, everybody have been asked to help including our wonderfull resident MVP.

Everything should be complete by Monday, he has not completed his work since he could not figure out how to get the AJAX toolkit working in SharePoint.

He left it without worrying and went home at 16:30. By the way, we work until 17:00...

Separating Date and Time in T-SQL

2007-08-24T14:12:00.001+02:00

I've used the following SQL Server 2000/2005 user defined functions successfully and they are just so usefull that I have to re-post them here, even if just for myself.

Luciano Evaristo is the original source of the scripts:


CREATE FUNCTION dbo.DATEVALUE
(
 @Datetime datetime
)
/*******************************************************************************
 * AUTHOR: Luciano Evaristo Guerche                                            *
 *******************************************************************************/
RETURNS datetime
AS
BEGIN
    RETURN CAST(ROUND(CAST(@Datetime AS float), 0, 1) AS datetime)
END
GO

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.TIMEVALUE
(
 @Datetime datetime
)
/*******************************************************************************
 * AUTHOR: Luciano Evaristo Guerche                                            *
 *******************************************************************************/
RETURNS datetime
AS
BEGIN
    RETURN (@Datetime - CAST(ROUND(CAST(@Datetime AS float), 0, 1) AS datetime))
END
GO

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.DATESERIAL
(
 @YearSerial int,
 @MonthSerial int,
 @DaySerial int
)
RETURNS datetime
AS
BEGIN
    RETURN (CAST(CAST(@YearSerial AS varchar(4)) + '-' + CAST(@MonthSerial AS varchar(2)) + '-' + CAST(@DaySerial AS varchar(2)) AS datetime))
END
GO

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.TIMESERIAL
(
 @HOUR AS int,
 @MINUTE AS int,
 @SECOND AS int,
 @MILLISECOND AS int
)
/*******************************************************************************
 * AUTHOR: Luciano Evaristo Guerche                                            *
 *******************************************************************************/
RETURNS datetime
AS
BEGIN
    RETURN ((@HOUR / 24) + DATEADD(hour, @HOUR % 24, DATEADD(minute, @MINUTE, DATEADD(second, @SECOND, DATEADD(millisecond, @MILLISECOND, 0)))))
END
GO

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.DATETIME_CUSTOM_FORMAT
(
 @INPUT AS datetime = NULL
)
/*******************************************************************************
 * AUTHOR: Luciano Evaristo Guerche                                            *
 *******************************************************************************/
RETURNS varchar(20)
AS
BEGIN
    RETURN (CASE WHEN (ROUND(CAST(@INPUT AS float), 0, 1) * 24) + DATEPART(hour, @INPUT) < 10 THEN '0' ELSE '' END + CAST((ROUND(CAST(@INPUT AS float), 0, 1) * 24) + DATEPART(hour, @INPUT) AS varchar(10)) + ':' +
            RIGHT('00' + CAST(DATEPART(minute, @INPUT) AS varchar(2)), 2) + ':' +
            RIGHT('00' + CAST(DATEPART(second, @INPUT) AS varchar(2)), 2) + '.' +
            RIGHT('000' + CAST(DATEPART(millisecond, @INPUT) AS varchar(3)), 3)
           )
END
GO

Sex linea

2007-08-12T13:06:00.000+02:00

Yes, But What Have You Done?

2007-08-03T09:25:00.000+02:00

I don’t particularly like people who do more talking than actually doing. Some “Microsoft Valued Professionals” strikes me as a breed particularly better at talking than actually doing, so naturally I can’t say I have great admiration for them.

This article makes for an interesting read. The quote below really sums up how I feel about our precious MVPs:

“The last thing the world needs is more pundits. Pundits only add ephemeral commentary to the world instead of anything concrete and real. They don't materially participate in the construction of any lasting artifacts; instead, they passively observe other people's work and offer a neverending babbling brook of opinions, criticism, and witty turns of phrase. It's pathetic.”

Magic: The First Unit Test

2007-08-01T08:56:00.000+02:00

Progress on the MTG game are going rather slowly since I am not devoting that much time to it. I have started with core functionality, namely the game engine, and should be busy with this for quite some time to come. Below an extract of the first unit test can be seen:

(...)

// get the startup player
Player currentPlayer = 
 game.Players.GetStartupPlayer();

Assert.AreEqual(currentPlayer, 
 game.Players.ActivePlayer, 
 "The startup player should be the active player.");

// it should now be the first turn 
// and the first phase
Assert.AreEqual(1, game.TurnNumber, 
 "This should be the first turn.");

Assert.AreEqual(Phases.Untap, 
 game.Phases.CurrentPhase, 
 "The first phase should be the untap phase.");

// perfrom a few game loops
for (int turn = 2; turn <= 5; turn++)
{
 Console.WriteLine("Current Player: {0}", 
  currentPlayer.Name);

 // move though the phases
 game.Phases.Next();

 Assert.AreEqual(Phases.Upkeep, 
  game.Phases.CurrentPhase, 
  "It should now be the upkeep phase");

(...)

From this test case you should be able to glean a bit of information of the infrastructure I will be using – As can be seen the application will be developed using the .NET framework and the C# language.

The game will consist of a (huge) collection of objects and event driven programming techniques will be used. Although not shown in the code snippet above the events I refer to are not just events for the user interface. There is, for example, an event in the phases class that fires when there is a move past the last phase, the game object then subscribes to this event and do things like start the next turn and assign priority to the next player.

The user interface are still a very long way down the line and until the core game engine is near completion the Magic games of this application will live only in test cases like the one shown above. I do however want the user interface to be loosely tied to the game engine, again though mechanisms like events raised by the game engine.

I am contemplating using XAML for the UI since this technology looks really interesting and well suited for the purposes of this game. If you are running Windows Vista XAML applications are also easily embedded in web pages, go here to see this dude rip in Internet Explorer 7.

A neat idea would also be to implement the user interface using only AJAX techniques, this will allow a person to browse to the web site, create a account, then browse to another page to find an opponent and then play right there and then in the web browser without the need to download anything else like a Java Runtime Environment or anything like that.

