I didn't invent this but I'm helping my friend spread the word on it (no pun intended).
Laughterbate
The act of breaking out into giggling or laughter when in the presence of noone or without external influence.
Possible uses:
That guy in the end cubicle is laughterbating again.
I see that you're a regular laughterbator.
How many times a day do you laughterbate?
Stop laughterbating, I'm trying to talk to you.
Pass it around. - The origin of the word is from a gentleman named Robert Pritchard - you can leave feedback for him on this blog posting.
This actually makes sense, though I haven't run into this issue until now.
For those of you who develop custom WebControls (composite ones specifically), I'm sure you've probably used the ClientID or UniqueID property of a child control when doing things like attaching javascript. What I didn't notice before is that you shouldn't access the ClientID or UniqueID property of any child control until it has been placed in the Controls collection of its parent. In fact, if you're building a hierarchy like putting a child control inside a panel and then the panel inside its parent, you should wait until the end to access these properties. What I've gotten accustomed to doing is placing all my javascript for my child controls or anything where I have to access these two properties, just before the CreateChildControls method is complete. That way you are sure to get the complete and proper naming for the controls. Like I said, this makes a lot of sense but I think in the past I just automatically placed this stuff where I was suppossed to.
I've just posted the ListBox Suite on my site (www.dotnetdude.com). The control is free to download and includes all source.
This is a collection of two custom controls that build on the power of the ListBox control.
The first control is called EnhancedListBox and adds reorder buttons to the standard ListBox control. The reorder buttons can be added to either side of the ListBox and are fully stylable. An optional heading caption is also a feature of this control.
The second control encapsulates two EnhancedListBox controls into a WebControl called ListMover. ListMover allows the classic moving of items between two list boxes and exposes the reordering capabilities of the EnhancedListBox.
What makes both these control unique is the ability to perform the moving/reordering using client-side script so there are no server trips, while at the same time making it fully persistable between postbacks.
There are many new features going into the next version of both these controls, including link/button switch and image button capabilities and I'll blog about it when they're online.
I've maintained true to my tradition and my preaching and exposed an extensive property and styling model in these controls, giving you maximum flexibility when using them and also allowing you to incorporate them into any site you wish.
As always, feedback on anyone that uses my controls is always welcome and appreciated.
The new hard drive comes in. I replace the old drive with the new one and initiate an NTFS format. No problem so far, then the Windows install begins... BSOD!!!! This is the point where blogging the detail of what took place can possibly get me arrested (they'll never find the bodies). After two or three tries and getting either a blue screen or a 'cannot read file - skip or retry' message, on a new drive mind you, I thought about something else. I powered down the notebook and removed the 1gig ram chip which replaced the old 512meg ram chip 3 months ago. Guess what, it worked!!! It seems that it was a memory-gone-bad problem the whole time. Now you would think, cool, put the old drive back and it should come up with no problem, right? Wrong! There were so many chkdisks run on that thing and index corrections, etc. that when I put it back in, it would just get to the Windows logo and reboot all over again. So anyway, I reinstalled Windows on the new drive and proceeded to connect the old one as an external, figuring I can at least get some data out of it. Well, the drive letter came up, that was nice, but when I clicked on it I got “cannot read volume”. I've come to terms with the fact that the old drive is unrecoverable. I'm going to reformat this weekend and use it as an external. The new one is up and running and all my stuff is back on. I keep most of my data backed up on my servers, and I use Vault for development source control so I was able to recover all of that. The only thing I really lost was my old emails. Oh well, such is life. It's good to be working again though. Oh, by the way, the company I bought the memory from is replacing the 1gig module free of charge (www.4allmemory.com). If this happens again (though it didn't go bad until 3 months later), I'll be getting my $ back and ordering RAM directly from HP.
