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Showing posts from 2006

Long overdue update

Jesus, It's been a while since I posted anything to the blog. Like the world rests on my half assed writing abilities. So a lot has happened in the past month or so. The democrats take the house and senate, but is it more from republicans dropping the ball or the dems making a good movement with voters? I think a little bit of both but more of the first. I have been shit deep in ASP.net and learning about it's issues and fun things. I've developed some pretty cool pages and am actually liking it more. I think it's web programming in general that sucks. Things I take for granted in the forms/win32 world take extra steps to get around in the web world. I took my first steps into masonry and am now an Entered Apprentice. I am working on my Fellow Craft degree and hope to have it done soon. I have enjoyed meeting the many new people in masonry and it's been a great experience so far. It's been a busy month and it's not letting up. Perhaps once the new

Firefox 2 RC 3

Ok firefox has put out another RC for their kickass browser. They're starting to look like Microsoft here. You can download it directly here: RC 3 I am installing it now and will see how it looks throughout the day.

Props to this dude

Ok I work in C# visual studio 2005 A LOT. For a while I have been wanting a nice right click context menu to turn a member variable into a nice property. I tried creating my own but I'm too stupid/lazy to figure it out. I gave up but found this handy tool today! Go dude! I don't know the guy but he rocks. This thing will be very handy indeed.

Firefox update

Ok after using the new RC1 for firefox it is getting the thumbs up from me. Tabs are better, searching is better, the add-in search is better. Everything is now better. Most of the mainstream extensions also work. I am using Script block, AdSense, IETab, and a few others with no issues. As mentioned before it sucked in all my bookmarks from my beta 2 install. However it did not suck in stuff from my 1.5 install. That will probably be fixed in the future. My only real issue is the themes aren't up to date with the 2.0 versions. Most of the really cool themse stop at the 1.6 version. This leaves few choices for themes. I don't use a lot them anyway so it's not a big deal to me. But some may find it irritating.

Firefox 2 reaches RC 1

Firefox version 2 has hit RC 1 status. You can download the goodies here: Binary downloads I've been using the 2 beta for a while and have just installed the rc1 release. It doesn't overwrite the old beta version but does suck in all your saved bookmarks, passwords, etc. I will be playing with it over the course of the next few days to see how she runs!

NTidy and ASP.Net

So I'm working on this asp.net project. We need rich text formatting for our customers. You know since they like to copy and paste from Word and what not. During the course of testing I discover malformed HTML, especially DIV tags bombs the app by closing our div tags before they are supposed to. So we decide we need to either prevent certain HTML or clean it before it gets saved to the DB. After some looking I find NTidy, a .net wrapper around Tidy a C/C++ HTML cleaner. You can download it from SourceForger here: NTidy on SourceForge I insert the dll into my project and get it running on my machine. Of course since its OSS no documentation( see my post below ) but I get it running. Soon we have clean valid HTML and no more malformations. But today, disaster strikes, the production server hosting this bombs on our new build. It says it can't find needed assemblies for the damn NTidy dll. Enter google (how I love thee so), after a few hours I find an obscure post

Why I hate OSS

Ok if you don't know I'm a programmer. I work in .NET mostly doing asp.net in C# and some vb.net stuff. My company has this project where we need some rich text capability in a web browser. So we look around and decide on the Free Text Box . We download the code, it inserts into the project with little work, and works great out of the box. A bit later on we need to make some changes to it. Turns out we need to remove problem html out of the text of the box before it saves to the DB. Try the standard javascript tricks document.getclientid sutff, no go. Google some answers and try the results, no go. I spend a ton of time pouring over the properties, yada yada yada and nothing. Finally I find one property that might, might do the trick. I then spend time changing all the controls in the project to use this property correctly. Typical OSS shit, no documentation from the creators, online help says RTFM n00b!!, well there is no manual dickhead. At least when I buy somet

My first real blog

Ok, I have to admit I'm a slashdot addict. I must go over it a few times a day. I read about blogger being updated and oh yeah I have a blog there. A few minutes later and a forgotten password and I was in. I don't write a lot but when I get the urge it pours out in spouts and then dries up. Look at my journal on slashdot under jlechem, I go a while with nothing then BAM tons to write about. I guess I should talk about me a little bit, I live in Utah, work for a DoD contractor doing .net programming, no kids, 1 dog, 1 wife (insert polygamy joke here), vote democrat, and am your typical white American male. As time progresses I'm sure I will write more and more interesting things.