Uncategorized Archives - Page 8 of 12

Oct 03

Workaround for IIS 405 error when using dummy form controls for a prototype

Nerd, Uncategorized 5 Comments »

For anyone who uses a software lifecycle process like FLiP to make clickable prototypes and hash out web applications with their clients, I ran into an interesting and frustrating problem today that you might be interested in. I have been using FLiP and specifically Adalon to generate a wireframe and ultimately a clickable prototype of a monsterous extranet application I’m building for Arizona Behavioral Health Corporation. FLiP involves more work up front but it’s really paying dividends in terms of helping us to unearth requirements that we missed in the brainstorm and wireframe phases. I made a mock application that consisted of static HTML pages that will look exactly how the screens appear in the app itself, only all the form controls are dummy controls simply linked to other static pages and don’t actually send any dyamic data. I did this by just href’ing the buttons to the target result pages and it worked great in both IE and Firefox when browsing the files on my laptop’s filesystem (not on a webserver), however when I posted the mock to my production server to demo to the client, I failed to retest the prototype in both IE and FF and only checked FF. Since it had already worked in both on my laptop it seemed like a fair assumption that just checking in one was adequate on the webserver. Apparently IIS 6.0 has this great ummmm error checking feature (ahem, annoyance) that disallows sending form data to staic pages and instead throws the following error:

HTTP Error 405 – The HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed

The confusing thing is that it only throws this error for IE. I would think an error generated on the server-side would display regardless of the browser and I have no idea why Firefox works fine and IE doesn’t. If it were a real live application I would welcome this type of error since obviously it does no good to send form data to a static page. But for the purposes of my prototype this caused major pain today. It would be nice if there were a setting I could choose in IIS to the effect of “thanks for your concern IIS, but really, just serve my pages and don’t tell me how to write them” but alas, IIS insists on enforcing this error checking. I do know that this is the workaround that finally solved the problem: I had to manually go through each page that had a form on it and do two things:

Change all method=”post” tags to method=”get”
Specify the desired linked page under the form action tag as action=”blahBlahResults.htm”

Unfortunately I had arrived today at ABC to meet with the entire staff and get feedback on the prototype. After I went through it in FF with the CEO, he sent out a staff email and told everyone to check it out. Of course everyone else was on IE and the phone started ringing off the hook with people who couldn’t get in and it took me an hour battling this issue along with learning how to rollback revisions in the Subversion repository using the “reverse merge” technique. Once I wiped the egg off my face though, we made some great progress today and got a lot of good feedback from the actual people that will be using the app. I definitely see the advantage now of using a software lifecycle process like FLiP to uncover features and usability issues before ever writing a line of application code or modeling a database.

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Sep 14

lifehack: using your car alarm panic button to locate a lost vehicle

Lifehacks, Uncategorized 10 Comments »

I guess I just took this tactic for granted: you lose your car in the parking garage but you know you’re within 50yards horizontally or vertically where you parked- hit your panic button on your remote and follow the alarm sound. I thought everyone used this method when they lose their car but yesterday a frantic lady approached me in a parking garage. She was beside herself because she had lost her car, didn’t know what to do and wanted me to help her track it down. I took her remote, hit the button and pointed upwards. Sure enough she was off by one level and she thanked me profusely awestruck by such a simple, readily-available method to locate her car. It’s even more effective at night in big parking lots because the flashing lights allow you to immediately spot it.

As a little bonus tidbit- you can extend your range on your remote by holding it to your chin. The human body is about 70% water and becomes an enormous antenna for the radio signal when you do this. Try it next time when you’re approaching your car, find the range at which you’re just beyond where your remote will work and then try again holding it to your chin. I guarantee you get better range using the chin method. And, no, I’m not sure why it works with your chin and not by virtue of the fact you’re holding it with your hand… that’s a Mr. Wizard question right there.

Aug 31

CF_FlashIfYouCan custom tag available and Greg Rewis Breezo

Nerd, Uncategorized No Comments »

I’ve looked through a lot of flash detection scripts and have found none that allow you to do inline flash detection (ie. test the browser and display either a piece of flash or a substitute graphic on the same page without redirecting the user). Flash 8 will supposedly come bundled with scripts to do this but in the meantime I found some javascript code that did the trick. I’ve finally got around to cleaning it up and wrapping the whole thing in a simple custom tag I call FlashIfYouCan. If you want to see it in action you can check my company homepage here (note that it only plays on the first visit and you’ll have to use the replay button after that). Unfortunately I don’t remember where I got the original javascript from or who the author was (it looks like it might have been generated from Dreamweaver because it uses the “MM_” prefix). There were no copyright notices so hopefully it’s cool to pass it along. Big thanks to whoever it was the created the original source. This is the syntax for calling the custom tag:

It lets you specify the minimum version of Flash you require and will allow you to have an imagemap on the static graphic to emulate the flash controls. The only problem I can see with using this method w/ js is that in the unlikely event that the viewer has flash but has disabled javascript, this tag will display a placeholder graphic instead of the swf which the user COULD play. The likeliehood of this scenario seems pretty rare to me though and the value of not having to do the wacky redirect technique outweighs the downside of having a few people that will falsely fail the flash detection.

On another note, the Arizona CFUG had Greg Rewis from Macromedia at Monday’s meeting talking about Studio 8. We had about 75 people attend in person and another 50 via breeze. The archived meeting is here if you missed it- it was a three hour tour of the features in the new Studio. Flash 8 looks promising, they really improved the video codec and the enhancements for doing encoding from within Flash are nice. Honestly, I don’t get very excited about the alphachannels, live dropshadows via actionscript, and designer-centric enhancements. The most powerful addition to me seems like the CSS support in Dreamweaver. Supposedly MACR had a dedicated team working just to ensure that CSS renders correctly in all browsers and in Dreamweaver and the demo proved that they nailed it. I just hope that team got a fat Maui vacation at the end of that process because that sounds like gruelling work. Apparently MACR is en fuego sales-wise w/ Studio 8- they beat their stated goal within 4 days of accepting preorders. Way to go out w/ bang guys!

