Comparing objects and values in javascript

Here I will go through 3 different ways of comparing values, not all of them a good idea.

The first "=", not a comparison!

The first time you start coding javascript and need to compare for instance a variable with a value you probertly make a mistake of assigning a value instead of comparing, and your code will fail to work correct.

var error = true;
if (error='true') {
  // This code will always be executed as "=" assigns a value!
  // And after the code has execuded the value of "error" will be 'true' (a string)
} else {
  // It will never enter this area
}

Equal "==", a "soft" comparison

This comparison will do conversion of the values into types which can be compared, so it will bear over for types which are not the same. An example would be:

var error = true;
if (error=='true') {
  // This code will be executed as the boolean value of "error" will be
  // converted into a string and then compared
} else {
  // Not executed
}

Strict equal "===", a "strict" comparison

With this comparison you will be sure that the to parts in the comparison have 100% equal values.

var error = true;
if (error==='true') {
  // This code will not be executed as the type is not the same
} else {
  // This area will be executed as the comparison evaluates to false.
}

Conclusion

As various ways of doing comparison exists you cannot say that any of them is the perfect comparison option. I hope that you have learned a litle more on the aspect of doing comparison in javascript.

Links

• Comparison operators at the javascript reference at Mozilla

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How do I copy my photoes from Google Picasa to Flickr?

I asked my self this question, and googling a litle lead me to a soloution: Flickr Uploader application for windows. It is free (ofcause) and works very easy! The reason why you should consider this at all is if you like for instance the way you can tag you photoes in Google Picasa – and when you then share your photoes you will have such info as tags, geo tags, descriptions inside the photoes for other people to enjoy.

Simple description (see screenshoots below)

• You ofcause need to have a (free) Yahoo identity/account and when you do you can download from http://www.flickr.com/tools/
• Having downloaded and installed Flickr Uploader you can start up your Google Picasa application
• Now you can actually just drag’n’drop directly from Google Picasa to Yahoo flickr uploader! Very easy!
• When you are done – click upload inside Yahoo flickr uploader! The rest is easy!

Nothing is perfect…

I must however admit that not every piece of information survives the transfer between Google Picasa and Yahoo flickr gallery… I was suppriced to discover that apperently the geotags from Google Picasa was not picked up by Flickr…! I would love to hear from you, if you can explain this to me…

Anyway – try it out, and if you feel like looking at my Flickr site you find it here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38942406@N00/sets/72157624659090233/

Links

• Yahoo Flickr Uploader
• Google Picasa applicaiton
• My Flickr gallery

Previous Google Picasa posts

• Merging the information about friends on facebook to your Picasa contact database
• Use Google Picasa to generate cool webgalleries using templates…
• Netsi Cycle Template for Google Picasa
• Face detection in Google Picasa 3.6

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At the time of writing only one is out there – it is “Surround in CDATA”. You may also read about that particular one here: Article on Stack Overflow: Can I define custom “surround with” templates in Visual Studio 2008?

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You do know getimage.aspx, right?

When you have a design to implement using Dynamicweb CMS and you have a list of items with images – say thumb images, Dynamicweb offers a nice utility which can ensure that the thumbs will have a given dimension. The images are cached on the server, so it is not using unnessesary resources of the server if you use the utility.

The utility can be found on any Dynamicweb soloution here:

http://[hostname]/Admin/Public/getImage.aspx

Enter the URL above and you will get a nice wizard which will dynamically produce what you need inside your templates. You can see the wizard above.

What makes things work for my needs!

To ensure that an image fits inside a container with known dimentions you need to:

• Enter the dimensions (width/height)
• Select the cropping offset: “Keep aspect ratio”

Try the utility by entering a path to an image – you have to start from “/files…”. When that is done, simply press OK and you will get a preview under the “Results” tab, as you can see below.

Using the Image URL in your templates

When you are happy with the results you should copy the “Image URL” path (highlighed with blue in the above image). The URL for my example is:

/admin/public/getimage.aspx?Image=/files/billeder/300×80.jpg&Format=jpg&Width=200&Height=100&Crop=5

If I were to use this path inside a template, I simply would replace the “/files/billeder/300×80.jpg” with a template tag like “<!--@Ecom:Product.ImageLarge.Clean—->”.