Magic: The Gathering

2007-07-26T09:36:00.000+02:00

Magic is a collectable card game to which many young people are introduced to during their varcity days. It is a little bit of a geeky thing, much in league with Dungeons & Dragons, but it really is a lot of fun once you get into it. To get a taste for it you should download the Tutorial Computer Game (located under learn to play).

The “problem” with the game is that it can become rather addictive and they are releasing new and exciting card set all the time that you “just gotto have”. This results in a rather empty pocket as you can imagine... To curb this problem a little bit I thought that if I am just going to play for fun I may as well create proxy cards using Magic Set Editor, and when I find something that really works well I will go and buy only the singles I need.

I also occasionally play Magic Online which I really enjoy. With this online game you always have somebody willing to play against no matter what time of day it is, and as an huge added bonus the game itself enforces the rules which means that there is no need to sit and scratch your head of what exactly is permissible or have long arguments.

Magic Online does however also have the same drawback as the real life card game - the electronic cards are just as expensive as the printed ones. This naturally means that if you are not willing to spend all your money on this hobby you are going to have a bad deck which everybody beats all the time!

There are alternatives to Magic Online like Magic Workstation and Apprentice. These two alternatives are however a little crap, for a couple of reasons like the UI and that there is no rules enforcement, but it is perhaps because of this crappiness that WotC have not shut down these two applications like they have done with others.

I recently found Magic-Project that looked really promising. I really liked the way it defines the cards in XML and even the rules for the game in XML, but sadly one should not be fooled by the pretty appearance of this application. After playing around with it last night I was a little less than satisfied, suspended cards works terribly (actually not at all) and putting counters on Spore Flower or Thallid Shell-Dweller does not appear to work. Although I can see from the architecture of this Java based game that it is quite possible to implement these abilities I can also see that the experience is sadly never going to be as pleasant as Magic Online.

I hereby undertake the rather ambitious project to create my own Magic application for online play with a similar interface to Magic Online or perhaps even that of the new beta version. My version should do rules enforcement, allow two players to play over TCP/IP and perhaps even have a little bit of AI for single player games. As I mentioned I really liked the XML card definitions of Magic-Project so I definitely want something very similar.

My first order of business will be to implement a two player game with a working Fun With Fungus theme deck. The reason for choosing this deck is that it is from the Time Spiral set which was the set at the time when I started playing, and also since this is the deck my fiancé always plays and drives me mad with.

Naturally if WotC gets wind of this they will shut me down since I am infringing on their copyright, but in all fairness I don’t see a huge problem here. There is nothing preventing magic players to create proxy cards for casual play and this is actually something players to often when they are play testing and don’t want to break the bank by buying lots expensive rares.

Still my logic may not be entirely sound and I will be infringing anyway, but if I only use this application for personal use to play my (future) wife and perhaps a few close friends without any sort of financial gain I don’t see the harm, surely I should be able to invest the time and effort without fear of the legalities from bureaucratic wizards?

XBOX 360 Customer Support

2007-07-23T08:14:00.000+02:00

In the continuing saga of my broken XBOX 360 I contacted Microsoft XBOX Customer support finding out where I should take my console to be repaired in Cape Town, South Africa. Naturally the support personnel fell over their feet in eagerness to help me and provided me with the following useful link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907534

I actually see a customer support email like this extremely insulting. Anybody with two brain cells, some typing ability and an internet connection could have found this themselves. This was the very first thing I tried, even before finding the KB article, and guess what, the article did not help me jack...

The problem with the AJAX UpdatePanel

2007-07-20T10:27:00.000+02:00

I want to start off by saying that Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX is a really powerful, useful and awesomely cool framework with the world of potential behind it. This post is thus in no way intended to slam it, merely to highlight a problem I found in the hopes that somebody will provide a clever solution that I have not thought of.

I tried to create a user interface as depicted below.

I want AJAX stuff to happen when the plus sign is clicked, it should for example change to a minus, update the group label and update the contents label. For this construed example I wrote code to this effect:

<table border="1">
  <asp:UpdatePanel ID="updateOne" 
                   runat="server" 
                   UpdateMode="Conditional">
    <ContentTemplate>
      <tr>
        <td>
          <asp:LinkButton ID="lnkOne"
                          runat="server" 
                          Text="+" />
        </td>
        
        <td>
            Group One
            <asp:Label ID="lblGroupOne" 
                       runat="server" />
        </td>
      </tr>
      
      <tr>
        <td>&nbsp;</td>
        <td>
          <asp:Label ID="lblOneContents" 
                         runat="server" 
                         Text="(not loaded)" />
        </td>
      </tr>
    </ContentTemplate>
  </asp:UpdatePanel>

  <asp:UpdatePanel ID="updateTwo" 
                   runat="server" 
                   UpdateMode="Conditional">
    <ContentTemplate>
      <tr>
        <td>
          <asp:LinkButton ID="lnkTwo" 
                          runat="server" 
                          Text="+" />
        </td>
        
        <td>
           Group Two
           <asp:Label ID="lblGroupTwo" 
                      runat="server" />
        </td>
      </tr>
      
      <tr>
        <td>&nbsp;</td>
        <td>
          <asp:Label ID="lblTwoContents" 
                     runat="server" 
                     Text="(not loaded)" />
          </td>
      </tr>
    </ContentTemplate>
  </asp:UpdatePanel>
</table>

At the face of it this code may appear to work and when a link button is clicked in an update panel only that specific update panel will be updated.

Sadly this does not work, at run time the UpdatePanel renders a div tag around the contents thereof to allow it to get the reference to the part of the page to dynamically update.

If you ever tried to group some tr elements together with a div or span tag and wrote some JavaScript code to dynamically show and hide these groups you will know that such grouping is simply not possible. It is also for this reason that the code I wrote above will simply not work.

Did Hitler’s XBOX 360 die?

2007-07-19T11:36:00.001+02:00

As I mentioned a couple of days ago my XBOX 360 died on me. I still feel it’s a complete shame, apart from the high hardware failure rate of these consoles they are actually very cool...

Affirmative Action

2007-07-18T08:23:00.000+02:00

We already heard reports form learned people like Dirk Hermann, who examined the subject in a doctoral thesis, that the time for affirmative action may be over and that the focus should rather be moved elsewhere. It is stated, and I think quite correctly, that AA “was never meant as a permanent framework but a temporary corrective measure”. I encourage you to read the full article here and post some comments on my blog if you like.

