Now, I’d have chalked this up to some weird Windows 7 bug but it’s not. I had the same problem with Win XP SP3.  The unifying thread was the fact that it happened after I pulled up an RDP connection and used it for a little while. I DID use the file system on the remote host so that could be something. But, like I said above, it doesn’t happen every time.

It’s almost like the RDP client is trying to allow DnD between my computer and the session (which doesn’t work) but then Windows gets all confused and blah. It screws up.

I tried closing out a bunch of apps, restarting the explorer process, messing with the Start Menu’s DnD setting but nothing fixed it. In the past (on WinXP) I’d have to reboot but I discovered something recently that seems to fix it. Just hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, lock the computer then unlock it and log in. Bam. Fixed.

No clue why it works but it does. It’s almost like the Windows session forgets that you’re the user (hell, it keeps allowing apps to toss windows in front of me all the time when I’m typing elsewhere which creates wonderful havoc like Accepting something I didn’t get a chance to read/confirm so Windows doesn’t seem to ever really know who the user is….maybe they should go see Tron). You can still double-click and perform most actions…you just can’t drag anything anywhere.

The lock/login trick is probably just resetting scope so Windows knows, “Okay, the user’s coming back into the Windows session, let me make sure everything’s where it’s supposed to be and accidentally turn DnD back on”.

Anyway, hopefully that’ll help the 1% of people out there who actually run into this problem on a regular basis.

kn

I was responding to a bug report for a situation where an internal page reference wasn’t working but only in IE8.

So, there was this anchor tag somewhere that looked like this:

<a name=”WorkedForYears”></a>

And somewhere else there was some JS that looked like this:

document.location.href = “#WorkedForYears”;

And, up until IE8 that JS code would move you down to the “WorkedForYears” tag’s position. Now, it seems, either Microsoft decided to get ahead of itself and support a standard that REQUIRES a value within the anchor tags (doutbful) or they did their usual and decided they needed it to work that way so it was easier to implement the Web engine.

Of course, in one fell swoop, they managed to invalidate a lot of code out there (countless pages with “top” links are now broken unless that “top” anchor actually surrounded content).

One the other hand, you could argue that the lack of a rule specifying the validity of an empty anchor tag was what Microsoft was looking at (trying to be all up with standards) or that they were trying to leapfrog everyone and be HTML 5-compliant. Doubtful.

While I admit I used to be an IE booster back in the heady days when it worked better (read: smoother) than Netscape and Firefox was merely gestating in the deep recesses of Mozilla, but that was almost a decade ago. Microsoft’s been playing catch up ever since and doing a terrible job of it. Worse, they insist on taking the Enterprise path and supporting it like any other office application. No wonder Firefox, Chrome, and even Apple’s own crap, Safari, continue to thrive and grow.

It’s about time Microsoft learned to turn on a dime (did they ever know how to?) and separate their beloved “integrated” web browser from their bloated yet broad reaching and slow cycle office products.

Oh, and please figure out a way to make FireBug work in IE. No, the Developer Bar thing you added, while nice, is a terrible development tool that breaks after a couple of tries. I know, you’re worried about hackers but then maybe you should consider NOT allowing anything to act/be seen as the user within your operating system environment…it’s called compartmentalization. And, yes, I’d rather download a tool than allow some douchebag to install an Active-X component that can nstall anywhere and do anything to my system. Maybe THAT’s why you’ve got security issues…

kn

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Seems like the economy’s hitting everyone now. GoG.com was a great site where you could dust off some old favorites for just a handful of dollars. They left this on their doorstep for everyone:

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We’re very grateful for all support we’ve received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we’ll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,

GOG.com Team

Seems like they might be hinting that they might be looking at a different way to pull this sort of thing off but something tells me it ain’t happening. Unless they find new life on Steam (which, by the way, just posted a bunch of SEGA Genesis games–I’m thinking they’re gonna start getting more of those) or some other digital delivery platform (Microsoft’s Games For Windows LIVE would be suicide unless Microsoft follows through on their plan to “revamp” it), you’ll have to dig around the Web or one of those retro gaming stores.

I bought a couple games from them but of course 20 year old PC games don’t always hold water…or at least they can be enough of an eye sore to make you not want to play them much. Then again, I lost a few hours after discovering this gem. Of course, the thing to consider: as time rolls on, that game you’re playing so much you’re wearing the CD down might one day show up in a retro game catalog.

And, no, Steam will not be around forever. It’s the reason I’ll sometimes pick up some good games I liked from the bargain bin and just stock up–depending on the price, I’ll sometimes buy a couple copies just in case.

