Star Wars films converted to 3D: 2012 release date for Episode I
sciencefictionworld.com
Star Wars creator George Lucas is converting all 6 Star Wars films to 3D with the first due for release in 2012.
Haven’t posted anything in over a year, but decided to break the silence to write about something that caused me to waste more time than it should have. Hopefully, it will save someone else (or future me) from wasting more time on it.
I’m developing an ASP.NET site using the Wizard control and have code that saves the user’s progress in a database. The idea here is that the user can return to the site and pick up where they left off. Simple enough, but I got caught in what seemed like a never ending debugging session when I couldn’t figure out why the "Previous" button didn’t work when I came back into the site to resume a previous session. The wizard simply would not step backwards when starting on any step in the middle. To make a long story short, turns out the genius at Microsoft who implemented this control decided to make the "previous" button work like the browser "back" button, i.e. clicking previous steps you back in your "history" since you starting using the wizard. In this case, there is no "history" when starting in the middle, so the button does nothing! Not at all intuitive.
I found this discussion enlightening: http://forums.asp.net/p/973337/1235981.aspx
The workaround is simple. Handle the PrevousButtonClick event and decrement the ActiveStepIndex property:
protected void MainWizard_PreviousButtonClick(object sender, WizardNavigationEventArgs e) { MainWizard.ActiveStepIndex–; }
Hope this helps.
Syracuse makes CIO Magazine’s The Worst U.S. Cities to Work in IT list.
Technically, I don’t live in Syracuse. I live about 15 minutes north in Clay, which is #2 on the top 101 cities with highest average snowfall.
Some folks (including me) are experiencing problems with version 10 of the Adobe Flash player and Internet Explorer. Oddly enough, I didn’t seem to have any trouble until after this month’s “patch Tuesday” (Microsoft updates).
For now, I’ve downgraded Flash to version 9 to workaround the problem. Adobe has older versions of Flash available for download here:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266
From the stuff I should know but didn’t until yesterday dept:
Handy method in the System.Security namespace for replacing invalid XML characters with their escaped equivalents:
I decided to check on the state of Vista fixes last night by installing the latest updates from Windows Update and the latest NVidia drivers. Unfortunately, my system would still hang when waking from its second slumber. These kinds of sleep problems with Vista are widely reported on blogs and discussion forums all over the Internet, so I thought I’d post about what appears to fix the problem for me.
I don’t know what made me think to do this, and I think I’ve tried this in the past, but I disabled hybrid sleep (Control Panel, Power Options, Change plan settings, Change advanced power settings, expand Sleep, expand Allow hybrid sleep, change setting to Off, click OK). Now my PC wakes from sleep every time!
Hybrid sleep is new in Windows Vista and is a cross between the old "standby" mode and "hibernation". Standby works by powering down just about everything except the RAM, which saves the machine’s state so that it can very quickly resume where you left off when you power it up again. Hibernation saves the computer’s state to the hard drive and powers down completely. Resuming from standby is many times faster than resuming from hibernation, since loading the state back from the hard drive takes some time. Windows Vista’s hybrid sleep mode saves the state to the hard disk but then goes into standby mode, keeping the state in RAM as well. The idea here is that the state is protected in case the power is lost to the PC (which would wipe out the state in RAM), but most of the time the machine wakes up quickly by using the state stored in RAM.
I don’t know what it is about my hardware that is preventing a wake from hybrid sleep and not "plain old standby" mode. I have a UPS connected to this machine, so I’m not particularly concerned about it losing power while it’s sleeping. XP only supports standby and hibernation and that had been working without and problems, so that may be what finally made me think to disable hybrid sleep.
So now I think I’m going to give Vista another chance. At least until I run into the next show stopper…
About a month ago, news spread that NVIDIA drivers were to blame for nearly 30% of all Vista crashes in 2007.