Today I am also going to be infringing on copyright and provide you with the full text of an article I found on News24. When you read this does it not leave a bit of a funny taste in your mouth, or a feeling that AA is really becoming something “anti-white” and a beast it was never intended to be?

I am acutely aware that I do not know all the facts or understand all the intricacies of politics, but when the average public, like you and me, reads an article like this how does it make you feel?

AA: 'White women benefit most'
http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/default/display_article.aspx?Nav=ns&ArticleID=1518-1786_2148818

Pretoria - Public hearings should be held to determine whether or not white women should be excluded from affirmative action, Commission for Employment Equity chairperson Jimmy Manyi said on Tuesday.

He was speaking at a press conference following the conclusion of a meeting of the Joint Presidential Working Group on Big Business in Pretoria.

He said a study of employment equity figures between 2000 and 2006 had shown that white women where the "main beneficiaries" of empowerment policies.

The figures had shown 60% of all recruitment and 60% of all promotions were given to white people.

Manyi did not give more details on the figures, or on when the public hearings would be held.

Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana said this showed that the government and affirmative action policies were not aimed against white people.

This should also shut up critics who said it was time to disbandon affirmative action.

"If employment equity is not being implemented, reconciliation will be affected.

"When racism is gone, employment equity will be redundant," Mdladlana said.

Red Rings of Death

2007-07-16T08:35:00.000+02:00

I am mad, really-really mad at Microsoft. My XBOX 360 is now bricked and I haven’t even used it that much – I mean the longest I played on it was maybe an hour continuously, plus it’s winter, the unit was well ventilated as was the power supply so I don’t see how overheating could be the problem!

When you search the web you will find many people claiming that the Forza Motorsport 2 game is the culprit. Although it may sound farfetched I totally belief this theory. My XBOX 360 worked perfectly until I bought this game created by Microsoft Studios. I played Forza 2 maybe for 90 minutes IN TOTAL and experienced console freezes multiple time. The next day I turned on my console and hey presto, the 3 red blinking lights indicating that my XBOX is now useless.

I have invested quite a bit of money in other games so this is a really upsetting situation, the money I have spend is now essentially thrown into the water – I will definitely not buy another shoddy piece of hardware that is just going to break again when I play the wrong game.

Now you may ask me why I don’t just take it to be repaired since Microsoft did increase the warranty on all these consoles retrospectively? Well the problem is this was a gift and I don’t have the invoice, what am I to do?

Court Drawings

2007-07-11T09:24:00.000+02:00

I apologize for the long delay since my last post from the airport. Since then I’ve been essentially without an internet connection.

My previously mentioned friends restricted the internet access to such an extent that almost nothing is accessible and then after an hour everything becomes inaccessible. If you think dialup is bad think again...

Anyway, here is my post for today:

You might have seen some of those drawings made in court depicting the judges, lawyers or defendants on the news. Have you ever wondered why they are draw in an age where videos and photographs can easily be taken instead?

As you may know the answer to this is rather simply, there are always some cases where the media will not be allowed to take photographs or videos. The old saying goes that a picture speaks a thousand words and it is for this reason the media uses these drawings. Something interesting is that the way court artists depicts someone will impact how the public judges them.

One thing that is also very interesting is that while court artists in America are allowed to do the drawings in court there is an act of Parliament in the UK dating back to 1925 that prevents artists in this country from drawing in court, UK court artists can only make notes and then have to do the court drawings from memory.

Did you know that even in trails where video cameras are allowed courtroom art is still important? The following quote is from CourtroomArtust.com:

"Created on site...each courtroom sketch is a unique document... a television prop and a historical memento. Ironically, the recent televisation of trials has endowed the courtroom art with a great and perceived value; it is increasingly sought after by collectors"

If you are interested in becoming a courtroom artist visit this eHow page and view the graphics of Elizabeth Cook, a well known court artists in the United Kingdom.

Blogging from the airport

2007-06-28T16:35:00.000+02:00

Right now I am sitting at the Cape Town international airport waiting for my (yet again) delayed flight to Johannesburg. Since 19 February I've been flying up and down between the two cities every weekend and the novelty of flight had long since disappeared.

Today it is with a happy heart that I say farewell to this airport with virtually no chairs. I haven't been to the international side yet, but I assure you if international departures are anything like domestic departures I foresee some trouble in 2010.

I am accessing the internet though the wireless hotspot set up here and actually find the internet access rather good. One must however consider that I would find any sort of internet access where one can actually download something very good, see my postings elsewhere – I might have complained enough already about the restrictive Medi-Clinic access...

Anyway I'm off for an early weekend and ready for the long drive from Jo’burg to Cape Town, wish me luck.

If you are reading this I would like to sincerely thank you for taking the time to visit my little blog, please do come again!

Internet Policy can bite me!

2007-06-27T11:57:00.000+02:00

First blocking MSN, google talk and gmail. Then blocking google forums, after that blocking wikipedia for a while. This is the latest crap:

Why do balloons deflate?

2007-06-27T10:42:00.000+02:00

Have you ever wondered why your balloons deflate while the balloon actually appears to be quite thoroughly sealed? The reason for this is a little bit apparent - latex balloons have microscopic holes in them though which air (or helium) can escape. Obviously this also explains why helium balloons deflate much quicker since the helium particles are much smaller.

Latex is not suppose to be full of holes though, and the tiny holes are probably the result of the manufacturing or packaging of the balloons. This does raise an interesting question: Isn’t latex the same stuff condoms are made of? This leads to two alternative inferences:

If you fill a condom with helium it will not deflate.
Condoms are full of holes.

If we fill a condom with helium and it deflates after a while I guess the latter is true, a very scary thought for some I am sure...

I have nothing to say today...

2007-06-26T14:12:00.000+02:00

Some Good News

2007-06-25T15:06:00.000+02:00

Previously I complained about the news always being full of just bad news. I was wrong, today there are some good news. Economists are predicting that the petrol price will go down by about 10c/liter due to a more stable rand and a drop in the oil price.

According to the clever people this drop could be quite short lived, but never mind that, at least for today we have something to be happy about!

