Cameron Priem

IE 6 on windows 2000 hangs on ajax

Campo — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:12:06 +0000

This problem took me a few days to sort out. We just started using Ajax in our application and everything was running fine, loading fast and being totally awesome (because its Ajax , and I heart Ajax). I couldn’t figure it out, every browser and every O/S this was working fine, there was just one customer using IE6 with windows 2000. The problem was the Ajax call was hanging, for a really long time. At first I thought the Ajax wasn’t firing at all, but with out live http headers for IE6, there wasn’t any way I could confirm this.

So after about 5 minutes of sitting there pulling my hair out…..the ajax returned a result and the next part of the process ran. Sooo….what the hell?!?! A few days of googling, trying different things, asking other people in the development team, and finally praying (all religions), I came across a blog post that explained that IE6 doesn’t handle closed connections very well. We had this line in our javascript:

xh.setRequestHeader(“Connection”, “close”);

We now had to change our code to only include this if the browser was not IE6. I wasn’t sure what performance hit this would have or what side affects it would have, but we’ve been running this for a few years and haven’t seen any difference with performance or had any problems. If anyone else has a better understanding of why IE6 behaves like this, please leave me a comment!!

FireFox Page Break CSS Not Displaying Correctly

Campo — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:10:32 +0000

I’ve always used CSS to handle page breaks when printing from the web, and its always been easy and pretty straight forward to implement. However FireFox would stop printing after 1 or 2 pages from what should have been about a 10 page print job.

After some googling I found that a fair few people have been having the same problem as me, only in FireFox though, every other browser is fine. The problem was the CSS I was using:

page-break-after:always;

FireFox didn’t like this. From what I found on the web the work around was to use page-break-before instead. I searched bugzilla to try and find out more details on why this happens, the best I could find was this lengthy discussion, with instances of this problem from 2002. So my lesson from this is to use page-break-before:always instead of after.

I, Tweet.

Campo — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:51:10 +0000

Twitter, the perfect app for when I have nothing of interest or importance to say…. but I need to tell everyone. I added a “follow me on twitter” button on my blog today, I figure all the cool kids are doing it now days: Vanilla Ice, K-Rudd, and even the fat kid from hey dad. I got the button from this blog, a canadian designer.

So this is the start of my 3 step get rich twit plan:

Step 1. Create twitter account
Step 2. Add button to blog
Step 3. Profit.

So do you think my tweets will be worth following? Well i just changed my twitter pic to a wookie feeling up princess leia….you be the judge.

Firefox 3 drop down list disables on postback with update panel

Campo — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:23:43 +0000

We came across a weird problem a few weeks ago where we were using an UpdatePanel through ASP.NET AJAX (.Net Framework 3.5 SP1) with an asp:dropdownlist on that page. When the update panel did a post back using ajax the drop down lists stopped working. You could click on the select list but they would not drop down with any options. This only happened in Firefox 3, no other FF version or Internet Explorer.

Through ages of google searching we found a work around online, adding a window.setTimeout() around the alert box, eg:

ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(Page), "validationAlert", "window.setTimeout(\"alert('Just testing')\", 0);", true);

Hope this saves some other people time and heart ache.

New Website Created www.broomshead.com

Campo — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:22:47 +0000

I got a couple of holiday units at brooms head. I’m trying to make it easier for people to find out info and to get in contact with me to book. For now its just a basic web site with:

photos
contact info
things to do at brooms head & surrounding areas

I also found this cool slide show thingy from picasa which I added. Its pretty cool, I was after a free image rotator and I already use picasa for all my brooms head photo albumn, so it was a match made in heaven. I would like to see some extra customisation, for example not displaying my name, but for free its awesome and it works on all browsers… that I care about. Hosting is with webhost4life which have been really good so far, and reasonably priced. Its my first .net hosting company I’ve gone with and it all self controlled within a cool online control panel.

The css design is a template by bryant smith, a web designer in Florida. I liked it immediately, great colours and simple design. The content was written by my dad, and the brooms head photos were partly taken by me and Dad.

