I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Simon, our in house designer, is a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) wiz.
I use CSS to apply basic style to a site but I hadn’t appreciated how you can totally separate content from very rich formatting. For example a nested dynamic menu can be displayed with the raw content being simple nested lists.
This means that down level browsers, text only browsers and mobile devices can normally view content from a very thin page, while a full browser gets all the fruit.
Love being shown new stuff.
ASP.Net security only works on files that pass through the ASP framework. Links to documents do not - exposing a security hole if you want to keep those documents available only to authenticated users.
Here’s some simple code to stream back a file from a secure directory via aspx.
Private Sub Page_Load …
Dim sFileName, sFilePath As String
Try
…
Response.AddHeader(”Content-Disposition”, “filename=” + sFileName)
Response.WriteFile(sFilePath)
Catch ex As Exception
Response.Write(ex.Message)
End Try
End Sub
The AddHeader function ensures the correct file name appears in the download.
One of the things I miss from the good ‘ol Access database days is CrossTab queries.
Here’s a great article on why CrossTabs should be done in the .Net data layer not at the database.
.NET CrossTabs: Transforming a Normalized DataReader into a Pivoted DataTable
Consider the result of a crosstab operation — the columns returned will vary depending on the data. There is pretty much no further manipulation you can do with that result in T-SQL; in the relational database world, the column names of our database objects should be constants and not continually changing as the data changes.
Though when SQL 2005 arrives there are a few more options …
- There is a CrossTab function
- You could put this logic in the database
The article has a great sample Pivot Function in C#. I translated to VB here.
While I was away they cancelled the Wellington V8 Street race.
From www.wellingtonstreetrace.co.nz …
No doubt the incriminations will go on about Council’s process, and the potential costs etc small groups can impose on others through the Resource Management Act. All we can say is that it is a sad day when the Council and Councillors don’t share the same enthusiasm and fortitude as the people of Wellington. It would have been great if they backed themselves to make this event happen.
Another win for the wowsers. Sure its noisy and non PC and causes some disruption for a few days, but events like this brings people in and creates opportunities. Any city needs that.
We would have had customers here from Australia and put events on around the weekend. A wasted opportunity for many Wellington Businesses.
We’re looking for a number of MS certified engineers who don’t mind spending time in Australia, the UK, USA and beyond.
Don’t be shy, it’s a fun ride.
I’ll be in Orlando for US TechEd. If anyone wants to catch up let me know.
Mauricio writes he’s a Telecom New Zealand customer again.
I did the same thing. Love my T3G card and use T-Mobile hotspots when overseas.
Great article on the issues of storing Write Once Read Many business events in an RDBMS.
Rethinking the relational database.
This is the exact issue we’ve faced with AfterMail, which is why we’ve developed a hybrid search engine that unifies relational searching and full text searching of WORM data. We’ve also developed a Centera interface to leverage EMC’s CAS strategy.
Back after a two week sprint around the globe. I’ve been offshore a lot in the past year and you can’t help but challenge your perspective.
With an increased focus in the US I’m starting to see the impact of NZ’s increasing ‘non-alignment’. Now I’m no fan of war and Iraq is just wrong but …
- The US is an important economy for us, especially in the hi-tech area
- Our increasingly arms-length relationship with the US is starting to cause grief for Kiwi’s working in the states. This has been compounded with the Thailand/Iraq immigration scandal. Kiwi’s are being packed up and sent home. It’s getting much harder to work there.
- The world is hardly without conflict and we’re really pissing off the Americans and Australians. Who are our allies?
- Close to home the Indo/Oz situation is getting pretty tense.
- We have a bit of a profile as a dream place to visit, and we punch above our weight sometimes, but as a country we’re insignificant.
While it’s easy in NZ to think we’re cool by not allowing nuclear ships here, it’s becoming clearer to me that this pure stance is not without cost. But, it would be political suicide for anyone to mention it. National has had a bit of a go.
I think it’s time to have a debate. It’s time to thrash out the issues around the nuclear ship stance so that everyone understands the cost. We may end up where we are but if this subject remains taboo we run the risk of being world orphans.
USA: Business travellers need broadband so we’ll provide high speed internet access for free. This will drive our core business.
UK and Singapore: We don’t understand the business traveller and some hotel IT supplier has sold us that we can make a fortune by providing high speed internet access at £15 per day (or $SNG29.50 per day).
So savvy Business Travellers look for hotels that offer Broadband at a free or reasonable cost and they loose their core high value customers.
