Corn Boiler Fun!

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote a journal entry. This summer was just a blur with all the work and truthfully this will be my first chance to catch up. I'm actually going to clean my house for a change!

Business is good though. It's been an adventure getting the corn stoves to market and building a routine for placing these outdoor furnaces in their new homes as they are delivered. We're getting better at this and next year things should really come together.

EZBurn is a good business for me. I have the websites to maintain, http://www.ezburn.com, http://store.ezburn.com, and http://www.ezburn.net. And bugs to clean out of the software that monitors the stoves.

That software, called the EZBLogger, installs on our customer's computers. The stoves contain the monitors, which transmit serially to the computer in the house through the ground wires. This in turn sends the temperature monitoring data to our web site, where Dale can pull the reports to his cell phone. It's very cool.

Here's a video we took which shows one of the customized stoves EZBurn has installed. This one is filled from the top, more convenient for the dairy farmer who owns it.

Popfly - checking it out

I'm having FUN tonight - I heard about this mashup builder from the Visit Mix site. I'm not repeating anything verbatim here. But Popfly seems to be a tool for creating mashups. So they invited me after I asked, and I get to play with my photographs now. It's fun. With this Popfly site, I have been able to add some see my pictures in a slideshow and other arrangements. I added them to my web sites and then found out that by making that addition my visitors couldn't see the pictures until they installed silverlight. (UPDATE FLASH: FROM POPFLY: Mashups that you’d actually want to embed in your blog!
The Silverlight install page no longer hijacks control of the page ) I'm not against installing silverlight, just against not being able to see anything on the page until it's installed. Especially if my little picture is a very small percentage of the screen real estate.

I guess It took about 15 minutes max - to get the little blocks of code plugged up. I had the static page out that served the images and they gave me the iframe code to plug into the site. So, as soon as we can have these little guys on a page with no forced installation, I'll try putting them out again.

Making Rocks

Here's how to make a hollow rock.

Start with a wire frame in the shape of the rock you want to end up with. The first frame can have a wide mesh, say 8 inches.


Wrap the first frame with chicken wire mesh.

Stuff the wire frame with trash bags full of packing peanuts or something similar - this will support the concrete while it sets up.

Mix your concrete - you can use some peat moss in place of sand to lighten it up. Or mix it regularly. I used one concrete to four sands in my mix. Keep it thick, not a lot of water.

Press the concrete into the mesh. Your stuffing will keep it from falling through, and your wire will keep it from sliding down. Start on the bottom, and work your way up.



When the wire mesh frame is covered with concrete, cover the whole thing with a sheet of plastic. Smooth the plastic out with your hands, rubbing it some so that the fine concrete raises to the top.

LEAVE IT ALONE until tomorrow.

The next day, you pull off the plastic. The cement is soft enough at this stage that you can carve it if you need to do that to make the rock shape right. If it's fine, then just wet it down and cover it back up for a few days to let the concrete cure.

Painting your Rock it what makes it real
Start with the medium color. Use brownish gray, this is an easy color to get if you have spare paint laying around. Mix one part latex paint with three parts water. Put it into a hand sprayer like you would spray weeds with. (the kind with a pump) Pump it up, and start spitting that paint on your rock. Layers, Layers, Layers. Each time, change your color a bit. You may want gray then brown then beige then black then blue then..... If you look at a rock, you'll see how many colors are there. Put your beige on last - that will be the finishing touch.

When you're done, you have a hollow rock. But it's kind of heavy.

The EZBurn Web Store

In 1999, I had a web store called Mister Retail. It was the outlet for our Brick and Mortar business which dealt with a lot of used merchandise. Mister Retail went to Internet heaven in 2002 when we sold the business, but I still have the URL and it hosts my under development sites for QA and testing. I've been waiting for another opportunity to have my own eStore since Mister Retail bit the dust - and now I have it. It's the EZBurn Store and is a part of EZBurn Manufacturing, Inc.'s business offering. I'll be implementing QuickBooks Web Connector into this one so the accounting systems are happy, and so I've put it out at misterretail.com for that purpose.