I hope in other releases to sex the site up a bit:

Public calendar for people to check availability online
A simple 1 page booking fee (as minimal and easy as possible)
Hook up to online secure payment gateway
Web admin to add bookings via phone (for multiple people)
Web admin to enter bills I receive or my dad does (he lives close). I’m hoping I can use the freshbooks API to do this, but will need to look into it.
Web admin setup email templates to make it easier for me or other admins to reply to emails.
Setup Subversion & automated testing with mozy backup
Pretty up the design

I’d be pretty happy if I get all this done, but this is a big investment on time….wish me luck!

Forward mail from gmail account to multiple email addresses

Campo — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:49:13 +0000

In setting up a new web site, broomshead.com, I wanted to be able to forward an email to multiple email addresses. So after a bit of research on the net I found out you could do this by creating filters:

Login to Gmail
Click on settings (top right)
Click Filters
Click “Create new filter”
In the “To” field enter your gmail email address
Click Next Step
Tick “Skip the inbox” if you want the email archived
Tick “forward it to” and enter one of the email addresses you want to forward your mail to
Click Update Filter

Repeat this process for each individual email address you want to forward to. Pretty simple huh?

Pet Adoptions From RSPCA in Springwood

Campo — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:45:14 +0000

The world for pets superstore at Springwood is a huge store for everything pet related, with all profits going directly to the RSPCA. They never used to do pet adoptions, but instead have information on adopting pets from Fairfield. This has changed though with kittens now available for adoption at Springwood. The adopt-a-pet web site though only lists adoptions from 8.30 am to 5.00 pm Saturday & Sunday for adoptions, however I’ve seen kittens and an adoption representative every day since the new year.

So check out the world for pets store and give a pet a new loving home from the RSPCA.

Software Developer Brisbane

Campo — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:29:32 +0000

RSPCA Qld are hiring a new software developer: http://www.rspcaqld.org.au/employment/vacancies.htm.

To be considered for this role you must have demonstrated skills in the following areas:

Web based programming and development;

VB Script, Classic ASP / VB

SQL Server 2000/2005 (T-SQL);

HTML, JavaScript.

The ideal candidate will also possess advanced skills in AJAX and #.NET (ASP.NET, Web Services, C#) and have a background in Network Support, VPN Troubleshooting and Server Maintenance.

The position will only be offered on an a contract basis – approximately 12 months and is based at Springwood.

Application close Friday 23rd January 09, if you’re interested you should apply!!

How to measure connection pooling SQLOLE

Campo — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:15:51 +0000

Our web app has been having some problems with ” [DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen (Connect()).]SQL Server does not exist or access denied.” error at random times. The connection string is fine, the app runs without any dramas, but at random times it will display this error message. After consultation with other people we think that the connection pooling may be failing on some areas of our app. I wasn’t really sure how to measure this in a test environment, so after some research I found out that you can use perfmon to do this.

Using perfmon to measure connection pools

Start > run > perfmon

Add the counter for SQL Server: General Statistics > Logins/sec

If this stays moderately low, at about 1 or 0 it should be fine, which was consistent with a majority of the different parts of our system until we ran a report. The screen shot shows logging in which was next to nothing in the graph, the large spike was running 1 report.

connection pools in perfmon

And as you can see my computer name is deathstar….orsm! The next step is to find out why the connection is not pooling correctly in our reporting engine…

Get subversion changes for single author

Campo — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:11:41 +0000

A while ago I was approached by my boss
“I need a list of all the changes a former employee committed into subversion”
“No problem!” I replied with gusto.

It didn’t turn out to be as easy as I thought. I figured there would be an inbuilt subversion command to do this, but after searching the subversion documentation I couldn’t find anything helpful. I then went to plan B which consisted of:

- Download windows sed editor: http://www.cornerstonemag.com/sed/
- export svn log to a txt file
- Run this sed command on txt file (this example was for only author of cpriem): sed -n “/cpriem/,/—–$/ p” svn.txt > cpriemSvn.txt

svn.txt is input file from svn log
cpriemSvn.txt is output file

sed command from: http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2007-08/0748.shtml

There may be an easier way with the latest version of subversion so just check out the documentation first.