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The rarely updated blog of Joel Dixon

Viewing blogs posted in 2005

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

I made the papers?

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 27/07/2005 14:46:00
Updated by Joel Dixon at 04/08/2007 23:03:13

As indicated earlier I'm planning on taking a trip to America early next year to watch a few Penguins games. I didn't know whether I'd need to purchase the tickets through a third party, so I emailed the Pittsburgh Penguins ticket inquiries address. They told me that I would be able to purchase the tickets online from September and print off a barcode (which is good), and said they were honoured to have a fan from so far away.

So, two days later, as I was reading my source of Penguin's News, I came across the following article:

Quote:
Sidney Crosby, in the, roughly, 87 hours since becoming inbound Penguins
property, already means this much to the local NHL franchise:

A guy called from Australia yesterday wanting
Penguins tickets.

A guy called from San Diego and purchased
a season-ticket package.

Now, I know I didn't actually call about the tickets - but I think that "guy from Australia" could be referring to me. Perhaps "an Australian called about Penguins tickets" was mis-communicated.

Anyway - I'll just assume it was about me

# Posted in the Travel section and tagged as: Pittsburgh Penguins
Comments (3) | Add Comment

Monday, July 25, 2005

Travel Plans

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 25/07/2005 14:39:00

Pittsburgh's recent acquisition of the 2005 number 1 draft pick has made me seriously consider a trip to the US to watch a hockey game. I had originally planned to be in Pittsburgh earlier this year with the hope of viewing a game - it's lucky that those plans fell through (with the recent lockout).

I'd love to watch a Penguins game with both Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby playing, as well as my other Penguins favorites (too numerous to name). It will probably cost a few thousand dollars that I don't have - but it will be worth it, as I may never get a chance to go there again, and they may sell the team within 4 years.

There's a lot to organise (acquisition of tickets, flights, accommodation, time off work, etc) - but I'd be worth it for one more tick on the travel itinerary (I'll change Philadelphia to Pittsburgh!).

# Posted in the Travel section and tagged as: Pittsburgh Penguins
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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Remember Me! <flaming eyeballs>

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 13/07/2005 11:58:00

Well, my USB key wiped itself again (third time thus far) which is very annoying. I use it to store old work, and common code I'm always looking up. An example of this is VBA code required to unlock a protected Excel workbook (for whenever I want the answers to the latest Excel Quiz doing the rounds):

VBA Code:

Sub PasswordBreaker()
    'Author unknown
    'Breaks worksheet password protection.
    Dim i As Integer, j As Integer, k As Integer
    Dim l As Integer, m As Integer, n As Integer
    Dim i1 As Integer, i2 As Integer, i3 As Integer
    Dim i4 As Integer, i5 As Integer, i6 As Integer
    On Error Resume Next
    For i = 65 To 66: For j = 65 To 66: For k = 65 To 66
    For l = 65 To 66: For m = 65 To 66: For i1 = 65 To 66
    For i2 = 65 To 66: For i3 = 65 To 66: For i4 = 65 To 66
    For i5 = 65 To 66: For i6 = 65 To 66: For n = 32 To 126
    ActiveSheet.Unprotect Chr(i) & Chr(j) & Chr(k) & _
        Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & Chr(i3) & _
        Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
    If ActiveSheet.ProtectContents = False Then
        MsgBox "One usable password is " & Chr(i) & Chr(j) & _
            Chr(k) & Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & _
            Chr(i3) & Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
         Exit Sub
    End If
    Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
    Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
End Sub

I've decided to start posting things like that here - and use my USB key for transport rather than storage.

# Posted in the Technical section
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Sunday, July 10, 2005

Checkers

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 10/07/2005 23:33:00

Going through some of my old uni work, I found my Checkers assignment. It's not very good - but I like the look of it. I've stuffed up the Game Tree Algorithm though - as the computer plays good for the first half of the game, then it tries to let me capture it's pieces.

Oh well, enjoy.

# Posted in the Technical section and tagged as: Java
Comments (0) | Add Comment

Friday, July 08, 2005

My Itinerary

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 08/07/2005 13:45:00

After posting my travel profile a while ago I noticed how lame I have been. So, I'm going to list all of the places in this travel survey for future reference. Hopefully I'll knock off another Australian location this year, and work on a few more next year.

