Read MoreThe Ministry of Economic Development has made public the submissions received in response to the ACTA.
You find the submissions in HTML here or PDF here.
Which groups submitted comments?
NZFACT: New Zealand Federation Against Copyright Theft, Distilled Spirits Association of New Zealand (DSANZ), New Zealand Retailers Association, InternetNZ, Google Australia Pty Ltd, New Zealand Institute of Patent Attorneys Inc., Trade Me, Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Association of New Zealand Inc. (CTFA), Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ), and New Zealand Open Source Society.
Worth a read.
Read MoreSubSonic Bug Workaround
SubSonic is an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) tool to which I converted a few months back from Strongly-Typed Datasets in Visual Studio. SubSonic is a free open source program. It’s brilliant because you point it at your database (supplying the database connection string) and it generates the code that maps your tables into classes. It automatically generates your Data Access Layer for you. Anytime you need to alter a table structure, you merely re-run SubSonic, et voila, your classes instantly reflect the change. You don’t need to muck around with editing 4 stored procedures like I used to do with Strongly Typed Datasets.
As long as the User ID you specified in your connection string has SELECT rights on your table(s) and/or EXEC rights on your Stored Procedures, then SubSonic will pick that up and make only those objects available. If you want your application to do INSERTS, you also need to grant that right to your User, and SubSonic will auto-generate a method for Insert.
However, I’ve recently discovered a bug, and subsequently the workaround for it.
Problem Description
You can call a stored procedure with the following code:
<quote>
Public Function GetOutstandingRequests() As DAL.RequestCollection
Dim sp1 As StoredProcedure
Dim ds1 As DataSet
Dim dt1 As DataTable
Dim retVal As New DAL.RequestCollection
sp1 = DAL.SPs.SelectRequestsByFilter()
ds1 = sp1.GetDataSet()
dt1 = ds1.Tables(0)
retVal.Load(dt1)
Return retVal
End Function
</quote>
This will result in an error: Object does not exist on the line that attempts to GetDataSet().
Explanation
The bug is that SubSonic cannot instantiate a stored procedure that doesn’t have any parameters.
Workaround
The workaround is to alter your Stored Procedure to always accept at least one parameter and use them to instantiate the object, thus:
<quote>
Public Function GetOutstandingRequests( _
ByVal createdBy As String, _
ByVal responseTypeID As Integer?, _
ByVal seekerID As Integer?) As DAL.RequestCollection
Dim sp1 As StoredProcedure
Dim ds1 As DataSet
Dim dt1 As DataTable
Dim retVal As New DAL.RequestCollection
sp1 = DAL.SPs.SelectRequestsByFilter(createdBy, responseTypeID, seekerID)
ds1 = sp1.GetDataSet()
dt1 = ds1.Tables(0)
retVal.Load(dt1)
Return retVal
End Function
</quote>
Status
If anyone is aware of whether this issue will be fixed in future versions of SubSonic, I’d be grateful to be kept informed (I’m using version 2.1 [Final] at present). Please leave a comment or send me a tweet.
Profile Storage Space Issues
Both Martin and I are experiencing blow-outs of our profile space (currently around 120MB), mainly due to Visual Studio 2008. We can handle it with the handy little Registry snippet which grants us unlimited space. However, logging in and out on the network is taking longer each time.
I wonder if now is a good time to think about and/or investigate the option of running Virtual Machines and moving Visual Studio onto there. I personally don’t have the time to look into this. What are other people’s opinions?
Norman replied:
<quote>
My profile is sitting on 45Mb and I am running VS2008 (VS2005 and VS2003 as well). I am wondering if it is SP1 for VS2008 that is storing a lot more in the d:\Documents and Settings...?
I am a bit wary of the extra complexity of using VMs and think a better option maybe some further tweaks so that VS2008 stores its settings in a different location than d:\Documents and Settings\... . I think most of it is set in the Registry as the options below only cover a small subset of where it stores its stuff
Totally agree we need to do something. Recently I had to test Brochure Template on an EDS Machine in Auckland logging in using my T number. As you can imagine very slow and could not log out (no rights to tweak the Registry).
</quote>
Martin replied:
<quote>
Where is the official source to state the current size of your profile? I was looking at System properties.. Advanced.. User Profiles.. and my roaming profile was 585MB! Is this the same profile EDS tracks? I've culled mine back to 100MB now..
I've cut that back dramatically by deleting the ReflectedSchemas and ReflectedTypeLibs that VS likes to generate all the time.