It's quite a challenge for me, putting this store together. No problem with the QuickBooks integration, NO, the PROBLEM is that ALL my inventory is coming off of a notebook put together by our supplier. A Notebook Put Together By Our Supplier. I've tried to get electronic version of this material from them - more than once. With that answer a sound no, my only recourse at this stage is to manually enter each and every inventory item by hand.

So, this is not a problem for me at the moment, because as it happens I'm having a little problem getting my brand new Gateway computer to be repaired properly and it's on it's third trip to the repair shop. Since I don't have my development machine handy, I can't work on my regular stuff - I CAN spend endless hours filling up spreadsheets with part numbers and plumbing fitting measurements.

My garden is full of weeds, my house is full of dirt, my contract business is on hold, but I'm having a ball filling up spreadsheets and doing bulk imports. Let's see, where was I? Oh, yes, right here:
4E200 1/8" x close Brass Nipple  , 4E201 1/8" x 1-1/2" Brass Nipple, 4E202 1/8" x 2" Brass Nipple  

AJAX, PageRequestmanagerParserErrorException, and PreInit

I added some AJAX code to an input form I was working on, everything was cool and it worked great. Click on the data grid link button, fill in the input form, no screen flicker.

When I put it to the Test environment and started running Watir against the web app in preparation for an update in Production (no -we're not automated here for unit testing - we are working on it though!)

I got this error when the Watir script ran against my new admin form:

"Sys.WebForms.PageRequestmanagerParserErrorException: the message received from the server could not be parsed. Common causes for this error are when the response is modified by calls to Response.Write(), response filters, HttpModules, or servertrace is enabled."

I honestly thought no change had been made to the code, but a very large change was made which I didn't notice at first. The original tested code inherited from System.Web.UI.Page. That was a coding error because the entire application must use a base class - I plugged in the baseclass after testing and before putting it to the Test environment.

So, anyway, in the OnPreInit of the newly plugged in base class is code to set the expiration of the page. This is the code that was breaking my AJAX.

Response.Expires = 0;
Response.ExpiresAbsolute = DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(-1);
Response.AddHeader("pragma", "no-cache");
Response.AddHeader("cache-control", "private");
Response.CacheControl = "no-cache";

I added an override to OnPreInit to fix it. But that was an adventure to find.

So, my post for the week. Nothing going on here but LOTS OF PROGRAMMING ALL THE TIME. My Poor Garden!


//bcp 4/30/2007 if we make this inherit from BasePage class, we must override PreInit,
// because the AJAX doesn't work, Probably because
// the basepage sets the masterpage? heres the error: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestmanagerParserErrorException:
//the message received from the server could not be parsed. Common causes for this error
//are when the response is modified by calls to Response.Write(), response filters, HttpModules, or servertrace is enabled.

Spring!

Minnesota living, ahhh, what can I say? April 11th, temperatures below freezing - snowing all day. I tell you, it gets tiresome. I guess it doesn't matter, there's no time for the garden anyway. I did manage a small sketch the other day, Straw Hat in the Green Room. I needed a break so anyway, I like the picture and may find a web site to use it on. I got a break in my Internet Development Business this year, things are opening up for me finally. I had to bootstrap into the business, no doubt. So, on my web site I offer an ecommerce site setup with six pages for 499.00. I put the site into my managed hosting service, which allows the owners up to six page updates a year. It's working out - because I am leveraging all the so very many opensource projects out there to get these sites up quickly. This is a simple way for me to pay for my hosting bill - which I used to have to foot the bill on myself. Today I get to work in the Commerce Starter Kit, I'm finding it nearly perfect for my needs. Very minimal coding changes, just enough to support the different industry the site will be for.

