For adding VLC to the list of programs, so that you easily can choose to set VLC as default for some or all its supported file types, I’ve made a registry fix/patch. If you choose to try this, use it at your own responsibility (and preferably read through it before executing)! I take no responsibility for this whatsoever. And if you have knowledge of the registry and have comments to my fix, please comment! BTW, the fix requires you to having installed VLC at its default location; C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe.

Download the registry fix here: default_programs_-_register_VLC.reg

For execution, download, and remove the “.txt”-suffix, so that you gain a “.reg”-file. Then double-click this file.

For finishing up, go to Control Panel -> Default Programs -> Set your default programs. Verify that VLC media player shows up in the list of programs. Click it, and choose if you want to make it the default program for supported file types.

For comments about the fix, and about adding programs to the “Set your default programs”-utility in general, please see my blogpost on this topic.

If you want a quick fix for VLC, look at this other post. If you want to read in general about adding programs to the list in “Set your default programs”, read on:

This is probably more a nuisance than a problem, because you can attack the file association from the other side, by opening the settings for each file type one-at-a-time and associate it with the program (right-click file -> open with -> select program). However, this can be really time consuming and frustrating with a media player or any other program with more than 50 file type associations.

Therefore, it would be nice to use the “Set your default programs”-feature, where one can view all file types supported by a program, and associate some or all file types to the program with few clicks.

I’ll soon describe how to add missing programs to this list. First some screenshots to get the picture:

Screen #1: Open this via Start -> Default Programs, and then click “Set your default programs” as indicated below:

Screen #2: Here is the program list, with VLC media player (or other program) missing:

Screen #3: Here is what we want, and how it looks after our fix:

The fix

This requires some familiarity with the Windows Registry (regedit). And NOTE: I take no responsibility for anything you do or don’t in relation to this fix or anything else on this blog. Be careful in the registry (mistakes can break your operative system), and remember it’s your own responsibility!

First some registry terms. In the regedit-editor: A key is displayed in left pane with a folder icon, a value is an item displayed as a line in right pane, while data is the data contained in the value. A “string value” is a value containing a string as data.

Now some todo-points (for more specifics, see example below):

• Fire up regedit.exe with Admin-privileges.
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\, and find as a key an equivalent to ProgramName (i.e. VLC) or VendorName\ProgramName (i.e. VideoLAN\VLC) under there.
• Add a key called ‘Capabilites’ under the ProgramName key.
• Add these three string values under Capabilities: ApplicationDescription, ApplicationName, ApplicationIcon. For contained data in these values, see example and apply imagination.
• Now, add a key called ‘FileAssociations’ under Capabilities. Under here, add string values referencing file type keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\ (see example).
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RegisteredApplications, and add a string value called i.e. “VLC media player”, with data set to “Software\ProgramName\Capabilities”. Change ProgramName according to actual program name.

Example

As an example, here is the registry-export of my registry additions when I was finished fixing VLC media player:


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VideoLAN\VLC\Capabilites]
"ApplicationDescription"="VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project. The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries; this greatly reduces the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins."
"ApplicationName"="VLC media player"
"ApplicationIcon"="C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe,0"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RegisteredApplications]
"VLC media player"="Software\VideoLAN\VLC\Capabilites"


Some comments to the example: Under [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VideoLAN\VLC\Capabilites\FileAssociations] above: The VLC.* values references keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\. For instance, the “VLC.mp3″ references the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\VLC.mp3, which existed from the installation of VLC media player. Under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\VLC.mp3, there exists values that describes how a MP3-file is opened if double-clicked while VLC is the associated program.

For a full example, please see my blogpost about VLC media player.

Download & extract

GNU Emacs

First, obtain the latest precompiled Emacs binaries for Windows. Get it directly from the FTP location here, alternatively follow the link from the Getting Emacs guide. Download the latest zip-version marked bin; emacs-22.3-bin-i386.zip these days.

For the full guide on installing emacs on Windows, consult this guide.

After downloading, extract the Emacs zip-file to a permanent location on your computer, i.e. C:\Program Files\emacs, so that this folder directly contains the folders bin,etc,lisp and so on.

Muse

Second, download the latest Emacs Muse (hereafter only called Muse) zip-file. Get it directly from here, alternatively follow the link from the project’s home page here.

Extract the Muse zip-file to, for instance, C:\Program Files\emacs_muse.

