code-complete

I recently made a photo montage of my trip to China that I wanted to get onto my iPhone and through much trial and error, was finally successful. I had over 900 hi-res digital photos that I wanted to include in the video and I wanted pans, zooms, and smooth transitions. And I wanted music. I used Photo Story 3 (free from microsoft), Windows Movie Maker (free from MS), iTunes, (free from Apple), and the Adobe Media Encoder (not free from Adobe). Photo Story 3 allows for only up 300 pictures, so first I created 3 movies comprising all 900 photos and chose no soundtrack. PS3 generated nice wmv files for those, which I imported into movie maker then added fade transitions between them and a soundtrack. Then I published from moviemaker a few different ways: one was using a dvd target becuase I wanted a dvd of the movie as well and another was targeting a windows mobile device. The mobile device target generated a 640x480 WMV file. I then used the Media encoder to try and convert it to a .mp4 file using the H.264 format and Apple iPod Video Large preset. This created the file but is was horrible. Choppy, terribly jerky, and not at all passable. So I tried something else.

I converted the wmv file using the media encoder into Quicktime format using the NTSC_DV preset. It generated a huge file, but the playback was great. I then added this file into iTunes and used iTunes to convert to mp4 by right clicking and selecting "Convert to iPhone". I added the resulting movie to my iPhone and it plays back flawlessly.

We have a client who runs an ecommerce package called asp.net storefront (we are in the process of moving them to AbleCommerce) A few weeks back, they began to hear customers complaining that they could not add items to their cart, or items in the cart would disappear. I traced this down to a cookie issue and updated default security settings in IE. The default security for the internet zone in IE 7 is not to accept cookies from sites that do not have a Compact Privacy Policy.

This is basically a set of files conforming to the W3C p3p standard and consists of the following:

p3p.xml - this is a policy reference file and it should live in a directory named W3c at the root of the server.
clientname.p3p - (or .xml, as we'll see later) this is the xml privacy policy
clientname.htm - this is the html privacy policy
clientname.txt - this is the compact policy file that is used to generate http headers

All of these files can be generated using a p3p tool from IBM: http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/p3peditor

A couple of caveats:
1. the compact policy file generated by the tool for the http headers only contains this:
CP="CAO DSP CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa CONa OUR DELa BUS IND PHY ONL UNI PUR COM NAV DEM STA"

the full header should look like this:

P3P: policyref="http://www.CLIENT.com/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="CAO DSP CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa CONa OUR DELa BUS IND PHY ONL UNI PUR COM NAV DEM STA"

2. When generating the actual policy file, the tool wants to save a file with a .p3p file extention, which is fine if you add the mimtype .p3p text/xml into iis and restart your server. But if you don't want to restart your server, you can just save it with an .xml file extension.

I haven't posted in a while because I've been spending time with my new daughter. My family traveled to China to adopt her a couple months ago (see http://www.code-complete.com/serendipity/). But today at work, I got to witness the famous exploding Laptop phenomenon first hand. I wish I had a photo of the thing while it was flaming, but my moto phone seems to have deleted it. Anyway, this freaking Dell inspiron 6000 literally burst into flames on someone's desk. It was scary, but funny at the same time. Luckily, no one was hurt. Here's the aftermath:

The latest release of MS SQL Server has been released to manufacturing today and is available for download for Technet subscribers:
http://technet.microsoft.com/

Currently the download throughput is only around 80 Kbps, so it'll take about a full day to download.

This is the second year for the A List Apart survey of web development professionals, and it helps us all learn more about who we are and how we work. It only takes a few minutes and there's no personally identifying questions.



Hopefully next year there will be more questions around RIA development specifically and possibly something more around tech stacks and platforms.

We are in the final QA phase of our new website, and everything was looking great until yesterday. Then, I noticed that some important flash elements were sometimes loading and working correctly and sometimes not - they actually would load, but the area they loaded into was just gray. It was seemingly completely random when the elements would work and when they would not. So troubleshooting time.

We saved out the flash in downlevel versions all the way back to 6. No luck. We changed the way we embedded the SWF from using SWFobject.js to using Object/Embed tags directly. No Luck. I tried changing the flash plugin from 9.0.0.115 to 9.0.0.224 No luck. Tried the beta of the 10 plugin (wayyy too slow). We tried accessing the swf directly - same problem. Then we tried a swf that we pulled down from Adobe's website. WTF?!? Same problem. We tried serving the code from Apache and IIS. Nothing.

So I determined it had to be something client-side and reviewed my yum updates from the past few days. I noticed a package called nspluginwrapper, and I remembered having some problems installing it when it initially appeared in updates. So out with that package: rpm -e nsluginwrapper (it was version 1.1.0 release 4.fc9)

And voila. no more flash problems!

Just a quick note to warn folks of a bug in anaconda, the installer in fedora 9. Machines that sport a Samsung hardrive should not attempt to move to f9 from f8 as the installer will throw an error like this:

Invalid Object Path
'/org/freedesktop/hal/devices/storage=model_SAMSUNG_HD160JJ/' ends with '/' and is not just '/'


This is because the harddrive's identifier contains the '/' character, and HAL gets confused. This happens whether you are trying to install from DVD or via the preupgrade process.

This is a known bug: here.

I have verified that you can install on this hardware using the Live CD.

Since F9 has been out for a bit, I decided to upgrade my Lenovo y410 lappy yesterday. Following are suggestions to make the process a little smoother for anyone else who upgrades.

