Well it’s off to Disney World again. Seems like only a few weeks ago when we last made the trip. This time we are taking our grandson Jayson. It’s his first time. He is very excited. I remember our first trip. It’s been close to twenty years ago. On that first trip I remember how new, colorful and clean everything was. Disney has people handling down to a well-honed science. We waited in many a line, but each was organized such that you could not see its full length. Along the wait path interesting displays were strategically placed to distract your attention from the wait. Over the years we watched the theme parks change and grow from three to five … they have included so many resorts I have lost count. One day we will stay at one of these resorts. For now, we stay with Mom. She lives just a short 30 minutes away.

Will be taking my trusty powerbook. Hope to spend some quality time writing Cocoa code. This will be a nice change from my every day work in C#. Don’t get me wrong I love C#…its just that the Mac is my favorest, and bestes machine. Have a goal in mind to write an application in Cocoa that will access the www.my-list.com database using web services. Really am disappointed that Apple has not included in Cocoa the ability to connect to mySQL. That is one of the nice things about the Microsoft platform, the ability to easily connect to a database. Have looked at some of the ODBC stuff for Mac to mySQL. However, found installation confusing, difficult and POORLY documented. I could get none to work. Even tried the Java stuff with the same result. Now perl and php connect easily to mySQL. So with perl SOAP should be able to create a web service to do the connection, data retrieval, insert and updates an make it all work.

Plan blog my progress…thats if I can get to a local hot spot.

Here it is … fresh from Microsoft Training…

Steps to Install MS-Content Management Server
Prepared by Murali Kothapalli Date : 5/27/04

Assumptions
You are installing it on
Window 2003 Server with IIS 6.0 installed (in a Lockdown mode)
Or Window 2000 Server with IIS 5.0 installed
– we shall refer it as WEB_SVR and there is an external SQL DB Server available to be used. – we shall refer it as SQLDB_SVR

Prerequisites
Has a Window domain account eg(CMSadmin with password as P@ssword) with Admin permissions on the WEB_SVR

Steps
1. Install SQL server Client Tools – from the SQL server CD
   a. Choose Install Database option and finally choose Client tools only

2. SQL Server SP3 (Servicepack 3)
   a. Run the setup.bat

3. Install Visual Studio.NET 2003(or 2002) (optional – if you want develop on this PC – you may need it initially)

4. Adjust IIS Permissions (2003 only)
   a. Choose Web Service Extensions
   b. Allow Server Side Includes

5. Create Database for CMS
   a. Connect to SQLDB_SVR and create a new empty database say name it as CMSDB

6. Install IE Webcontrols
   a. Run setup for IE Webcontrols – from the CMS2002 install CD/ms web

7. Install CMS – base version
   a. Run setup.exe and choose all defaults
   b. When prompte for DB point it to SQLDB_SVR\CMSDB

8. Apply SP1a (not SP1) for CMS
   a. Run the setup for Service Pack 1a for CMS2002

9. Run Setup again from Installed folder
   a. Look under C:\program files\Microsoft content Management Server\Setup.exe
   a. Run this setup.exe
   b. Choose all the relevant components
   c. download and install the Sample sites
   d. download and install Office Authoring Connector

10. Remove SSL for Admin site (2003 only)
   a. Launch IIS Admin tool
   b. Look under Admin Web properties
   c. Open Directory Security Tab
   d. Edit Security (last button)
   e. Uncheck SSL enable (remove SSL security)

11. Verify Installation
   a. Launch https://localhost/woodgrovenet
   b. Login as administrator

12. Allow Woodgrovenet to Guests
   a. Launch Site Manager
   b. Launch User Roles
   c. Subsribers add new group ‘Guests’
   d. Add Doman Guests as members
   e. Add Required channels to be viewable under rights tab
   f. Launch SCA – Site Configuration Application
       i. Security tab
       ii. Allow Guest – Yes
       iii. Change context as IUSR_{WEB_SVR} account

Purchased a great product for work, Contribute 2 by Macromedia. This tool gives our web site owners the ability to manage content. What is really sweet is that we can control what they are allowed to edit. In general, they have control of the site text. It took just one little demo session to get our first owner up and running. It’s so great not having to fix those little things like contact names and phone numbers.

We have a mixture of both internal and external sites with architecture of ASP.NET and ASP. It can’t handle Perl CGI sites.

This product does not work on my Mac…. big disappointment. It loaded fine. Auto connected to my .Mac web site. Connected to my web sites via FTP no problem. However, both of my sites are CGI-Perl. With the exception of a few html pages nothing was editable through Contribute. The main page, which was editable, would not render properly in the edit mode. That is to say it only displayed the left side of the page. The balance was black on black. One big problem was that its window would slide off the screen when attempting to move the page.