My number 1 criteria for choosing a hotel is Broadband access.
Update: What Chris does in Hotels …
Even better than Frys in the US is the Singapore ITMall.
Today’s treats
- PCMCIA multi card reader, so I can read SD memory cards on my Vaio
- Skin for iMate Jam.
- Stylus pack for iMate Jam
- Motorola Bluetooth head set (#8 maybe now I think)
- Bluetooth 1.2 USB stick - for Bluetooth to Skype
I hate that hard plastic packaging. How do you open those things? You could loose a finger.
Just had three whirlwind days in London. The UK is such a great market. Smart people, huge, easy to get around.
Using Priceline I got a hotel at around £60 pounds in Whitehall where the room rate was £300+.
Our UK team is firing and expanding rapidly. We’ve working with excellent distributors there and have built out an active and successful channel. Version 3 of Aftermail, is being seen as the best mail server storage management available and the challenge now is to capitalise on our technical lead.
In Singapore now for a day before home for a couple of weeks.
grrrrrr
No Upgrade for iMate JAM Users to Windows Mobile 5.
I’ve been avoiding buying these babies for a while but had 3 hours to kill in Philadelphia and I couldn’t resist.
Bose noise cancelling headphones.
I brought a cheap Sony set a couple of years ago. These are the real deal. They are incredibly good and comfortable.
The A330 is a nice plane. Even down in cattle it’s pretty comfy. Not a lot of love on US Airways though. Looking forward to the AirNZ fleet upgrade that starts in June.
I happened to be in front of the tube for the MTV launch of the XBox 360.
It was a pretty lame show. Rappers seem to give everything street cred right now but it still seems wrong when a tattooed street hood and MS geek give each other a complicated street handshake and and say ‘wassup my brother’.
The online marketplace contained in the console looked for virtual commerce with real money.
The launch is a high stakes game. Good analysis of the MS MTV launch move on news.com.
XBox 360 is HiDef and will spur HiDef adoption. HiDef TV is awesome. Watched a RedSox Mariners baseball game last night. The quality is spectacular even on a 5 year old rear projection TV. We’d flick back to normal TV and “my eyes, my eyes. I can’t watch that.”
And in the US the various set top TV systems just work. HD recording, online guides etc. It’s really convenient and changes your TV experience by you controlling your TV time rather than the broadcasters. Significant.
Great time in Boston. Lot’s of business here. On to London.
It’s now really easy to stay connected in the US.
- Vodafone’s GPRS data roaming works seamlessly. So my iMate can ‘over the air activesync’ for easy access to email. On a plane you can do this until they close the door and start up again as soon as the wheels hit the ground.
- SMS is ubiquitous.
- T-Mobile hotspots are everywhere. NWTech our US reseller generously gave me access to their account and I can normally get a connection. Outlook RPC over HTTP works great and means that my phone is always up to date.
- Most hotels now offer free broadband.
- Skype makes it really easy to stay in touch.
- Most friends I might stay with have wifi over their DSL.
So its really easy to stay connected while on the move.
I’ve often heard of people taking about taking the red eye east.
I left LAX at 10:20pm and arrived in Boston 6:40am.
My eyes are definitely red.
The problem with travelling this way around the world is you keep loosing hours to sleep.
Was good to get back into SanFran and the Valley. Haven’t been here for a couple of years. You can almost smell the deal flow.
Spent a bit of time with Andy Lark yesterday. Andy said something that really got me thinking on NZ’s addiction to investment in housing.
Andy is a passionate supporter of New Zealand tech and also has a global perspective. He therefore sees clearly some of the macro economic factors that may discourage NZ business. A bite sized example that’s easy to understand is the following observation:
Having no capital gains tax in housing forces investment into the housing sector. But that is at the expense of investment into small businesses.
So while no capital gains tax in for housing investments at an individual level seems appealing, at the macro level it’s holding us back.
5 am and heading out to fly to SanFran for the day and then onto Boston overnight.
It’s going to be a long time between pillows.
Loved North of San Diego. Great lifestyle. We’ve got an excellent reseller here so hopefully I’ll be back often.
Now I use Skype and as MSN Messenger jumped the shark, I found an alternative to the cluttered neon flashing lights in the latest MSN Messenger version.
Use Windows Messenger when you have to communicate with non-Skypers. It’s simple and clean and already installed with XP.
Oh and for those that don’t know. MS gives you two IM clients. Windows Messenger that you have to have and MSN Messenger that has all the fruit. Yeah that makes sense.
blog