The importance of DOCTYPE

2007-06-25T10:26:00.000+02:00

I don't know if many people realize how important it is to place the appropriate DOCTYPE declaration at the top of their HTML files so I have created the following HTML sample to illustrate some of the value:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC 
 "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html>
 <head>
  <title>Table Test</title>
  
  <style type="text/css">
   .myFont
   {
    font-family: Arial, 
                 Helvetica, 
                 sans-serif;
    font-size: 1.3em;
   }
  </style>
 </head>
 
 <body class="myFont">
  <h1>Doctype</h1>
  
  <p>
   This is a simple page to test the 
   effect of doctypes and what they 
   do with your CSS.
  </p>
  
  <table border="1">
   <tr>
    <th>Name</th>
    <th>Surname</th>
   </tr>
   
   <tr>
    <td>Hannes</td>
    <td>Foulds</td>
   </tr>

   <tr>
    <td>Lize</td>
    <td>Taljaard</td>
   </tr>
  </table>
 </body>
</html>

This is what it looks like when the DOCTYPE is in place, notice how the font size we set in the body tag trickles down to all the child tags:

When we take out the DOCTYPE it ignores the font of the parent and renders thus:

I have provided the most common DOCTYPE declarations below and you may find them usefull:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC 
 "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC 
 "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC 
 "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC 
 "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Britain bans biltong

2007-06-22T11:39:00.000+02:00

You just got to love news articles headlines. Take this one: Britain bans biltong.

What would you say this article is about? Perhaps the British government got this crazy idea that biltong does not go well with tea and should be banned from the country?

Not the case, the headline is there just to entice you to read the article. The article is in fact reporting about a media campaign to warn visitors that it is illegal to bring meat and animal products into the country, especially if you are traveling there by plane, or posting a package. The reason for this does make sense: "The UK, being an island, has to be sensitive about possible pests that could be brought into the country via food parcels"

This reminds me of another piece of irresponsible reporting that was done on News24 about the Constitutional Court's Shocking Ruling on anal penetration.

Now before you go off in a hissy-fit and explode, like other readers have done in the comments for the article, do yourself a favor and go read the complete ruling so you at least know what you are talking about.

Using the .NET 2.0 Build in support for AJAX

2007-06-22T09:45:00.000+02:00

The following is an article I intend to publish on The Code Project but I thought to make it available here first as I am unable to download the article template since Medi-Clinic internet policy apparently blocks any form of download that is not HTML, JPG or GIF.

The source code download is currently also not available as this will require me to upload something to the web, another function that was kindly blocked by the friendly people in some IT dungeon somewhere...

Introduction

I have spend most of my professional career in a Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Content Management server 2002 environment and have learned to appreciate the value of custom WebControls In SharePoint we have WebParts which are just glorified WebControls and in MCMS 2002 we have Placeholders, also just WebParts that have mutated.

Today when I look at any custom piece of functionality that should be hosted either in SharePoint or on a normal .NET web page I see things in terms of custom controls. Every custom control can contain many other standard and custom controls, and each of them can also contain child controls as needed. I think this is the same top down approach most of us use when writing code. We have methods, or methods call other methods, the can call more methods etc.

With the above being said I am sure that you can infer that this article will be about custom web controls that are written using one of the .NET languages, my focus however is only to show how custom controls can be constructed to use some AJAX functionality with only the standard features provided by the .NET 2.0 Framework.

In this article Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (formally known as Microsoft Atlas) is not used in any form, using the techniques described in this article you can, for example, add AJAX functionality to your SharePoint 2007 web parts without the need to deploy any additional libraries the approach will be to implement the ICallbackEventHandler interface.

Check Box Example

In this article I will construct a simple AJAX enabled check box, but let me first explain why a check box like this can be useful: Assume we are creating a sales view control. This control will list all the sales that were made during the day (a potentially substantial list). When going through list the sales manager can "red flag" items that appears important to him. Later he can apply filter to view the entire list or only his short listed items. A sample interface might look like this:

The question now is how do we implement the red flag functionality? Using conventional strategies we can do one of two things:

Have the checkbox controls do an automatic post-back when they are clicked.
Put a button at the bottom (and top) of the list labeled Update that will store the users red flag selection when clicked.

Both of these approaches are less than optimal if we have the entire page is posted back and refreshed we are going to have a very frustrated sales manager sick of contending with constant page flashes, and tired of waiting for the page to finish loading every time he selects something. If we have a button to save the selection, the sales manager may forget to click it, close his browser and when he later returns find that he have to go through the entire list again and re-select everything he is interested in and hopefully remember to click on the save button...

A much more user friendly interface will be where the user can just tick the check boxes for the items they are interested in without the page posting back and without the need to remember clicking a save button somewhere. To accomplish this we will need the power of AJAX.

The AJAX Check Box

What I will be creating is a re-usable AJAX check box control that is not only relevant to the ACME Sales view described above, but which can also be used as part of any custom control requiring AJAX check boxes.

Declaring the Check Box

Our control starts with the following declaration:

public class AjaxCheckBox : WebControl, INamingContainer, ICallbackEventHandler

The WebControl and INamingContainer interfaces are just the standard interfaces we always implement when creating custom controls, the important bit here is the ICallbackEventHandler that we will use to AJAX enable the check box. To implement this interface our control must have two functions namely RaiseCallbackEvent and GetCallbackResult. The RaiseCallbackEvent method is the method that will be executed on AJAX callbacks to the server and the GetCallbackResult method is used by the client browser to get a string of any data that resulted from the callback.

The typical logic that custom ICallbackEventHandler AJAX controls use is the following:

On page load the control renders itself as normal though through the Render method. In the render method a container control (like a div tag) will also be rendered to the client, this container will display any AJAX results/dynamically created user interface.
The user clicks on a button or perform some action that will execute a JavaScript function to initiate the AJAX callback.
The server code calls the RaiseCallbackEvent method and performs the necessary processing (this method receives a string argument which is passed from the JavaScript method).
The RaiseCallbackEvent method stores any results that should be passed back to the client in a class level string variable on the server.
The client script calls the GetCallbackResult method and receives the string result from the server.
The client script processes the string result and omits resulting HTML in the client container control (the div).