Anyhow, to the peeps at GoG.com, good luck on the next phase and let’s hope you–or someone else–figures out a way to get that retro gaming business to work. Steam seems to be doing something, anyone else??

kn

Did a little hunting and found a part of the code where we’re taking data from a JSON Ajax call that’s a date (but passed as a string since the whole Microsoft-Ajax-JSON thing screws up dates with a UTC conversion). Thing is, the date isn’t always passed. Sometimes we’ll just get an empty string.

For all the other browsers out there (at least as far as we’ve heard), the following is true:

IF:

var date1 = new Date(“”);

var date2 = new Date();

THEN:

date1 == date2

According to the latest version of Safari (v5), this is not always true. Now, obviously, I need to clean up my code and check for an empty string, ignoring the whole check if it’s blank (which I’m doing now). But, really? Why, oh, why does Apple think it’s okay to do something different here when it’s worked as it has for years now?

Whatever the reason, it’s typical. I get so tired of all the fanboy stuff going on with Apple. It distracts from the various flaws all of their products have, however minor. It’s okay that the Delete button doesn’t work in most applications in Mac OS X. It’s okay that my iPod randomly pulls songs from a different playlist than the one I was listening to. It’s okay that my iPhone 3GS’s Bluetooth drops out 2-3 times when I drive around whereas my original iPhone rarely did it.

Anyhoo, in case you’re unlucky enough to have to support Safari (15% of our traffic!), be on the look out. You can’t pass a blank string into the Date object constructor in JS and expect to get today’s date. It’s possible it’s a weird timing issue (the one with the blank param is created first) and somehow these people are hitting a millisecond border or something thus causing the two objects to represent different values.

Then again, we haven’t heard of anyone on Windows, IE, FF, or Safari 4 having this issue. Could be non-reports but I think we’d have heard something by now if it were common enough as it seems to be now for Safari 5 people.

Looking forward to Safari no longer supporting DIV tags or something else because Steve Jobs ran into a site that had a stray div tag he didn’t like…

kn

kn

The experience was weird as usual when you schedule euthanasia. He’ll be missed especially since he’d been around for almost half my life.

I said goodbye to him, for now. I hope to see him again one day.

kn

Now, Virgin makes an announcement about their move away from Flash (and, not to be subjective, any possibility of using Microsoft’s Silverlight) ostensibly to broaden the availability of their Website. I’m not saying they’re doing this to purposely drop-kick Adobe’s Flash which has had a great run for some time now. But, with their expanding iPhone (and soon iPad) platform, Apple’s decision is potentially going to lead developers towards other solutions.

One does exist:  JavaScript and  CSS. But, one the biggest uses for Flash (and the main reason it’s gotten so mainstream) is support for video–also the most likely reason Apple won’t allow it on it’s mobile platform OS (beyond games). HTML5′s potential for rich media, namely video support.

The HTML5 standard is still a ways away (the target date is 2012). But, as with previous versions, nothing will stop Microsoft, Mozilla, and others from rolling preliminary support into the coming versions of their browsers. Of course, you can be sure Apple will take as long as possible to roll it into Safari…at least on the iPhone.

If the industry pushes this (to the demise of Adobe), Apple’s going to be in a corner. Will that matter? Likely not, knowing Mr. Jobs and his disdain for following the pack. But, there’s going to be a point, sometime in the future, when Jobs and his disciples will need to stop holding that last tiny hill against the non-Apple waves threatening to submerge it.

Still, here’s hoping the push towards HTML5 continues or even accelerates. Dealing with plug-in versions and of course yet another plug-in to check for and support. Don’t get me wrong, though, Flash is still where it’s going to be when it comes to animation and flashy movie sites. JS and CSS can only go so far (though they CAN go far). Will that hurt Adobe? Maybe but who cares? Their support (version 10 was a pain in the ass for people who offer Flash controls for file downloads) and their profiteering off Flash ($699 just to be able to work with it? Maybe you shouldn’t have given it away to the end users…) has built up their egos a bit too much. They were better when they were still fighting Macromedia (remember them? They made Flash) and Quark. They tried. Now, they rule.

kn

I was doing an Ajax call to an aspx page with a Web Method. Something like this:

/someplace/somefile.aspx/MyWebMethod

Using JSON and JQuery. Fine. Done it a ton of times throughout the site but this time it was in a specific folder that contained files used exclusively for Ajax calls (mostly XML).