I’ve also seen folks report problems resuming from sleep mode that have NVIDIA graphics chips running VISTA. Exactly the problem I’ve been having.
The Asus motherboard I’m using not only has an NVIDIA video chip, but also the nForce chipset. So, it seems very likely that I unknowingly picked the wrong motherboard when I built my first Vista system. Will NVIDIA ever fix their drivers for VISTA or am I going to have to stay with XP until I build my next system? I’ll probably think twice before choosing NVIDIA in the future…
I grabbed Service Pack 3 for Windows XP from MSDN and nearly hosed up my machine tonight.
After backing up my drive, I installed SP3. Once the installation finished, it wanted to reboot the system (of course). Problem was, it wouldn’t start back up. It just hung there on the Windows XP logo screen with the "progress bar" going around and around forever. I reset the box and tried again. This is standard operating procedure with Windows - sometimes just trying something again works. But not this time.
Fortunately, I could still boot into safe mode and uninstall SP3. After that, everything returned to normal. So now, I’m left wondering if I’m going to be stuck at SP2 on this machine and unable to get future security updates. Is this Microsoft’s way of getting me to try Vista again? At least under Vista things sort of worked and I could get updates.
Maybe it’s time to reconsider getting a Mac.
UPDATE: 5/10/08 - Installed SP3 via Microsoft Update with no problems. Mac purchase delayed for now. 
From the things I didn’t know department comes JScript.NET. What is JScript.NET? In a nutshell, it’s a .NET version of JScript, i.e. a .NET version of JavaScript! Why should you care about JScript.NET? Well, here’s a scenario I had recently:
The company I work for uses Nagios to monitor it’s mission critical systems. One common use is to simulate a user logging into a web application by POSTing credentials to a login form and checking for specific strings in the response. This usually gives you an end-to-end check that all systems (web server, database server, etc.) related to the app are functioning.
I was asked to investigate how we could monitor one app in particular that couldn’t be checked with the simple tools included with Nagios. This application was encrypting the user’s password two different ways using JavaScript before submitting it to the server. To make matters worse, it was using a random key generated by the server each time the login page was opened.
Since I’m primarily a .NET developer and have very little experience with *NIX systems and PERL (most Nagios plug-ins are written in PERL), my approach was to build a simple web page that Nagios could check that would act as a proxy to this particular app. This still left me with the problem of how to simulate what the browser was doing in JavaScript.
One solution would be to translate the JavaScript to C#. Another would be to try to host the Windows scripting engine in my .NET app and invoke the existing scripts as-is. Or maybe I could write a "classic" ASP page using JScript. None of these options appealed to me much, so I consulted Google.
I eventually came across JScript.NET. I knew about J# (Microsoft’s attempt to lure Java programmers to the .NET platform), but what the heck is JScript.NET? When I create a new project in Visual Studio, there’s no JScript options…
Hidden away in the .NET SDK is jsc.exe, the JScript.NET compiler. So, now it was just a matter of taking the JavaScript code I wanted to use from C# and compiling it using jsc /t:library <source file> and I had a DLL I could reference and call. A few minor tweaks were needed, like wrapping stuff in a class, but overall it was pretty painless and it worked!
Not sure if I’ll ever need to do something like this again, but it’s nice to know JScript.NET is there…
Windows Vista caused me to have a Samuel L. Jackson moment a couple of weeks ago.
I installed SP1 with high hopes of it fixing the things about Vista that have been driving me nuts for almost a year. Namely:
So, after putting up with with this nonsense for nearly a year, Microsoft finally released Service Pack 1. And guess what? IT FIXES NONE OF THE ABOVE PROBLEMS. The first time Vista SP1 would not wake from its slumber, I said enough is enough (among a few other phrases that I won’t repeat here) and "upgraded" to XP. XP has none of the above problems ON THE SAME HARDWARE (which I purchased new with the intent of running Vista). As a bonus, everything is noticeably faster. This review of XP got it right.