Integration

Now it’s time to make include Muse into your Emacs installation/folder: Copy all contents of C:\Program Files\emacs_muse\lisp\ to C:\Program Files\emacs\lisp\.

The HOME environmental variable

We must now set up the .emacs init file, residing in your HOME directory. But first, we need to make sure you have HOME environmental variable. Check it by clicking Start->Run. Type in %HOME% and click OK. Does it open a folder? If so, notice the path of this folder. This is where we’re putting the .emacs init file. If you instead get an error, you must first set the HOME environmental variable:

Start->Settings->Control Panel->System->Advanced->Environmental Variables. In the upper field (user variables), press New. Name=HOME, Value=(whatever path you choose as your home folder. Make sure it exists!). OK x 2.

Editing the .emacs init file

Now that you have a HOME folder, open it: Start->Run. Type in %HOME% and click OK.

Create and edit a file named _emacs or .emacs, any one is good (.emacs is the original file name as used in Unix environments, but Explorer won’t let you create a file with filename starting with a dot, so therefore it’s easier to use the name _emacs). Put this contents into the file:


(setq load-path (add-to-list 'load-path "C:\Program Files\emacs_muse"))
(require 'muse-mode)
(require 'muse-publish)
(require 'muse-html) ;; and so on


For further contents regarding Muse in this file; see here under the heading “Getting Started”.

Testing

Now, start emacs by running the file: C:\Program Files\emacs\bin\runemacs.exe.

Create a new file with the .muse filename extension, (automatically puts emacs in muse mode) i.e. musetest.muse, and you’re set. Try typing something like (notice space bewtween asterisk and text in headings):


* Heading 1
** Heading 2

The end of the beginning.


… and notice that the two first lines (the headings) aquire different font weights. If they do; congratulations on your successful Emacs + Emacs Muse installation! If not, maybe you haven’t got emacs into muse mode. Try doing so by pressing Alt-x, then write muse-mode and hit return.

In the end, try publishing to HTML by hitting Ctrl-c Ctrl-t on the keyboard and follow the instructions in the “status field” in the bottom of the Emacs window.

Diving deeper

For diving deeper into muse, reference the project’s documentation:

• http://mwolson.org/projects/MuseQuickStart.html
• http://mwolson.org/static/doc/muse/
• http://mwolson.org/projects/EmacsMuse.html – the muse maintainer’s project page

References

• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/Installing-Emacs.html
• http://mwolson.org/projects/MuseQuickStart.html
• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9116#comment-331272 (on lisp to lisp folder copying, regarding Org-mode installation in emacs)

For basic caching of a generated PHP-page I find the “Expires” / “max-age” HTTP headers the most convenient to use;

//Cache for 15 minutes:
$maxage = 60*15;
header ("Cache-Control: max-age=$maxage");
header ('Expires: ' . gmstrftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT", time() + $maxage));

With this method, the page will be loaded from the user’s browser-cache instead of from my server until $maxage seconds have passed. After that, a new visit to the page will be freshly loaded from my server to the browser’s cache again, and will live there for another $maxage seconds. This works well with URLs such as

• http://www.example.com/index.php
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/pages/frontpage/

but not with URLs containing query strings:

http://www.example.com/index.php?page=frontpage&itemcount=10

The problem with query strings

If the URL to the page in question contains a query string (starting with the question mark in this URL: http://www.example.com/index.php?page=frontpage&itemcount=10), the HTTP standard says that the browser never should cache that page. Using standard-compliant browsers like Opera, you’ll have to get rid of that query string to enable caching of such pages.

I long scratched my head over this, but was after a while enlightened by Cal Henderson’s post:

According the letter of the HTTP caching specification, user agents should never cache URLs with query strings. While Internet Explorer and Firefox ignore this, Opera and Safari don’t – to make sure all user agents can cache your resources, we need to keep query strings out of their URLs.

Getting rid of the query string – URL rewriting

URL rewriting can be used to tricking the browser into believing we’re browsing an ordinary page without query strings. URL rewriting means that the user and the user’s browser enters and sees an URL like http://www.example.com/frontpage.asdf, while the Apache web server internally translates this to, let’s say, http://www.example.com/index.php?page=frontpage, running your index.php script with the right GET parameters.

Using Apache, this is as easy as writing some RewriteRules in a .htaccess-file, for instance:

RewriteEngine On

#rewrite /frontpage.asdf, /photos.asdf
#to /index.php?page=frontpage etc:
RewriteRule ^(.*?).asdf$ /index.php?page=$1 [QSA,L]


More tips and tricks about URL rewriting can be read here and many other places. Google it!

