Channel 9 - Discussions by zhuo

Tech Off - Persistence Framework in .NET

zhuo — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:46:41 GMT

I've worked with SubSonic in a recent project and it's an absolute pleasure to work with. Zero configuration for ORM mapping and low learning curve.

The learning curve is about 1 day if you put your effort into it. If you need longer than 1 day either IM me or leave a comment in my blog and I will write you something that will get you through the learning curve quickly. Check it out at subsonicproject http://subsonicproject.com/

Sorry for digging up this old post but I thought it appropriate to leave a note in this post since other people has left good suggestions.

Tech Off - Queue - Processing In Order

zhuo — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:29:42 GMT

I am not sure if I've understood your question.

If you have a queue and presumably that queue is built up chronologically, why would record 1 ever get processed after record 4?

Tech Off - sending db diagrams to your customers (2005)

zhuo — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:13:06 GMT

I always take a screenshot and paste it in paint. Works reasonably well unless if you have a lot of tables.

Coffeehouse - what is significant about Mars?

zhuo — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:50:17 GMT

Massif wrote:

Cornelius Ellsonpeter wrote:

Sabot wrote: We are out growing the Earth.

The human race is expanding at such a rate we will run out of resources and space.

We are already eating into our natural habitats at an alarming rate. So the answer is we either expand outward or start placing limits such as stop breeding or eating or driving cars. Even if we start replacing all our power stations tomorrow with Nuclear Fusion (instead of fision) we are still knackered because the natural rate our population is increasing.

So the problem isn't bad now, but if we wait till they are it will be to late, starting now will allow us to have a solution just in time for when it does get bad. So we may not so the fruits of out labours in our own life times but thats ok.

Ever been to Montana? There's tons of room out there. Or North Dakota/South Dakota. Plus, there's shale oil, a glut of recyclable materials in some places, and we still have natural gas fields. I seem to remember reading about a gas field in the Pacific that could be bigger than anything we've ever seen, but if it isn't drilled right, it could release a crazy amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Interesting nugget: Iran has what is likely the world's largest natural gas field (according to Wikipedia). Yet they need nuclear energy...huh...

The "we're running out of space" argument never quite cut it with me. Are people suggesting continual mass exodus from earth? Do you genuinely think that the surplus population can leave the planet regularly, without having a severe impact on our resources.

No, I don't think leaving the planet will help with population problems as the poorest will be unable to leave, and will simply reproduce in situ, whereas the richest will leave and populate somewhere else.

Finding another planet won't help the population problem, unless an incredibly cheap superluminal transit method is discovered.

Alternatively, Condoms are pretty cheap and effective

We are not running out of space, just out of resources, clean air and we are killing the atmosphere which protects us, melting the icebergs that has kept sea levels at bay.

To be able to conlonize other planets means we will need to create better technologies for recycling air, water and materials and that we will be able to create a habitable artifical environment on a long term basis. All of which will benefit earth as well as any potential space colony.

Once we can create a satellite colony (like a bigger version of the space station) then mass exodus from earth may be possible with the invention of the space elevator (which is theoretically possible and although currently infeasible right now, but we will get there).

With regard to the population problem, i think it will cure itself. As developing economies become developed economies there will be less reliance on creating children as a way of investing for old age, this is already evident today in developed economies.

Coffeehouse - what is significant about Mars?

zhuo — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:36:01 GMT

Dr Herbie wrote:

zhuo wrote: Eventually we will have to move off Earth to find other inhabitable planets, I guess colonizing Mars is naturally the first step to take.

Why will we 'have' to move off Earth?

Herbie

We are running out of resources and more importantly the way we live is unsustainable even if it's just for the next 100 years!!!

Population growth may be slowing in most developed economy, but the overall population of the world is still rapidly growing and if everyone on earth wants to live the same lifestyle as the developed economies, earth simply cannot handle it.

Even if we assume unlimited resources on earth, one day the sun is going to run out of energy and we will need to move to another solar system anyway.

Not to mention climate change, which will probably destroy earth long before the sun runs out of energy.

Hope that's reason enough.

Coffeehouse - what is significant about Mars?

zhuo — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:56:38 GMT

I wouldn't be surprised if they've found water.

Back to your question about what's significant about Mars?

Eventually we will have to move off Earth to find other inhabitable planets, I guess colonizing Mars is naturally the first step to take.

Tech Off - ASP.NET ViewState (flawed architecture?)

zhuo — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:46:51 GMT

stevo_ wrote:

I wouldn't say its a 'flawed architecture' at all, it was designed with its purpose, not to rely on the session...

Yes and I agree with the idea of ViewState, only that in cases where you want to perform bulk editing and updating (as is in my case) the ViewState causes problems.

