[~Off topic~ just noticed this is the 400th blog posting since I started this one. That has to be a milestone and a surprising low one given the levels of gobshitery I aspire too]
Back on topic again ... OK I upgraded my development server and home boxes to V8.5 almost as soon as it was available and I could actually get attached to the Passport Adv download site and to date I have been impressed. Which in itself is odd because I am starting to hear people get quite cross with DDE in particular both on their blogs and twitter. It is odd because I have very little negative news to report.
Well apart that is from a couple of occasions when I got a "Platform Command processor has encountered an error" when trying to open the designer client. The extra details on the error were abbreviated to a parallax of brevity in that they comprised of the single word "error" and it was not even capitalised! Sort of the error equivalent of the Gallic shrug so beloved of my French colleagues.. "it is fubar, c'est la vie ~shrug~"
Must ferkling and swearing later, DDE would not arise from the grim depths of whatever the "error" was. I would get the splash screen, the sign on and then 10 mins of the status bar moving really slowly and then .. the status screen disappeared and .... nothing.
The problem is something to do with something in the /data/workspace dir which shoots from a normal 50-80mb to 770mb during the problem. The more you try to open DDE the bigger the DIR gets and oddly it is not the /log/ dir? On the first occasion I eventually gave up looking for the problem and just renamed and deleted the directory it had reached 1.9Gb! There is obviously something amiss there.
However it has only happened three times(twice on Vista and once on XP) and I have been using it daily. I now have a .bat file that renames the /workspace/ dir and then deletes it. Hmm I wonder do DOS skills date me?
Those 3 occasions have been my only major problems to date.
The only other thing of note is a problem that I had in V7 and earlier V8 DDE and that is with the JS complier which remains ... hmmmm ... very like a grounded teenager on a Saturday night ... it sulks a lot when there is a problem, doesn't give you any idea of what the problem actually is by saying "Error compiling script" and then hides the cursor to spite you. The only way out is to close the element you are editing without saving and then re-open it.. and then 9 times out of 10 the change you made HAS been saved and there is no problem.
I have yet to see the problems of the load times in DDE, it remains satisfying brisk on local and on servers in VMs, on local LANs and even on remote access over a VPN is fine, well within workable limits but then I have over the years taken to doing a full re-compile on an NSF when I open it in a different version of the designer than it was designed in. I got caught badly in the V4.5 -> V5 world by not doing this, so I may have inadvertently missed the problem John Roling had here and that John Head describes here in point 3.
All in all I like 8.5 both client and DDE better than I liked 8.0.*. (Which is not to say I disliked 8.0*) every seems smoother, faster and more managable.
I could kiss the person that put CSS as a direct edit in DDE, that alone was worth the wait. The number of times I fecking forgot to refresh CSS files after edits in V7 and V8!
I do not seem to have been affected by the DDE slow loads reported by other colleagues, but then I am not dev'ing on a mac in a windows VM which does seem to be a common thread in the reports of sluggish load times. My Windoze boxes are either XP64 (4gb with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set) and on VISTA HP64 with 16gb.
I have run up XP SP2 in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu with 1gb of ram and a 4gb virtual disk and DDE can be a bit chuggy on the initial load of a new NSF, but the waits are not of the "go away and make a coffee, smoke a cigar and arrange a romantic assignation with Sandra from Quality Control" variety.