An example: I want to search for a pattern in a string, and replace any occurences with an array element whose key/index equals the occurence.

Without the /e flag this wouldn’t be as easy, because this does not work;

$pattern = '/\{(.*?)\}/i';
$outputline = preg_replace($pattern, $array[\\1], $inputline); //doesn't make any sense

With the /e flag, however, this works like a charm;

$pattern = '/\{(.*?)\}/ei'; //note the /e flag
$outputline = preg_replace($pattern, '$array[\\1]', $inputline); //works with /e flag

This replaces occurences of $pattern in $inputline with $array[OccurenceOfPatternInInputline] and assigns the result to $outputline.

Damn, the third year in a row(!) something erroneous happens to my server in the middle of my exam preparations. Why can’t it happen during fall, when the weather’s bad and I have the time for such challenges.
Well, I suppose it’s Murphy’s law. However, over to a more precise description of the problem…

The problem

I have 6 SATA disks in a RAID5 software array (through the use of Gentoo’s md), on which an XFS filesystem is mounted.

The actual error is that two(!) of my disks became faulty overnight. Diagnostics follow.

/proc/mdstat:
md0 : active raid5 sdf1[5] sde1[6](F) sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1] sda1[7](F)
(some number) blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/4] [_UUU_U]
I really got nervous here; 2 faulty disks in a RAID5 array means trouble. But why on earth did two disks fail at one time?? I’m not sure yet.

dmesg excerpt:
md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun ...
md: considering sdf1 ...
md: adding sdf1 ...
md: adding sde1 ...
md: adding sdd1 ...
md: adding sdc1 ...
md: adding sdb1 ...
md: adding sda1 ...
md: created md0
md: bind
md: bind
md: bind
md: bind
md: bind
md: bind
md: running:
md: kicking non-fresh sde1 from array!
md: unbind
md: export_rdev(sde1)
md: kicking non-fresh sda1 from array!
md: unbind
md: export_rdev(sda1)
raid5: device sdf1 operational as raid disk 5
raid5: device sdd1 operational as raid disk 3
raid5: device sdc1 operational as raid disk 2
raid5: device sdb1 operational as raid disk 1
raid5: not enough operational devices for md0 (2/6 failed)
RAID5 conf printout:
--- rd:6 wd:4
disk 1, o:1, dev:sdb1
disk 2, o:1, dev:sdc1
disk 3, o:1, dev:sdd1
disk 5, o:1, dev:sdf1
raid5: failed to run raid set md0
md: pers->run() failed ...
md: do_md_run() returned -5
md: md0 stopped.
md: unbind
md: export_rdev(sdf1)
md: unbind
md: export_rdev(sdd1)
md: unbind
md: export_rdev(sdc1)
md: unbind
md: export_rdev(sdb1)

It seems like sda is the only faulty one (mdadm –examine says it doesn’t have a superblock at all), but the crash of this one must have messed up the superblock of sde. However, it (the superblock of sde) was recreatable, and thereby also the RAID5-array as a whole: RAID5 allows for one disk (in this case, sda) to fail, but then you have no extra parachute, until you replace that faulty one.

The (temporary) solution

The superblock information for the different disks in the RAID-array were extracted for each disk with
mdadm --examine /dev/sda1
and so on. I noted (that is, copy-paste) the exact information for all disks, for (at least) using as option input to the mdadm –create-command in the next paragraph.

I ran (Warning: do this at your own risk! It’s incredibly important setting the right options here, so be sure you’ve read and understand the contents of man mdadm first! Failing to do so will result in loss of data!):
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=6 missing /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1, which put the array back up in degraded mode, with the erroneous disk sda set to missing. This was sufficient to be able to mount the array, but not without problems.

Mounting the degraded array

A first attempt on “mount /dev/md0 /mnt” gave the error “mount: Structure needs cleaning”. This is the XFS filesystem telling it’s not entirely consistent. I could possibly run xfs_repair (I did, in a pretend-type-mode, with the -n option), but I’m not willing to risk my data on this yet. Instead, I did get the device mounted with this command:
mount -r -o norecovery /dev/md0 /mnt

In this way, I can now access my data and make a backup of them. Some data is probably corrupted without repairing the XFS file system, but hopefully most of it is recoverable…

Some of the pages I visited in my frustration

• Kicking non-fresh member from array
• Linux RAID bitmap question

• Flatten image (from many layers to one layer).
• Convert to 8 bit (JPEG doesn’t support 16 bit): Image -> Mode -> 8 bits/Channel
• Convert Color Profile (Edit->Convert To Profile…) to sRGB.
  Important to choose Convert to… and not Assign…!
• Then save as JPEG using either Save As or Save for Web & Devices. Use the first to preserve EXIF tags from camera, use the latter if you want to finetune compression and target file size.