The error I was getting was:

Exception information:
Exception type: ArgumentException
Exception message: Unknown web method DoLookup.
Parameter name: methodName

Unknown web method, huh? But, the file was there, the code was in there and it worked fine on Dev…what the deuce?

After trolling the net to find something (mostly found people forgetting “static” or making their WebMethods private), the idea that the file might be corrupt popped into my head.

I thought I was stupid…after all, the aspx file just contains a basic page reference to the code behind. All the real action was in the site dll. It’d be stupid if–

Then I saw it. The file size was ZERO. Nice. I checked the delivery folder (where I drop deployments onto the server). Also zero. Great.

Checked my dev publish folder where said deployments start their life after a publish from within Visual Studio. 1kb. Oooo…looks like something died in between.

So, I copied that sucker all over again and lo and behold, the friggin thing works!

I dunno, I guess you’ve got to ask yourself what you’d do if you were trying to figure out an error message for that…how’s about Page reference missing? Or Holy Shit, your aspx file has NO CONTENT.

Ugh…Microsoft…love/hate is becoming hate/hate…

I just saw this little bit on the WSJ about a large apartment complex in NY that has a year of money left to pay a huge debt that was used to finance its purchase not too long ago. Just this time around it’s less about bad loans and more about bad forecasts and judgment in general.

This quote from the NewsHour piece says it all: “the market was full of such optimism that rents would keep increasing and office buildings would stay fully leased.” Of course, because all markets go up all the time…

Granted the deal was done in early 2007 so everyone was on the same bandwagon seeing dollar signs and thinking the economy would keep going up. But, at the same time, you had others already looking at the overinflated residential market with worry. I can’t remember the guy but Jon Stewart interviewed someone who was quoted (there was a video so we’ve got proof!) as saying the market is going to tank. Meanwhile, the guy interviewing him scoffed at the idea. Great job.

The big problem with commercial real estate is the relative size of the transactions. There may be fewer buildings versus single-family homes out there but your typical home doesn’t sell for a hundred million dollars.

Time will tell of course but I’d hate to see another dip in the emotional economy–dictated by fears and whims–bring the current progress, however shaky, crashing down.

kn

The controller contains sensors to sense just about any movement and even squeezes and passes it to the console or computer. The demo on CrunchGear looks pretty cool (you can sort of skip the first half if you want).

Outside of being a largely direct competitor to the Wii controller (Microsoft? Sony? You listening? You’d better get in there quick!), I think the best parts of it are the fact that it’s smaller (it’s the size of a friggin golf ball!) and wireless (i.e. none of this bullshit IR that requires you to point a part of the controller at the screen all the time). It can really free things up when it comes to the more “active” gaming experience.

Of course, the downside is that–just like the Wii-mote–it will be limited a bit in terms of gaming experiences. Even in the demo, you can see that the movements in the real world tend to be jittery when translated to the computer (note the basketball as the guy’s talking flails around like a loose electron). That might be a calibration or sensitivity issue but it’s still a potential issue game devs will have to deal with.

And while the Wii has plenty of games that use the Wii-mote they aren’t always that good. Shooter games have the issue of accuracy (I can never seem to get the console to realize where it should think my controller is aimed at when I look down its length) and sword fighting requires big movements.

Still, if you checked out that video you’d see how well the controller worked for running and jumping (though I think there was a bit of a delay on the jump which can be annoying). It’ll be interesting to see who picks it up and how well it will penetrate. As the days of the PlayStation seem numbered in my mind (it’s not like it’s going to disappear…it’s just not the hot platform anymore and if my game library is a judge of it, I’ve got a 10:1 ratio of XBox360 games over PS3 games…for a reason), this is really Microsoft’s ball to play (pun intended).

If MS can license that sucker and figure out how to attach, include or incorporate the controller’s technology into its console bundles, it can finally take a chunk (a potentially huge chunk) out of Nintendo’s new-found success. Of course, if Nintendo can get it first, they can further solidify their place in the market but it won’t be quite as revolutionary. It would just be a downsizing of the controllers–and would make people look even funnier as they play with the controller in their pockets when someone walks in.

The tech has been around for a while–it was profiled almost a year ago here–so you’ve got to wonder if it’s just a funding thing or if it’s because they had trouble figuring out how to leverage the tech properly.

I guess we’ll see. I’m sure the main console players have heard about it by now. Time will tell if they pick up on it and grab it before it’s too late. If they don’t then Ball-It might have to go the route of the obscure controllers like the PS Eye, the Novint Falcon, and the NeuroSky which are all trying to carve out some sort of niche in a market that doesn’t require them for anything.

kn