But it is only a temporary fix, though I plan to write a script to run when I want to log off or shut down that will automatically delete them every time.
Those project and template locations tend to not have much in them unless you are creating your own user templates.
The best solution would be to exclude certain folders from our profile. The only thing stopping that from happening is getting EDS to set it up for us?
</quote>
Summary
I am reluctant to adopt Martin’s idea, as I believe those Reflected Schemas are what IntelliSense generate each time you invoke them, so I don’t want to constantly have to be waiting for IntelliSense every day. Does anybody in the community have any (useful) suggestions?
Read MoreSo a couple of night’s ago I was at the NZ Wireless and Broadband’s Forum’s Wireless Wednesday. I was there to pre announce a Location Based Services application development competition. If you have read my Bio, you will be aware that I was a founding member of this organisation in New Zealand and the first elected President. I still remember the day we were working on a name for our monthly get togethers and I came up with Wireless Wednesday. Well the name has stuck and Steve Simms, the current president said that there have now been around 163 of them!
I haven’t been to the Forum for a while because it wasn’t relevant to my current activities, but with this upcoming competition and a new focus on bringing LBS into the real world, things are going to change.
What was really cool for me is that it is around 10 years since the Wireless Data Forum (as we were called then) launched it’s first developers competition for wireless and mobile applications. Even more so was the coincidence that this week’s excellent presentation was made by Ghanum Taylor of The Hyperfactory. The Hyperfactory won that first competition all those years ago. At the time they were an enthusiastic family group, Derek and Geoffrey Handley and a few other people who were equally passionate about the potential of mobile cellular technology.
These guys never wavered from their passion and commitment and I think it is worth a mention that passion imho is the single most important factor in their rise to success. They worked tirelessly and dragged the advertising and direct marketing industries, kicking and screaming into the future.
Just like many other technologies I enjoy, the market has slipped into the mass adopter phase without anyone noticing. If you saw a txt to win coupon on a product, you would simply txt the coupon number to a short code today and think nothing of it. LBS marketing is coming big time.
I’m not going to talk about their campaigns, because they can do it far better than I. Just go to their website and it is full of video’s and campaign success stories.
I didn’t start this blog as a kudos story for The Hyperfactory, but I do think that they can take some credit for helping to change the face of tomorrow’s advertising world. Check out a few of these names and I’ll wager (their first application concept was designed to allow people to bet against each other at sporting events via their mobiles) that you have seen or participated in one of their mobile campaigns:
- Coca Cola
- Nivea
- Adidas
- Vodafone
- Motorola
- Tylenol
- Kellogs
- Jim Beam, and the list goes on.
I’m not big on advertising. Most of the time I don’t pay attention to TVC’s at all, with rare exceptions like the Vodafone commercial where the guy folds up his life and puts it in his pocket (I really like the song and the dobro guitar) or the new Ford adverstisement where all the instruments in the orchestra are made of car parts.
In general, I hardly ever read print ads. I read a book during the TV commercials and these days rarely listen to broadcast radio as I am educating and updating myself in podcasts. Advertising is creeping surrepticiously into podcasts, in fact there are companies specialising in ads for podcats, but they tend to be well targetted which means that I am probably interested in the products, or I can fast forward my iPod anyway.
Anyway, watch this space for news about an exciting new competition in New Zealand for LBS Applications.
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I have spent this morning re-installing Mythbuntu onto a partition of my USB drive so this is just a further update on the situation for those who were interested.
Last time I put Mythbuntu onto the entire drive, rendering it useless (Windows can't see a ext3 partition) for data transfer etc. So I had to take it off, and this time I only used up about 18GB. Also used EasyBCD to have the boot manager on the SATA drive and don't have to plug the USB drive in to reboot the machine.
So after all the setup (Nvidia drivers, my version of lircrc, getting Paul's patches) got it all working like before. Unfortunatly TV3 is still the same, so now my mission begins to learn how to edit source code and rebuild mythtv so I can enable skip loop filter. If anyone here can help with that please leave a comment.
I did make one improvement this time around by using a new guide source from nice.net.nz. I have used Reven for ages (and will still use it on Windows) but his grabber is not a xmlTV complaint grabber which means going through the 'mythfilldatabase --file' rigaramole, and I have found that a real hassle with multiple sources and digital TV. The solution is a complaint script, and instructions are given here for how to set this up. This data is from the DVB-S feed and I am told is good data. When I can run mythtv full time I will be able to test that!
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