The check box created here will not do any client side processing as there are nothing more to do on the client after the user have clicked a check box, but for an example of the complete model as described above refer to the Validate sample provided in the source code.

Check Box Events

I have implemented a custom event for the check box that will notify the control containing the check box whenever the value of the check box changes. This is actually a very neat part of the control when RaiseCallbackEvent is called you can fire events from this methods and listeners of the event will actually be notified of the event although it is an AJAX callback. The code below shows the relevant sections for the custom event (you will notice that there is nothing fancy here, this is standard code we know even from 2003 days):

#region Delegates
/// <summary>
/// The delegate for the check changed event
/// </summary>
/// <param name="value">The value of the check box.</param>
public delegate void CheckChangedDelegate(bool value);
#endregion

#region Events
/// <summary>
/// The check changed event.
/// </summary>
public event CheckChangedDelegate CheckChanged;
#endregion

#region On Check Changed
/// <summary>
/// Execute the check changed event if it has been wired up.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="value">The value of the text box.</param>
protected void OnCheckChanged(bool value)
{
if (this.CheckChanged != null)
this.CheckChanged(value);
}
#endregion

In the sales example our view control will thus have a few of these checkboxes and wire up event handlers for them, when the AJAX text box fire off its event the sales view will update the database accordingly blissfully unaware that the event was actually a result of an AJAX callback. Below a simple control containing the AJAX check box is illustrated:

Doing the AJAX

The first thing I did was to render the user interface of the AJAX text box as show below. You will notice that a server side check box is not created and a simple <input> tag is rendered. The client side onclick event is responsible for calling the appropriate JavaScript function that will perform the AJAX callback.

The clientValue in the example below is the client side JavaScript that will be executed on an AJAX callback to get the value to pass to the server RaiseCallbackEventmethod, while the callbackRef variable contains the string of the client side AJAX JavaScript to execute for the callback.

#region Render
/// <summary>
/// Render the interface for the control.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="writer">The writer used for rendering the control.</param>
protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
      string clientValue = string.Format("document.getElementById('{0}').checked", this.CheckBoxID);
      string callbackRef = this.Page.ClientScript.GetCallbackEventReference(this, clientValue, "null", null);

      writer.WriteLine("<input id=\"{0}\" type=\"checkbox\" onclick=\"javascript:{1}\" />", this.CheckBoxID, callbackRef);
}
#endregion

The final pieces of the puzzle are the implementation of the two functions which the ICallbackEventHandler interface requires. The RaiseCallbackEvent method parses the string value it receives from the client and then calls the method that will execute any wired up events. The GetCallbackResult method simply returns null since no other client side processing will be performed.

#region Get Callback Result
/// <summary>
/// Get the result of a client side callback.
/// </summary>
/// <returns>The callback result string.</returns>
public string GetCallbackResult()
{
      return null;
}
#endregion

#region Raise Callback Event
/// <summary>
/// Raise the client callback event
/// </summary>
/// <param name="eventArgument">The event arguments.</param>
public void RaiseCallbackEvent(string eventArgument)
{
      bool value = Boolean.Parse(eventArgument);
      this.OnCheckChanged(value);
}
#endregion

Complete Code

To help put everything in perspective I have provided the complete code for the AJAX check box below:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

namespace DrainCleaner.Controls
{
      /// <author>Hannes Foulds</author>
      /// <date>11 June 2007</date>
      /// <summary>
      /// This control creates a ajax check box.
      /// </summary>
      public class AjaxCheckBox : WebControl, INamingContainer, ICallbackEventHandler
      {
            #region Delegates
            /// <summary>
            /// The delegate for the check changed event
            /// </summary>
            /// <param name="value">The value of the check box.</param>
            public delegate void CheckChangedDelegate(bool value);
            #endregion

            #region Events
            /// <summary>
            /// The check changed event.
            /// </summary>
            public event CheckChangedDelegate CheckChanged;
            #endregionregion

            #region Properties
            /// <summary>
            /// The ID of the control that AJAX results should be displayed in.
            /// </summary>
            protected string CheckBoxID
            {
                  get { return string.Concat(this.ClientID, "_result"); }
            }
            #endregion

            #region Render
            /// <summary>
            /// Render the interface for the control.
            /// </summary>
            /// <param name="writer">The writer used for rendering the control.</param>
            protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
            {
                  string clientValue = string.Format("document.getElementById('{0}').checked", this.CheckBoxID);
                  string callbackRef = this.Page.ClientScript.GetCallbackEventReference(this, clientValue, "null", null);

                  writer.WriteLine("<input id=\"{0}\" type=\"checkbox\" onclick=\"javascript:{1}\" />", this.CheckBoxID, callbackRef);
            }
            #endregion

            #region Get Callback Result
            /// <summary>
            /// Get the result of a client side callback.
            /// </summary>
            /// <returns>The callback result string.</returns>
            public string GetCallbackResult()
            {
                  return null;
            }
            #endregion

            #region Raise Callback Event
            /// <summary>
            /// Raise the client callback event
            /// </summary>
            /// <param name="eventArgument">The event arguments.</param>
            public void RaiseCallbackEvent(string eventArgument)
            {
                  bool value = Boolean.Parse(eventArgument);
                  this.OnCheckChanged(value);
            }
            #endregion

            #region On Check Changed
            /// <summary>
            /// Execute the check changed event if it has been wired up.
            /// </summary>
            /// <param name="value">The value of the text box.</param>
            protected void OnCheckChanged(bool value)
            {
                  if (this.CheckChanged != null)
                        this.CheckChanged(value);
            }
            #endregion
      }
}

Conclusion

I hope that this article has at least provided you with something to think about, and if you still dont believe me that the event handler is executed set a breakpoint at bool test = value; and test this yourself ;-)

In the downloadable source code for this article I have also included a validation control which does something a little more complex. I recently implemented a control like this that validated asset numbers against a database and it worked quite well.

AJAX is a really powerful technology and I belief that it is here to stay as it definitely make the user experience more pleasant by leaps and bounds. In future articles I will have a look at ASP.NET AJAX and the wonders thereof.