Which is why I am suggesting that ViewState should be encoded and decoded individually for each control, this way it gets rid of the problem with large ViewState while at the same time achieving what ViewState is useful for. Just an idea I guess.

Tech Off - ASP.NET ViewState (flawed architecture?)

zhuo — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:42:24 GMT

stevef100 wrote:

look at the SessionPageStatePersister for a way to keep viewstate server side that is inbuilt into asp.net 2.0. The client recieves a simple viewstate key which is used to lookup the viewstate server side

Thanks for that, I will look into it. This should be adequate for my purpose. It should also makes the user experience a lot more responsive.

Cheers,
James

Tech Off - ASP.NET ViewState (flawed architecture?)

zhuo — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:26:39 GMT

cheong wrote:

zhuo wrote:

I might be wrong, but what you've said about size limit could not possibly be true based on experience.

No. The size limit for the hidden input control is documented. And the most frequently seen exception report when I join this company is "Invalid Viewstate" exception on Mac_PPC clients running IE5 for Mac. (The exception is cause because the viewstate is trimmed by the browser hence become corrupted). It takes me a good week to disable disable viewstate of individual pages.

It could be because of our business nature (my company is running printing business), but you'd be surprise how many exception report I've seen because of this.(About 30% of our customer still uses iMac running Mac OS 9.X)

I know that for both IE6 and Firefox, my app works fine and I've checked with one particular scenario where the ViewState is as big as 206kB and all postbacks works fine in both browser.

It would still be nice to know if some of you out there has a solution to the ViewState problem.

Any comments welcome.

Tech Off - ASP.NET ViewState (flawed architecture?)

zhuo — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 07:55:05 GMT

cheong wrote:

I'll say that it's expected.

You know, the viewstate is stored in a hiddenText element which is 1024 byte in Mac and 4096 byte in other browsers of other systems. If you have too many controls and you don't selectively enable the viewstate for each item, you're destinated to burst the limit.

But is there anyway to tell ASP.NET to use Session instead to store "state" data?

I might be wrong, but what you've said about size limit could not possibly be true based on experience.

I agree that the problem i described is expected, but my point though is that ASP.NET probably should have implemented one hiddenText field per controls type of scheme, so the states of individual controls are loaded on the page independently, thus no issue with the problem described.

In anycase Ruby on Rails doesn't even need such a thing as ViewState in order to retain state, but that might be because they have a simplified representation of html elements thus not requiring to store extra info related the ASP.NET controls.

Tech Off - ASP.NET ViewState (flawed architecture?)

zhuo — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 03:39:01 GMT

I've encountered an ArgumentException in ASP.NET and it has been a question that sort of stuck in my head for a while now.

I know the likely cause of this ArguementException is a ViewState issue. I think ViewState is the cause because the ASP.NET page in error loads a datagrid of many editable elements, all of which require ViewState to retain states. In cases where many rows are loaded, it may take a while for the whole page (including the ViewState) to load. If the user is impatient and clicks on another button on the page, the page errors out because an incomplete ViewState has been posted back thus can't be decoded properly.

I can't really see anyway of fixing this other than to try to reduce the latency of the loading process or some how reduce the use of ViewState whilst still being able to retain state somehow.

Isn't this (ViewState) a major flaw with ASP.NET architecture? I.e if ViewState information had been associated with individual elements/controls on a web page instead of being put into a single chunk of Base64 string then the problem described above wouldn't really be a problem in majority of the cases. Ruby doesn't have this problem, maybe ASP.NET can learn from their implementation?

What do you guys think?

James

Coffeehouse - GUID's and javascript

zhuo — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 01:12:26 GMT

zhuo wrote:

Speaking of GUID, what do you all use to generate GUIDs?

just thought I should post here the answer to my own question.

the .net framework has System.Guid.NewGuid() function that can be used to generate GUID. if you were to generate GUID on the database side, simply use NEWID() and insert this into a column that is of type "uniqueidentifier".

for more:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-3513_11-5708732.html#

James

Coffeehouse - Windows XP crashing.

zhuo — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:06:18 GMT

Thanks very much guys. The windows' automatic restart option is already unchecked so I am guessing it's a hardware issue that is causing a restart, very annoying.

I will try Dr Watson as suggested, i haven't tweaked my PCs since years ago so I don't know what's out there, much appreciated if you guys could point me to more of the same sort that you think is good.

Cheers
James

Coffeehouse - Windows XP crashing.

zhuo — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:39:16 GMT

Hey guys,

My windows XP machine crashes every now and then, i.e. no blue screen or nothing, it just goes black, sometimes it reboots itself, other times it just goes black and i have to manually reboot.

Is there a log or something that I can check to see what problem it is? I suspect it's the video driver but I've updated that with no luck.

