Tin Isles

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2006/01/debugging-xmlserializer/

This is pretty much the reason why I started this blog. I regularly find an article to help with a particular coding problem I'm having. The really frustrating thing is having the problem (or a similar one) a second time and not being able to google up the article again!

Which is what happened last night when I recieved a "Input string was not in a correct format" when deserializing the response from a flickr method call. Something had changed in the XML I was receiving from flickr, which caused a problem when attempting to deserialize the XML into a class. Here is a handy article that explains what is exactly going on when you deserialize an object: Troubleshooting Common Problems with the XmlSerializer.

The last section 'Debugging Serialization Code' shows how you can grab the dynamically generated serialization classes, and step into them to find where an error is occurring.

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2006/01/google-video-highlights/

It took someone as smart as Google to realise the current multitude of video clients and codecs isn't good for the web. The Google video site uses Flash for video playback. No need to download Quicktime, Real, or the latest Windows Media. I can actually send someone a link to a streamed video reasonably confident they'll be able to play it!

Here's some highlights I've discovered from the most popular page:

1. Tom Kills Oprah
2. Shingo Mama No Oha!
3. Cup stacking world record
4. Smart car

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2006/01/quick-way-to-find-space-used-by-each-table-in-a-database/

Found this very handy:

sp_msforeachtable 'sp_spaceused "?"'

Produces a kind of ugly output (returns a table for each table). The original article includes a query to get all the results into one table: Quick way to find space used by each table in a database

Labels: mssql

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2006/01/reverse-ip-lookup/

Whois Source has a pretty cool feature: Reverse IP Lookup. Enter an IP or domain and find out how many other sites are sharing the same IP. Requires 'silver membership' to see all the matching sites, but the free membership will tell you the number of sites that match. Good way to check if your hosting company is being honest about their semi-dedicated hosting!

Turns out the cheap (and reasonably good) hosting that I'm using for a project of mine, has managed to squeeze 183 sites onto the one box (for the cheap hosting - NOT the semi-dedicated one)!

Labels: networking

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2006/01/electronic-paper-update/

Some more e-ink devices have appeared recently:

• Sony Reader, very a Librie-like E-Ink e-book handheld for the North American market. From SMH: Easy on the eye: new e-book is a page turner.
• Lexar JumpDrive Mercury - uses an e-ink display for the capacity meter. Pretty clever, because e-ink only needs power to change the display. That way it can constantly show you the capicity, without the need for an power within the device.
• Ambient 5 Day Weather Forecaster from ambient.

The last two both use a segmented display (like a calculator or the old Game & Watch) which isn't nearly exciting as a high-res display.

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2006/01/some-links/

Back to work tomorrow, 2 weeks of holidays are over. Some links I found funny / interesting over the holidays:

• blogjam's North Korea trip - I think I discovered this from flickr. After I read it, I had Korean for lunch...
• Courseware for .NET and C# - Know of anyone about to learn .net? I was pretty impressed with the online lessons here. The C# Tutorial looks like it'd be good for a developer to come up to speed on the language, and Application Development with C# and .NET covers the major APIs of the framework (plus more).
• Did you get a webcam for Christmas? Or did you get one for someone else, and open it to 'make sure it works'? I found the Webcam Fire flash demo pretty cool (so is the snowstorm).
• Lord of the Rings vs. The Matrix vs. Star Wars - really made me laugh.

Labels: links

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2006/01/listamatic-css-lists/

In a similar vein to the css Zen Garden comes Max Design's Listamatic. A collections of CSS styles that can be applied to simple lists for "radically different list options". There is also a browser support chart that can save you some hassle of testing in a stack of browsers.

I'm currently playing with the clagnut CSS tabs for a project of mine. More on that later. Possibly much later...

Update: I think I'm going to go with Super-Simple DHTML Tabs now.

Labels: css, html