On Automatic Payments

Lots of people suffer by this instrument devised in Hell by the master himself. It ought to be banned by law.

I have found people complaining about this in many of the forums I visit. I have suffered myself quite a lot. Never, ever agree for automatic payments, in fact for automatic anything. You loose control.

Can you pass a parameter to a query against a linked server?

In the cases I have studied you can. I have tested with two different drivers for the same database and I could pass parameters. I used the Openquery() method to retrieve data.

The how of out of browser experience in Silverlight 3.0

When you run the Silverlight application and right click on the HTML or the ASPX page you can choose the option "Install Out of Browser Silverlight...onto this computer...". You will then launch a window where you can choose to install it on the Desktop or Start Menu or both and click OK. This will leave a short cut on your Desktop (if this is what you chose). When you double click this shortcut you will launch a Silverlight Viewer(I call it so) which will display the application. It goes by the name sllauncher.exe.

What if you see that the above option is grayed out?

By default it is grayed out. You can go to the AppManifest.xml in your MyProject folder and remove the indicated commenting. After this you will see that you are capable of launching the shortcut which when activated provides the Out of browser display

How is it useful?
I am not quite sure. As a demo it is great. The shortcut, if you were to transport to another machine will not work. It's just a link and not an executable.

Long live SVG

SVG short for scalable vector graphics is thriving. The 7th International SVG Conference is going to be held in Mountain View, CA between Oct 2 to 4, 2009

XAML is proprietary and SVG is not, that is good enough for most folks these days. Last year the conference  was in Germany and before that in Japan. Well Google (Google Maps and Google DOcs) is behind it and is natively supported by iPhone. Most browsers except you know which does not support it.

How good are these messages? Ref:SQL Server 2008

I am trying to attach data to my Analysis Server 2008 and find confusing and erroneous messages. How good are these?

1. Trying to attach

I choose to attach using the menu, Attach

Click (...) Browse for Remote Folder Window gets displayed. There were two files displayed neither of which I am interested in.

I see at the bottom of this window, the following:

To add or remove folders to this window
it is suggested to edit the
'AllowedBrowsingFolders' property.

It turns out that there is no such property

Figure 1.

I tried to locate the file with specific format for attching data to the Analysis Server, look what kind of a message I get.

Figure 2

Picture from a 2 column report in SSRS 2008

Here is a picture of a report exported as PDF. I will follow this up with a full how-to article when I find some time.

SuperPreview partially fixed

I ranted on SuperPreview having a bug. This has been recently fixed and I got a new DLL emailed to me from one of Microsoft's people. It is better than the previous one. The web pages come up slowly. Also I am not quite sure that the IE8 browser in the SuperPreview is really what it is supposed to be.

Test: I tried to bring up a web page with web slice implemented from my intranet site and the feature was missing in SuperPreview.

Web page on IE8

Web page inside SuperPreview Left: IE8  Right: IE6
No difference between the two versions

This is not a issue:
The window close control is now a red drop-down which is a red line before dropping down. Looks colorful but does not fit to Microsoft's time honored standard GUI conventions.

Code Camp Philly April 2009 De Vry University

A scene captured with AT & T's Built-in camera.

The cafeteria was over flowing. Rooms for lectures were small and many had to sit on floor or, lean against the wall. No pain, No gain.

It was a very interesting experience and I may go again for the next one.

I need a better response from Microsoft

In their Connect web site I posted this message:

Installed the SuperPreview and try to get my blog to see how it would look in the different browsers as I have been comparing browsers for several javascript libraries. 

This message showed up. "Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program". I was having the Windows Task Manager and was looking at the Performance and did not notice even a tiny blip. I was trying to bring up my blog at: http://hodentek.blogspot.com, a relatively small blog


They answered me by a reply which just said it is fixed.


I want to know how. I took my time to point out and, Microsoft should have the courtesy to point out to me how it was fixed. Is it really?

I joined the flock yesterday

After resisting for quite a while, I finally succumbed and joined the Twitter flock this week. I tweet at
http://twitter.com/subbagiri

Well, my forefathers hailed from 'Subbagiri' which is not too far from Bangalore. Presently it is a little hamlet with a brook and mango trees. Lots of tweeting birds you can find. It is altogether a pleasant place.