First of all, there are a few different ways to upgrade. It can be done via yum exclusively, from the dvd, or by using the new preupgrade program. I chose the latter, but I did have an F9 install DVD handy, and I'm glad I did - you'll find out why in a bit. So, on to it.

#1. make sure you're on a reliable high-speed network and run the preupgrade program following all the prompts. this will download a core set of F9 rpms into a /var/yum/cache/upgrade directory.

#2 after that completes, it asks you to reboot. once again, make sure you are on a reliable high-speed network because there's more to be downloaded. if the installer can't recognize your NIC and network connection, you may need to try a USB NIC. Once I got the installer online it downloaded something then began installing the fc9 packages into my system.

#3 I had over 1400 rpm packages that got upgraded to get to the new OS - that took about 2 hours. Once that was complete I got a creen that said "finishing the upgrade process, this may take a little while." Indeed it did: 45 Mins later I was ready to reboot.

#4 on reboot the system loaded up the 2.6.24.7-92 kernel and all the modules loaded except cups, which failed. Also, the gnome GUI was a little strange and some other minor issues were there, but overall, the system was working.

#5 time to get updates. The familiar add/remove programs link was no longer present in the Applications menu (that program has been deprecated) so I used yumex to see what was out there. Well, it turns out the upgrade process did not update my yum repositories, which were still pointed at fedora 8 for updates from fedora as well as livna. To fix this, you need to edit the yum repo config files under /etc/yum.repo.d I just edited my fedora.repo file and livna.repo file changing out refs to f8 to f9 and set the gpgcheck flag to 0.

#6 running yumex again showed a lot of legitimate updates. I decided to update the kernel packages first including development and headers becuase I could not recompile the vbox kernel module with what the upgrade had installed.

#7 Once the updaes were installed, I rebooted. Shit! The machine got as far as black screen with GRUB _ and a blinking cursor. Glad I had the DVD becuase I needed to boot from dvd, go into rescue mode and fix the boot loader which had gotten screwed by the kernel update. Once you are in a command shell the following commands worked to fix grub:

#chroot /mnt/sysimage
#grub-install /dev/sda


#8 reboot and all was good.

#9 still some funky things going on with the GUI so overnight I installed all the updates for f9 from the updates repository and today everything is working like a champ.

Get Some Here

After realizing I need to use Sun's JVM globally in order to get Flex Builder A3 working under my Fedora 8 install I decided to investigate further how to get it to be an option in the system-switch-java applet. That applet is tuned in to the update-alternatives command. by running the following commands as root, the system was able to switch between the 3 different JVMs I've got installed:

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/java" 3

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/javac" 3

# update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javaws" "javaws" 

"/usr/java/default/bin/javaws" 3

Now I can change JVMs globally using update-alternatives --config java command!

I am looking for anyone who is currently involved in the Solar Rebate program in Denver or Austin and is working with Earth Solar Group / Armadillo Solar.

Please contact me via this website.

My 6-year-old son has this digital camera that we got him when he was 5. He wasn't that into it, but recently has shown interest. It's a disney Pix "toy" camera that comes with specialized software from digitalblue that you need to install if you want to get the pictures off. When I first got the camera, I just plugged the camera's USB cable into my XP machine to see if it would come up in the file system. No luck, I had to install the software, then it worked.



After "upgrading" to vista, it no longer worked even after uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers. This morning, he asked me to get pictures off the camera. I told him it wasn't likely because of the new computer. I was shocked when I plugged the USB cable into my Lenovo Y410 fedora 8 machine and a dialog box popped up asking me if I wanted to import pictures!

Freaking awesome! Cheers to the Fedora community!

I have just gotten around to using the amazon ec2 tools to manage my amazon machine images from my linux laptop. I mentioned before that I am rolling with fedora 8 on a new laptop, and it's been sweet. But there are gotchas here and there and I ran into one today with the ec2 tools.

Turns out that fedora 8 comes with 2 JVMs: GCJ 1.5.0 and IcedTea 1.7.0 - those are installed via yum or selected during the install process. I have no problems with any java-based GUI apps that I have installed like Oxygen and dbvisualizer, but when running the ec2-describe-images command, I got the following error:


Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
org.codehaus.xfire.aegis.type.xml.SourceType
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass(libgcj.so.8rh)

etc....


I had my JAVA_HOME set to what redhat and fedora lilke: /usr/lib/jvm/java, which is really a sym link pointing into the /etc/alternatives library of sym links. It's actually a great way to switch globally between JVMs, because you can use the system-switch-java applet to quicky change your JVM if you have multiple versions installed. So I did and switched from 1.7 over to GNU 1.5 and tried again. Same exception was thrown.

It turns out the the ec2 tools really only work with Sun's JVM, which I downloaded and installed via the RPM from sun.com. After installing, uninstalling, reinstalling a few times I determined that for whatever reason the 1.6 JVM from Sun was never going to appear as an option within the system-switch-java applet. So I changed my JAVA_HOME variable from /usr/lib/jvm/java to /usr/java/default, which is what Sun likes.

Now the ec2 command line tools work great!

Apparently SP1 for Vista has been made public, but if you've got Intel's 945G Express series chipset or Realtek for audio, better be careful and read this article on InfomationWeek first.

I have no firsthand knowledge of the problems since I switched to fedora 8 a couple months ago and I definitely won't be applying SP1 to my vbox vista install till some better news is out.