Read more about color spaces/profiles and skin tones at SmugMug.com

Here I will set up a sample Ruby on Rails application with the ActiveScaffold scaffolding plugin. I will first give the basic instructions to a default setup (as found on ActiveScaffold’s site, only with my field names and values), and will then make some tweaks and override some of the default configuration. It’s all very basic, but it can be a help for those trying out ActiveScaffold for their first time.

The case we’re working on: create a list of Equipment, i.e. electronic gadgets you’re planning to buy. We want to register title, price, an url to the product page of a webstore, an image url, some description and whether it’s in the webstore’s stock. Aditionally, we would like to calculate the registered price into another currency. All of this is to be shown in a sortable, searchable list.

It will be looking like this when we’re done.

After some years developing and experimenting with PHP, I’ve become curious of Ruby on Rails and what it has to offer in ease and “speedy” development. I’m for the time being an absolute rookie in RoR, but I’ve had a look on some resources on the net and have tried making a few very basic “test” applications.

Having limited experience regarding web development frameworks, it takes a few scratches on the head to get the concept of MVC and knowing what does what (M=model, V=view, C=controller) and what calls what. Generating a scaffold and investigating the different files helps grasping the concept after a while.

The first time I saw the result of a scaffold-generation, I was convinced that this kind of development was something to look further into. However, after having seen samples of other scaffold generators, the default one seems a little static and cumersome to override: It seems like the default scaffolding generator is meant for running once, and then hardcode-editing the scaffold-generated code. Then, if you for some reason have to rescaffold, you must reimplement the changes. Also, the result is rather static without “fancy stuff” like Ajax.

Therefore, I had to test out the ActiveScaffold scaffolding plugin. It’s very easily installed, quickly up and running (a getting-started-tutorial on their site is estimated to 2 minutes from scratch), produces a smooth Ajax’ed design and is very easily to override and configure.

Remember, though, that I’m quite new to RoR, so I haven’t a broad basis of comparison, and there may be better practices for what I’m doing here. If so, please tell me!

Assumptions

I think the majority of the steps in this tutorial should work with most versions (except the scaffolding, which is different in rails v. >= 2), but here’s what I’ve used:

• Rails 1.2.6 (yes, I know, it’s time to upgrade…)
• Ruby 1.8.6
• ActiveScaffold rev. 739

I assume you have a working rails-application, set up with connection to an existing database and accessible through a web browser before starting off.

Basic setup

The first thing we’re gonna do, is create a new table in the database to which the application connects. I created a table called equipment like this in my MySql database:

CREATE TABLE equipment (
  id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  title varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  descr text NOT NULL,
  price float NOT NULL,
  updated timestamp NOT NULL
    default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
    on update CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  url varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  imgurl varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  instock tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '1',
  PRIMARY KEY  (id)
) ;

Then, let the generator scripts make the appropriate files we’ll be working on. 4 types of files are created, but we’re only interested in 3 of these; the model, controller and helper files, not the view files. However, we’ll just delete the view files afterwards…
Open up a terminal window, and cd to your rails application root folder. Then run
./script/generate scaffold Equipment

Now, delete the unnecessary views files (not only unnecessary; they also override the ActiveScaffold which we’ll put to work later on, so follow this step!):
rm -R app/views/equipment/

Now it’s about time to install the ActiveScaffold plugin:
([Parts of] the following few steps are borrowed from ActiveScaffold’s website)
./script/plugin install http://activescaffold.googlecode.com/svn/tags/active_scaffold

When the plugin has been downloaded and installed, you need to update a few of your files.
Add this to the head-section of your app/views/layouts/equipment.rhtml file:

  <%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
  <%= active_scaffold_includes %>

It should then look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
       "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
  <title>as test</title>
  <%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
  <%= active_scaffold_includes %>
</head>
<body>

<p style="color: green"><%= flash[:notice] %></p>

<%= yield  %>

</body>
</html>

Then, edit your app/controllers/equipment_controller.rb, so that it looks similar to this:

class EquipmentController < ApplicationController
  @equipment_pages, @equipment = paginate :equipment, :per_page => 10
  layout "equipment"
  active_scaffold :equipment
end

Also, quote from http://activescaffold.com/tutorials/getting-started:

3a. Make sure that you don’t have AjaxScaffold installed in your project. Since ActiveScaffold evolved out of AjaxScaffold they share some common method names and are incompatible with each other.

