Tuesday, May 22, 2007

how to: fix google reader when it reports new items that we cannot see


every once in a while (happened to me twice today) google reader (for different reasons) reports that we have new (unread) items, but we cannot see them (because they don't really exist), to fix this problem simply
- click "all items"
- click "mark all as read"

GPS mobile phone tracking system, track any cellphone, anywhere

wow... Found this via Aldoara, you thought cell phone tracking was only possible in the movies?... go check it out

Friday, May 18, 2007

.NET user control not loading under https

keywords: .net user control, activex, ocx, IE7, IE, https, http, secure

Justin and I just had a heck of a week fighting ActiveX controls developed using C# in .NET 2.0, so we will be blogging about some of the issues that we found and their solutions (so we can remember later), the first one is about ActiveX controls running under https.

We developed our control, everything was fine, one of our clients wanted to try that over a secure site, so we said no problem... until we tried, and tried, and tried, and nothing worked, the control would just not load.

the solution ended up being really stupid (as is usually the case); when you include your control, you usually do something like this:

<object id="someId" classid="SomeDll#Namespace.ClassName"></object>

that's the way you'll find it in all the examples around the web, and that will work just fine (once you get past all the other stuff that is required to make it work) under http, but when you move that to https, it will simply not work.

the solution?

when you create your control, you assign a guid to it

[Guid("CAE67AEA-F489-4e52-956B-CCC774F40A3A")]
[ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.None), ComSourceInterfaces(typeof(IControlEvents))] // --Expose events
[ComVisible(true)]
public partial class MyControl : UserControl...

something like that...
well, to make it work on https, you simply have to use that GUID, not the class name, so you would just write this on your html code

<object id="someId" classid="clsid:CAE67AEA-F489-4e52-956B-CCC774F40A3A"></object>

done, hope we saved you hours of headache

Thursday, May 17, 2007

(humor) I'm a programmer...


a little humor

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

one hour of timezone difference doesn't always mean one hour of time difference

this is one of those "why didn't I know that?" stupid little things...

this caught me off guard as I was traveling, I went to a city that I knew was under the next timezone, so I adjusted my cellphone, but the time didn't change... I got confused for a little bit, then started changing to other timezones just to realize this fact

after that I verified the same behavior on my PC, if you still don't believe it you can try right now, switch your pc to different timezones, and you'll see the time changing unexpectedly

e.g. the actual time is the same at
(GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada) and
(GMT-06:00) Central America

I know of at least one application where this actually causes a problem...

how to: easy way to see the methods and properties exposed in a TLB file

...just drag and drop the file in Visual Studio (at least in VS2005 it works), it will add it to the object browser and you can expand it to see it's methods and properties full definition

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

igoogle broken... again

a few days ago I saw that the google personalized pages (now called IGoogle) was broken, but mine was fine, so I laughed at all of those souls (just kidding), but today my igoogle is broken! aaarggh, nothing works, I can't minimize/close any gadgets, the gadgets are there but don't display anything, I can add new ones but they don't work

sigh...

fix your mom's computer for mother's day

I thought this would be all over the blogosphere by now, but is not, and I thought it was a good idea, this comes from Joel Spolsky

This Sunday is Mother's Day. Why not fix your mom's computer?

You know: remove the spyware and adware, install Firefox, and make it so that weird toolbar toast doesn't pop up every 15 seconds.

To make it easy, this Sunday we're making Fog Creek Copilot absolutely free.


for those of you who may not know, copilot is software that allows you to connect remotely to any computer, you don't have to worry about firewalls, etc, it just works

check it out