The Netscape Navigator 9 browser is now available for download at: http://browser.netscape.com/downloads/. I didn’t think any further development work was being done on Netscape Navigator. Everyone uses Internet Explorer or Firefox now.
The most interesting new feature is that you can now use all of the Firefox 2.0 Extensions in Netscape. There are several Firefox Extensions that are useful for web development work and I was able to install all of them in Netscape.
I have deleted my blog post about Hanna Auto Mart because it was based on a misunderstanding. Please note that a Captcha has been added to the blog to prevent spam comments. If you are unable to leave a comment, you should email me.
Next month I may be blogging on the ASP.NET community site. Currently I keep a journal on the IT Toolbox web site which is dedicated to IT Professionals. They also have blogs and a wiki but the site is mostly about professional networking. I plan to attend a developer’s meeting in Second Life because I’ve heard that some people use it for distance learning, social networking, and other virtual community business
Yesterday I got the Terry Roth & Another Pretty Face: Live From The China Club DVD I ordered. Terry Roth is a very popular vlogger on YouTube where he is known as Zipster. I see him every night in the NutCheese Stickam room. Terry is more famous now for being a YouTube celebrity. Some people may argue that nobody on YouTube is a celebrity but I’ve gotten rid of my cable TV and these are the people that entertain me now. That makes them celebrities in my eyes.
Terry used to be a glam rock singer. The DVD is to commemorate a reunion gig for his old band. It includes a Rockumentary and live concert footage. It is pretty cool to have a DVD featuring a performer that you see every night chatting with all your friends. The early punk rock scene was inspired by glam rock and apparently Terry met Deborah Harry, The New York Dolls, and Iggy Pop when his band played CBGB and Max’s Kansas City.
You can met a lot of creative people on YouTube where everyone is learning how to edit digital video and how to entertain people. There have been a lot of collaborative videos made and I can see this becoming a thriving artistic community. Sometimes it is like a Fellini movie full of freaky people and bad melodrama. You could also compare the scene to Andy Warhol’s Factory days when he made underground art movies with a lot of weirdos. I expect YouTube to become a significant part of our cultural history.
As you can see, I have created a new WordPress theme using the web site design template I bought. The template was not intended to be used for WordPress so I had to reslice it in Photoshop to create a header and footer. I may not be very good at creating web site designs from scratch but I can certainly hack up anything I am given.
Today I added two pages to my Notes for CSS. I added a topic on CSS hacks for correcting browser bugs in their implementation of CSS and a topic on three column layouts. I had to edit the style sheet for this WordPress theme and I’m doing a lot of other work involving CSS so I needed more detailed information. I do have a VisiBone HTML Foldout for Syles but it is only good as a reference.
I am selling my old Visual Basic books on eBay. I am going to replace them with ASP.NET 2.0 books. VB6 is obsolete, replaced by VB.NET, and there are many books devoted to in depth coverage of ASP.NET 2.0. I have some Visual J++ books which I may as well throw away because nobody is ever going to buy them. I don’t like throwing books in the trash though.
I have begun the redesign of my web site using the template I bought. I wish I could upload it now but I still have to write a lot of content and do a lot more work on it. My new web site will emphasize my multimedia skills instead of my programming skills because I would rather do something creative than technical. However, I won’t completely eliminate programming content. I will have some pages on scripting After Effects, coding widgets, and developing mashup sites using web parts and RSS feeds.
Today I had to edit the multimedia header which was done in Macromedia Flash. I don’t know Flash that well but I can edit text and add links. I wasted some time trying to get Flash to find a few missing fonts which were actually provided with the template and properly installed. I eventually gave up on that and just changed the fonts that are used.
In addition to redesigning my web site in such a way that potential clients will be less likely to seek my services, I also plan to double my rates for any new clients. I have been overworked because I charge too little. The clients I do get tend to be on a tight budget and refuse to pay me for the work I do. Therefore it makes sense for me to charge a lot more to cut down on my work load and attract clients who can actually afford web development.
Amazon now allows you to upload video reviews of the books and products you buy from them. This has me really excited because I think it is an excellent way to get the attention of an author. It is just another example of how online video is increasingly important on the Internet. I’m pleased that I have developed my video editing skills sufficiently to take advantage of all the wonderful opportunities that now exist.