Overall, this solves a problem at work ,,,, but has limited applicability once you move away from ASP, HTML, and .NET sites.

Stumbled onto a blog, “DavidM” with some great C# code for data table relational operators. Contained herein is code for UNION, JOIN, INTERSECT, PRODUCT, and DIFFERENCE.

Noticed a bad pixel on my powerbook this morning. This 12” powerbook is only two month old. I have heard about this problem with iBooks, but never suspected that it was also a problem with the powerbook. Since it’s under warranty I took it to out local Apple store where it was purchased. Much to my surprise, they advised that one bad pixel was within the technical specifications. Having paid close to $2K for this system, I politely advised them that this condition was not within my technical specifications. Fortunately when I started the system to show the bad pixel it was gone. Apparently it reset itself. I had previously restarted the system with no effect, but seems like a shutdown, followed by a restart about 1 hour later did the trick.

This is my 6th Apple laptop and the first time I have experience a pixel problem. In addition I have owned several flat panel displays and PC laptops with no such problem. Perhaps I have just been lucky, but never encountered a bad pixel before. I am starting to get concerned about Apples quality. I have always been confident that I could count on Apple providing the highest quality products, and when problem occurred providing a no hassle fix.

Last year I purchase an iPod. Had to return it 4 times for replacement before I got one without a problem. The issues included display problems, battery problems, and hard drive problems.

Is Apple quality degrading form the use of cheap materials and/or cheap labor?

We successfully deployed our Pivotal enhancement Friday. We started promptly a 6:00AM and finished at 6:30PM. Took only a 10-minute lunch break. Otherwise it was nose to the grindstone. All in all it was a very success full effort. We validated the overall system installation, rebuilt our offline system and rebooted both the SQL and IIS server. This was followed by the actual enhancement installation followed by a complete system functionality test. We were actually complete with all the changes by 4:00PM. It took the balance of the time to perform a full system test. Monday will be the big test as our users start using the system. I am just glad that it’s over. Friday night was beer and TV zone out time…

It’s March already. Just don’t know where the time has gone. Managed to survive a cold and bout of “Strep Throat”. Got it from the grand kids. Have been just to busy at work. Just glued to the screen coding away and no end in sight. On top of everything else have to start work at 6:00 AM tomorrow to role out a change to our production Pivotal system. This is going to be a much welcome weekend.

Purchased a copy of Apples DVD Studio Pro 2 on eBay. Managed to get it a very reasonable price. This is now my latest home project… learning to be proficient with this product. I am running this product on a 12”-Powerbook. Performance so far has been excellent.

To list shares on a server…create and run the following script.

SERVER=”<<your server name>>”
Set objFileShare=GetObject(“WinNT://” & SERVERNAME & “/Lanmanserver”)

objfileShare.filter=Array(“FileShare”)

For each FileShare in objFileShare
wscript.echo “Share Name:” & FileShare.Name & bvCRLF & “Path=” & Fileshare.Path
Next

This code snippet is from a great reference book. “Managing Enterprise Systems with the Windows Script Host”, A Press Publisher, ISBN# 1-893115-67-4

When users click on the browser refresh button, the page resubmits and executes code associated with the last button clicked….not good. To prevent this problem do the following.

1. Add SmartNavigation to the page

Change this
<%@Page language=”c#” Codebehind=”Webform2.aspx.cs” AutoEventWireup=”false” Inherits=”WebApplication2.WebForm2” %>

to this
<%@Page language=”c#” Codebehind=”Webform2.aspx.cs” AutoEventWireup=”false” Inherits=”WebApplication2.WebForm2” SmartNavigation=”true”%>

2. Verify that .NET 1.1 Framework is installed on the web server

From the “Start” button, select “Control Panel”. Then select “Add or Remove Programs”. Scroll down the list of installed items and look for Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1. If not found, you can download it from www.microsoft.com or msdn.microsoft.com.

3. Verify that ASP.Net client script library 1_1_4322 is available

Look for folder [WEBROOT}\aspnet_client\system_web\1_1_4322. If it does not exist, create the path and extract file 1_1_4322.zip into the folder.

4. Close the browser and then test the page….the problem is gone

Have been working on a project where I need to move through a dataset one row at a time. Now this is not too difficult. However, I just could remember the syntax. After some research I found a strategy …

1. First create a DataTable object:

         Private DataTable dataTable;

2. Next, set the dataTable equal to the DataSet table with your data:

         DataTable = dataSet.Tables[0];

3. Next get the first row of data from the DataSet:

         DataRow dataRow = dataTable.Rows[0];

4. Then get a column value for display such as a text box:

         textBox .Text = dataRow[“Fname”].ToString();

Now that was not too hard. Problem is remembering.