US
Albuquerque, Aspen, Atlanta, Atlantic City, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Cape Cod, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Key West, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Martha's Vineyard, Memphis, Miami, Minneapolis, Napa Valley, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Reno, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, Scottsdale, Seattle, Sedona, Tampa, Taos, Tuscon, Washington DC.

Canada
Halifax, Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Vancouver.

Latin America
Acapulco, Buenos Aires, Cabo San Lucas, Caracas, Cozumel, Havana, Lima, Mazatlan, Mexico City, Montevideo, Puerto Vallarta, Rio, San Jose del Cabo, San Juan, Santiago.

Europe
Amsterdam, Antwerp, Athens, Barcelona, Belfast, Berlin, Birmingham, Bologna, Bordeaux, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Crete, Dublin, Edinburgh, Florence, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Geneva, Hamburg, Helsinki, Leeds, Lisbon, Liverpool, London, Madrid, Mallorca, Manchester, Milan, Moscow, Munich, Naples, Nice, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Reykjavik, Rome, Salzburg, Seville, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Stuttgart, Venice, Vienna, York, Zurich.

Australia
Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney.

New Zealand
Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Nelson, Queenstown, Rotura.

Asia
Bali, Bangkok, Beijing, Chiang Mai, Delhi, Goa, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Java, Kathmandu, Kolkata, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, Lombok, Macau, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Sumatra, Taipei, Tokyo.

Middle East
Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Istanbul, Tehran.

Africa
Cairo, Nairobi, Capetown, Zanzibar.

# Posted in the Travel section
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Friday, June 17, 2005

Java Snob

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 17/06/2005 17:52:00

Java has been my programming language since my first year at university (1999). Before Uni I had toyed with Basic, Turbo Pascal and VBA (Visual Basic behind Access / Excel) for VCE, but my largest programming experience was Batch files on our home computer.

I really took to Java at uni, and programmed a few things in my own time (a calculator and text editor). When I started my graduate job I was put on a Java maintenance project, which I enjoyed a lot for the first few years. Since then, I have also been toying with my shape drawing program in my spare time - which I also enjoy.

I haven't coded much Java lately, as I've been doing .NET work and recently been on a BizTalk Server course which I enjoyed thoroughly. Tonight I decided to play with my shape drawing program and try to get some work done. So I started JBuilder and couldn't start - I've been spoiled by Visual Studio, and .NET development.

JBuilder's Form Designer is shite - and wiring up event processing is tiresome. The IntelliSense was also limited compared to what I've been used to. A mate from work was saying that .NET development was very enjoyable - I'm starting to understand why.

So I've closed by JBuilder - and I'm not sure if I'm going to opening it again from home. Perhaps more Java projects at work will change my mind - but for now I think I'll be happy with .NET.

Unless there's a client that wants an MS-DOS Batch File solution

# Posted in the Technical section and tagged as: .NET, Java
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Tuesday, June 07, 2005

I've toured around the world, from London to the Bay...

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 07/06/2005 20:00:00

... or perhaps not. I saw this on another Blog and thought it was neat. Doesn't look too good for me though - I'll have to fix that one day:

Travel Profile

How Well Traveled Are You?

# Posted in the Travel section
Comments (0) | Add Comment

Thursday, April 07, 2005

ADO.NET Strongly Typed Relationships

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 07/04/2005 01:55:00
Updated by Joel Dixon at 21/09/2007 04:03:35 - added comment captcha

It's been over a month since my last blog - but that's OK - I'm sure no-one will mind!