Well, looks like I'll be offline in the evening for the next two or three days. My laptop ceased to function last night. First, VS2003 closed down without warning, but that was shortly followed by a complete shutdown (yes, with BSOD). Reboots proved futile. I only lost about an hour's worth of work so that's not so bad. I have not been able to get Safe Mode booted, or VGA only, and have also not been able to perform a “R”epair from the XP disc. I tried reinstalling Windows on top of the current install and it crashed too. The disk scans it performs when it tries to boot fail on the index verifications. Either way, looks like without a complete reformat, this drive is screwed so I ordered another 7200RPM 60GIG drive today for overnight shipping. Once I build that one, I'll attempt to connect the old one as an external and copy my emails only (the only thing I lost). Then hopefully I can just reformat it and use it as another external drive. This is also an aftermarket 7200rpm drive so the original 5400rpm drive that came with the notebook is in an external casing and used for backups and Virtual PC images. I appologize to my friends who are used to seeing me online (MSN) nearly every night. See you in a couple of days.
Well, Cabana Night has come and gone and I gotta say despite the bad weather, it went very well. We had a total of five rooms set up with myself manning the “Web UI” room. The crowd started out a little timid so I had to kick off the talk on my own, but things picked up tremendously. The talk seemed to be enjoyed by everyone because I didn't loose anyone for the duration. I received a lot of really great questions and I think everyone, including myself, walked out that night with some new knowledge.
I look forward to the next one.
I've put up two more controls on www.asp.net, Web FormField and Web EmailContact. Check 'em out, tell me what you think. The GalleryBuilder.NET control is being downloaded like crazy and I've received a number of very complimentary emails about it. This weekend I plan to put the features/demo pages together for these controls on my site, as well as try to finish the GalleryBuilder.NET Help file. The Help files for the other controls will follow shortly.
As usual, all my WebControls can be downloaded freely, with source, on www.dotnetdude.com.
I'm releasing a Pro version of GalleryBuilder.NET (like it's not Pro enough already) soon, but this one will carry a small fee (don't worry - very small).
If you're a user of this stuff already and you read my blog, thank you for your support.
The new version of my GalleryBuilder WebControl is up on www.asp.net as well as www.dotnetdude.com. I've gotten a boat load of hits and downloads so far and a few very complimentary emails. I'm gonna finish up the help file this weekend and also put up a features/demo page on www.dotnetdude.com.
I've also submitted two other controls to www.asp.net which are also available on www.dotnetdude.com - Web FormField and Web EmailContact.
Check them out and drop me a line with your comments.
Every so often I buy a piece of electronics I am absolutely thrilled with. Last weekend was one of those times. I've been a die-hard TiVo user since the first 14 hour version came out. Later when I got DirecTV, I traded up to the DirecTivo box and I loved it. It became my primary tuner, as my TV did not have one at all, and the thing totally changed my life. The problem is that I had purchased a 50” Plasma Hi-Def so I needed an additional Hi-Def tuner plugged into one of the other inputs. I found that as much as I loved watching Hi-Def, having to switch back and forth between the two tuners was annoying enough to make me not want to watch Hi-Def too often. So I finally bought the new Hi-Def Tivo and I've consolidated the two other receivers. I stay on one tuner now and I find myself hitting the Hi-Def channels quite often. Let me tell you, Discovery HD Theater is worth the price for this whole thing! The new TiVo has a massive harddrive (needs it for HD I gather). It can record up to 30 hours of HD or up to 200 hours of regular TV. I think that TiVo's Season Pass feature is the greatest thing since life's bread. For those of you who are probably saying, “200 hours?!? You watch way too much TV!” Let me tell you that the reason that TiVo is a life saver is exactly because it takes me so long to watch things. I'm pretty religious with about 6 programs. Sometimes they pile up 2 to 3 weeks of episodes until I have time to catch up. This is where TiVo is great. And now I can get to watch some of the awesome HD stuff as well - just don't know when.
By the way, I'm selling a 120 hour DirecTivo box and a Hughes HD DirecTv Receiver. If anyone is interested, just respond to this posting.
TiVo Rocks!