All in all, I am happy with 8.5 so far it is a 8.5 outa 10
Now it is getting near supper time and the McDonagh Horde is getting restless and hungry so I had better be off
My mother helps stop MSDS (Memory Stick Disappearnce Syndrome)
Mon, Mar 8th 2010 6:25a Steve McDonagh We have all been there.. we are in a meeting or are called to a colleagues PC and we feel we really really need to share some file with that user. So out comes the memory stick and into the other PC it goes .. and as soon as the file is copied your prized memory stick just disappears... poof ... gone.br /
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I have a theory that there is a eddy in the space time continium, the memory chips on the memory stick act as a strange attractor and becon the eddy towards the memory stick and once it ge [read] Keywords: ilug
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Is "a" Sandwich a category error and can mayonasie dribble be accurately measured
Sat, Mar 6th 2010 11:25a Steve McDonagh I was sat in a href="http://www.groundcoffee.net/pages/about.htm"Ground/a Having the usual excellent Chill, chicken, bacon, roast pepper, cheese and onion panini with a white chocolate Moccha no cream (Well i am on a diet) Now it was pointed out to me recently when you buy a panini you are actually doing nothing of the sort! You are noshing down on a PANINO for PANINI is the plural.br /
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Now it occured to me that a Ground Panino is a foot long and to fit on the plate the very nice baristas c [read] Keywords: blogger
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Good Music , good company and craic in the nineties @ the Beflast songwriters festival
Fri, Mar 5th 2010 9:24p Steve McDonagh Having spend the last 10 weeks in the purgatory that is the post Christmas anticlimax I decided that a bit of fun was in order. So I booked SWMBO and myself into the a href="http://www.dukesatqueens.com/"Dukes Hotel/a in Belfast for the weekend of the a href="http://www.belfastnashville.com/"6th Annual Guinness Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival/a now that might sound a little bit too country and western for my taste and yes there was some Camp;W but we managed to avoid it :-)br /
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I hav [read] Keywords: blogger
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If curling were easy it would be called Hockey
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 6:24p Steve McDonagh span class="goog-spellcheck-word"T'other/span span class="goog-spellcheck-word"nite/span I was chatting to span class="goog-spellcheck-word"Duffbert/span about the fine art of Curlingbr /
Whichnbsp; rests vampire like in the popular consciousness for 4 years andbr /
then explodes on the moonbeam of publicity that the winter Olympics brings.br /
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All of a sudden the media is full of "houses", "Skips" "Stones" and "Ends"br /
However as my chat with the bold Mr span class="goog-spellcheck-word" [read] Keywords: blogger
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ILUG 10 Preperations gathers pace ... poster ideas
Wed, Feb 24th 2010 6:23p Steve McDonagh The throb of antipication has moved from barely noticable into "shit itis only 9 months away" mode. 9 month's eh? I have time to get pregnant and give birth before the crowds of the faithful descend on Ireland for another round of ILUGy excitment.br /
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Here are a few posters ideas that may or may not be usedbr /
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div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; tex [read] Keywords: ilug
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Access the clipboard in Javascript
Sun, Feb 14th 2010 9:24a Steve McDonagh Now here is a wee something I fell over the other day whislt trying to figure out a way of copy and pasting a text stream from a Turdcopy; document to a text area on a form. It would be really useful to grab the clipboard contents .. do some RegExp replaces on it and then import it into the text area.br /
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Well after a moment or two's research you can be done in IE and you have to tweak Moz browsers a href="http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/securityprefs.html"see here/a to allow it to [read] Keywords: blogger
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....and while I am at it, Ireland WTF?
Sun, Feb 14th 2010 8:23a Steve McDonagh ... ohh and while I am at the keyboard and logged on to the blog ...What the hell were Ireland thinking yesterday? Jeeze I mean to say what is the point of me getting all prepared with loads of beer and crisps and the other accoutrements of 6 Nations watcherdom and then you sent the under 13's instead of the real international team?br /
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Go home dig out the SKY+ box and watch the Wales vs Scotland game, now THAT was rugby at it's best!div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' s [read] Keywords: blogger
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Enthusions and Indifferons - The physics of not being arsed
Sun, Feb 14th 2010 8:23a Steve McDonagh It has been a while since I last sat at the keyboard to write a blog post of any kind and to be honest I think I reached the rubicon between "arsed" / "can't be arsed" and Julius Caesar like I marched resolutely in the territory "can't be arsed". Mind you instead of declaiming "ālea iacta est" (The die is cast) or something equally as memorable I think I may have sighed deeply and poured another cup of coffee.br /
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There comes a time in every diariest's life where you start to slip into the [read] Keywords: domino
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UKLUG Supremo and Arch Mandrite of Brick Related Workings makes the big time
Thu, Feb 4th 2010 8:25a Steve McDonagh Noterati, UKLUG and ILUG honco, and Admin Guru a href="http://www.elsmore.net"Warren Elsmore/a has been recognized by the Beeb for building above and beyond the call of duty ... undoubtedly well deserved fame! Well done Warren and although not mentioned [SHAME!] Kitty too!br /
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8493631.stmdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1527573980897631948-458624458794314289?l=dominoyesmaybe.blogs [read] Keywords: admin
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A new 419 Scam arrived this morning and I just couldnt resist
Fri, Dec 11th 2009 5:55a Steve McDonagh Greetings people! It has been a while since i last posted , busy busy work work, you know the score. However I just couldnt help myself this morning when this popped up in my inbox
British Airways Authority(BAA)
Baggage Claims Unit (S506)
London Heathrow Airport
PO Box 5619
Sudbury Suffolk CO10 2PG
This is British Airport Authority (BAA), the world's leading airport
company. I wish to inform you that a box containing US$5.5 Million has been
received through our Heathrow Airport in [read] Keywords: blogger
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