Build AJAX apps in the Java language

2007-06-21T14:05:00.000+02:00

This entry is more of a reminder to myself to check out the Google Web Toolkit which simplifies the creation of AJAX applications like Gmail. According to the site “you write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.”

This page shows off the various widgets you have available to create the user interface with.

I've been thinking with the aid of this you could perhaps write a killer Google Gadget for your personalized Google search page...

Crazy idea of the day: #1

2007-06-21T09:26:00.000+02:00

Yesterday the WAN connection between or Tyger Park offices (the whole Medi-Clinic apparently) and Milnerton Medi-Clinic was down. User acceptance testing was scheduled for today and a SharePoint rollout had to be completed the afternoon before that. The end result was that we could not roll out from our cozy little offices far away and had to drive to the hospital to get on the LAN.

The deployment was completed by about 21:00 after SharePoint designer crashed maybe a thousand times and a pop up message appearing in which Microsoft apologized for the fact that my office application is frequently crashing... During the entire deployment the project manager was with me to keep me company/give moral support/buy pizza/go and refill my car/whatever, I really appreciated him being there and this made me come up with the following crazy idea:

I don’t think anybody really likes working late, sure it’s fun once in a while, but it is definitely not a maintainable situation and after a while burnout can occur. With this in mind I think that whenever developers are necessitated to work late their project managers must be required to spend the same amount of late hours with them. Depending on how you look at the issue the motivation and logic for this can actually be sound, think of it – why are you required to work late?

If you are not one of those developers who play Quake during working hours or participate in other time wasting activities that eats into your development time, why should you have to work late? If you do your bit every day not wasting time and follow the project plan (assuming the project plan is accurate) surely the project run smoothly? Unfortunately real life rarely works like this, I am sure you have many stories to relate of how you are continuously loosing half days (or even full days) of development time due to being pulled into meetings, or have to do other things that was just not planned for, scope creep anyone? If you have to work late because of this then surely you are not to blame and the situation is actually the result of bad or inaccurate project planning? In this case I feel that it is actually justifiable that the project manager should suffer with the developers when they have to work late. This way both the developers and project manager will realize that it is not that much fun working late and both parties will hopefully make future efforts not to have the situation repeat itself.

Tell me what you think!

Ruined my tie

2007-06-20T15:51:00.000+02:00

I just managed to ruin my light blue silk tie. Not sure of exactly how it happened, but after lunch I noticed a spot on the tie. It's not a terribly big spot, but it is definitely something you will notice.

Naturally the first thing I did when I got back to the office was to consult Dr Google. I was told that silk ties aren't meant to be cleaned. If you expose them to water they may fall apart and if you apply stain remover they may discolor. It appears that your only resolve is to get a new one.

This is a real pity and I am actually very upset about it, not only do I have to be aware of the spot for the rest of the day, but I am also sans one pretty tie...

Wash your hands!

2007-06-20T10:22:00.000+02:00

I was at the Tyger Valley mall to see a movie, when I went for a quick toilet break I heard the words: "Fact, 52% of all men do not wash their hands after going to the bathroom. The choice is literally in your hands, go wash them now."

After a few seconds I realized that this was not the voice of God (to be honest I never thought it was God, when it started the distorted voice actually sounded like a cell phone ringtone saying "F*cked!") , but a clever little Dettol advert with a motion sensor that was placed above the urinal.

It did inspire both me and the guy next to me to go wash our hands so I guess it worked... Maybe they should put up more of these in public restrooms? :-)

This is evolution

2007-06-19T18:47:00.000+02:00

Almost everybody have seen a Garfield comic strip, but did you know that the fat cat has been around since 19 June 1978? So very happy birthday Garfield!

I must say the years have treated him very well, look at the very first comic strip and the one of today with images we are all too familiar with - he sure has evolved.

All computer software is faulty

2007-06-19T12:53:00.000+02:00

In case you are interested you can read De Rebus online, it is one of South Africa’s oldest journal for attorneys and not all articles are as boring as you may think.

Have a look at this article which will perhaps make you think how to better test the software you develop.

Free Audio Books

2007-06-19T09:27:00.000+02:00

If you are going on a long road trip or feeling bored, why not download yourself some free audio books? The human read recordings on Project Gutenberg are quite good and they include quite a few of the favorite classics!

Propaganda Machine

2007-06-14T09:21:00.000+02:00

Wednesday was a big day for the COSATU strike action with public servants demanding higher salary increases and unions from the private sector joining in and vowed to "shut the country down in sympathy with civil servants". Personally I think the union is starting to go to far, government has increased their offer to 7.25% across-the-board, which is perhaps not that bad seeing that everyone will get their 7.25% even if you are a municipal worker who spends his working day sleeping under big trucks.

Government is also proposing occupation specific dispensation which means that the increase will be based on the seniority, period of service, performance, qualifications, scope and nature of work. Now this does make a whole lot of sense, surely a hard working teacher should receive a bigger salary raise than that aforementioned municipal worker?

An interesting phenomenon I noticed yesterday is that some blue collar workers who a) are not civil servants and b) does not belong to any union, did arrive for work on Wednesday, but were very reluctant to do any real work. When asked why the were like this statements like the following were made: "Today is not a work day, it is a strike day". To me this shows just how much people are like sheep and will follow each other even if they do not truly understand why or know the facts. In my view this truely shows just how easy it can be to spread your propaganda and get people to do what you want them to. Maybe a possible recipe could be this:

Design your propaganda in such a way so "flock of sheep" thinks that the issue somehow effects them personally.
Get influential and charismatic leaders to spread the message and rally the flock.
Get your flock to make public demonstrations and make sure your propaganda and demonstrations gets into the media.
Rally other flocks that may have not have been part of your initial focus.

Hey who knows, after a few refinements of my recipe you might see me on TV as the next president!

I also realized something very interesting around the wage increase negotiations. If government can maintain the country’s infrastructure while civil servants are on strike, government could take the strategy of just doing nothing at all. Let them strike for a while, the strike will be illegal, the employees will not have to be paid, money will be saved that way, and when enough money have been saved to meet their demands then give them what they want. Workers will rejoice not realizing that they haven’t really received anything extra, but just the money the would have earned (perhaps even less) if the continued working as normal.

