Taming the Page Flash Beast in ASP.NET 2.0

My buddy Shaun Eutsey had his first ASP
Alliance
article published today:

CodeSnip:
Taming the Page Flash Beast in ASP.NET 2.0

Since SmartPageNavigation has gone to the wayside,
there has been no real, non-AJAX way of eliminating the flash when a postback
occurs. This code snippet will explain how to eliminate the page flash without
using AJAX.

Congrats Shaun!

Read the full article at http://aspalliance.com/1232_CodeSnip_Taming_the_Page_Flash_Beast_in_ASPNET_20.

 

The Death of my Netgear SC-101

When I first bought my SC-101, I loved it.  I had a pair of 200GB
drives, mirrored and partitioned into three 50 GB drives each.  This lift
50 GB for future expansion.  A couple years on, and after collecting the
photos for our flower shop (The Bloomery in
Butler, PA
), I started to realize some of the complaints others have had
with this device.  The file system doesn’t cache the file list, so each
time you open a folder, the entire file system has to be read.  As you add
more and more files, this time takes longer and longer.  After about 15,000
photos, this was taking a very long time.

Eventually, we ran out of room on the photo parition, and it was time to
expand it.  Should be simple enough using the management tools provided,
but this is where disaster struck.  The expansion failed, and the photo
archive was seemingly lost.

After picking through the help files, I found they include a command-line
tool which can be used to recover files from broken partitions.  I ran out
and bought a Western Digital USB hard drive, and ran the recovery tool,
transferring to the USB drive.  The recovery tool worked perfectly, and I
was able to recover all the files, but my confidence in the device was
shaken.

The USB drive is a good start, but doesn’t really get me where I need to
go.  I’ll detail some of my next steps in following blog
posts.

Triple X and “keeping children safe online”

So I catch this article the other day.  I a little terrified at
the idea of the government deciding on appropriate content.  Not that this
doesn’t sound good in theory, but in practice, they’ll screw it up royally.

Senators propose labels for adult Web sites

The requirements appear in legislation announced Thursday by two Senate
Democrats, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Max Baucus of Montana, that they say
will “clean up the Internet for children.”

The proposal, which the senators describe as a discussion draft, relies
on the idea of embedding a new tag–such as <L18>–in all Web pages that
the government deems unsuitable for minors. Then future Web browsers used by
minors could be configured to reject L18-labeled Web pages.

Another section of the Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007 would require
the owner of any Web site with adult content on it to say so when registering
the domain with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The
owner must also give ICANN the Web site’s Internet Protocol address and other
information.

(http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6175549.html)

Oh, if only there was a way to easily indicate an x-rated site. 
Something really easy to filter on, like maybe a top level domain.  A TLD
could be very easily filtered out, and you’d pretty much know what kind of site
you were headed to when you looked at the URL.  Something that industry
would fully support…

ICANN rejects .xxx domain registry

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has rejected a
controversial proposal to create a new .xxx domain suffix for adult Web sites.

(http://news.com.com/ICANN+rejects+.xxx+domain+registry/2100-1030_3-6172046.html)

Well, never mind.

Web Browsers for Treo 700w

The Treo 700w comes with Pocket IE.  Were it 1998, we’d be golden. 
It’ll get the job done for some simple sites, but there’s not a lot of
functionality there.  Right now, there are a couple of good ideas to watch,
but only one replacement browser.

Opera
for Windows Mobile
just had a new release, and is the only complete
replacement for Pocket IE at this time.  It’s not free, although there is a
30-day trial.  I tried an earlier version, and liked it.  I didn’t
take the plunge because the JavaScript and CSS support made things exciting when
sites weren’t 100% compliant.

One technology to watch is Minimo,
which is based on Mozilla, the same guts that Firefox uses.  It’s getting
better, but at version 0.2, it’ll be a while before it’s ready for prime
time.  I messed around with the 0.1 version, and it showed a lot of
promise.

The other one to watch is DeepFish
from Microsoft.  Except for input fields, the page is comverted into an
image which you can scroll around and zoom in.  This allows you to see
sites as they were intended, without weird CSS issues.