Today I discovered that my Yahoo Widget for Stickam has been approved and is now available for download from the Yahoo Widget Gallery. I did not receive any notice that it was approved. Now I just need to get my Vista Sidebar gadget for Stickam approved.
I have been invited to blog on the Microsoft web site for the ASP.NET community. I have been reading programmer blogs at work in order to pick up some tricks and keep up with changing technology. Microsoft provides this web site to encourage developer community. It is an interesting example of social networking for business. If Microsoft can create a vibrant community out of the developers that work with its frameset and platform then they will gain programmer allegiance. Programmers have always been very important to Microsoft. Web developers could just as easily use PHP and MySQL on Linux or Java and its massive framework.
However based on my experience with YouTube, I think Microsoft is going about it all wrong. I am not impressed by a collection of text blogs. Vlogging is far more effective at creating a sense of community than text blogging because you can see and hear the people you are communicating with. The sense of community is so strong at YouTube and Stickam that people actually talk about it! They have become very conscious of the fact that vlogging creates real community which they never found elsewhere on the Internet.
It is interesting that Microsoft did have an opportunity to steal the vlogging community from YouTube but they blew it. When Microsoft started their own video sharing site, Soapbox, many vloggers checked it out but ultimately rejected the site because it did not promote community. If Microsoft had designed Soapbox with better social networking features and with less emphasis on video sharing, it is possible that YouTube vloggers would have mobbed the site. However, what they could now do is integrate Soapbox into their developer communities to strengthen their market share in the IT industry.
Over the weekend I attended the North Coast Gathering for vloggers in Sandusky Ohio where I met the popular vloggers Zen Archer and Tara916. Fortunately I did not get lost during the 6 hour drive and I did not get pulled over for any traffic violations. I found it surprisingly easy to reach Cleveland OH because you only need to follow Interstate 80 West the entire way.
Unfortunately there were no other vloggers there except for an undergraduate student who was there to conduct interviews for his college paper. He interviewed Zen and Tara and then left. Since Zen and Tara organized the event and were already close friends, that really just left me as the only person from YouTube or Stickam to show up. This actually worked to my advantage because it made me the center of attention. Being a very quiet person, I pretty much need to be the only person there to be the center of attention.
The gathering took place at Camp Sandusky which is a campground with a lot of Amish cabins. Unfortunately it was cold that night and my blanket was too small to cover me so I was very uncomfortable. On Sunday the campground was completely deserted and all of the planned events were canceled because Tara was not feeling well. We were supposed to go to Cedar Point, a big amusement park and see a show or something. Zen wanted to carry on and fulfill his obligations but I don’t blame Tara for wanting to go home right away because it was just becoming a big waste of time. She was feeling faint and did not want to drive. I could have gone to Cedar Point by myself but I preferred to start home before it became dark. I think this was a good idea because I could have got lost driving in the dark.
The North Coast Gathering was not a huge success like the SouthTube gathering but I was thrilled to meet Zen and Tara because I frequently catch the Zen Live show on Stickam. I appreciate the intelligent conversations they encourage on their show. It is better than the mindless flirting that goes on in every other Stickam chat room. Zen Archer is not a Zen Master but he is wise and compassionate and there certainly aren’t many people who possess those qualities in our culture.
While reading my book on CSS today I came across the best explanation I’ve seen on how to structure your HTML code for the search engines. Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion about how to optimize HTML code for the search engines. Some people don’t realize that what you see in the browser is not what the search engines see. The search engines can only parse the HTML code in plain text as if they were blind. They do not render the page in the browser and apply human judgement to what they see. This is why an ugly web site may rank better than a beautifully designed web site. Other people seem to think there is only so much text the search engines will parse so you should place all your content at the top of the page. They want you to get rid of JavaScript, CSS, and meta tags in favor of as much text content as possible. Then there are those people who absolutely forbid Flash because they’ve heard that Flash is bad for SEO. Actually, Flash is only bad when the entire web site is designed in Flash and there is no text to be found. This does not mean that you should avoid any use of Flash.
