I have just finished making a script which allows any site owner/blogger to be able to post full screen cover shots of a selection of thousands of different magazines hosted on Newsstand Magazines.
To do so, simply navigate to any of the magazines details page on Newsstand.co.uk, copy the URL, and replace the first link in the below code. You will also have to change the link text too to match the magazine.
I will shortly write a bit of code to automate this step, so watch out for it within the newsstand site.
Note: This feature is in early development stages, in future please see official statements regarding the installation and policies of use within the Newsstand site. As this is not yet in production, it may be retracted or malfunction without warning.
<div id="nsMagCover">
<a href="http://www.newsstand.co.uk/613-Satire-Magazines/196-Subscribe-to-PRIVATE-EYE--Magazine-Subscription.aspx">More About Private Eye</a>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://www.newsstand.co.uk/Scripts/magazinecovers.js"></script>
</div>
Techie
Client Sites, FancyBox, JQuery
Just finished the long old process of building Chrome OS, and the moment of installing the image on a dev machine is awaiting me tomorrow; if all goes well!
So far it’s taken around 6 hours to install all the prerequisits, sync & build the code and create an image. The actual build took just over two hours on a 64bit single core virtual machine. Next time I will add a few extra cores in aid of speeding the process up; the project is very active so I will need to do this fairly regularly.
I’m going to be interested in seeing the speed of the system first hand. The official videos demonstrate the boot sequence taking 7 seconds from the power button being pressed to the login screen appearing; something I’m finding a little hard to comprehend seeing as the bios load normally takes longer than this on most machines. Hopefully I can get my own video done too.
Anyway, it will be fun to have a look at the new concepts, and start developing some apps for it.
Will keep you all posted!
Techie
Chrome OS
The ‘SQL Server Import and Export Wizard’ can fail when trying to import a spreadsheet which was originally created by Open Office and converted by Excel into an Excel format.
Symptom
Symptoms of this problem can be seen when you edit mappings within the Wizard there are always 255 columns with the extra columns being prefixed with an ‘F’.
Even though these extra columns are not selected for import, you will get a violation of a datatype for the first column.
Solution
If this is the case, simply copy and paste the data from one document to a new blank document created by Excel.
Versions
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 10.0.2531.0
SQLServer 2008
Excel 2007
OpenOffice
Techie
Bug, SQL
I’ve just discovered yet another glitch with the ‘Import Data’ tool within the ‘Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio’. It took me a while to figure this one out as the error message was of a slightly unhelpful wild goose chase.
Error
If you have a column within excel that contains a mix of both data and null cells, the import tool fails even if the destination column is set to ‘Nullable’ within ‘Column Mappings’.
“Text was truncated or one or more characters had no match in the target code page.”
Solution
The only work around I have found is to separate the null columns and import them separately.
As alternative I think you can place a single quote (’) in each null cell, this forces the excel engine to register the cell as text rather then a null type and import it as an empty piece of data; I’ve used this technique before to force mixed numeric and text fields to be solely text, as using ‘format cell’ and selecting ‘text’ still imports the cell as a numeric value. I haven’t tested it for this scenario, but it sounds plausible that it will have the same effect with null values.
Versions
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 10.0.2531.0
SQLServer 2008
Excel 2007
Techie
Bug, SQL
This is a note to self more than anything for the bear minimum http headers of sending a JSON request.
POST: /Services/OutwardFacingService.asmx/GetList
Host: testserver.co.uk
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 36
Post Content:
{ "LastModifiedSince":"01/01/2010" }
Techie
http, JSON, Quickies
