Author: Andy Burns

Windows Media Player

Andy BurnsLeave a comment

So the court case about Windows Media player rolls on, albeit that it’s somewhat obsolete. The court case, not the software. More on it in a minute…

Microsoft contend that customers don’t want a media player free version of Windows. They’ve not sold a copy. This isn’t, perhaps, surprising. I’d have bought one, except none were actually available to consumers. Also, given the choice between the two versions, just with or without Media player, for the same price, well, people will choose with. Even if they don’t want it.

It’s like, given the choice of a burger with a gherkin, or searching all over the place for a burger without a gherkin, most people will accept the easy to find burger, and TAKE OUT THE GHERKIN. Much the same has happened here – except that people can’t take the gherkin out as Microsoft have tied it to the OS. Again. Internet Explorer – ring any bell? And that worked, didn’t it? Continue reading “Windows Media Player” →

Windows Media Player

Take care when indexing external content

Andy BurnsLeave a comment

So, one of my colleagues set up Sharepoint to index some external blogs. Just as a bit of an experiment, and maybe a way of capturing people’s (possibly, though not normally) temporary blog postings.

Well, the server dutifully set off to index the Internet. Yeah, not a few blogs but the whole enchillada. Unsurprisingly, when I went to the machine, it was reporting ‘Low Disk Space’. A brief search showed up some ma-hooo-sive (i.e. large) index files.

“Right”, I thought as I looked at a report saying ‘0 bytes free’, “I’ll clear the indexes”

Wrong. I went to the search administration pages, and tried to reset the indexes. I got no response – no error, nothing. My browser just showed the ‘page loading’ bar. No page ever loaded.

So I set the blogs path to be excluded, and tried to run a full index – again, no result.

In the end, the only answer I found was (get this), deleting the index file by hand. Then you can do exciting things like, I dunno, reset the indexes or run a full reindex. It appears that having the disc full prevented Sharepoint from being able to do anything with the indexes. Which was fun, as they were filling the disc.

Take care when indexing external content

Microsoft Stuff

Andy BurnsLeave a comment

So, lately at work we’ve started dealing more with Microsoft products, so I sort of think I should blog about them, if only to remind myself of the things I’ve discovered – like yesterday and my efforts with Sharepoint. Anyway, that’s for another posting.

It sort of goes against the grain to talk about Microsoft stuff, but some of the things I’ve been working with lately – Sharepoint, Biztalk, Content Management Server – are actually pretty good. Okay, so they tie you to MS SQL-Server, IIS, IE, Visual Studio (uck), Windows, Office, and the kitchen sink, but in terms of what they give users, they’re neat products actually. Sharepoint – well, it’s not a master of anything, but it’s pretty good at many things. CMS, well, it did what it said on the tin. Biztalk – silly name, but a good idea.

If they could just unbundle the browser, web server, database and IDE, that’d be great.

Microsoft Stuff

Why I hate Microsoft Products

Andy BurnsLeave a comment

In short, they’re fat. I’ve spent the entire morning installing Visual Studio .NET, and all it’s prerequisites. The damn thing is gigabytes in size, and I’m only installing it because I need it to do some work on their “Content Management Server”. Oh, and Biztalk needs it too. And they both need SQL server. And IIS. And Frontpage Extensions. And Internet Explorer extensions. And so on. And Office, I think.

Compare this with Ruby Rails – a little MySQL DB installation, a little Rails installation, maybe some GEMs – and a text editor to do your development in. I know it isn’t exactly a like for like comparision – you can create lots more than Web applications with Visual Studio – but given that that is what we’re dealing with in the CMS product, I don’t see why it all has to be so complicated. It’s like taking your entire collection of Snap-On tools to fix a leaky pipe – when a pipe wrench will do.

And the installation speed! Slow doesn’t cut it. Hours for Visual Studio, despite the fact that I could copy the entire DVD in less time.

All in all, I’d better be impressed with the functionality of all this, ‘cos right now I’m looking at the pipe wrench thinking that it is small, cheap, flexible and easy to use.

Why I hate Microsoft Products

Impressed with Rails – again

Andy BurnsLeave a comment

So, I had need of a little ‘Ajax’. I wanted to provide a brief preview of some content, but without all the nastiness of page refreshes – an ideal candidate for XMLHTTPRequest. So I wrote my own. That was a mistake.

I’m comfortable with Javascript – I think I’m fairly accomplished with it – so I got it done, and it worked. It was only then that I thought ‘I think Rails does Ajax too’. Does it ever! Ten minutes, and I had a Rails Ajax version working (a lot less than my own time, even with my boiler-plate code) and, and this is the best bit, much more readable code! That’s what I call a win. link_to_remote was the useful function in question, and my call is:
link_to_remote( "Show",
:url => { :action => "show_small", :id => game.id },
:update => "js_board",
:before => "document.getElementById('js_board').style.left = get_x(this);
document.getElementById('js_board').style.top = get_y(this)",
:complete => "document.getElementById('js_board').style.visibility = 'visible'" )

Impressed with Rails – again

Progess on Ruby Chinese Chess site

Andy Burns, Leave a comment

So, I’ve been a bit busy with things, so I don’t have any of my usual interesting links to post. I’ve been getting stuff done with the Rails Xiangqi site that I’m building (Chinese chess to the rest of us). Nothing radical, just plugging away.

My biggest complaint with Rails so far is a lack of books and documentation. I mean, the API docs are pretty good, but I’d like to see more example, more tutorials, and a structured thing like a book would be wonderful.

So, what have I learnt? Well, I’ve used routes.rb to set up the default page for the site. You can also ditch that index.html file from public in your application too. I think I’ve figured out how change passwords in the security thing, which is a bit involved, so sometime I’ll post the code.

Partials – annoyingly – don’t have a ‘general’ folder. You can create one, but you have to specify it each time you call a partial. That sucks a bit.

I built a lot of the user admin stuff – login, signup, etc.. It was made very easy by the Login Generator. Updating users and stuff – well, that was only a slight change to the normal scaffold. The big change was updating the password – but even that wasn’t too bad.

All in all, still impressed by how much you can get done in a short time with Rails.

One thing I’d like to figure out is how to do a persistent Login cookie for Rails. I don’t mind having my session deleted, but having authenticated that user, I’d like to not have to do it again the next time they visit the site.

Progess on Ruby Chinese Chess site

Porting Java to Ruby

Andy Burns, Leave a comment

Long time ago I wrote a Java engine for figuring out valid Chinese Chess (Xiangqi) moves. I was going to build it into a website, something like Red Hot Pawn. Well, it seems that Ruby might be much quicker to develop the database and presentation parts of a website, so I decided to port my Java code across to Ruby. It was very easy, both being very object oriented. It works just fine. Now, all I have to do is the site itself – which should be quick in Ruby.

Porting Java to Ruby