I am currently entrenched in ActiveRecord – trying to learn it and implement it on a project. There seems to be a lot of practical documentation and examples missing on the net (or my search skills have severely diminished).

Anyway – I hope to put together a few postings on my learnings to try and save you some time should you run into the same problems.

Here’s the first:

“Could not perform SlicedFindAll for ClassName”

I’m trying to create a new user, and attach a company that was populated into a select list.

This is the line that caused the error:

Company.Find( lbCompany.SelectedValue );

Apparently, despite the fact that the Expression function I’m calling takes an Object as for the value, it won’t convert it to the appropriate type. This caused me many headaches trying to search through 285MB of log files (created just from the init and few calls I make to log4net before this point). I was unable to get the same result in my unit tests because I was passing in an actualy Int32.

So – convert the value to an Int32 (assuming your primary key is an Int32), and you should be fine.

Company.Find(Convert.ToInt32(lbCompany.SelectedValue));

Good luck.

Shendy.

The hourglass is one of the most controlling, patronizing elements of computing. It says “I know you have work to do, but I’m more important right now. I don’t care if the CPU usage is at 5% and memory is at 10% usage, I can’t do it captain – I. JUST. DON’T. HAVE. THE POWER.”.

Do yourself a favour – and max out your RAM. Lack of it is the most crippling thing to productivity.

I recently got rid of my home laptop which had 512MB of RAM. It was becoming a chore using it, because of the lag. I couldn’t wait to get back to the office the next day to use my desktop with 2GB of RAM. Even more recently, I got into Visual Studio 2008 and was running it in a Virtual PC (for reasons I won’t get into). This really slowed down the system despite the 2 jigowatts of power. Fast forward to a new home PC in place of my laptop – 4GB of RAM, and how the tables have turned. My work PC (that I spend 8-9 hours a day on) is a miserable atrocity  in comparison.

Long story short, until I get more RAM on my work PC I am removing the Virtual PC that I’ve been running, and my consider doing all of my ASP.NET programming in notepad.

Go buy RAM.

Shendy.

I'm trying to get a better handle on Joomla and have gone through a few installations with a little help from JP.

I wanted to post some solutions to a few snags I ran in to

• configuration.php and the FTP user

On the the pre-installation check, when it gives you the red "No" for the configuration.php file being writable - ensure it stays this way. Otherwise you'll run into problems on the next page. You can copy the configuration.php file from the last page in the setup into a text file, and then upload that file to your root directory. I had originally went to my FTP server and changed the permissions to allow write access to this file, and when it came to the FTP setup portion, I received an error "the XML response that was returned from the server is invalid". Making the configuration.php not writable fixed this.

• Admin user name and password don't match

The admin email & password settings are on the same page as the "install sample data page". For some reason, clicking the "install sample data" button after entering the admin email and password gave me an error saying that the "admin passwords do not match". I tried a number of different matching passwords, refreshed, went back to the previous screen - nothing would work. Finally I came back to the admin email & password screen, entered an email and matching passwords and it worked (not sure why). Anyway - the point is, despite using Roboform I forgot which password actually worked. Which brings me to my next snag:

• Resetting the super admin password

If you want to reset the super admin password, go into your database using PHPMyAdmin and locate the jos_users table (or whatever prefix you have on your joomla tables). Open this table and edit the admin user (by default it's id # 62). Change the password to whatever you like, but choose the "MD5" function in the dropdown on the left. This will hash the password using the MD5 algorithm that Joomla uses to match passwords.

There you go!

I think the team at Adobe are doing a tremendous job. They put out great products like PhotoShop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Flash - all which are a core part of my daily web development and web life.

I think however, that Adobe may be doing too good of a job. I would love to see their road map - where they expect to go with their products. They must have thousands if not hundreds of thousands of developers working day in and day out to produce the 15 UPDATES I receive for Adobe products on a DAILY basis.

Now - updates are a good thing, they usually make good software better, fix any security holes, buffer overflows, that sort of thing, but the Adobe update process is TERRIBLE. It takes several hours to find updates for all the products I have installed, it often crashes, and rarely finishes.

Anywhoo - simple thing, but thought I'd show you how to turn these off.

From within any Adobe product, chose "Updates..." from the Help menu:

Then click Preferences:

Then select the options you prefer (in my case - NONE).

So in short - Adobe, please update your updater, and maybe fix a few of those Flash bugs that Macromedia could never find.