I've decided to add a little technical advice about accessing data with Strongly Typed DataSets in ADO.NET. Reason being, I spent over an hour looking for this information before I finally tracked it down on someone's blog. After my post, it will double the amount of blogs with this information

In my ASP.NET WebService, I like to use strongly typed DataSets to access my data with ADO.NET, it's a whole lot cleaner that way. For my example, let's say we have a Customers table, and an Orders table. Customers are identified by their CustomerID, and orders by their OrderID (yes, I'm using Northwind). The Orders table also has the CustomerID that made the order (a one to many relationship). Defining the strongly typed DataSet for this in Visual Studio.NET is quite easy:

  1. Right-click your Project in the Solution Explorer and select Add > Add New Item...
  2. Select "Data Set" from the Templates list, and type the name for your item (CustomersDataSet.cs).
  3. In the Server Explorer, navigate to the Northwind database tables. Drag across the Customers and Orders tables.
  4. Select the Customers table and select Schema > Add > New Relation... from the File Menu.
  5. This is where your relationship is defined. Change the name to CustomersOrders, and change the Child element to Orders. Clicking OK will then create the relationship for you.

Now that you have the strongly typed DataSet, you can directly refer to column names. For example, instead of:

Code:

DataSet1.Tables["Customers"].Rows[0]

you can use:

Code:

DataSet1.Customers[0]

That was all good - but I wanted to look at the Orders that are assigned to a Customer (as per the relationship I added above). Most examples were telling me to do something like this:

Code:

CustomersDataSet.CustomerDataRow customer
    = myDataSet.Customers.FindCustomerByID(1);
if (customer != null)
{
  // Print out order numbers
  foreach (DataRow orderRow in
    customer.GetChildRows("CustomerOrders"))
  {
    Console.WriteLine(orderRow["OrderID"]);
  }
}

This gets the job done - but we're back to using things like orderRow["OrderID"] instead of orderRow.OrderID. The disadvantage to using GetChildRows is that it returns an array of DataRow's - not Orders. A way to achieve the above code using your strongly typed relationship is as follows:

Code:

CustomersDataSet.CustomerDataRow customer
    = myDataSet.Customers.FindCustomerByID(1);
if (customer != null)
{
  // Print out order numbers
  foreach (CustomersDataSet.OrderRow orderRow
    in customer.GetOrdersRows())
  {
    Console.WriteLine(orderRow.OrderID);
  }
}

When the relationship was created above, it added a GetOrdersRows() method on the CustomersRow object. It may not seem like much - but having the strongly typed OrderRow can help (well, it helped me).

After doing a quick search on GetOrdersRows() (to see if I had missed any examples of this) - I found a good ADO.NET tutorial. I wish I had have found that a few hours ago!

# Posted in the Technical section and tagged as: .NET
Comments (5) | Add Comment

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Vroom Vroom, sniff!

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 02/03/2005 20:19:00

I have never been a huge fan of motorsports. I've never gone to the Australian Grand Prix - even though it's held in Melbourne. I'll usually watch F1 when it's on the television, but I'd never set the VCR for it (most of my friends do). I generally like watching most sports, but I could never see the advantage of watching one corner of the race in person when I could watch it all from home if I was so interested.

But I think I may have to give it a shot next year. At lunch today I watched some of the F1 cars doing a few laps of the Melbourne Streets.

First thing I noticed, I couldn't see a thing. I had arrived a little after the start time, and it was completely packed. I couldn't see the track they were going down, even though I was about 20 meters away. I did, however, hear the cars!

As soon as the Minardi came up our section of the track, the sound was deafening and the smell was overpowering - but I quite enjoyed it. Even though I couldn't even see the car, I started to understand what the point of seeing the race was. When I got into a better position (I could actually see the car), I was amazed at how fast it was. They were probably only going half their max speed (as they were in the middle of the city), it'd be good to see them at full speed.

Perhaps I'll actually go to the race next year (or just buy some high-octane fuel to sniff).

# Posted in the General section
Comments (2) | Add Comment

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Living up to my title

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 23/02/2005 11:58:00

Yes, it's been close to two weeks since my last update. I'm only really adding this post now so that I won't have to change my title from "The rarely updated Blog" to "The very rarely updated Blog".

Been busy with wedding plans, and looking into buying a house. Also, the current project I'm working on will be finishing at the end of this week - and it's a bit of a mad rush to the finish line. I'll be happy when this is over - but who knows what I'll be going onto.

Here's an amusing Blog link - Things I hate about my flatmate. The artwork on there is nicely done as well.

# Posted in the General section
Comments (2) | Add Comment


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