Symbiatch - maailma on rikki

Itqpotqraivareita ympäriinsä Windows 8:sta

15.10.2012 14.18 - IT-ala 

Ärsyttää suunnattomasti, kun ihmiset vinkuvat taas turhasta. Nimittäin Windows 8:sta ja Metrosta. Anteeksi siis Modernista. Viimeisin oli erään kotimaisen "lehden" artikkeli toisen "lehden" jutusta, jossa "toimittaja" oli antanut vaimonsa käyttöön Windows 8:n ja "pelkäsi tämän ottavan avioeron." Mitään perusteluja "toimittaja" ei jutun perusteella antanut sille, miksi Windows 8 on niin kauhea, mutta kovasti selitteli miten se on tietoturvaongelma ja sitä ei oteta yrityksiin käyttöön ja tulee olemaan isompi valitusvyöry kuin Vistasta ja ties mitä. Epäilenpä, että kyseinen "toimittaja" on aika ammattitaidoton. Muutenhan olisi saattanut perustella asioita.

Tästä ärsyyntyneenä kirjoitin Windows 8 -vinkkisivun, jossa myös vanhemmille käyttiksille joitain vinkkejä. Ei pitäisi olla enää Metro-näkymän hirveä, saati että siellä edes tarvitsisi käydä.

Jos joku on eri mieltä, saa toki kertoa miksi käynnistää sovelluksia hitaasti käynnistysvalikon kautta, ellei kyse ole satunnaisesta käytöstä. Mitään syytähän siihen ei ole, muuta kuin osaamattomuus. Ja siinä ei ole mitään vikaa, kunhan käsittää, että vika ei silloin ole järjestelmässä. Ja ottaa vaariksi näistä vinkeistä.

Ja Modernilla on paikkansa. Se on todella kätevä kunhan siihen tottuu. Itselläni meni ehkä vartti, vaikka olin varustautunut tuhahtelemaan Windows 8:lle muutaman päivän. Toisin kävi.

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SQL Server Not Starting on Windows 8?

11.10.2012 19.18 - IT-ala 

If you happen to have a problem with SQL Server not starting on Windows 8 (probably only happens when upgrading from Windows 7, but could be on fresh install too), check the event log. If it says something like "Cannot use file X because it was originally formatted with sector size 4096 and is now on a volume with sector size 3072", you might have a problem with your drivers. Your drive probably didn't change sector size, it's just being reported that way.

I have a Latitude D830 and had this problem. The error was fixed by removing and reinstalling Intel Matrix Storage drivers (version 9.6 for me). The newer Rapid Storage thingy didn't install and I had to search for the 9.6 since the Intel download page only had 8.8 as a previous version. But after this everything worked fine.

On a related note, also if upgrading to a 500GB+ drive makes Messenger crash, the Intel drivers help with that too. Strange things...

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Philips, Please Enhance Achieva a Bit!

05.10.2012 12.26 - IT-ala 

Dear Philips,

I've been using your Achieva system for some time now and I have a couple of important enhancements for it. I'm sure if you ask others they'll agree that these features would be very useful in everyday use.

First, make a button that copies the offset/angle parameters from the imaging box to the volume box. It's really not hard to do and it's so annoying that we have to align it ourselves.

Next is Undo feature. This would also be easy to do but would help a lot. Many times I've accidentally changed the slice width or rotated the box when I actually just wanted to move it. Now without undo I have to manually fix this or use cancel and do it all over again.

Oh, and it would be nice to have the possibility to scroll through the images with mouse wheel in the imaging mode. Would cause less strain than going to the scroll bar all the time.

And the whole UI would look nicer with ClearType and a better font :)

Not much to ask, is it? Thanks!

PS. I'd be interested in working for or with you. Get in touch!

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EF Code First, LINQ-to-XML and Other Niceties for Telkussa.fi

04.10.2012 18.29 - ohjelmointi web 

I wanted to update my skills since I haven't done much web due to my studies. So I decided I'd update Telkussa to the newest technologies. It was made with ASP.NET MVC 2, used Microsoft's AJAX libraries for data handling and client side templating etc. It works very well and is very lightweight, compared to other popular TV sites.

So, the point was to update it to ASP.NET MVC 4. Since Microsoft has been going towards jQuery for a while, they don't really support their client side templating engine anymore. They recommended jQuery templating. Which is obsolete nowadays, it seems. The next big thing is JsRender.

JsRender looked nice, so I converted the templates for it. Went smoothly, the syntax is simple and there are some examples that tell you how to use it. No problem here!

I also wanted to try out the new WebApiController, which helps in creating REST services. Before I used Microsoft's AJAX thingies that created JS code to use web services. No more, now it's nice and RESTful. So I learned that one. Must do some more work with it still, though. One thing I miss is the simplicity: before I just had to include a server-generated script and I could just call Telkussa.SetFavorite(id) and not do all this $.ajax(...) stuff. Yes, I can make a function that does it for me, but it'd be nice to get it ready-made. Maybe I'll make a patch for ASP.NET MVC someday...

I used Entity Framework for the previous version too but now I wanted to try code first. It's a lot nicer to just create the classes for the database tables and let the system determine the links between them. So simple and clean! So now I don't need any designer stuff for this either.

In the RSS part I got to test LINQ-to-XML, which are these X-classes (XDocument, XElement etc). They're so cool in creating documents, compared to XmlDocument etc. Or what do you say about this:

var res = (from x in ctx.Programs where x.channel == chan && x.stop >= now && x.start > DateTime.Today
	orderby x.start select x).Take(8).ToArray();

doc = new XDocument(
	new XElement("rss", new XAttribute("version", "2.0"),
		new XElement("channel",
			new XElement("title", "Telkussa: " + channame),
			new XElement("description", "TV-ohjelmat nyt"),
			new XElement("link", "http://telkussa.fi/"),
			new XElement("ttl", "60"),
			new XElement("copyright", "Tokavuh Technologies oy"),
			new XElement("webMaster", "info@telkussa.fi"),
			(from x in res select
				 new XElement("item",
					 new XElement("title", String.Format("{0:HH'.'mm} {1}", x.start, x.name)),
					 new XElement("description", x.description),
					 new XElement("pubDate", x.start.ToUniversalTime().ToString("r")),
					 new XElement("link", String.Format("http://telkussa.fi/p/{0:x}", x.id))
					 )).Take(8)
			)
		)
	);

(Yes, I know there are some nasty string concatenations, I'll get to them later :)

The main point here is: the resulting XML structure can be shown in the code and you only need one statement for the whole RSS! First I get the programs from the database. Yes, I could've put it inline too, but it's a bit messy. And if you're wondering why I used ToArray(), it's because you can't create anything but classes with default constructors from LINQ in this case. So I had to take the data as an array and then I could create the XElements from the data.

I like this a lot. It's self-documenting and simple. No more adding children to this and that and keeping track of elements in variables.

All this took me a couple of hours and now I'm back on track with the newest things in ASP.NET field. Kinda. I'm sure there are many things still to (re)learn, but it's a good start. Nice to have a project that can be upgraded and used for learning purposes.

(Note: the public site is still the old one, so no point in checking out the JsRender things from there. I'll put the new one up when I'm sure everything works and I won't mess up the mobile clients etc. It probably already works, and even better than before, but still checking...)

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