MediaWiki and missing images

Just as a reminder to myself... if mediawiki isn't showing images, check the /wiki/skins/common/images folder. Chances are it's missing or the files aren't there.

That is all...

Creative writing

I think I'm starting to understand just why writers always seem so strange... it infiltrates the psyche.

I've recently started a creative writing project, and while I'm still quite the amateur it has become an obsession. Like, keeping me awake and overrunning my dreams when I finally CAN sleep, sort of of obsession.

I'm in my left brain all day. Programming, math, analysis, problem solving, etc, etc, etc... switching to my right brain to 'feel' and empathize and verbalize those feelings in an attempt to create empathy in others is a vastly different experience.

Maybe the feelings of anxiety will fade over time. But I kind of hope they don't. It's a strange type of co-dependence I feel; knowing that I (and my characters) are at the mercy of my imagination.

Yeah... that doesn't make me sound like lunatic or anything. O.o

WYSIWYmG!

WYSIWYG aka "What you see is what you get" has taken on a new meaning for me today.... it has now become "What you see is what you (might) get".

I haven't been this frustrated with an IDE in years. All I'm trying to do is center one element on my page. It's a User Control, and I've tried putting in a Div and an ASP:Panel and centering those. It works in the WYSIWYG editor, it looks 'centered'. However, when it's loaded up into firefox it isn't centered. It's centered in IE though (of course). So I guess that makes it WYSIWY(kind of)Get...

*grumble-pants*

Visual Studio and renaming controls

Perhaps one of my only annoyances (so far) about Visual Studio (2008, at least) is the sporadic ability of it to rename my controls. Renaming a control is like Russian Roulette. Maybe it will update all the place that control is named, maybe it'll get half of them... you just don't know until you go to run it and, hey, it doesn't work properly any more! And of course, the problem is that only half of what you expected to get changed got changed. And it's the half you can see easily. The part that got missed was the often hidden/obscure back end declarations.

I've seen this in web developer and the VB IDE as well, and it often causes a few minutes of: 'Buh?' until I find the discrepancy.

Cest la vie.

ASP.net's "Wizard" wizard control and javascript fun

Alright, so here's where my massive nerdliness comes out. I just worked through a problem and I'm stoked.

More for my own documentation than anything, here's what happened.

I switched an ASP.Net 2.0 form to a Wizard control (named Wizard1, how quaint). However, I still needed to call a pop-up page and have that pop-up page read information from the Wizard page. When I tried this, it didn't work, it couldn't read the controls anymore, even though they were still on the page. Frustrating.

So I end up throwing javascript alerts and digging through what it CAN see, and I found the problem. Somehow the Wizard control makes it seem as if the calling page has multiple pages, and the controls I was trying to read weren't on the page that was calling the pop-up. What I needed to do was to create controls on the 'review' page and populate them with data from the controls on the input page, then have the pop-up read the duplicated controls like so: "window.opener.document.getElementById("Wizard1$txtFullAddr").value". I just had to add the 'Wizard1$' in front of the new controls I made (the duplicated ones) and all was well.

UPDATE:
It turns out that 'getElementByID' doesn't work all the time in FireFox. I had to resort to 'window.opener.document.forms[0].elements["Wizard1$txtEventReview"].value' to get access to my page's controls. Meh. It'll work I guess.

All the cool kids are doing it.

It seems like everyone has a blog, and I'm not going to be the only guy without one! I figure since I like to write this is something I probably should have done a long time ago. Hence the URL for my blog. I'm cool too or, rather imcooltoo.whateverthissiteis.com.

The name of my blog is a nod to a friend whom I haven't talked to in a long time, and I hope he's doing well. It's also a nod to The Simpson's, when Homer writes 'ok' in a form that says: "Please leave this space blank".

Good stuff there.

Well, enough gibbering, it's time to add some content.