I hope this has helped you! I really find this improvement nice!

links

• Dynamicweb Templates
• Finally webdav access to dynamicweb websites
• (en-US) Release Notes, Dynamicweb 7.1.pdf

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Go download the utility: “Facebook Contacts for Picasa”

You need only do a few simple things to do the merging job. First of all you will need to download the “Facebook Contacts for Picasa” from SourceForge.

Run the utility!

When you have finished downloading the utility, simply run it. You will get the screen below:

The steps to follow inside the utility

• Get the facebook contacts simply by clicking the button “Get Facebook Contacts” and identify yourself (log in – may be nessesary).
  That will get the information about your friends from facebook and put them in the list to the left (blured in the image above).
• You then need to locate the “contacts.xml” which Picasa uses. It should be somewhere within “Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Picasa2”. I found mine here: “C:\Users\Sten\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\contacts\contacts.xml”. Be sure to make a backup of that file – the contacts.xml file.
• Press the “Get Picasa Contacts” to fill out the dropdown box to the right of “Merge With”. That dropdown will contain the local contacts which you may allready have created.
• Manually go through the list to the left – the one from facebook. The Utility may or may not have found a match. So I suggest that you go through them. This feature has however a strange behaviour! It seems that after each time you manually select a contact from the “Merge with” list, you have to save it… Hmm… It however seems to work, though not as I expected.

  I expected that going through the list and choosing which person from facebook to merge to which Picasa contact, the relation was remembered and all of the relations then saved after I had finished them all and pressed save…

You are now ready to Save the data to the Google Picasa contacts.xml file! But as I suggested above, do make a copy of the contacts.xml before saving!

If everything went okay you should now have more accurate information inside your local Google Picasa gallery! You can now tag people using those data inside your picasa library.

Links

• Use Google Picasa to generate webgalleries using templates
• Using Google Picasa to generate cool webgalleries
• Get “Facebook Contacts for Picasa” from SourceForge

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I don’t know how you feel about having tons and tons of advertisements showing at the bottom of your Windows Live Messenger client (WLM), but it annoys me. But don’t worrie help is on the way! I will give you a WLM specifik fix and a description to avoid many adds in your browser and other places.

I had an error showing up today during init of WLM, and so I let the Microsoft Visual Studio debugger start up. Inside that I could locate the address – host name – of the host which deliveres the adds.

I was now ready to follow the advice from a collegue of mine given in another context. The advice was to add an entry to the hosts file on your computer which would bind the add server hostname to 127.0.0.1. By doing that you effectively makes it impossibel for the add handling software to show any adds!

So what you need to add to do is:

• Open the “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts” file in an editor
• Add this line: 127.0.0.1 track.adform.net

The effect is that any request to “track.adform.net” will be pointing to your own computer – effectively disabling the adds!

The next step – disabling any adds inside webpages (or anywhere else) from a list of add servers.

I have at this time not gone deeper into this step, but a simpel google on “hostnames for add servers” gave me this link: Ad blocking with ad server hostnames and IP addresses. Just choose the “hosts – in host file format”. Here is a direct link to a test I made. Actually the host mentioned at the start of this post is inside the list

Happy add blocking!

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Min Toyota kontra Dynamicweb CMS

Jeg er den lykkelige ejer af en Toyota. Tidligere ejede jeg en Yaris og da den var ca. 2 år gammel modtog jeg et brev om at man havde konstateret at der kunne opstå et problem med bremserne under visse ekstreme omstændigheder. Jeg skulle bare køre ind til et selvvalgt Toyota værksted og de ville rette fejlen uden beregning. Hverken mig eller værkstedet ville blive lastet for noget i den forbindelse. Det er service!

