Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

It’s amazing how when you step away from a project, you believe that everything is working fine. Months later, you go back to work on the project to find out that what you thought was working wasn’t even close. This just happened to me while I was working on my new Team Task Project Managenet site.

I have been going through the forums application and I noticed that posting replies was not working properly. When you attempted to post a reply, the system would instead post a new topic. Definitely not a desirable behavior and something that needed to be fixed immediately. The good news is that this is now fixed and I found some other issues as well.

The HTML used to build the page was rendering differently in Firefox than it was in Internet Explorer. It seems that when using the break tag (br), the two browsers handle them differently when placed alongside paragraph and table elements. The solution was to change my paragraph tags to div tags and now everything looks consistent.

I was also plagued by the Firefox not wanting to abide by inline CSS style attributes. Instead, I placed these styles within their own style element and created ID selectors to reference the style of these elements. It’s a shame that the site has been in a state of disrepair for so long. I hope to get this site running in prime form very shortly.

Whilst coming up with new business ideas, I often ask myself “What is the most useful tools I’ve found on the web?”. Often, my thoughts turn to things like the Google search engine, the Internet Movie Database or just a reference site such as ASP Nut which contains a quick reference along with some useful articles.

Over the years I’ve found that it’s these sites that tend to attract the most amount of traffic. I’ve become interested in generating more traffic since I’ve started a new campaign with AdSense to sell advertising on my sites.

When my company was originally founded, I used to have a very simple site which would allow a visitor to see his or her IP address as it appeared to the outside world. While this may seen basic to most people who are even somewhat technically inclined, it can be a real chore to the novice computer user. So we just built a single page site where visitors could view their IP on the home page of the site. This site quickly became one of our most popular sites. The irony was that the site only took a couple of hours to build.

So now I find myself in a similar position. I am looking for some useful sites that I can create which will add some real value to the Internet. In doing so, it should prove to be a popular site which receives a lot of visitors. I will be brainstorming for ideas over the next few days. Should you have any ideas you would like to contribute, feel free to add a comment here!

One thing that drives me nuts about blogs is people who put a bunch of advertising at the top of their page. There is no useful content on the top page of the site if you are using a small monitor. At work I use dual 15″ monitors so not a lot of content displays on the screen. But the display is still 1024×768 so you would think at least some content would show up.

As an example take a look at the Smart Capitalist Blog. You will noticed the top of the page just has a list of Google text ads. If you are using a 15″ monitor like mine, then you will see no content whatsoever. I think this use of advertising is a bit of overkill. If you are going to put advertising on the top of your page, at least use a template so I can see some useful content on my screen without scrolling.

I used to read one blog every day and leave comments all of the time. I don’t want to mention the blog here lest I give it anymore publicity. They switched to a syndicated blog network which added a few ads in the middle of the screen. This was perfectly fine with me … for a while. You see, eventually, they modified the layout of the site to put the advertisements right in your face (at the top of the screen). When they did that, I removed all of my one-way links that I had setup (out of courtesy) and stopped reading the blog altogether. This is an example of the backlash people face when they get too aggressive with their advertisements.

So my boss just came to me and told me we needed to speed up the reporting feature on one area of the website. He was trying to pull up a report consisting of 40 applications. There are about 10 columns of data for each application. Each column of the report is compiled dynamically by performing a sub-select in the database.

What this means is that for each statistic displayed, you have to run a complex query on a sizable database. When combining all the records and columns together this makes for a time consuming process. So how should we go about fixing this problem? The only solution that I could see is to pre-compile these statistics into a temporary table so that the sub-selects don’t have to be run each time a report is generated.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are just optimizing the software to deal with limitations in hardware performance? I could really go on-and-on about how cheap my company is. But it really wouldn’t do me any good… management has heard the arguments time-and-time again. I guess I had better get back to work – I have to modify our software so that we have the appearance of having fast software.

I have been trying to blog more about programming here. But this article from the AP Wire is just begging for attention. The article titled Exxon Mobil 2Q Profit Jumps 36 Percent
announces that the latest profit reports by Exxon Mobile amount to $10.35 billion. This is the second largest profit reported by a publicly traded company in the history of the United States.

