Proper Props from Planet Rock

The very first 12″ album I ever owned was Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.  It was a promo record that my dad got at a garage sale.  He bought it for me based on the title since I was (and pretty much still am) crazy about anything having to do with space.

I was really young, and that album really influenced my taste in music, and influenced a lot of the groups that I ended up liking later in life.  Now there’s a commercial on TV featuring Afrika and some hip-hop guy (dunno his name, too lazy to google it) arguing over who influenced who with Planet Rock, and blah blah…no mention whatsoever of Trans-Europe Express, the Kraftwerk song to which Planet Rock owes its melody riff.

So Afrika…I know it’s just a commercial, but puh-leeeeze…before anybody talks about credit or influences, please include a shout to Kraftwerk.  And not just because you got your ass sued last time, but because props are only proper.

CrystalDecisions.Web – could not load assembly, etc.

VS 2008 givin’ ya grief cuz it can’t find that nifty Crystal Reports viewer?  You need to install Crystal Reports Basic 2008!  You know…the one that is supposedly packaged with Visual Studio 2008?  The “embedded” one?  Yeah!  That one!

Here’s where I finally tracked down my copy:
https://smpdl.sap-ag.de/~sapidp/012002523100009351512008E/crbasic2008sp1.exe

That long string of numbers + E is probably a session number or something.  If it asks for an identity, just smile and nod and click OK.  Why they put free stuff under an https site is beyond me.  But then again, so is the fact that I have to go to some German website to download something that’s supposed to come with my IDE.

I really had to dig for this one.  Some folks might be lucky enough to have an installation file in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\CrystalReports10_5″, according to this thread on MSDN.

There’s also “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Crystal Reports\CRRedist\IA64″ but  I ain’t got one of them fancy 64 bit processor doodads.

Second Life: Creativity Sink?

For me, Second Life has become little more than a creativity sink.  I’ve wasted enough time dreaming up ideas, coding and designing products for so little financial gain.  Without going into specifics, I’ll just tell you that sales have hit rock-bottom for me and I don’t think it’s going to get better anytime soon.  I’m selling about 20% as much as I was this same time last year.

And it sucks, too, because I love making stuff in SL.  Love it.  As much as I bitch and complain about the lack of features, I really think it has potential.  So while I’m not going to devote as much idle brain cycles to crazy new product ideas, I’m not quite ready to pack up the shops yet.

There’s so much amazing art and architecture and coding going on in SL.  Unfortunately, there’s hardly anybody around to see it.  So I’m gonna go cry and stuff.    See ya.

Intellisense fix for Visual Studio 2008 ASP.Net pages

Somehow my settings got jacked up on VS 2008 and Intellisense didn’t work when viewing editing aspx pages in “source” mode (when you’re editing HTML and web form tags).  It coulda been a service pack install, it coulda been some of the paranoid junk that corporate America loads onto work computers nowdays, but regardless of the cause I was hosed.  I tried everything.

I finally found a post that led me to an answer while looking digging through the offical ASP.Net forums.  The proposed fix on the forum didn’t solve my particular issue (the topic was intellisense in XML files), but one poster mentioned switching the editor by right-clicking and selecting “Open with…”.  I remembered seeing that and tried out a couple of different editing modes.  It turns out that the “Web Form Editor” is the one to use.  I set that mother as my default and now I’m plugging away at aspx pages again.

Soooo…in VS 2008’s Solution Explorer, right-click on an aspx page you’d like to edit, then select “Open with…”.  Choose “Web Form Editor” and click the “Set As Default” button.  Done.

Give Up and Use Tables

When I think about how much time I’ve wasted during various projects just trying to get a nice, clean table-less CSS layout to work on multiple browsers, I get a little nauseous.  Tables…I love tables.  They’re so…tabular.  They make simple layouts really easy.  They work in all versions of Internet Explorer.  Honestly, if you’re going to overhaul your site so drastically as they demonstrate on A List Apart (*love* that site, btw), then your underlying page structure is going to change, too.

This is why I love the fact that Give Up And Use Tables exists.  It’s good to know I’m not the only out there who gets frustrated by hacking away at CSS only to revert to tables out of desperation.  I think those of us on the programmy side of web development (as opposed to the design side) have more trouble with CSS layouts.

Active Directory – pulling your hair out trying to get the username?

After much digging and trying to get the userPrincipalName and/or samAccountName properties when doing a search for users on my Active Directory thingy, I found an obscure post on an obscure site that mentioned the “cn” property being used as the actual username.  All of the other sites I’d seen said that “cn” was the user’s first name (or “christian name”).  I pulled the “cn” and viola, the username was right there.