Then you’re done with basic setup. Now browse to http://your-rails-app-root/Equipment, and hopefully you’ll see the magnificent Ajax’ed layout created by ActiveScaffold. Isn’t it wonderful?

If you, like me, are running Rails on Apache/FastCGI, you may have to restart your Apache httpd-server every now and then (I don’t know of any other methods of killing/restarting the rails fastCGI-scripts being run by apache. If you know; please tell me!). When testing new stuff and/or when getting errors, I always restart apache to see if the problem still persists.

Up to now, we’ve basically dealt with initial setup covered by ActiveScaffold’s own Getting Started-tutorial. Now it’s time to tweak the config to our needs.

Tweaking and overriding default ActiveScaffold config

I’m over all very satisfied with the looks and functionality of the initial output, especially when considering it almost takes no time at all. However, since ActiveScaffold can’t know how I plan to view my data, there are some overrides to be done. Datafields are overridden very smoothly by creating small methods with designated names in the right classes.

Anyways, here’s what I’m gonna do:

• Show the image pointed to by imgurl instead of the url itself.
• Put the image inside an <a href…>-tag, so that the image links to the url in the url-field.
• Create/include a virtual column that shows the price in a foreign currency as well as in USD.
• Format the two price-columns with sprintf
• Reorder the columns
• Exclude the descr-column from list view
• Tweak the output of the boolean field instock
• Apply a default sorting of the rows in the list view

This may sound as a lot of work, but fact is it’s quite easily implemented.

First a note on the two price-columns: I live in Norway, and am sometimes interested in monitoring prices in some US webshops. Therefore, I register the USD price in the price-field in the database, while I calculate what this will cost me in NOK (Norwegian kroner) based on the current exchange rate. Since most of you probably are not from Norway, I called NOK the foreign currency.

First, place a floating point number (for instance 4.99 – the actual rate on 2008-Apr-15, the lowest rate in 25 years!) as the only line in a file placed here (though customized for your rails-path!):
/usr/local/www/rails/as/myincludes/nok_usd_rate.txt

We want a global variable (yeah, I know everyone’s not found of that) to hold the exchange rate, read from a file in the event of page loading. I do this so that I won’t have to read the file over for each record.

Edit the app/controllers/application.rb-file, so that it looks like this:

# Filters added to this controller apply to all controllers in the application.
# Likewise, all the methods added will be available for all controllers.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def setmyglobalvar
    # reads exchange rate from file: UPDATE TO YOUR PATH!
    contents = File.read('/usr/local/www/rails/as/myincludes/nok_usd_rate.txt')
    # converts to NOK and includes 25% "mva" (=Norwegian VAT). Stores in global var:
    $myglobalvar= contents.to_f * 1.25
  end

  # Pick a unique cookie name to distinguish our session data from others'
  session :session_key => '_testapp_session_id'

  before_filter :setmyglobalvar
end

Here, we have defined a method, and calls this by the before_filter-statement.

Next, we must extend our record-model so that it includes the field to be used as a virtual column. Edit app/models/equipment.rb to look like this:

class Equipment < ActiveRecord::Base
  def price_nok
    # $myglobalvar is set in controllers/application_controller,
    # and contains exchange rate incl VAT:
    # self.price references the price-
    # field from current database record.
    self.price * $myglobalvar
  end
end

Then we must tell the controller to include this new field as a (virtual) column.
At the same time, we reorder the columns and apply a default sorting for the list view.
Note that we only alter the columns of the list action and not of any other actions (list is an action, so is new, edit, show etc). Altering the columns of edit or new can result in an error on record edit or creation attempts.
Note also that only the columns listed in config.list.columns will be shown in the list view.
Here it goes – app/controllers/equipment_controller.rb:

class EquipmentController < ApplicationController
  @equipment_pages, @equipment = paginate :equipment, :per_page => 10
  layout "equipment"

  active_scaffold :equipment do |config|
    list.sorting = {:price => 'DESC'}
    config.list.columns = [:imgurl, :instock, :price, :price_nok, :title, :updated]
  end
end