But as the CSS book explains, it is semantically rich markup that is important. Intelligent markup of the content helps search engines better understand how they should weight and index web pages. In other words, it is not the text or code that is important. What is important for the search engine’s interpretation is how the code structures the text. For example, blocks of text that are not contained within the tag will not be seen as paragraphs. You may have a lot of text on your web page but without tags the search engines will not see a lot of paragraphs. Therefore you may only get credit for having a single paragraph even though you have line breaks to separate the text into paragraphs. It is quite possible that your entire text content will be overlooked by a parser if none of it is contained within tags!
Another example is how headers are defined. A header should be indicated using the <h1> tag. You can use font tags or CSS to scale text so it is header size but it will not be seen as a header by the search engines. Therefore you will not get any credit for having headers in your content. Unordered lists will not be seen if you use a bullet point character to indicate list items instead of the <li> tag.
Content is frequently poorly marked up because people copy and paste text from Word documents and other sources without looking at the HTML code. Word uses a lot of inline style bloat to format text exactly as it appears in a word processing document. Copying and pasting from other sources frequently carries over a lot of <div> and <span> tags which provide a meaningless structure to the document.
Therefore it is essential to understand HTML code. You must stop relying on a visual inspection of your web page and remember to view the source. You have to know how to replace content that is formatted by inline styles, <font> tags,
<div> and <span> tags with <h1> tags that are formatted by the style sheet. You also need to understand CSS so that you can reapply formatting to the proper tags for your content.
But don’t become a tag Nazi and forbid the use of <div> tags. These are often necessary to apply the CSS. A <div> tag should not be used to create visual paragraphs. In other words, this is a matter of making proper use of the tags according to how they were originally intended to mark up the content.
The bus trip to Washington DC for Saturday, September 29th has been canceled. There was not enough interest. So instead I plan on going to the North Coast Gathering for YouTube, Stickam, and LiveVideo vloggers which will be held on Sept. 29th and 30th in Sandusky Ohio. This event is being put on by Zen Archer, a popular vlogger on YouTube. He does not vlog much now and spends more time doing his Zen Live radio show on Stickam which I frequently participate in via text chat. If I do go to this gathering I won’t get any work done on Saturday and Sunday.
I did buy a design template to redo my web site with a multimedia emphasis. The design template I choose is for a film studio so I need to customize it extensively. I don’t have any problems customizing a web design but I’m not very good at creating one from scratch. I’m too busy to do the redesign now and if I am away over the weekend I won’t be able to get it done this week.
This blog post is going to wrap up a week of activity that didn’t give me time to blog. This week I worked on an important web part that creates a parent / child relationship between two database tables. I based it on the Northwinds sample database and used some code from my book on web parts but without its particular database access methods because that was not a standard approach. This gave me a lot of trouble because there is little sample code to be found on the Internet for this type of web part connection. I found this rather surprising because you can’t use web parts for any serious web application work without using them to interact with a database. I created one web part to show a list of departments and another web part to show the department’s employees based on the selected department.
Today I discovered YAML Yet Another Markup Language which I found in a PHP web application’s scripts (i.e. SPYC – Simple PHP YAML Class). I added some info on this to my notes even though I may never use it.
Next week I will be going to the National Book Festival in Washington DC. This means I won’t get any work done next Saturday.
I had to find a way to reference the div classes using JavaScript so I could set the background images via code. This proved to be tricky so I will share my code below. It has solved most of my problems in my help topics that illustrate CSS techniques:
var divTags = document.getElementsByTagName('div');
for(i = 0; i < divTags.length; i++)
{
if (divTags[i].className == "sidebox")
{
divTags[i].style.background = "url(sbbody-r.gif) no-repeat bottom right";
}
if (divTags[i].className == "boxhead")
{
divTags[i].style.background = "url(sbhead-r.gif) no-repeat top right";
}
if (divTags[i].className == "boxbody")
{
divTags[i].style.background = "url(sbbody-l.gif) no-repeat bottom left";
}
}
document.getElementsByTagName('h2')[0].style.background = "url(sbhead-l.gif) no-repeat top left";
Today I was converting some ASP code to ASP.NET when I ran into a problem with the eval statement which is not supported in the NET Framework. Fortunately, I found a clever solution on the Internet at http://odetocode.com/Articles/80.aspx. You can compile that C# code into a DLL and put it into the bin directory of your ASP.NET web site. Then your VB.NET code will have access to functions that perform the same purpose as eval:
OdeToCode.Utility.Evaluator.EvalToDouble(variable)
There is a free charting component for ASP.NET by the name of NPlot but it is poorly documented and I could not figure out how to create a simple bar chart. I contacted one of the developers and he sent me some code that pointed me in the right direction.
