Solutions

If the solution is too complex/complicated then simplify the problem.

It is amazing how companies spend huge amounts of money duplicating their complex systems in a computer program instead of taking the time to simplify their processes.

Bugfixing

A bug fix does not neccessarily make the software more stable. The most annoying thing in the world is fixing the aftershock of a "fix".

GTD

So I am trying out Getting Things Done simply because I am, um, not very organized by nature. I am fiddling with the GTDTiddlyWikiPlus which seems very nice (GTDTiddlyWikiPlus). Just have to learn to use the tool, and get into the habit and then I will become Mr. Organized. Well, perhaps Mr. NotCompletelyDisorganized.

Ordering things online

So I was reading this really nice article (http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/tools-for-sketching-user-experiences/), and I figured I'd try to order some pens.

Now, I suffer from that worst of online disabilities when it comes to ordering things - I live in Europe. And apparently, Americans have no idea how to ship a package to this relatively unknown part of the world.

utrechtart.com only ships FedEx. Which is great since the base cost of that is more than I would want to order for anyways. And apparently I have to call in my order, since the web-solution is not fit for the european style of ordering things. They also do not accept international credit cards, whatever that means.

"We do not ship internationally" seems to be the order of the day for the rest of the web-stores I checked out. I know, spelling those darn addresses must be just too much for you guys.

But we do get the Kindle finally. Granted, it's the small version and we only get an american plug for it. And we can't surf on it. And the selection of books is limited. But at least I do get the old, small, version and we should be happy for that. I live in europe after all...

Python programs not receiving arguments under windows

Odd problem, but when trying to run python programs under windows none of the programs seemed to receive any of the input arguments. Searching the web I found a lot of advanced solutions to this (involving our beloved registry), but the answer turned out to be rather simple. When I finally found it of course.

So here goes:

• Under Explorer go to Tools -> Folder Options.


• Select the 'File Types' tab.


• Find PY and click 'Advanced'.


• Edit the open action and enter: "D:\Python26\python.exe" "%1" %*


• Done!

Of course if you happen to have installed python.exe somewhere else then change to that.

No registry editing, no downloading programs to fix this. Simple solution.

Validating asp.net textboxes using jQuery

Since I have a page with a lot of textboxes, some which should be integer values, and some which should be double values, I needed a quick way to validate a bunch of them without too much code.

So I ended up with the following code. What it does is separate boxes on the class, and then parse the boxes according to the class. It uses the error css to mark the boxes that does not validate and sets the tooltip to the error message.

Css:

.error
{
    border: solid 2px red;
}

asp.net:

<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox3" runat="server" CssClass="doublebox" /><br />
<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox4" runat="server" CssClass="doublebox" /><br />
<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox5" runat="server" CssClass="intbox" /><br />
<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox6" runat="server" CssClass="intbox" /><br />
<asp:Button ID="btnValidate" runat="server"
    Text="Validate"
    OnClientClick="return validateBoxes();"
    OnClick="OnValidate"/>

JavaScript (with jQuery):

function validateInteger(box)
{
    var value = box.value;
    var integer = parseInt(value);
    if (!integer) {
        $(box).addClass('error');
        box.title = '"' + value + '" is not a number';
        return false;
    }
    $(box).removeClass('error');
    return true;
}
        
function validateDouble(box)
{
    var value = box.value;
    var float = parseFloat(value);
    if (!float) {
        $(box).addClass('error');
        box.title = '"' + value + '" is not a number';
        return false;
    }
    $(box).removeClass('error');
    return true;
}

function validateBoxes() {
    var result = 1;
    $('.doublebox').each( function() {
        result &= validateDouble(this);
    });
    $('.intbox').each( function() {
        result &= validateInteger(this);
    });
    return Boolean(result);
}

MSDTC

Oh the joy of working with microsoft technology eh?

Project crashes with a "MSDTC not available on MACHINE" error. So I go on the internets to find out what MSDTC is. So after finding out that I need to know how to start this Distributed Transaction Coordinator service.

After the tenth google hit I still haven't gotten a simple answer, so just for the hell of it I try the logical thing:

> net start msdtc

And it works. Frack me.