The Iron Yuppie

Sorry, Firefox, I have to say you guys have gotten lax. IE 7 Beta 2 is just better. More stable, more secure (I know, I can't believe I'm saying that either). Any how, check it out for yourself, but my decision is made until FF 2.0.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/04/24/582546.aspx


D

Oh I love it when I come upon someone else doing the same thing I am when it comes to errors. And because he did, I was able to find the answer to my problem quickly! There has to be a way to index this stuff effectively. Anyhow, here's what I searched for:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2005/06/markup-compatibility
is.not.a.recognized (on MSN)

And the answer was what I was looking for is here... Not only that, the quote after the text was an absolutely perfect description of what I needed to know to know that it was the right link. let's hear it for MSN.


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Searching for the Unsearchable

Boy, this took a long time. A REALLY long time.

I needed to find out a little bit more about a specific tag in ASP.net. Specifically, the '<%' tag. So why not just drop it in a search engine? All the major search engines block searching for this kind of text. It's an incredible pain.

Fortunately, I was lucky enough to find a term that was always associated with this (in this case databinding) that helped me search for it. After browsing through about a million websites, I finally found someone who had the same problem. Let me hand it over to Tone's website.

http://tonesnotes.org/2004/06/16/aspnet-code-block-mystery

It's remarkably hard to search for syntax like "<%=" if you want to find something that speaks about the syntax rather than all the pages that use it.

I ran into a case where apparently identical code blocks in the same .ascx file were being treated differently. One was expanded and the other was treated as a literal.

The problem ended up being that a "runat=server" attribute had been added to the element with the failing code block.

A normal inline ASP.NET code substitution block uses the syntax <%= … %>.

ASP.NET databinding uses the syntax <%# … %>.

<%@ … %> is WebForms syntax. One of the following must follow the @: Page, Control, Import, Implements, Register, Master, MasterType, OutputCache, Reference

<% … %> executes a block of inline code.

<%= … %> does a Response.Write of the value of inline code.

<%# … %> does data-binding

<%$ … %> is used for configuration file substitutions

Thank you Tone!

D

Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean



Interesting concept for a book, where two marriages (one of middle aged people and one of elderly people) are examined in great detail, specifically looking at whether or not they stayed together due "to habit and a long-ago promise, or because of some stronger bond." (Christina Schwarz) The tracing the singular seed of victory (or downfall) back to is source gives me endless fascination. Tying this examination to a relationship and how it turns out makes the subject even more intriguing.

Cool Science: Robot Actually Walking Close to How a Human Does

Comedy: Same robot tripping over a box.







Watch the video to see it in motion. Ah, good times.

D

I love how simple this:

Graphical Representation of the U.S. Budget

makes this:


Full disclaimer, it does not include off-budget spending, such as the $100B spent on Katrina relief and lots of others.

I once worked with a guy who spent six months doing this for his large corporation. Though he really provided a lot of visibility into how the business worked, my biggest problem was that it was that hard to envision before. I suppose there may be problems in the world that really are that hard to understand that making a graph can make all the difference, but they're a lot rarer than most people claim them to be.

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Blue Balls

Man I could watch this forever. It reminds me of Satori for the Mac.

D

One other thing on the disk space tracker is around how there are actually a lot of them out there that do something similar, but this is free and has a nice UI. This is a lot rarer than you would think. I've always been shocked that people wanted to charge $29.99 for such a simple piece of functionality. On the other hand, I've always been stunned that MS hasn't put something new in their OS that does this in a useful way.

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Man, I've been looking for something like this for a while.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/03/31/JDiskReport

It's a cool little tracker that shows how much space is taken up on your disk by different stuff. I love it!

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