I have created some sample code in VB.NET and C# which I shall offer to the developers because their Wiki asks for someone to submit some examples of bar charts. I used the Northwind SQL Server sample database as the data source for my bar charts. The Northwind database is frequently used to demonstrate database concepts and anyone may download a copy. The only innovative aspect to my sample code is the rather complicated SQL query I use to get the data. First I get the distinct values for one of the columns and then I get a record count of another column based on the distinct value. This is a fairly difficult query to create but it is useful for getting data for charts of record counts by date.
I also created a NPlot bar chart that used a XML file as the data source. This was pretty difficult because I loaded the XML into a dataset and the columns wound up having a string data type when they needed to have the double data type. I had to create new columns with the correct data type and then use dataset expressions to calculate their values based on the existing columns. Dataset expressions were another NET Framework feature that I’d never heard of.
Yesterday I bought a new used car, a 1994 Pontiac Grand Prix SE. It is the same color, red, and mileage 157,000 as my last car so in that respect it is not much of an improvement. However it has air conditioning and power windows. The body is free from dents and it runs well. The paint was coming off the roof of my old car and it had trouble accelerating.
Today I got a lot of work done on two projects but I didn’t do anything new. I’m reading a book on CSS during my lunch breaks, Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design by Christopher Schmitt, etc. There are a few aspects of CSS I’d like to understand better like floats. And the book did direct me to a way to do drop down menus using nothing but CSS and a little JavaScript. That reminds me that I would like to redesign my web site. The current web site design is hard to update and I need to get rid of outdated content. I also want to change the focus from web development to video production as a way to encourage a different set of clients. I’ll keep my domain name but remove the Williamsport connection.
This blog post is going to be different from my usual blog posts because I will address the value of creativity. Programmers have to be creative and logical but they are usually given more credit for being logical than creative. Although web developers are often asked to make design decisions or tasked with creating a web site design, this is often better left to a professional web designer who is trained in commercial art or graphics design.
Unlike most programmers, I have some experience with Photoshop and other graphics programs. Currently I am doing a lot of creative things with After Effects which is like Photoshop for video. I’m also trying to learn Propellerhead’s Reason so I can create original synthesizer music for my videos and avoid copyright infringement. Video production requires a considerable range of creative skills to the point where it needs to be a collaborative effort.
However, I want to get a bit personal now and explain why I feel my creativity goes beyond this and is wasted in my profession. The artist I identify with the most is William Blake because he had a visionary imagination. When I read a biography of William Blake I could easily appreciate his perspective even though the biographer was merely respectful of Blake’s spirituality. Unfortunately, few people suspect just how powerful the imagination can be. The imagination can be genuinely visionary. By visionary I mean otherworldly and exalted which are the qualities I suspect Blake was thinking of when he spoke of “divine imagination” An artist’s vision can be incredibly subtle and profoundly sublime. It should be understood that an accurate representation of such vision is often beyond the artist’s skill and that the quality of an artist’s work is no measure of the quality of his vision. Vision can exceed everything you have ever known.
You might think that the visionary imagination would be greatly appreciated and much sought after. However, this is not the case. Blake was misunderstood in his lifetime and I don’t think he is given enough credit today. It is often noted that it was a shame Blake had to work as an engraver and waste his time making a living when he could have been creating great works of art. I agree that you should not want a visionary artist to scrape by as a commercial artist. However, it can not be said that Blake was truly impoverished because he did not possess an impoverished imagination. This is an important point to remember. While the visionary artist may suffer neglect, it is the public and posterity that is deprived of what he may have created. Blake clearly expressed the exalted nature of his imagination and how he felt it enriched his life. That he was not given an opportunity to share this fully is our tragedy and not his.
The only people who seem to appreciate Blake are people who experiment with psychedelics. Apparently these drugs may give you the necessary visionary experience and provide some insight. However, I’m not impressed by psychedelic artwork because it does not strive to express anything profound. It is not the kind of artwork I would expect an exalted imagination to attempt. Also psychedelic drug users tend to attribute too much to their drugs and show little interest in people with any kind of natural gift.