Og nu til Dynamicweb CMS… Jeg oplever jævnligt at der opdages fejl som opstår på grund af fejl i Dynamicweb CMS. Jeg arbejder jo som sagt professionelt hos en Dynamicweb CMS Partner (Bleau A/S) og det er nok noget der i ovenstående situation med Toyota må være at betragte som at arbejde på et “autoriseret Dynamicweb værksted”. Selv om Dynamicweb CMS også selv finder fejl og retter dem uden beregning gennem hot-fixes, så er situationen fra før med fejlen på bilen i en Dynamicweb CMS verden normalt noget anderledes:

1. Brugeren (chaufføren) oplever at noget ikke fungerer i hans “bil” (hans hjemme side)
2. Han kontakter værkstedet
3. Værkstedet må bruge megen tid på at fejlfinde og bevise overfor Dynamicweb CMS support at fejlen er noget der ligger i selve Dynamicweb
4. Dynamicweb CMS anerkender måske at der er en fejl, men det medfører ikke at fejlen rettes. Fejl prioriteres naturligvis af Dynamicweb CMS.
5. Brugeren må så acceptere at der ikke kommer en løsning “sådan lige”

Som professionel konsulent er det svært

• At forklare overfor kunden at det er kundens problem.
• At kunden vil blive faktureret den tid som vi har brugt på at finde fejl i det system vi har anbefalet dem.
• At problemet ikke umiddelbart er blevet løst.
• At en løsning vil koste yderligere tid (=penge).
• At løsningen ikke nødvendigvis giver en forbedring.

Intet er fejlfrit! – men hvem skal nu betale?

Der er mange elementer i ovenstående sammenligning der kan anfægtes og en sammenligning mellem en bil og et CMS system er måske unfair. Det som jeg her forsøger at starte en diskussion om og brokker mig over er at det ikke er rimeligt at kunderne alene skal betale for noget som kan påvises er fejl i det produkt de har købt.

• Jeg ville personligt aldrig betale for reperationen hvis min fladskærm holdte op med at virke indenfor garentiperioden! Det måtte producenten betale for (gennem forhandleren).
• Jeg mener at det er i alles interesse at fejl rettes, så produktet bliver bedre.

Jeg har ikke en færdig model for hvordan man kunne løse problemet med at få dækket omkostninger ved fejl. Der er tre parter som burde dele omkostningen – brugerne, forhandlerne (partnerne) og Dynamicweb CMS. Idag er det kun de to første der betaler! Jeg tror på sigt at hverken brugere eller forhandlere kan leve med den model!

P.s: Ovenstående står for min egen personlige regning.

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The javascript below will fix that problem by redirecting the page to an URL without those two parameters. It is a simple javascript, just insert it into the HEAD section.

<script type="text/javascript">

// Dynamicweb CMS fix: Make sure that details view of news item is rendered correct

// Insert in Master page in HEAD section

// Will redirect to same URL but with any "M=News/M=NewsV2" removed

// 2010-06-29: Sten Hougaard, Bleau A/S

var loc = document.location+'';

var newLoc = loc.replace('&M=NewsV2', '').replace('&M=News', '');

if (loc!=newLoc) {

 document.location = newLoc;

}

</script>

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I read about “Soluto”

This morning I read about Soluto and watch a video on lifehacker.com. So now I have downloaded and installed the Soluto application and will reboot now to see what it finds out. Shat Soluto does is watch for instance the boot sequence of your PC, and suggestion what can be changed to improve the performance of your PC.

After the first running of Soluto

When I had installed the application I asked me if I wanted to reboot – I did – here are screenshoots of what I experiensed after the program had analyzed my PC:

Conclussion

So I found the application very cool and can reccomend it! It makes it easy to get an overview and act upon the things making your PC slow!

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The “//” (decendant-or-self) XPath operator: Can it be used relative inside a full XPath? Will it “search” from the Document top, or start where it is placed inside the XPath selector?

An example XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<people>
  <group type="frontEnd">
    <person name="Sten" />
  </group>
  <group type="backend">
    <person name="Sten" />
  </group>
</people>

The two XPaths

//person[@name='Sten'] – Returns a nodeset containing 2 elements

//group[@type="frontEnd"]//person[@name='Sten'] – Returns a nodeset containing only 1 element

So as you can see the first one looked from the root (/People) and anywhere inside the document. The second one had the “//” inside a XPath, which in made the “//” operator look from the spot it was and below.

Conclusion

Well, I just got a litle wiser as I learned that I actually can use the “//” operator inside XPath selectors.

Links

• https://infohost.nmt.edu/tcc/help/pubs/xslt/operator-sect.html

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