John Croson's Blog Home

Does anyone actually do this? Well, here are my wife and I waiting for our son after school on Monday. He loves to unwind on the playground, so we gave him about 30 minutes to burn more of the day off.

Image via Wikipedia This error was giving me fits today. Thought I had my Oracle connection string all setup correctly, since I'd already used it for a GridView control. Thinking I could just copy/paste a SqlDataSource command down for another couple of controls, it should have been a snap... But I kept getting these System.ArgumentException errors pointing me to my web.config!!!! WTH??? Turns out I forgot ONE parameter in my SqlDataSource object: ProviderName="<%$ ConnectionStrings:MyWebConfigDsn.ProviderName %>" Voila, all is well in the world.

Image via Wikipedia After reading numerous articles relating to the AutoCompleteExtender, I was able to use CSS to set the overflow property of the ul that comprises the drop-down selector to get the browser to render a vertical scroll bar , making it easier to look through a long list. My struggle was to get the list to shrink backup up after the item was selected and not sit on top of other elements below. I tried using javascript on the OnClientItemSelected event of the extender to set the ul to a low zIndex, but this only partially succeeded since the ul would never produce an event I could find to bring it back to the top of all elements on subsequent picks. I also tried setting the height on the fly, but only ended up with the same thing as before, no event to expand it back out again. Then I found a couple of clues on the internet that pointed to using the Animations XML beyond what I was using it for, which was simply to add 'glitz' to the picker. ...

My sister Elizabeth Croson was diagnosed with PPMS (Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis ) several years ago. Before the disease robbed her of most of the things we take for granted, she enjoyed writing among other things. Here is one of a few stories I'll be posting. YOU KNEW THIS WHEN YOU MARRIED ME Four years ago on November 4th I met, who is now my husband Curtis. It was a cold and rainy afternoon, 12:37 to be exact. My fiancée, at the time, and I had driven down to Arkansas to witness the joyous event of my cousin's wedding. I was the maid of honor. I still have yet to understand why it is considered such an "honor ". The utter chaos and confusion one must endure is anything but an honor, but I willingly refrained from making my cousin's day unhappy and shut my mouth. When we arrived in Arkansas , we met with Eric the future hubby, and some of his friends that had driven down to be apart of the festivities. Curtis being Eric's best friend and bes...

My sister Elizabeth Croson was diagnosed with PPMS (Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis ) several years ago. Before the disease robbed her of most of the things we take for granted, she enjoyed writing among other things. Here is one of a few stories I'll be posting. Mistaken Identidream June and George were married on a beautiful day in June 1956. They dated for roughly 6 months before George, in his clumsy yet endearing way, proposed. The prenuptials took place in a small church in Fresno, California where they both resided. The first year went very well, and they became comfortable with each others good habits as well as bad. Being a new bride, June looked to her friends for advice and an understanding ear. She had been concerned about George and spoke with her dearest friend, Janet. "He works sometimes, 12 hours a day. This just can't be good for him. When he gets home at night he's so exhausted he can hardly finish his supper!" June explained, ...

Back in 2005 when I started work at a Milwaukee area technology consulting company I was asked to develop a kiosk system that could automatically copy images from a digital storage card to a CD . Image via Wikipedia The business idea from our customers perspective was to provide an iMac G4 with a handfull of cheap waterproof digital cameras to a water park free. The water park would then provide a camera to their customer during their stay, and when they returned the camera they would have the option to purchase a branded CD of all of their pictures for $20. The problem was that even though the iMac was easy to use, staff still had issues at times with dragging the images to the proper template folder for burning the project to CD. That's where I came in. I started to research the needs and available GNU projects that could do what we needed: Automount BashBurn Festival We spec'd out a Shuttle Box and had one purchased for testing. My first distro chosen was SuSE...