Although I’ve expressed a lot of praise for Blake, it should be understood that I don’t really care for his artwork which is far too antiquated for my taste. My vision is shaped by modern life which is curiously transformed and exalted in my imagination. In other words, I can recognize something in Blake beyond what is apparent in his work and I’m not fixated on his work.
It is difficult to identify genuinely visionary artists because you cannot base your assessment on their work which can only be a failed attempt to express the ineffable. Instead, you have to evaluate their interests and inclinations. A visionary artist is likely to be interested in Rimbaud, Blake, Jung, surrealism, and possibly shamanism. He may strike people as being a dreamer and very distant, a distracted soul is my favorite way of expressing this quality. The punk rocker Patty Smith seems to fit the profile and the photography of John Santerineross is clearly visionary.
An interesting question would be, is this ever reflected in my professional work? Certainly I have not created any applications that would be considered visionary. I think I occasionally have a brilliant idea and I sometimes get very enthused for technology because it can become inflated in my imagination but for the most part I cannot express my vision in my work. You would underestimate me if you disagree. I am ruled by disquieting muses.
I recently found an interesting social networking web site where you can list all the books you’ve read so you can connect with other people based on your reading habits. This is very appealing to me because I have read over 2000 books. I’ve also kept a list of all the books I’ve read. I maintain the list in a simple Access database with just three columns; book number (sequential number), book title, and book author(s). Unfortunately I do not record the ISBN number and the web site www.librarything.com only offers bulk import of ISBN numbers.
I found a web service isbndb.com/data-intro.html that allows you to look up the ISBN of a book based on its title. The web service provides an opportunity to automate the process of populating a new database column for the ISBN number.
I created a project in Visual Studio 2005 with C# as the programming language. The first thing I had to do was import the NET Framework classes that the project would need. These include the classes for XML, Diagnostics, IO, Threading, Network, and SQL Server client because I imported my Access database into SQL Server for this project. It is easier to deal with a SQL Server database when working with the NET Framework, at least most of my sample code is written for that.
Next I added a trace listener to the project’s application configuration file. Trace listeners were added in NET Framework 2.0 to make it easier to log debugging information. Using a trace listener, my application can log the response from the web service and the SQL statements used to update a record. This provides a written record of the program execution so I can see where a failure occurred and what data caused the problem. The web service places a limit on how many ISBN look ups you can perform in a day and my log file shows me where I was in the database updating when I reached my limit for the day.
The first thing my application does is establish a database connection to the SQL Server and run a query to get all the records for a data reader. Then it loops through the records and calls the web service with the book title in the web address. The web service is called using a web request object and gets an asynchronous callback. The response callback method reads the web service response string and creates an XML document because the response is string data in the form of XML. An XML node reader is then required to find the BookList node to see if the total_results is greater than 0. In other words, I must check to see if any books were found and do nothing if we come up empty. The ISBN number is actually an attribute of the BookData element so this project required some sophisticated knowledge of how to find data in a complex XML document. You should know the difference between elements (aka nodes) and attributes in XML and how to extract data from each.
Finally, my application updates the database record by adding the ISBN value to the new ISBN column. The SQL statement to do the update is logged in case some unexpected value causes an error. Logging your SQL statements is always a good idea and often the key to troubleshooting a problem. I also look at the entire XML response in case something in that causes the application to error. If there is an error and my application needs to pick up where it left off, I just change the query for all the records to get just the records where the book number is greater than the last successful update.
Unfortunately, the web service only allows approximately 500 queries a day and I’ve read almost 2500 books so this application must run for 5 days to complete the job. Also, looking up ISBN numbers by book title is not very accurate so I won’t be getting the exact copy of the book I read or own. I’m just using the first book result so it may not even be the right title in some cases.
Later on I may turn this into a web part so I can perform ISBN look ups as part of a web portal.
I plan to get a lot of work done over the Labor Day weekend. Last night I finished working through a lengthy chapter on Lighting in 3D with After Effects. That was the last chapter I needed to complete my study of the essential features of the program. However there is still a chapter on standard special effects I need to go through and then I’ll move on to other books.
