Apparently, if your database-driven website is under heavy concurrent user load, the Adapter.Fill method in the .NET Framework (called by code generated by the XSD in Visual Studio) begins to fail because it doesn’t close connections properly.
The next time I need a data access layer for anything of substance, strongly-typed datasets are off the list.
If a single word could define my 2007, it would be “travel”. I suspect it’s the biggest reason I enjoyed the year. The places I had the chance to visit include:
There were a couple of short road trips to Pennsylvania as well.
Looking back at the five things I wanted to accomplish this year, I finished two: taking two full weeks off, and forming an LLC. The latter should play a large part in what 2008 will be like for me. The three things I didn’t accomplish last year go back on the list for this year:
One brand-new goal for this year is to increase my involvement in software development training. Last year, I started an informal learning lunch program at work. My original intent was to give the consultants that work for us multiple opportunities to transfer their knowledge to our permanent staff. I ended up preparing and presenting on a wide variety of topics myself. The program has been very well-received by the staff, and I’ve enjoyed assembling and giving presentations on best practices and technologies. At the suggestion of friends & family, I’ve decided to pursue part-time openings as a technology instructor. I’m scheduled to interview with a local community college for an adjunct position this month. It will be the first work I do for my LLC if I’m accepted.
This time, from a much higher-profile blogger than me–Tim Bray. The bulk of the post is actually about digital SLRs (DSLRs), more specifically, Bray’s follow-on commentary to this post by Dave Sifry. The starter kit looks decent, but the estimate of how many RAW files a 4GB Compact Flash (CF) card will hold makes me wonder if Canon’s RAW files are bigger than Nikon’s. I have a D70s I’ve been shooting with for about two years, and a 2 GB CF holds over 350 RAW files.
The only place where I might differ with Bray’s additional points is the first one on camera brands. Canon and Nikon between them own the vast majority of the film and digital camera markets. This is important because it means you’re far more likely to find used equipment of good quality in those brands than with Pentax, Sony, etc. In my own case, the reason I got the D70s was that my friend Sandro found a refurbished one for $600 at Penn Camera. Maybe 6 months before that, the same camera cost $1200 new. New lenses get pretty expensive once you get faster than about f/4, so good used ones also keep things affordable.
I wish all my readers a happy holiday season!
My earlier plan of a longer series of posts on the ins-and-outs of Lightroom was devoured by work, holiday stuff, etc. In this post, I’ll talk briefly about Navigator, collections, and the Slideshow portion of the workflow.
Navigator
This feature, available in the Library and Develop portions of the workflow lets you look at various areas of a selected photo. You can zoom in as far as an 11:1 ratio. It’s quite useful in Develop, since at least some of the edits you can make (red eye reduction, spot removal) are most successful when you get in really close. I haven’t used this feature a ton, but I certainly haven’t found anything like it in iPhoto.
Collections
Collections are the mechanism for organizing groups of photos in Lightroom. They appear to be equivalent to iPhoto albums. In Lightroom, photos have to be in a collection before they can be sorted. Unlike iPhoto, Lightroom allows you to sort photos both in the filmstrip and the grid view. The number of photos displayed per row in the grid view also adjusts automatically based on how large you make the application window (it’s a manual adjustment in iPhoto).
Slideshow
In this amount of time using Lightroom, I only have one complaint: when you play a slideshow directly from the software, it starts reverting to earlier slides after you’ve displayed around 50. At least, that was my experience when I used to help a friend present photos from his trips to various Seventh-day Adventist churches. I’m hoping it’s some sort of trialware restriction, because that would be a pretty major bug otherwise.
Slideshows export as PDFs, with one slide per page. There are five default templates, and the software lets you create your own. You can change slide backdrops, text overlays, and layouts in a number of interesting ways. If I get some time before the trial runs out, I’ll make some sample outputs available in a subsequent post.
In retrospect, I should have used the Preview app in slideshow mode to present the slides, since there weren’t transitions, music, or anything else requiring Lightroom to run it.
Import
If Lightroom is on when you connect a camera or memory card to your Mac, a dialog pops up that lets you decide how to import the pictures. It didn’t interfere with iPhoto when I used it.
My sister and I spent the weekend with my parents and an aunt to watch the Christmas shows at Sight and Sound Theatre, in Strasburg, Pennsylvania. We were fortunate enough to see both Miracle of Christmas and Voices of Christmas. Both shows are Christian-themed musicals with live animals and very impressive set design. The Millenium Theatre, where Miracle of Christmas was staged, is large enough to have front and side stages. There was plenty of action to both sides, and the show also used the center aisles to move people and animals in and out. They even had the actors playing angels on wires, flying them around at heights of what must have been at least 30 feet for some scenes. I really enjoyed both shows.
It would be easy enough to assume so–but surprisingly, that’s not always the case. So the following quote from this post:
“If there’s an exception, it should be assumed that something is terribly wrong; otherwise, it wouldn’t be called an exception.”
isn’t true in all cases. In chapter 18 of Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming (page 402), Jeffrey Richter writes the following:
“Another common misconception is that an ‘exception’ identifies an ‘error’.”
“An exception is the violation of a programmatic interface’s implicit assumptions.”
He goes on to use a number of different examples where an thrown exception is not because of an error. Before reading Richter, I certainly believed that exceptions were errors–and implemented application logging on the basis of that belief. The exception that showed me this didn’t always apply was ThreadAbortException. This exception gets thrown if you call Response.Redirect(url). The redirect happens just fine, but an exception is still thrown. The reason? When that overload of Response.Redirect is called, execution of the page where it’s called is stopped immediately by default. This violates the assumption that a page will execute fully, but is not an error. Calling Response.Redirect(url,false) prevents ThreadAbortException from being thrown, but it also means you have to write your logic slightly differently.
The other place I’d differ with the original author (Billy McCafferty) is in his description of “swallow and forget”, which is:
} catch (Exception ex) {
AuditLogger.LogError(ex);
}
The fact that it’s logged means there’s somewhere to look to find out what exception was thrown. I would define “swallow and forget” this way:
}catch(Exception ex){
}
Of course, if you actually catch the generic exception, FxCop would flag that as a user violation. I’m sure McCafferty was using this as an example.
I’d been hunting around for awhile trying to find a tool to automatically convert some .resx files into Excel so the translation company we’re using for one of our applications would have something convenient to work with. It wasn’t until today that I found RESX2WORD. It’s actually 2 utilities: one executable to convert .resx files into Word documents, and another to do the reverse.
The resulting Word from the resx2word executable has a paragraph of instructions to the translator and automatically duplicates the lines that need translating.
I just started playing with Google Webmaster Tools yesterday. I was very interested to find out where this blog has been showing up in search results. According to the “top search queries” stats, the queries my site appeared most for were “ndbunit” and “failed mergers”. Considering that I only wrote one post about NDbUnit, and one about the Daimler-Chrysler split, I found that surprising.
Webmaster Tools includes a lot more statistics that look as if they’d be very informative. I’ll explore them later, as well as trying out the sitemap functionality.
The FBI awarded Lockheed-Martin (my former employer) the lead role in implementing Sentinel, a follow-up effort to the failed VCF project, in March 2006. Nearly two years later, it will be interesting to see what lessons (if any) the FBI learned.