Moving to Linux, at least temporarily

Something was up with my Windows install, and for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. The sound was very choppy, Windows startup time and Internet browsing were incredibly slow. I ran every virus/spyware/malware scanner I could think of, cleaned the registry out carefully with CCleaner, reinstalled my sound card drivers, removed always running apps that I didn't need, defragmented the hard drive, defragmented the page file and registry hives, etc, and still had the same problem.

About to reinstall Windows XP on my 10-year-old computer, I decided to give Ubuntu another shot, pledging to boot only Ubuntu for a week, and attempting to fix whatever issues came up. I had tried it at v7.04 and was generally impressed, but eventually scrapped it mostly because Windows was working fine for me, my Digital Audio Workstation wasn't supported, and there were no "killer apps" I could think of to keep me on Linux.

So I installed Ubuntu 9.04, and was about as impressed as I was with 7.04. I worked through a few initial issues, but everyone in the forums I was reading said something like, "[whatever issue] isn't a problem on Linux Mint". After reading that for about the 5th time, I decided to make a Live USB of Linux Mint 7, and was completely blown away. Pretty much everything just worked out of the box, and the interface looked absolutely stunning and more user-friendly. What really sold me, though, was that it was based on Ubuntu 9.04, so it's got lots of built-in support.

So I wiped Ubuntu and installed Mint, and mostly haven't missed Windows at all. I still do have a full-screen video issue using the generic video drivers - the "nv" drivers work, but only give me a resolution of about 320 x 240. UPDATE: Installing the latest nv driver fixed this.

Most of the programs I want are available on Linux - Firefox, Photoshop (via Wine), Picasa, and Netbeans, mostly. But I can't find a DAW that supports MIDI to work. I spent quite a bit of time reading up on this, and it looks like I need a realtime Linux kernel, which can be installed with apt-get, but it seems like nobody can get it working with Linux Mint. I did find this video, but it looks very complex (though promising). I've got to spend a lot more time with it, but I may just set up a Windows partition with only my DAW on it.

The "killer app" for me so far is not having to really worry about viruses, spyware, etc. nearly as much (the computer is used by a number of people). I do have ClemAV running now, and am looking into whether or not I need more protection, but I like what I've read so far - that Linux out-of-the-box is leaps and bounds above Windows in regards to these things.

And my son LOVES the Linux Education games - GCompris and Childsplay. To my surprise, he was WAY into the Childsplay letter finding game, which is great because he's working on his lower case letters now. I can't wait to hack these games a bit and put in some customized graphics for the kids.

Quick SQL --> Excel export w/ column names

I know there's lot of ways to do this, including an SSIS/DTS package, but here's another quick way I pieced together for ad-hoc exports with that I haven't seen outlined before:

1. Run the query in SQL Server Management Studio (w/ "Results to Grid")
2. Copy all data from the grid (right-click on the unlabled box at the top left of the grid, choose "copy"), and paste into second row in Excel.
3. Back in SQL, run this query:

SELECT sc.name
FROM syscolumns sc
   INNER JOIN sysobjects so
       ON so.id = sc.id
WHERE so.name = '[table name]'
ORDER BY sc.colid

4. Paste the results into Excel in a new sheet.
5. Copy the row, then "paste special" --> "transpose" into the first row in the original worksheet, so that they paste as columns.

This will probably break down for very large tables, but I just did this with 96 columns, and 10,000+ rows without issues.

Some more ways to accomplish this:
http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1202

BTW, not sure why there's not a "Results to .csv format" in SQL Server Management Studio. "Results to Text" seems rather useless...

UPDATE: Dave Kearns points out an even easier way to do this:

In SQL Server Management Studio, go to "Tools" --> "Options" --> "Query Results" --> "SQL Server" --> "Results to Grid" --> check "Include column headers when copying or saving the results"

Forcing label values to be displayed to the right of a bar (ASP.NET 3.5 chart control)

As I've previously written, the new ASP.NET 3.5 chart control is great. However, a minor thing that doesn't work well is displaying value labels for bar charts. It displays the value to the right of the bar except for the longest bar when it determines that it wouldn't fit within the scale. So, if you have a bar with a value of 98, and you have your axis interval set to 25, it will display "98" in the bar. This doesn't necessarily look good, depending on what color the bar is, and it is also inconsistent with the other bars.

Here's my solution (C#):

Chart1.DataBound += delegate(System.Object o, System.EventArgs ea) {
      double longestBarLength = Chart1.Series[0].Points.FindMaxByValue().YValues[0],
             padding = 10d,
             roundedUpBarLengh = Math.Ceiling((longestBarLength + padding) / 25) * 25;

      Chart1.ChartAreas[0].AxisY.Maximum = roundedUpBarLengh;
};

I'm determining the longest bar length w/out looping thanks to a nice built-in function "FindMaxByValue()" which gets me access to the DataPoint object with the largest value, and I'm just grabbing the Y Value from it (in my case, there's only one Y value).

Then I specify a set padding to make room for the value label to be displayed on the right side of the bar (10 seems to work well for numbers in the 100's at least). Lastly I'm pushing the value whatever the longest bar length is to the nearest 25 and setting the axis max value to that number.