Read more about the strike at News24.

Just pay me with alcohol

2007-06-13T15:50:00.000+02:00

Imagine yourself as a worker on one of the Cape's wine farms, at the end of the week you queue op for your remuneration, but your remuneration is not money, no it is something "better", you are being paid with alcohol in place of wages. This is known as the "dop system" and is part of a legacy we have from slave labour on wine farms.

Although this system is no longer legal I must say it remind me a lot of my days at SA Breweries, but at least I was also paid some hard currency.

All jokes aside, it seems like The Black Association of the Wine and Spirits industry is trying to sue government for "creating thousands of alcoholics". Read more here:

Conspiracy Breeding Grounds

2007-06-13T09:06:00.000+02:00

South Africans were greeted with petrol hikes the last few months which naturally effects every single one of us in the pocket - if petrol goes up, so does the price everything else, a unfortunate but very real fact. In a naïve few of things some people may actually be happy when the petrol price goes up...

Think of retailers, for example, when the petrol price goes up they have a "valid excuse" to raise prices since transportation is now more expensive, thus it costs more to get the goods to them. But do you think they lower their prices again when the petrol price goes down?

That however is not the conspiracy theory I am referring to, what I am referring to is governments apparent inability to alleviate traffic problems. Gauteng have released their transport budget and they have allocated 69% of the budget to the Gautrain. The Gautrain is a great idea, but there is also great debate about it. Will it really help reduce the number of cars on the road?

Some think it will not, and that the Gautrain will actually be used by a relatively small percentage of current commuters. Some angry commuters actually thinks that it makes sense for government not to reduce traffic problems. "The more cars there are on the road, the more we will be stuck in traffic, the more fuel we will use, the more money government will earn in fuel levies"

Naturally any responsible government will not be so short sighted and will see that there is much more value in improving the infrastructure of a country, especially with the World Cup 2010 coming to SA, but it does make you think.

I've got some bad news

2007-06-08T10:47:00.000+02:00

I am a subscriber to the News24 Newsletter. Every morning and afternoon I get news alerts informing me of the latest happenings, I do feel it is important to know about current affairs, but I sometimes wonder if oblivion is not perhaps better...

Every single day I read about murder, sexual abuse, petrol price hikes, interest rate increases, and car crashes. When I read these articles I wonder if the only news ever is always just bad news, or is the focus of reporters just on bad news since it is more sensational and helps sells their newspaper?

Enable Excel 2007 Macros

2007-05-29T11:48:00.000+02:00

I just found something really annoying in Excel 2007 around macros: I opened an Excel spreadsheet, from the macro’s drop down under the view tab I selected Record macro and started recording my skeleton macro that I wanted for a starting point. At this stage all went well and I was able to edit the macro in VBA.

When trying to save I was informed that the file format does not support macros – fair enough, so I saved it as XLSM. Only problem is that next time I opened this XLSM document and wanted to edit my macros I was told that I cannot do this as macros are not enabled.

I started hunting down the option where you set this and eventually found it under: Office Button-> Excel Options (button at the bottom)->Trust Center->Trust Centre Settings (another button)->Macro Settings.

I noticed that "Disable all macros with notification" was selected, but this did not allow me to edit my macros and the only way I found to get to my code was to choose "Enable all macros", then close and re-open the sheet...

m'Lord, I'm sorry, but there is a snake next to the accused.

2007-05-29T08:33:00.000+02:00

If found a very amusing article on News24 about a snake disrupting court proceedings:

Read the article here.

Buy a place in Midrand

2007-05-22T16:50:00.000+02:00

If you are interested please have a look at the listing form my place at Private Property. I am moving to Cape Town soon and would really like it if somebody can buy this place. It can be described as follows:

Tiled, open plan lounge and kitchen
Lounge has sliding doors that goes out to the tiled, covered patio and communal garden
Kitchen has cherry wood finishing, a pantry, space for appliances and a breakfast nook
Guest bathroom has a bath
Guest bedroom is carpeted and has built in cupboards
Main bedroom is carpeted and has built in cupboards. The en suite bathroom has a double volume shower
Electric fenching

I really loved staying here and the area is really nice and secure. The only reason for selling is that I want to move to Cape Town, the ocean bacons...

What I’ve been up to

2007-05-22T16:01:00.001+02:00

It's been quite a while since my last blog entry and I really don't want my blog to die since it is really such a cool concept. I've been in Cape Town working on a project for Medi-Clinic titled "Nursing Administration Automation" so that has been keeping me busy.

I noticed that I received absolutely no comments on my previous posts, which probably means that I have a boring blog... I am going to blog a little more and will blog about anything that I feel I have something to say about. In 2007 I started my law studies, studying law almost feels like your eyes are opened for the first time and when one reads newspaper articles you see them in a different way.

Well, that’s my experience anyway, and whenever something catches my eye I will make a post here.

Free Microsoft Press SharePoint 2007 e-Book

2006-10-12T08:58:00.000+02:00

Just this morning I’ve been browsing Amazon for SharePoint 2007 books...

I found an electronic copy of a book titled "7 Development Projects for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0" which is a totally legal and free download!

Side-by-Side IE6 & IE7

2006-10-12T08:52:00.000+02:00

By now you might have read that Internet Explorer 7 will be part of the automatic updates once it is released. I personally see this as a very good thing as IE7 is certainly the way forward and will hopefully make it easier to get your site looking as it should across browsers.

Speaking of which, once IE7 is installed on your machine (you can download it here) how are you going to test if your site will still look fine in Internet Explorer 6?

The answer is easy! Simply download a stand-alone version of IE6!

Creating a Microsoft Word 2007 Document from Scratch

2006-10-11T14:50:00.000+02:00

One of the nice new features of Microsoft Word 2007 is that it now allows you to use a new format for documents that are actually a zip file containing a bunch of XML files – you can actually just rename the file extension of a document saved with the new format to .zip and you will be able to open it up and see the files contained in it.

To get a better understanding of the file format you should have a look at this screencast.

Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas"

2006-10-09T10:37:00.000+02:00

If you want something new to play with why not grab yourself the CTP of the next version of Visual Studio? This download comes as a VPC image. Remember that if you don’t own a copy of Virtual PC you can also get this from the Microsoft site.

