roncli.com blog: February 2006

Just a warning to those who like to play MP3 and other files in Winamp: Don't upgrade to 5.2.

Apparently there's a lot - and I mean a lot - of problems with it. I installed it and I can't even open it now, I get a fatal exception.

Back to WMP for now... Sigh.

Labels: Software, Winamp

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Due Process Close
Posted: 2:40:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Korn - Twisted Transistor (2:58)

Actually, Due Process is done! I have it happily running on my workstation and my computer with no problems. I am very pleased with how it turned out.

The reason you don't have a copy of it yet is because I'm working on the website that's going to promote this and other pieces of software I'll be spitting out over the course of time. Backup is going to be the next offering, which is a copy of my FTP file backup service. After that, I'm open to pretty much anything. Who knows, I might even get back to Cent.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process

Happy Anniversary
Posted: 2:37:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Korn - Twisted Transistor (2:58)

It was one year ago this past Saturday I set up this blog. In that time, I managed to post 160 times, a little under 1 every other day. It is interesting to walk through it and see where my interests wane and wax over time.

Here's to more years of pointless posts such as these!

Labels: Blog, Life, roncli.com

ASP.Net DataGrid
Posted: 2:33:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Korn - Twisted Transistor (2:58)

A while ago, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would have to custom-build my own shopping cart for a site I'm working on. Well, I'm sure I could have bought something to do relatively the same thing, but what fun is that for a coder like me?

Anyway, I got to the part where I actually display the items in the cart. I was happily coding along in my usual ASP mindset, adding forms, hidden input tags, and... whoops. That's not going to work, this is ASP.Net. Doh.

So I switched out to a DataGrid. The first thing I figured out is that I have absolutely no idea how to use a DataGrid. The second thing I figured out, and this one took a while, is that the CssClass property of the styles are applied to the table row, and not each table cell. Very annoying, as I ended up creating my own custom class to fix that. Easy enough:

    Public Class DataGrid
        Inherits WebControls.DataGrid

        Protected Overrides Sub OnPreRender(ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
            MyBase.OnPreRender(e)
            For Each dgiItem As DataGridItem In Me.Items
                For Each tc As TableCell In dgiItem.Cells
                    If dgiItem.ItemType = ListItemType.Item Then
                        tc.CssClass = Me.ItemStyle.CssClass
                    ElseIf dgiItem.ItemType = ListItemType.AlternatingItem Then
                        tc.CssClass = Me.AlternatingItemStyle.CssClass
                    End If
                Next
            Next
        End Sub

    End Class

Next came figuring out how to add a title to the grid. If you notice on all of the sites I host, there's a title bar for each table in the content section. Well, there wasn't an easy way to do this. I couldn't figure out how to access the table control that the DataGrid populates, so I ended up just stacking a one-row table on top of it.

Now I had to figure how to put the total of the order in the footer, but there are enough good articles on how to do that, so that didn't take long. Adding a remove button to remove a product someone doesn't want from the cart was fairly easy as well.

The fun came in having to allow them to change the quantity on the fly. That turned out to be more of a project than I was expecting. There were two approaches I was considering, and of course I took the difficult one: using the onblur method of an input tag to populate two hidden fields with the ItemID I want to update the quantity of and the new quantity, as well as activate a hidden button on the form.

Phew! I wasn't expecting so much work out of what would be maybe an hour of work in classic ASP.

Labels: ASP.Net, Coding, DataGrid, VB.NET

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Internet on the PSP
Posted: 2:49:00 AM 0 comments

Yes, it can be done. I know little about game consoles and their handheld counterparts, but I was shocked to see this in my OSMusic.Net log today:

Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)

I did some digging and found that people view the forums on the D3TL and download the Modplug software. I am almost interested enough to get one and see what it's like. Kudos if you surf with it, I can't imagine it being easy.

Labels: Coding, Logs, PSP, roncli.com

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Website Logs
Posted: 3:03:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: Korn - Twisted Transistor (2:58)

Well, I've had a pretty rough time with work lately. I've been putting in a lot of extra time from home and on the weekends. As a result, my activity with some of my own projects has slacked a bit. Fortunately, this overtime is over, and I'm back to my normal relaxed self.

I've gotten some progress done on my websites, though. One of which is my Logs site, which I've been wanting to open up to the public for a while now. This is my own creation that processes IIS logs via a VB.Net application (previously it was done in all ASP, as can be shown by the now-inactive Import Logs links) and sorts out all the data as needed. The data is all in a SQL 2005 backend, which the ASP site queries to get its data. Some parts are pretty slow, like looking at the referrals on the larger sites, but overall it's a fairly fast web application.

The front page lists the number of hits for the past month, and it revealed something surprising that hasn't happened since the beginning of 2001 when I started hosting the D3TL - My own website, roncli.com, is the #1 site in terms of hits. At first this surprised me, but then I realized that the majority of those 18,593 hits is downloads of the ModPlug software.

I have always been a mirror for the ModPlug software since they implemented the partner program back in the day, but it's never seen this many hits before, which indicates that, despite active development on the tracker, the ModPlug software is as popular as ever.

Labels: Coding, Logs, roncli.com