Test blog entry
3:00am, August 31st, 2006
Now a Flickr PRO
Yesterday I upgraded my Flickr A/C to PRO. Earlier I thought the limit in the basic free version is only the 20MB per month upload limit. But when I reached 200 photos I found out that my later photos started to vanish when I uploaded the new ones as there is a display limit of latest 200 photos. Unfortunately Flickr processes their on-line payment through Paypal and worst case is Sri Lanka is not in their list of countries to make an on-line payment. The alternate is to send payment via money order. I'm so much used to making on-line payments and really didn't want to go through all the pain of manual methods. Writing to the forums in Flickr didn't help my course though finally decided what I should do. There is a great option in Flickr where someone can buy a Flickr PRO A/C for another person. So I told my friend abroad to get me one. And he did ![:)[Smile]](http://www.nazly.net/smiles/icon_smile.gif)
. So that solved my problem in five minutes. Flickr being a Yahoo! company should consider about choosing payment method that everyone can use as I know there are lot of people who want to upgrade to PRO but finding it difficult because of this problem. Their application is by far the best for sharing photos over the web. Hopefully they will come up with some alternates for paying on-line by the time my A/C expires.
. So that solved my problem in five minutes. Flickr being a Yahoo! company should consider about choosing payment method that everyone can use as I know there are lot of people who want to upgrade to PRO but finding it difficult because of this problem. Their application is by far the best for sharing photos over the web. Hopefully they will come up with some alternates for paying on-line by the time my A/C expires.
10:53pm, August 30th, 2006
Best practices on Object Model Design
Last week I got some emails from colleagues regarding “C# Coding Standards”. Lance Hunt’s “C# Coding Standards for .NET” caught my eye and especially the part about Object Model Design.
- Always prefer delegation over inheritance.
- Avoid “Premature Generalization”. Create abstractions only when the intent is understood.
- Do the simplest thing that works, then refactor as time permits.
- Always make object-behavior transparent to API consumers.
- Always separate presentation layer from business logic.
- Always prefer interfaces over abstract classes.
- Try to append the design-pattern name to class names where appropriate.
- Make members virtual if they are designed and tested for extensibility.Consider using the sealed keyword to break the inheritance chain.
- Refactor! Refactor! Refactor!
8:17am, August 29th, 2006
WMI Event Watcher: Is it a dead duck?
Listeners are really needful if you plan to get some information uploaded to the database from a particular location once it has the source. Listeners listen to specified location and raise events when the source is ready (when the source file is uploaded). It is a common scenario in ETL type application. I used to have .net components in my most of ETL type applications with DTS (SQL 2000) for listing the location but made me to use WMI event watcher that is exists in SQL 2005 SSIS because it was so promising.
The task can be easily set up by setting its WMI options; WmiConnection and WqlQuerySource. In order to test this one, I set the connection as localhost (what else, though I have two machines at home, they are not connected) and wrote a simple “SELECT” WMI query that queries the temp folder. The event "WMIEventWatcherEventOccured” gets fired whenever a file is placed in the folder that is listened by the task. Everything is ok. I thought that this task saved my time. But unfortunately it is not. Now where are the event arguments? How can I capture them? Is it possible to capture them? How do I know what file has been placed?
I made a search for a solution, talked to the people who have used this, read articles but found nothing talk about this problem. I found some posts regarding this issue but all had remained unanswered.
So, what is the solution? One way is; enumerating files with “foreach loop container” inside the event handler. I have not tested this one yet but I think the problem could be sorted out. Other way is; using FileWacher that was designed by www.sqlis.com. It has some great features (like OnFileWatcherEvent and OnFileFoundEvent) and some disadvantageous (biggest problem is, once the event is fired, it stops listening).
Even though there are solutions out of the box, I may be continuing my research whenever I have free time. I look forward to publishing an exact way of using WMI event watcher.
8:38pm, August 28th, 2006
CAPTCHA on my blog
I have added the CAPTCHA on my blog when posting comments to avoid SPAM comments. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" which is used in Web based applications to only allow human beings to submit data. Though I was aware of CAPTCHA it was Christian Wenz's tutorial session on "Web Application Security Bootcamp" during the ApacheCon Asia 2006 that influenced me to add this feature on my blog. So when you are posting comments you just need to enter the verification code you see in the image.
11:31pm, August 24th, 2006
Driving Licence at last
Atlast I got my driving licence yesterday after one year since the day I passed the trial test. I was riding my motorbike with the temporary licence which I had to extend the validity period a couple of times coz its valid for only 6 months. I'm glad that I atleast got it by now otherwise I have to extend it again end of this month.
10:01pm, August 24th, 2006
Ubuntu Dapper - XserverFailover
I came home after work in the evening and found out that the X Server failed to start after booting my laptop. The log didn't give me that much of a clue though I tried to update my xorg.conf using this command
But that didn't help and was wondering what could have gone wrong. It was working well till I shut it down without any problems when I left work today evening. Suddenly I realised that I installed some updates via the Update Manager and it was the xserver-xorg update that I installed. Good thing I didn't update it on my desktop which also runs Ubuntu Dapper Drake. When I checked the Ubuntu Community blogs I found out that there is a problem with this update. And the best part is I found the solution for it and fixed it as well. If you haven't updated it please don't do it for now. If u have done already here are the links where I found the solution.
Latest Dapper xserver-xorg upgrade might break the xserver
This is how I fixed it since xserver-xorg-core_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4_i386.deb was not uploaded to the Ubuntu Servers.
HOWTO solve the problem
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
But that didn't help and was wondering what could have gone wrong. It was working well till I shut it down without any problems when I left work today evening. Suddenly I realised that I installed some updates via the Update Manager and it was the xserver-xorg update that I installed. Good thing I didn't update it on my desktop which also runs Ubuntu Dapper Drake. When I checked the Ubuntu Community blogs I found out that there is a problem with this update. And the best part is I found the solution for it and fixed it as well. If you haven't updated it please don't do it for now. If u have done already here are the links where I found the solution.
Latest Dapper xserver-xorg upgrade might break the xserver
This is how I fixed it since xserver-xorg-core_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4_i386.deb was not uploaded to the Ubuntu Servers.
HOWTO solve the problem
10:32am, August 22nd, 2006
Custom List
- ICloneable.com: Mahasen's Blog
- Ludmal's Blog
- Thushara's Blog: Speaks about project management
- MVP - Prasanna's Blog
- MVP - Merill's Blog
- MVP - Wela's Blog
- MVP - Jinath's Blog
- Lolitha's Blog: Dotnet Creep's Blog
- MVP - Manoj's Blog: Manoj Matchado's Online Journal
- Yeshan's Blog: Little Sri Lankan Fellow
- Asela's Blog
- Gogula's Blog: G-Space
8:55pm, August 21st, 2006