TheWayOfCoding.com

I’ve used linux/unix quite a bit over the years. Probably my first experience with Linux was when I bought a magazine in the 90’s that had Mandrake linux on CD. Since then I’ve used distributions from Slackware to Ubuntu, but never really had a desire to do much with the OS once I had it running, so it just usually sat on my harddrive. I have recently been reminded why I was never interested in using *nix exclusively. Don’t get me wrong here, I think the concept of free open-source software operating systems is great. (Edit 09/2010: I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and have had generally a good experience with it for a few months as my primary desktop. I’m going to keep using it…) Let me go over a scenario to explain my thoughts: Goal: Setup Debian Linux so that I can test my software. I specifically want to use a VMWARE appliance so that I don’t have to mess around with my current OS. (Edit: I’ve since switched over to Sun’s VirtualBox software, which is much better than t...

I was due for a site software update, so I decided to modify the site as a whole. My main goal was simplification and to improve on usability.  As I went through the visual-template code, I also attempted to improve execution speed by minimizing include files and removing unnecessary features. Minimize the website banner to remove wasted space (logo redesign as well). Remove unpopular items from the site such as the forums. Reorder the site tags, recent postings, and other navigation links to improve on ease of use. Lessen the use of colors on the site. Clean up the footer area. I’ve noticed that the site seems to load faster in general. I suspect something like that XML parser for the forum was decreasing overall speed quite a bit.

I’ve been working on a personal project with a friend for quite a while now.  To make a long story short it deals with loading/editing/saving large quantities of public geographic data. Lately we have been throwing around the idea of having our database server’s OS in Linux instead of Windows 2000. Which brings me to the MONO project. I’ve started testing some code I wrote in C# (a console application that accesses the Internet) by using that MS Virtual PC program I setup in my previous posting with Xubuntu. While my current goal changed a bit, I’m glad to start getting some use out of it. Basically, all I needed to do was install the mono run-time libraries and I was good to go. Now keep in mind that some Linux distributions might only have older versions of MONO available by way of a package manager (or pre-install). In this case you should see if your .NET application requires something that the available version of MONO does not have by visiting the mon...

I’ve been interested lately in using virtualization to setup a “computer” to do local web development on. I’m looking to configure it it closely as possible to my paid hosting, so that it will be as easy as possible when I take a project and migrate it over to to the host. If you haven’t had any experience with virtualization, it’s basically a way of running an operating system inside whatever operating system you are currently using. The nice thing about it these days is that more recent processors have hardware extension to improve performance to the level where it’s quite usable. The software mimics all aspects of a basic computer with standard hardware. So you take your operating system install disk and go through the process as you normally would. I am currently using Windows Vista Ultimate x64. So looking at the easiest option, I downloaded and installed Microsoft’s free “Virtual PC 2007” program. I’ve used it...

It’s been while since I have used the language, so I thought it would be fun to try making a few new ideas with it. I did a quick search to see what PHP IDEs were available.  I’ve used Eclipse quite a lot, but I’m not particularly fond of it, so I wanted to try something else. I plan on giving NetBeans a chance to see how it fairs. http://www.netbeans.org/features/php/ Seeing as I am currently using Vista Ultimate 64-bit, I decided to just use IIS. I had a few quips getting it working. I had modified IIS beforehand when I was doing some old VbScript coding, so needless to say when I tried installing PHP it didn’t work out of the box. In the IIS configuration program (use the start button search in vista on “InetMgr”): Install PHP as a ISAPI filter. In your selected application pool advances settings, make sure that “Managed Pipeline Mode” is set to “Classic” mode. In the list of global settings: Add a default document “index.php” In ISAPI Filters, add a new filter that points to (...

There are quite a few issues in getting classic asp scripts working on vista. I want to quickly go over what I did, so that when I need this information available in the future I have an easy place to find it. So to save time I am just trying to get this written as fast as possible and continue on with my work. Sorry for any typos. Install IIS through control panel -> programs and features -> (left panel) “turn windows features on or off” Once the feature listing window populates: expand the “internet information services” item check web management tools and world wide web services …really I went through the options and selected the majority of them. Key ASP related items to make sure you have selected: “world wide web services” -> “application development features” -> ASP I needed windows authentication, so I needed: “world wide web services” -> “sercurity” -> “windows authentication” After tha...

I have a dual screen setup with two 20″ Dell LCD screens. I recently changed my primary screen to be vertically orientated. The benefit here is that I can see a more “global” view of the source file I am currently editing. The irritating thing I stumbled upon was tabulation in Visual Studio. I changed my tabs to be 2 spaces instead of two (to make up for my primary screen having less horizontal space). The issue that I had was all old source files were stuck with 4 space tabbing. Here is what I did to fix the issue: Tools>>options (make sure “Show all settings” is checked) Navigate to Text Editor>>All Languages>>Tabs In the Tab box, change the tab size to 2 and indent size to 2 select “ Keep tabs ” (this tells visual studio to not change tabs to spaces) Okay, so now the editor now uses two tabs and I can manually fix code I made before using shift-tab . This doesn’t solve my issue of having old source files stuck with 4 spaces as one tab. What I just figured out ...

I recently finished working on a macro program where the software’s interface is COM.  Everything worked great until I wanted to transfer the macro over to a test client computer.  The program I was writing the macro for requires some registry entries, so I assumed that was all I needed to do.  After about 2 hours of having issues I figured out how to get the macro working on computers other than the one I developed the macro on. What happens automatically when developing COM innerop projects in Visual Studio is that the IDE automatically registers the DLL file behind the scenes, so when the program that is going to use the macro starts up, it can find the DLL file (assuming the “register for COM Interop” is checked in project properties). When transferring over the macro DLL(s), the client computer does not have the correct registry entries, so when the program attempts to load the macro, it will fail because it can’t find the macro DLL(s). Things I learned: regsrv does ...

I’ve been working on a program that needs to parse a html file for form data.  So when I was deciding what method to use, a few popped right into my mind. The first being a character by character search through the string.  Parsing through the data and flagging sections that fit the signature of what was being searched for. The second would be automating that by using the built-in string functions to split up the string and drill down until the needed data was extracted. The third, and one I chose to use, was with regular expressions.  This in my mind is the most “poetic” method of the three, which would allow me to make the a robust and reliable function. While I’ve used regular expressions a lot throughout the years. I never seem to remember enough to construct a decent statement. I had recently bought a pocket reference (link below), so I used that to get a statement constructed. It had a total of about 6 pages for C#, but I pretty much got what I needed from it. An...

Edit: I’m having some issues with a second tutorial, so at this point I don’t think this process below is correct.  2nd Edit:  This code should work fine, the issue was when I started using COM objects from Esprit.  There are a few gotchas that need to be taken care of.  I think the primary reason I had issues was due to writing the macro in C# instead of VB (the language the Esprit tutorials have).  I may be writing about it in the future.  If you are interested right now, send a message, or post in the forums. This post will be a little more special interest them most of my posts. I recently started learning how to create macros for a program called Esprit (D.P. Technology). It’s a “CAD/CAM” program. They still use COM/VBA as their plug-in interface, so to write a plug-in in .NET there are a few things that need to be taken care of. Their tutorial that comes with the program goes over setting everything up, but It misses a few steps. Well more likely...