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Aug 28

MyFax equivalent for snail mail?

Ponderings, Uncategorized 7 Comments »

So my creosote bush in my front yard is out of control. Apparently it’s found some untapped source of groundwater and doubled in size enveloping my mailbox. The postman is not happy with this situation and seems to be in silent protest of my shrubbery encroachment because about a week ago he stopped delivering snail mail (no explanation of any kind for the cesation of mail delivery, just an empty mailbox for the past week). The funny thing is, what surprises me most about this incident is not the postman’s silent protest nor the failure to leave notice about the but… the fact it’s had exactly zero impact on my daily life- the only thing that’s really changed is that now I don’t have to stroll to the end of the driveway when I get home to clear out the coupons and creditcard offers to make room for tomorrow’s batch (and the junkmail I get now is still a fraction of what I received before doing the NewDream.org postcards). If it wasn’t for the fact that the new WIRED just came out, I wouldn’t be cutting back my shrub this morning. This little mishap w/ the bush actually IMPROVED the quality of life both for myself and my postman this past week.

So I got to thinking more about this situation. A few months ago I ditched my physical fax machine in favor of using MyFax.com for all fax transmissions. It’s great because in keeping with my desire to be entirely mobile as a consultant, I am now no longer leashed to a physical fax machine – I can go in over a web interface from anywhere and send, receive or call up an old fax. Having this kind of flexibility along with a digital timestamped archive of all fax correspondence is priceless to me – $13/mo is a no-brainer (not to mention I have one less communication device to check since I get faxes emailed as pdf to my gmail and simplicity is always a good thing). My question is this: "Does the equivalent of MyFax exist for snail mail" Please tell me somebody has developed a service where I can get a PO Box w/ Virtual SnailMail of Arizona and direct all my paper crap there. They scan it and give me an RSS feed of what’s clogging my inbox (now their physical inbox). I can setup intelligent SPAM filters (since it’s just another message to me at this point) and minimize the white noise I deal with daily. Does exist, and if not, ummm hello-potential-business-idea…

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Aug 23

Aha moment: selfish objects as a means for mitigating complexity in large systems

Nerd, Uncategorized 3 Comments »

I recently finished a book called “Object Technology: A Managers Guide” that my friend Max Porges recommended to me. In all it was a very nice high-level overview of what OO technology is and does. It certainly was not a nuts & bolts, syntax-level book (as the name probably confirms) but I still think it has value for programmers in that it reels in all the relevant concepts in a nice summary. I won’t summarize the content of the book as you can get that from amazon, but one example really gave me an “aha” moment and I wanted to cover that here.

I have always been awed by how UPS can successfully route millions of boxes each day to where they need to be. That feat alone is stunning but add ontop of that all the constraints they deal with limitations like physical volume of the various shipping vessles, the weight limitations on their airplanes, the fluctuating price of gasoline, right down to the changing road and weather conditions and blockages that affect their vehicles – how on earth do they seem to roll with the punches so effortlessly and choose optimal routes for each package? If you think about it, it’s an interesting challenge because there are infinite permutations of how to group the boxes and choose the routes and there may be multiple “right answers.” The amount of engineering that must be involved a system that accomodates this level of complexity and variance from that many unpredictable, real-world circumstances is incredible and I’ve had trouble conceiving of where I would even begin if I had to design such a system. That is until I read the above book… It’s actually a mind-blowingly simple concept made possible via OO design once you consider all the packages objects. Here is the key:

Each box is a greedy, self-serving object operating under freemarket conditions and abiding by a predetermined set of rules and priorities as far as tradeoffs with respect to price/speed/reliability. I think of it in terms of that one reality show that seems to be so popular (The Great Race?) -they give ten couples $100 and tell them each that they need to get themselves from starting point A to destination B in 12 hours and await instructions there. The couples have a ruleset they must abide by (both from the show’s producer and from society if you think about it – ie. carjacking should not be a viable option). They come up with the most effective strategy of getting from A to B given their resources at any given moment and this can change, they can even partner with other teams if the circumstances provide that such arrangement would be self-serving and mutually-beneficial. But it’s crucial that all decision-making capability is distributed to the level of the couples. If there were to be one central authority trying to call out the plan for best strategy for every couple at every given moment, first it wouldn’t be interesting but most importantly it would be a completely unmanageable mess.

According to the OO book above, UPS undoubtedly employs a similar strategy in how they route their packages. They make them into greedy, self-serving individuals trying to get to where they need to be as cheaply as possible and as quickly as possible. Let the packages figure out what route is best given the paramters and the conditions. If you expand this concept further, their planes are probably simultaneously calculating tradeoffs for optimal weight loading and space management given the destinations of the packages that have chosen them. And one level further, if UPS is like Southwest Airlines, there is some forethought and forecasting going into their purchase and allocation of fuel and they’ve probably done monte carlo simulations on the value of buying oil futures at any moment. Especiall w/ oil at $60/barrel and with a fleet of gas-guzzling machines as large as theirs, there is no doubt in my mind that they’ve invested considerable resources into building intelligence into the “selfish” fuel reserve object that determines the most effective way to buy and distribute their gas. Of course these are all just speculations on my part and I don’t actually even know anyone who works at UPS- I’m just a big fan of how smoothly their operation always seems to run given the complexity of what they juggle.

Read that book if you get a chance. There are some other examples in there which are equally as inspiring, that one just stood out for me as being the “aha” of the month.

Aug 22