This is outrageous. Americans are hemmed-in at every side. While the cost of living has skyrocketed, only wealthy corporate executives and “fat cat” politicians are receiving a raise. The Federal minimum wage has not been raised in 10 years while congressional salaries have increased 9 times during that same period. Write your representative, your governor and your senator. Let them know that we have a voice and it will be heard.

It’s hard to get any work done for my current employer. Our system is very complex and convoluted and doesn’t respond very fast when navigating our website. That’s one of the drawbacks of working for a smaller company. We don’t have the manpower nor the resources to build a responsive website.

A lot of it boils down to the large amount of data we are sorting through. We have thousands of users on our systems with gigabytes of data for our websites. Despite best programming and database practices, our relatively weak servers cannot keep up with client demands. It seems that we should improve our database server or put in extra effort to optimize our database layer.

The key to keeping your customers happy is to create a fast and responsive website. With a highly dynamic website, the best way to do that is to improve your database speed and use caching on your site to speed up your pages. We have managed to make general improvements in this regard, but more needs to be done if we are to be considered the major player in our field.

I just got back from a two-week vacation to Canada for my family reunion. I didn’t spend much time on the computer (intentionally). I really had a good time just enjoying the weather and the holiday season.

We spent a lot of time swimming in the pool and just relaxing. I definitely felt like I needed a break from work (although I did manage to do some work while on vacation.) Our kids really enjoyed the trip and they are already wanting to go back. We took them to a petting zoo, to a parade and to the Canada Day fireworks show.

I still may take another week’s vacation this year. It’s one of priveleges I’ve earned with my current employer. It may be hard to get some time off during the Christmas or Thanksgiving holiday, so I may just save the vacation time for next year. Make sure that you take your vacation time. There are little (if any) benefits to being a workaholic.

My computer at home was having problems recognizing my AGP video in an old system I was putting together. I think there was an IRQ conflect between the built-in video and the AGP video memory or something like that. Even though I disabled the onboard video in the BIOS, the system refused to recognize my video card.

It wasn’t like the video card didn’t work. I’d still get graphics but even when I tried to install the correct drivers for the card, the system didn’t recognize the device. I finally ended up giving up on the AGP port and just went with a PCI video card. It’s not AGP, but it still runs about 40x faster than the AGP card I had installed.

Next I’m going to have to re-install the sound card I used to have installed. After reverting back to the onboard sound card, the speakers are generating some really annoying noises that are definitely not normal. Once this is done, it should make the computer complete (well unless I install a bigger hard drive that is).

So I read this study guide from Microsft called “Developing Windows-based Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C#”. I thought that after studying this book thoroughly, I would be totally prepared for my Microsoft certification exam. Good thing that I looked into additional training material.

It turns out that this study guide amounts to not much more than a really large primer. In order to be prepared for the exam, you need to either take a training class or buy a full-fledged training application for windows. I chose the latter and am using the TestOut MCAD preparation kit. It contains tutorials that work just like the classroom.

So far, I’ve learned a ton of new information that wasn’t covered in the Microsoft test. The total training time for Microsoft Exam 070-316 is 50 hours. A lot of that is videos where an instructor walks you through the process of building an application and adding features to it. I would definitely recommend this product to others.

Actually, the primer book does server one good purpose. If you are totally new to .NET, it provides you with a foundation for the class library and object-oriented programming. This is one thing that the TestOut package doesn’t include. So you can see that different training materials can overlap and just using one source is usually not sufficient. The one exception to this rule is when you take a real class – usually the instructor knows exactly what you should study for and won’t leave you hanging.

Recently, I’ve been studying for my Microsoft Certification in order to update my skills. I’m working towards the MCAD (Microsoft Application Developer) certification. So for the past two months or so I’ve been studying for Microsoft C# – Windows-Based Applications (070-316). This will be the first step in reaching my certification goal.

I’ve had to delay the test date once already and may have to do so again. Judging from some of the practice exams that I’ve taken, a lot of the exam questions are not based on information presented in the Microsoft study guide. There are little idiosyncrosies and gotchas that you need to watch out for when taking the test. It would be impossible to memorize every aspect of the Microsoft .NET Framework, so my goal is to just focus on the most commonly-used features.

I’m really glad that I found out about this before I took the test and not after. I really can’t afford to pay for repeat tests and I prefer not to pay more than I should. The real question will be whether or not I can get this first test out of the way before I head out on vacation in two weeks. That is my goal since I don’t want to spend my whole vacation studying for this test.