The Shed

So, our motto on the house has been Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. We've just about finished construction on the house, finished so much in fact that we'll probably not finish completely until we remodel. It's not something I'm proud of, but I do know myself pretty well and the house is just so comfy. ( That's also not mentioning my two jobs I'm working at the moment which ties up every waking hour lately. Actually, this weekend (Easter) is my first weekend off in two and a half months. The kids are coming, can't wait. )

Anyway, back to the subject of this little blog, - I need to get the pictures out of our shed moving adventure. A nice neighbor of ours, about 4 miles away or so, wanted a new shed. We were told of it by a friend of ours, the gentleman was giving away his existing shed so that he could replace it with the new one. Now - the old shed is/was very sturdy, 40 ft. by 60 ft. Insulated, Electrified, on a foundation.

Long story short - we got the variance from our county, permits, hired a house mover, and had it moved to our property to replace the trailer which was what started all our construction in the first place. This shed will be used at our home very completely. Believe me.

I'll get the pics when I can, I happened to be working from home the day they moved it in - I've never seen anything like that big old shed being shoehorned into my yard. So Cool.


Now, how's that for recycling!

Lessons Learned: Themes

.NET. If you add a theme to a project, remember this: any .css files that are placed in that themed folder will be added into every page that uses the theme. And so if you place an invalid .css file into the folder, it may be a tricky thing to figure out.

I learned this a dumb way, when I was tasked with adding a pdf file to a website that was to be printed out from an excel spreadsheed, I first saved the excel spreadsheet as html, and used that customer's themed folder to work in. Bad Idea. The site mysteriously went haywire in the display. I checked versions against versions and found nothing wrong. I checked the same files again. Then when I looked at the source of the site I saw the Excel .css file was being linked in. So that was how I learned my lesson about Themed folders.

:-)

Tears of a Clown

Oh. What a title. I was going through some old documents the other day and came across this drawing. Something from another life, boy did that bring back memories. I used to have a goal for becoming a professional artist. But really I'm just not that talented. Took me a while to realize my folly, kind of reminds me of those poor singers who want to be the next American Idol.

HaHa. But life is good. Plenty to do these days and not enough time to do it in.
But anyway, hope things are going well with whoever may read this too. Happy Spring!

Contractor (I.T) Tools

Tools, I love my tools. When I'm working on the house, it's the table saw and miter saw that I use the most. When I'm working on a software project, it's my wiki.

I use a code base that is soon to be opensourced, I hope. -That part may be up to me, I need to finish getting it ready. It was originally written by Travis Giggy at Giggy Development in 1999. This source code base has evolved from .asp to ASP.NET and today I've got it settled in .Net 2.0. I'm just finishing the new data layer - it was originally in SQL Server. I'm changing that to be provider based so that whoever is using this code base can adjust the data management system to their preference.

I personally want to have SQL Server Everywhere baked into it, so I can put it where ever I want and not worry about what the local database system is. That limits multiple users, though, so there's always the option to plug in SQL Server Express, or bring out the big guns again for an enterprise version of this portal software.

This code base doesn't have a name, the program is a portal management system. Yep, there are a lot of them but this is the one I work in and can kick some butt with when I'm trying to get a project off the ground. It takes care of my menus, user profiles, logins. It has a system within it to pass a single sign on from one web app or web service to another so that my menus can contain links to wherever and the user will still be logged in when they get there. I like that part. I can be admin over the program, my users can be admins over their company or organizational structure. The user admins can make menus available to their users, or restrict the view.

So that's my main tool when I'm setting up a new client or when I'm adding a new service for my business. This thing has a wiki as one of it's linked in applications, another opensource tool that I added the authentication layer to and adjusted to my requirements. Then when I am at a new client, I can keep notes and easily find the information I need to be able to work most efficiently. I want the client to get their money's worth - and since I have a memory like a sieve the wiki is a lifesaver.

Thanks, Travis!

Live to work or work to live?