This has already corrupted my system once, lucky i had all my data in tact.

Any suggestions is much appreciated. Cheers

James

Coffeehouse - A Game You'll Never Make

zhuo — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:32:40 GMT

i like your "wilson" avartar icon

Coffeehouse - What colour is the bear

zhuo — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 02:38:04 GMT

Ping wrote:

A bear dropped into a hole from v=0 m/s at start, 2 seconds later, it landed on the bottom, the hole is 20 m, if the air resistant does not count, what colour is the bear? (useful formula S=Ut+½at²)

probably black, since the hole is 20m deep.

Coffeehouse - Wireframing Tools

zhuo — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 02:13:26 GMT

Minh wrote:

Assuming you mean "prototyping" -- why not just use the Visual C# / VB ... themselves. It's pretty quick to put together mock screens w/ them.

It's for preparing functional specifications, so not quite prototyping, in fact it's more for functional proposals that I prepare to try to get contracts signed. I guess I can put in the extra effort of making the wireframes using Visual Studio but no body's going to pay me for it so I try to keep this stage as short as possible.

Coffeehouse - Wireframing Tools

zhuo — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:52:05 GMT

Just wondering if anyone know of any good wireframing tools? Visio, word, PPT are just terrible for wireframing. So time consuming and hard to change.

Any suggestion is much appreciated.

Coffeehouse - The Final Hours of MSN Search Engine

zhuo — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 12:51:12 GMT

live search works great, it just sounds stupid.

Windows Live Search, Windows Live Local, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live lalala. What's next? Who came up with all these? ???????????

*REMOVED - spoke too soon

Coffeehouse - Travelling through the US

zhuo — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 12:13:56 GMT

Nice,

Me and a friend of mine is planning exactly the same trip for early 2007, Feb to Mar. I wonder if a lot of people's doing this, what about you Americans, do you guys travel across the country on a 2 month road trip?

Would be cool to hear some good suggestions from you guys.

Coffeehouse - scripts - how/what/where/why

zhuo — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 12:07:52 GMT

Hello,

There are many scripting languages, each could be used for many different purpose.

Some of the more common scripting languages include
o javascript
o vbscript
o php

In general any of these scripting language could do pretty much what the others could do, but people generally use these scriptiong languages in the following ways:

javascript is most commonly found embedded in web pages, so if you know a bit of html and want to learn how to do client side scripting, then this is the thing to learn. we also call this DHTML.

vbscript could also do what javascript do but this will onlly work on IE browsers. vbscript is also commonly used for server side scripting (ASP). it is also the most common scripting language used for windows scripting.

You may want to start with http://www.w3schools.com/ which allows you to try lot of different scripting languages with samples guiding you. That's where I picked up HTML and javascript ages ago.

Cheers
James

Coffeehouse - How Long Is Your...

zhuo — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 11:55:30 GMT

jsampsonPC wrote:

I remember weird things, like lengthy quotes from movies.

That's so cool, i can never remember anything to its exactness. To show how bad, i generally can't remember movie names, nor names of actors.

But for some weird reason, I can walk through an office of 50 people, get introduced to them once and I can recall all of their names for an extended period of time.

For things like concepts, algorithm and knowledge, i generally remember these because I am interested in them and I generally understand them as well.

And like the rest of you, I too am experiencing information overload, so i generally ignore a lot of things around me.

JAMES

Tech Off - DNS service software for windows machine?

zhuo — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 09:20:29 GMT

Does anyone know of any DNS service software for windows? I know the windows server product comes with DNS service and it's pretty good but I want free DNS service software to run on windows XP.

If you have had good experience with any free DNS service please reply in as much detail as you could. The software should preferrably have a nice user interface for configuration purpose and it would be a plus if there's a API.

Cheers,

James

Tech Off - Re-learning Math

zhuo — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 08:32:53 GMT

The answer to your question is probably that there's too much to learn. I reckon you will get more out of your time if you just try to pick up what you need to know for the specific application.

This also brings up the sad fact that a few years from university and I've forgotten almost all the maths which I used to be pretty nimble with. The fact is line of business applications don't need any maths, well almost none.

Coffeehouse - Vista late in Europe?

zhuo — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 05:50:50 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

erik_ wrote:

W3bbo wrote:
Actually, there is. Microsoft has strict rules they make OEMs abide by. Which includes not altering the OOB configuration (at least that's as much as I've heard)

Why is there a FAQ item about installing additional 3rd party applications while preinstalling on oem.microsoft.com then? To show you what you aren't allowed to do?

It wasn't that, it was about pre-installing Windows and changing things like the default browser, media player, and visual style.

Speaking of which, imagine if Microsoft ships windows without a browser, LOL. Try downloading Firefox without IE.