This all needs to be done after the data is already there, obviously, so this is all wrapped in the databound event handler.

I'll add pics later.

Great .NET 3.5 Charting Control from Microsoft

I don't know how I missed this when it was released a few months ago, but this control is awesome - it generates very professional-looking charts that you used to have to pay hundreds of dollars for, and it looks just as good as the best charting tools I've seen.

The organization scheme seems a little convoluted to me, but it probably just seems that way because I was just trying to do a simple 3D bar chart, and the scheme is set up to allow a very high level of customization. I also ran into a few web.config-related snags while getting my code up and running, but nothing that I couldn't fix within a few minutes of searching the web.

Example screenshots and everything you need to get started are here.

Interesting SAP JCo error

Exception Details: com.sap.mw.jco.JCO$Exception
Type conflict when calling a function module (field length).

Possible Source of Error:
Class Name: com.sap.mw.jco.rfc.MiddlewareRFC$Client
File Name: MiddlewareRFC.java
Method Name: nativeExecute
Line Number: -2

Line Number -2? Those SAP guys sure are tricky with their coding before the file even starts.

BTW, SAP JCo is a major nightmare to get working. If somebody brings you a JCo project and says "this should be easy", my advice is to run away as fast as you can.

UPDATE: I solved this problem, no thanks to the error message. I was trying to pass in a field as an Export instead of an Import. Which makes perfect sense, expect the original VBScript/COM code that I am re-writing this from uses the call "[function].Exports()" for an import (and the code works!).

Camera Focal Range Data application

I'm currently using a point & shoot camera (Canon S2 IS), but have a DSLR on the way (Canon Rebel XS). The DSLR comes with a kit lens that ranges from 18-55mm (28.8mm - 88mm in 35mm equivalents), which is quite a bit shorter than my p&s (up to 432mm equiv!). So I got worried that I wouldn't be too happy with just the kit lens. At the same time, I wanted to try out LINQ in .NET, so a quick project was born...

I wrote a bare-bones console application that reads in EXIF data from images, extracts the focal length of each, and uses some simple LINQ queries that lets me see exactly how many photos were taken in wide, normal, tele, and super tele modes. It recurses through directories from a starting directory you specify, and tries to get info on all JPEG images.



Right now, there's no nice GUI, it's not multi-threaded, you can only search one folder at a time, there is no progress bar, and you can't actually see what images fall into which category, but if there's any interest in this app at all, I'll add all that sometime soon.

Also, you have to enter a 35mm focal length equivalent for the categories to be accurate. This is annoying, because for point and shoots, that info is sometimes hard to find. I had to actually take a picture all the way zoomed in, and compare the specs on dpreview.com with the EXIF data (72mm max zoom in the EXIF = 432mm max zoom in the specs, so it has a multiplier of "6"). I may end up looking up the multipliers on a bunch of popular cameras and just ask the user to select his/her camera, or optionally manually enter the focal length multiplier if the user's camera is not on the list.

Anyway, the application is fully working in it's current state - all you need is the .NET 3.5 framework. If you want to use the app and can't figure out the proper multiplier to use, just post a comment here, and I or another reader can certainly help you out.

No crazy code in this app, but here's the LINQ part:

//generic list
private List<double> zoomData;
...
zoomData = new List<double>();
...
//code in the directory/file loop
zoomData.Add(focalLength * focalLengthX);
...
int shortTele = (from t in zoomData where t > 100 && t <= 150 select t).Count();

In my case, I was happy to see that I had a significant amount more wide and normal shots than telephoto shots, so maybe I won't need an extra lens after all.

You can download the app here.

UPDATE: Picasa somehow figures out the 35mm equiv. from the EXIF data. I'm going to figure out how they're doing it and update my application soon.

System.Net.Mail throws "no such user" exceptions w/ Lotus Domino!

Code that I had running for years without issues suddenly broke with the error "Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: user@domain.com... No such user". Very useful, as with this information, I can now automate (or at least partially automate) internal mailing list management.

For now, I've just added code to catch this specific exception (in addition to the catch-all SmtpException) to have it generate a work order ticket if there's a problem:

try {
    smtp.Send(newsletter);
} catch(System.Net.Mail.SmtpFailedRecipientException ex) {
    //generate work order...
}

There's also "SmtpFailedRecipientsException" which triggers only if it can't send an email to all the recipients, though I don't see why you would use this over SmtpFailedRecipientException, as the latter informs you in the exception message if all recipients haven't received the email in addition to handling the case where one or some recipients failed.

However, I've noticed that if more than one recipient email fails, it only displays the first email address that failed in the error message. Makes sense, since it probably is processing one email completely at a time, and if it fails on one, it doesn't go any further. The solution to this, I guess, would be to have each email sent out within a loop of separate SMTP calls instead of using the handy "mail.To.Add" method. There would most likely be a performance hit doing it this way, though.

I'm going to keep looking into it, but does anyone know of a better way?

Also, I assume this works with MS Exchange as well, but don't know anyone using email with Exchange to test with. I have verified it doesn't work with Gmail and Hotmail, so this is best used only with an environment where you know that everyone is on the same mail server.