Then, at last, we alter the way some of the columns are shown. This is done in app/helpers/equipment_helper.rb, by creating methods with name columnname_column. All output within the method will be printed in the respective table cell (td) for each record of that column. Here is the contents of that file:

module EquipmentHelper
  def imgurl_column(record)
    '<a href="'+record.url+'">' + image_tag(record.imgurl, :alt => "Image") + '</a>'
  end
  def url_column(record)
    '<b><a href="'+record.url+'">[ link ]</a></b>'
  end
  def instock_column(record)
    if record.instock
      image_tag("/img/yes.png", :alt => "yes!")
    else
      image_tag("/img/no.png", :alt => "no, sadly!")
    end
  end
  def price_column(record)
    # http://railsmanual.org/module/ActionView::Helpers::NumberHelper
    number_to_currency(record.price)
  end
  def price_nok_column(record)
    number_to_currency(record.price_nok, :unit => "NOK ", :delimiter => " ", :separator => ",")
  end
  def descr_column(record)
    # for the show action, where we want to show the description as well.
    record.descr.gsub("\n", "<br />")
  end
end

Custom stylesheet

If you want to apply your own css-formatting, don’t edit the default stylesheets, because they may be overwritten. Instead, include this as the very last line in the head-section of app/views/layouts/equipment.rhtml:

  <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'active_scaffold_overrides' %>

Then, add your css rules in the stylesheet public/stylesheets/active_scaffold_overrides.css! For instance:

.price_nok-column
{
        font-weight: bold;
}

Links

• MVC-concept @ betterexplained.com

http://aphnetworks.com/reviews/logitech_mx5500_revolution

I’ve had my MX3200 for a year and five months now, and it has been alright, but the last few months I’ve experienced times of frustration:
Sometimes when I write a character (which requires the shift-button??), the character is being repeated until I hit another key, even though I released the first key. The problem is not related to the key itself, so I guess it’s a problem regarding weak wireless reception or something. When the problem first occurs, it can happen over and over again for hours, while other times there can be days/weeks when there’s no problem at all. This makes me suspect that maybe the signal/noise ratio is too low; maybe the signal reception is too weak on this model and that the problem occurs when the noise from cellulars etc is having its peaks?

What made me suspect the reception quality in the first place, was when I first plugged the receiver in the back of my computer, curious to try out my new keyboard. The reception was less than low: Not all keystrokes were recorded, and I had to use the equipped USB extension cable to place the receiver nearer my keyboard. Considering that the back of my computer is no more than 1,5 m away from the keyboard — though visually hidden by the cabinet itself — I think that’s poor reception.

Anyways, I haven’t had this problem with any other (Logitech) wireless keyboards I’ve had, so I hope and think it’s just this model. Therefore, I found the review linked to above interesting, especially since they mention good reception on the MX5500.

Anyways, I’ve experimented some with MySql-queries from within C# .NET, using Windows paths (containing backslashes as path separators) in the WHERE-clauses. We have a query of one of the forms:

case 1: = operator
querystring1 =
"SELECT a,b,path FROM table " +
"WHERE path = ‘" + patharg1 + "’;";

or

case 2: LIKE operator
querystring2 =
"SELECT a,b,path FROM table " +
"WHERE path LIKE ‘" + patharg2 + "’;";

Here is what I’ve found out:

case 1: = operator
Use 4 backslashes for each backslash in the saved record you’re matching against. You could do:
patharg1 =
patharg1.Replace("\\", "\\\\");
(The 2 backslashes in the first replace-argument is for escaping the backslash within the compiler.)

case 1: LIKE operator
Use 8(!) backslashes for each backslash in the saved record you’re matching against. You could do:
patharg2 =
patharg2.Replace("\\", "\\\\\\\\");
(The 2 backslashes in the first replace-argument is for escaping the backslash within the compiler.)

The two cases could then look like this:

case 1:
querystring1 =
"SELECT a,b,path FROM table " +
"WHERE path = ‘c:\\\\some\\\\path.txt’;";

case 2:
querystring2 =
"SELECT a,b,path FROM table " +
"WHERE path LIKE ‘c:\\\\\\\\some\\\\\\\\path.txt’;";

The above is if you put the querystring into, for instance, a MySqlCommand’s CommandText.

However, if you use datasets and run something like
dataTable.Select(filterExpression)
where dataTable is a DataTable instance and filterExpression is a string, you must not escape the backslash more than for a usual string (you’ll just write “\\” or @”\”, because some kind of escape of the backslash is always necessary for the compiler).