Just So I Don't Forget...Force IE8->IE7 Rendering

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jQuery Thickbox Alternative: TinyBox

TinyBox looks like a lightweight alternative to the jQuery ThickBox.

http://www.leigeber.com/2009/05/javascript-popup-box/

jQuery Ribbon Plugin

The jQuery Ribbon Plugin allows you to give your web apps a Windows Vista/7 type menu.

jQuery Ribbon

jQuery Plugin: Fancy Gestures Mouse Recognition

Check out this latest jQuery plugin marvel, one that recognizes mouse movements.

http://anantgarg.com/2009/05/21/jquery-fancy-gestures/

MS SQL 2008 Developer Training Kit

This might be of interest, a training kit for MS SQL 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=e9c68e1b-1e0e-4299-b498-6ab3ca72a6d7

Source: Pinal Dave

New Marque jQuery Plugin

This one looks pretty cool.

http://www.givainc.com/labs/marquee_jquery_plugin.htm

Cool jQuery Masked Input Plugin

Here is a cool jQuery plugin that lets you do masked inputs easily.

http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/

Source: Link

JavaScript: OOP

Here is a pretty concise javascript OOP tutorial.

http://mckoss.com/jscript/object.htm

Sad Loss, 60 Year Old Major Killed In Iraq

A Veit Nam viet reinlisted in the Army after his wife died, and then was killed recently. He is the oldest soldier to be killed in the theater to date.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/national/6424905.html

The Magic Footer

I've done this before, but like usual if I only do it once in a while I forget how. The task at hand? Have a footer on a web page that stays at the bottom of the page. I did a quick search, and here are two ways (though there are others) of doing this.

1) Frack older browsers, and do it the easy way,

2) Or two, do a minimal CSS hack so you can support IE6 and older versions of Safari.

So here is some reinvent the wheel code. For number one, you just need a bit of CSS.

.footer{ width:100%; height:50px; position:fixed; bottom:0px; z-index:1000;}

then on your page, <div id="footer" >

done.

For step two, try this approach.

CSS bottom footer by MJT, or google fixed footer.

Proud Ship Leaves the Fleet

The Kittyhawk, the last US conventionally powered carrier, after 42+ years of service, now is entering moth balls.

http://nosint.blogspot.com/2009/05/carrier-kitty-hawk-leaves-active-fleet.html

Vista Built-In Unzip Sucks

There, I said it. The built in Unzip capabilities of Vista suck.

Sad End of An Era

Reign Radio, one of the best online Christian radio stations, died some time in April, and sad to say even though RR was one of my favorite audio sources on the internet, I missed its passing by a few weeks. Even the forums were locked down so I couldn't express my thanks for so many months of great music.

I guess the site creator, Shane, had been struggling to keep the site going for a long time. I think it was causing him to go broke and he wasn't getting enough donations to keep the station going. RR's passing is a true loss, but on to bigger and better things to the site's creator Shane.

www.reignradio.com.

Star Trek, Generation ?

I saw the new Star Trek movie this weekend. I thought it was a pretty good flick, glad I saw it. I'd say the story was trekkie enough so that only the absolute purist star trek fans will not like it, the rest will enjoy it. I consider myself a trekkie light, and I thought they did a great job with the movie. The guy who played the new spock did an outstanding job, the character who played Kirk did well also, and all the rest put in good performances.

8.7/out of 9 Stars. Go see it.

Getting the Public Key Token of An Assembly

This is a useful tip. If you stumbled here, you know why you need it.

Link

One Note: I Get It Now

Ok, a very talented developer where I work at is all about One Note (part of MS Office 2003+?). At first I didn't get One Note, now I do. One Note allows you to-

• Copy paste from web sites code examples
• Makes all your content searchable
• Has an interface to automatically post things to external blogs
• Is easily Organizable.

I'm occassionally hunting through favorites/bookmarks wondering where that could I saw was at, while my developer co-worker just types in a few keywords in One Note and all the info is at his finger tips. Plus he puts all the locations of servers, company procedures, personal info, etc... all in One Note, so he really does have one spot to look for things.

I haven't fully explored One Note, but so far I like it. And if Office 2007 is a little to big a purchase for your wallet, try Ever Note. I haven't used it, but I hear it is almost as good, and it is free or low cost.

Evernote.com

Executing a Console App from ASP.Net

Well, I was fooling around with a .Net API that does google tanslations. I thought it might be a good idea to not call the translating API for bulk translations directly from the website, so I created a little console app so I can do that and do a thread.Sleep pause and control the SQL Connection opening and closing a little more robustly. Anyway, here is some sample code on how to open a console from ASP.Net in C#

 // path to the console app
      string sPath = Server.MapPath("~/apps/GoogleTranslationConsole.exe");
      // pass your path, and your arguments array into a ProcessStartInfo
      ProcessStartInfo proc = new ProcessStartInfo(sPath,Request.Form["lagr"]);
      // Incase you want to read messages back from the code
      proc.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
      // hide any command windows from showing up
      proc.UseShellExecute = false;
      proc.CreateNoWindow = true;
      // create the process that will control the console app
      Process p = new Process();
      p.StartInfo = proc;
      p.Start();
      
      // use console.writeline for data to return back.
      // Also, be sure to either p.Dispose() of your process here or do
      // do a System.Environment.Exit in your console app when work is done
      //p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd() for results.

Here is the original link that I got this info from, which is in VB.Net.

Opening a Console App in VB.Net

Note: I haven't deployed this code to production yet, I've only got it working on my local box. In a production environment you probably want to make sure that your console apps aren't accessible by the web, that your console app is secure enough so that it only does what is should do when it should do it, and that only the right people can execute it (thought for my purposes probably the IIS account will probably have permission to execute). Just something to watch for once you are to that point.