Google AdSense Report Thinks I'm Using an Unsupported Browser

When I visit the AdSense reporting site in FireFox, AdSense thinks I'm using an unsupported browser (the source html even recommends downloading a version of FireFox newer than 3 (but I'm using 12.0)). AdSense shows me a really scaled down report version designed for mobile. The problem turns out to be "Ad Block Plus". It is interfering with the Google's browser detection. To turn off "Ad Block Plus" in FireFox, select "Tools/Ad Block Plus/Disable on Google", then you will get the full richness of the amazing reporting from AdSense.

HTML5 excanvas "Object doesn't support this property or method"

I'm building a little HTML5 practice page at www.MyDoodleDot.com and was having problems getting "excanvas", the shim for using the HTML5 canvas element in older IE browsers. In my HTML I included the conditional running of the excanvas shim with this:

<!--[if lt IE 9]><script type="text/javascript" src="excanvas.compiled.js"></script><![endif]-->

But when IE got to the second line below, it would die with "Object doesn't support this property or method".

    var canvas = document.getElementById("mycanvas");
    var context = canvas.getContext("2d");

The problem was that excanvas.js had not been fully loaded, so when IE hit that line, the canvas object didn't have a "getContext()" method. This happened because I was using this to start my javascript,

$(document).ready(letsStart);

The "ready()" method kicks off when all the DOM has (pretty much) loaded, but excanvas.js still wasn't loaded. The solution was to replace "$(document).ready(letsStart);" with

window.onload = letsStart;

Then my canvas app started working fine with an old version of IE.
BTW, my five year old daughter made this with www.MyDoodleDot.com

Making Contact Sheets with "montage"

Being very cheap, er,..., I mean frugal, and wanting to get a bunch of small pictures printed on real photo paper that I could slice into tiny 1 inch by 1.5 inch smaller-than-wallet photos, I used the open source, free "montage" program in the ImageMagick suite of tools on windows XP to create a contact sheet with this command:

montage pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg ^
pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg ^
pencil.jpg  pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg pencil.jpg ^
-tile 4x4 -geometry +0+0  -border 0 -rotate -90 pencils.jpg

(Surely there's a way to not repeat "pencil.jpg", but I was in a hurry.) The source photo, in this case "pencil.jpg", needs to be 1 inch by 1.5 inches which will reproduce 16 times on a standard 4x6 inch photo. This is great if children want to give others a small picture of themselves.

Execution of user code in the .NET Framework is disabled. Enable "clr enabled" configuration option

While running a test from a project I've taken over, I get this error:

Execution of user code in the .NET Framework is disabled. Enable "clr enabled" configuration option

My first thought is , "I thought the .NET Framework kinda *had* to run CLR code." Turns out the project is using .Net CLR inside the database. The error message wanted to be

Execution of user code in the .NET Framework inside the database is disabled. 
Execute this TSQL:  "sp_configure 'clr enabled',1" and "RECONFIGURE"

So to fix this run this TSQL inside the database.

sp_configure 'clr enabled',1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
sp_configure 'clr enabled'  -- make sure it took
GO

Pictures from Enterprise Mobile Applications with ASP.NET MVC 4 Workshop

Jimmy Bogard and Jeffrey Palermo from headspring.com gave an insightful presentation at Enterprise Mobile Applications with ASP.NET MVC 4 Workshop to 45 people last Tuesday. Here's a few pics:




My jumbled musings and take-aways:

• Microsoft is starting to realize we are in the 21st century and thankfully putting their MVC4 in an open format that ... gulp ... real users can see the source code and submit fixes at aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com. This is such a welcome change from the "We-are-the-smartest-people-in-the-world-and-no-one-else-could-possibly-contribute-anything-of-value-to-us." attitude.
  
• "Web Api" is the new term for http access to data. REST is a little too vague.
  
• alt-mouse.select will allow block editing in Visual Studio.
  
• Chrome has a handy extension, "Advanced Web Client", for playing with web services, ur, I mean "Web Apis". It allows you to enter headers like "accept: application/xml" to tell MVC4 what for to download.
  
• Skeleton is a good css framework for creating Responsive Web application so layout changes intelligently with changing screen size. Skeleton uses a 960 pixel area divided into 16 strips.
  
• Headspring has example code checked in at bitbucket.org/headspringlabs.
  
• Much of the Responsive Web is done with the @media query in css:
  

  @media screen and (max-width: 524px) {
  #container, footer, #sidebar, #content { width: 292px; }
  #content article h2 {font-size: 24px;}
  }
  

• MVC4 has automatic bundling of css files, so you can declare a directory of css files and it will bundle and minimize all the css files into one file to speed delivery.
  

The URL-encoded form data is not valid

As a developer, it's the call you always dread.
"Hey, you know that web site that's been working great for years - it's broken."
We had that experience this last week with this error:

SOURCE: System.Web
LOCALPATH: ...
TARGETSITE: Void FillInFormCollection()exception: System.Web.HttpException: 
  The URL-encoded form data is not valid. ---> 
System.InvalidOperationException: 
Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object.
at System.Web.HttpValueCollection.ThrowIfMaxHttpCollectionKeysExceeded()
at System.Web.HttpValueCollection.FillFromEncodedBytes(Byte[] bytes, Encoding encoding)
at System.Web.HttpRequest.FillInFormCollection()
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at System.Web.HttpRequest.FillInFormCollection()
at System.Web.HttpRequest.get_Form()
at System.Web.HttpRequest.get_HasForm()
at System.Web.UI.Page.GetCollectionBasedOnMethod(Boolean dontReturnNull)
at System.Web.UI.Page.DeterminePostBackMode()
at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)

To prevent malicious attacks against asp.net sites, Microsoft in the patches for Bulletin MS11-100 limits the number of name-value pairs to 1000.
To increase this number you need to add this key to the website's web.config or to the machine.config(s) on your servers:

<add key="aspnet:MaxHttpCollectionKeys" value="3000" />

Reducing the size of Sql Server log files

How do I trim down the size of log files in MSSQL 2008?
A quarter of my precious SSD disk space on my dev laptop was in database log files, the *.ldf files in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA.
Since I'm not a Sql Server expert, I googled and stackoverflowed and patched together the minimum statement I needed to rid me of these tenacious ldf files.
Do not use these on production machines. Use only on development boxes where you are testing and really don't care about the database. This statement took the log size of my typical database from 15Gig to 30K.

DBCC SHRINKDATABASE ([MyDatabaseName], 10, TRUNCATEONLY)