Today I am backing up my data because I have a lot of work to preserve. It would be horrible to lose all that work and a real set back. I also plan to copy my projects, development web sites, and Visual Studio projects to my spare PC. A spare PC with plenty of disk space makes an excellent back up device. My wireless network makes it easy to share files between my computers located in different rooms.
My favorite vlogger has closed all her social networking site accounts without a good by or any explanation to her many friends and fans. That has deeply saddened me.
Next week I plan to buy a new car to replace my current vehicle which cannot be trusted for long trips. I won’t be buying a brand new car because I cannot afford it. I will be buying a used car because even the low-end used cars are better than my junk heap. My car does not even have air conditioning and that really sucks on long trips in the summer. Buying the car may lose me a day of work on my numerous projects.
Last week I completed a set of ASP.NET pages for typical database table management or CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete). I designed the pages using various tips I’ve picked up on how to make these operations convenient for the user. This includes popping up a confirmation window before allowing a record to be deleted, icons to visually indicate the operation to be performed, tooltips to identify the record title and provide a hint, data entry validation and confirmation messages. I still need to document my ASP.NET 1.1 version and then begin an ASP.NET 2.0 version.
I have booked a cabin on the YouCruise, a Carnival cruise for YouTube vloggers. The YouCruise was the idea of YouTube rant comic, Pipistrello. You can download a Word file with all the details at: YouCruise.doc. I frequently watch the WingsSpanRadio show put on by Pipistrello and RavensLaugh on Stickam. Pipistrello pimps the cruise during the show.
Apparently there have not been very many confirmed bookings. This event will probably not be as well attended as other YouTube gatherings, but it should be a lot more fun. Many vloggers cannot afford a cruise. I know several vloggers have been doing a lot of travelling to attend previous gatherings and it has drained their finances. I recently suggested that we have a gathering in Second Life which would not require any travel. I would prefer to meet with more vloggers but the small number of people may work to my advantage because I’ll be less likely to get lost in the crowd. All of these vloggers are major attention whores so they are likely to monopolize a get together.
Going on the YouCruise will mean that I will appear in many videos. Everyone will have their video cameras to make videos for YouTube. I hate being on camera and actually avoid it but this won’t be possible on the cruise.
I have applied for a United States Passport which is required for the shore excursion to Nassau, Bahamas.
I feel that I have become a much better programmer this year. I have learned a lot more about Visual Studio and now use all of its features. This includes using bookmarks to find my way back to lines of code, using macros to automate some tasks, using the debugging features, using templates to create new items, using snippets for code I frequently reuse, etc.
I have also learned better methods for debugging ASP.NET web applications. I can now use log4net to write debugging information in a text file. This makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot logic errors in the code behind files.
My documentation methods have also improved because I now have additional tools to do syntax highlighting and I have integrated my notes into the Microsoft Document Explorer. This is a fairly sophisticated method of creating documentation that few other developers use.
I have become a better database developer because I have learned the value of cascading deletes, column encryption, and transactions. I am also using more sophisticated types of joins.
I’ve recently begun to learn a lot more about web application security and have a better understanding of cookies, sessions, proxy servers, web bots, captchas, and HTTP methods. However, I still need to learn more about buffer overflows, cross site scripting, and SQL injection.
My next goal is to improve my use of CRUD in ASP.NET web applications. CRUD is an acronym for Create, Read, Update, and Delete which is the functionality you need to manage a database table. I’ve been working on too many projects that I did not build from scratch so I have not developed my own methods of implementing CRUD. This is now a high priority for me.
My other goal is to migrate a few web applications to ASP.NET 2.0 and get some practice using its new features. I want to abandon Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1 which now appear to have many shortcomings.
I added a topic to my notes on C# data structures. I think I had a class in college on data structures. We used Pascal for that class. I still have my Pascal book and Pascal compilers but there is not much point in using it because nobody uses Pascal for anything except teaching.
The .NET Framework provides built-in data structures within its System.Collections class. It includes the ArrayList, SortedList, HashTable, Stack, Queue, etc. I created some sample code for all of them in my notes. The only data structure I could not write code for is the binary tree. I found some C# classes for binary trees but it would not compile.
None
Mathematics for the Digital Age and Programming in Python by Maria Litvin and Gary Litvin
Statistics In Plain English by Timothy C. Urdan