BTW, Twitter has its own API which you can use to work with Twitter. I have written an article to 'SSWUG.org' on authoring SSRS reports with Twitter API. I will post,  if and when it gets published.

Why Hodentek?

It was boom time in silicon valley - days of dotcom. Anything sounding -tek was good. So I decided on Hodentek.

But Why Hoden?

Denki Hoden stands for electrical discharge in Japanaese. I worked the better part of my life in electrical discharges and so my fascination continues. Well, I have a fixation on electrical discharges atmospheric or otherwise. The random path chosen by the atmospheric discharge is spectacular and breathtakingly beautiful.

Recently I copied a part of the lighting photo from a web site to include it in my twitter page,

http://twitter.com/subbagiri

 

I therefore want to acknowledge that. If you are inclined to see more lighting pictures you may go to this link from which I copied. There are many other sites but you need to register, pay etc.

XML Parsing in Firefox, IE 8.0 and Google Chrome

Looks like Firefox gives a more friendly parsing error information than IE 8.0. However, the error information given by IE 8.0 is still good and moreover it will display the XML up to the point the error occured where as Firefox will not show anything untill the whole XML is compliant.  Google Chrome displays the text (innerText!) in the xml pointing to the first error.

For the same error compare the error information from these browsers.

Firefox

IE 8.0

G_Chrome

Migrating from SQL Server 2008 to Postgres on EnterpriseDB

With many database vendor products in the market and data intensive applications using them, it is often required to port the application to use the data or, migrate the data so that the application can use it. Migration of data is therefore one of the realities of the IT Industry. Some of the author's previous articles on migration can be found at this link.

Read the full story here .

IE8.0 - another bizarre behaviour

I am not sure I can reproduce this. I was browsing a page on my IIS when this one popped out. The
page had some simple CSS decorated text.
Well, IE 8.0 is also very slow. Open three tabs and you are stuck for a while.

Adobe Media Player and IIS - Part 2

It looks like Adobe Media Player does rely on Port 80.  But can it be changed to use another port?
Review the following:

RTMP short for Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is Adobe's proprietary protol for streaming audio, video and data over the internet for connections between a Flash player(Adobe Media Player) and a server.

Adobe Media Player & Internet Information Services

Recently I installed Adobe Media Player and after that my IIS stopped working. I suspect that Adobe Media Player has hijacked the IIS default port 80.

The error I get is typical when there is a port conflict. The "Unexpected Error 0x8ffe2740 Occurred" message.

In order to test the possibility I changed the Default Web Site listening port from 80 to 81 and immediately I could start IIS.

If I want to keep Adobe Media Player which I like, I should configure it to use a different port as I want my IIS continue with what it was originally configured for.

Adobe Media Player - very, very cool

Adobe Media Player is a cool media player with a small foot print (little bigger than WMP). It is quite dazzling in its capabilites and it's free. You can watch vidoes from an infinite number of categories including TV film clips. You can add videos you have taken to your own personal video colletion and play them at a flick of a button. You can also delete them if you don't like. There is both a classic navigation for playing videos . You select on the left pane and play the selected on the right pane. You can also download or view the ones that are updated regularly. Pick and choose and add it to your favorites.

Get your own Adobe Media Player. If you have used only Windows Media Player you will see the difference right away. Of course Silvelight will challenge it in a big, big way but it is still a work in progress. Adobe Media Player has the finished look and feel of a product.

Adobe Media Player download brings in a ~2.5 MB adobe_media_player.air installer program. You double click this file to begin installing. One thing to note is that you give up your whole machine internals to the program, the player will have access to anything on your computer.


Watch:  System Access Unrestricted

You can also read a tutorial on how to add your own videos, add to your favorites and many others.

GoogleAutopilot and the loosing battle

*Computers killed hand crafting of letters (I have not written one in years and doubt if I can bring myself up to pen one).

*Calculators killed use of  memorized multiplication tables,
and now Google's GmailAutopilot will waht kill little punctuation, #4$, and style:7'skills we muster can.

Well,what we need is a couple of slider controls in our life and we are done.
Links to GmailAutopilot .