This is the official description:

Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" delivers on Microsoft’s vision of smart client applications by enabling developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality rich user experiences. This new version enables any size organization to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and more reliable applications that take advantage of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System. By building these new types of applications, organizations will find it easier than ever before to capture and analyze information so that they can make effective business decisions.

Getting usfull SharePoint 2007 error information

2006-10-06T15:11:00.000+02:00

If you are a old hand at SharePoint this will be old news for you, but if you are a new SharePoint Designer hacker getting frustrated with the generic "An unexpected error has occurred" page after you modified some code in your pages do the following:

Go to the virtual directory of your application - it should be something similar to this: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\[PORT]
Open the web.config file in notepad.
Locate the SafeMode element and set the CallStack attribute to true.
Locate the customErrors element and set the mode to Off.

Now you will get the standard ASP.NET 2.0 custard screens to help you identify exactly what the error was.

Wikipedia

2006-10-06T09:31:00.000+02:00

For something completely off topic:

The Wikipedia must be one of my favourite sources of general information. In a blog by Brad Smit I just discovered that you can download the entire thing from http://download.wikipedia.org/ the pages-articles.xml.bz2 in enwiki is probably what you are after for offline viewing as it contains Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages.

Upgrading to SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh

2006-10-06T08:51:00.000+02:00

I managed to upgrade my sandbox SharePoint 2007 environment with the TR release without any problems. I have also included the steps I used to get my existing WCM site functional again as I did not want to recreate it.

Here is what I did:

Stop the Office SharePoint Search Service (start->run->services.msc)
Go to SharePoint central admin and stop “Windows SharePoint Services Search”
Uninstall Windows Workflow Foundation Build 2.2
Install the .NET Framework 3.0
Run the WSS Beta 2 Technical Refresh Update
Run the MOSS Beta 2 Technical Refresh Update
Run the SharePoint Designer Technical Refresh Update
Run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard (Start->Programs->Administrative Tools->SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard)
Start the Office SharePoint Search Service
Start the Windows SharePoint Services Search
On my exiting site that now breaks edit the TopNavFlyouts.master and replace TrimNonCurrentHeadings="true" with TrimNonCurrentTypes="Heading" for the PublishingNavigation:PortalSiteMapDataSource control
Replace the <SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="core.js" runat="server"/> and <SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="ows.js" runat="server"/> scripts tags with a single
<SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="init.js" runat="server"/>

Windows Vista ReadyBoost

2006-10-05T10:57:00.000+02:00

Here is something interesting I just found on Windows Vista, wonder if I will now have more memory for my Virtual PCs...

Windows ReadyBoost

Adding system memory (RAM) is often the best way to improve your PC's performance. More memory means applications can run without needing to access the hard drive. However, upgrading memory is not always easy. You need to know what type of memory you need, purchase the memory, and open your computer to install the memory—which sometimes can invalidate your support agreement. Also, some machines have limited memory expansion capabilities, preventing you from adding RAM even if you are willing to do so.

Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. Windows ReadyBoost lets users use a removable flash memory device, such as a USB thumb drive, to improve system performance without opening the box. Windows ReadyBoost can improve system performance because it can retrieve data kept on the flash memory more quickly than it can retrieve data kept on the hard disk, decreasing the time you need to wait for your PC to respond. Combined with SuperFetch technology, this can help drive impressive improvements in system responsiveness.

Windows ReadyBoost technology is reliable and provides protection of the data stored on your device. You can remove the memory device at any time without any loss of data or negative impact to the system; however, if you remove the device, your performance returns to the level you experienced without the device. Additionally, data on the removable memory device is encrypted to help prevent inappropriate access to data when the device is removed.

from Windows Vista Performace

SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition

2006-10-05T08:46:00.000+02:00

At some point or another I am sure you wanted to develop a stand-alone Windows application and wanted to use some data persistence mechanism. You have many choices, XML, flat files, or a database etc. Using a database is a superior choice if you want your application to do a lot of CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) as you can use the familiar ADO.NET object modal and write queries in SQL.

Naturally if you want to write a application for distribution you don’t necessarily want the users of your applications to buy a full copy of SQL Server so you probably thought of using the MSDE or SQL Server 2005 Express edition. These will provide you with most of the functionality you will get from the full server products and they can be installed by users of your application without the need for expensive licensing.

Using MSDE of SQL Express could be a good choice, but does your application really warrant a full installation of a database server? In the past when I wrote simple applications that required a relational database I used Embedded Firebird with which you have stored procedures, views, and triggers at your disposal without the need to install a full database server, instead you just link to the appropriate libraries and when you deploy you simply copy the database with your application, much like MS Access, but without the yuck factor of Access.

I was very pleased when I found out about SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition, it would appear that it will provide us with the same functionality of Embedded Firebird – I think this is definitely worth checking out!

An introduction to SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition Community Technology Preview

Learning SharePoint 2007 the virtual way

2006-10-05T07:00:00.000+02:00

Here’s the scenario: You want to play around with SharePoint 2007 but you certainly don’t feel like spending a whole day setting up a Virtual PC, or even you have tried setting up a VPC and found that if SQL 2005 & SharePoint 2007 is running on the same machine the performance is so bad that attempting to do anything meaningful is an exercise in futility. What can you do instead?

You could always find some real servers to host your playground SharePoint and SQL or you could use MSDN Virtual Labs!

If you don’t know this already MSDN Virtual labs are essentially VPCs hosted in never-never land by Microsoft that you are allowed to remote into and do whatever you want. The advantages should be obvious: No need to install everything from scratch, a nice environment where you can play around and mess things up completely without fear as you can always start over with a clean machine, a environment that you know has been set up correctly etc. But what I think the greatest advantage of these is, is the fact that it is not just a matter of “OK, here is a machine for you, play with it and figure out how stuff works”. No, what you also get is a nice Hands On Lab manual that will guide you through a certain topic and help you learn the technology.

Below I listed some links relating directly to SharePoint 2007, you should also consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you will be notified whenever a new LAB becomes available that you might be interested in.

It worked

2006-10-04T08:06:00.000+02:00

If you can see this it worked!