Month: May 2011

15 bean soup recipe

1 bag “15 bean soup” mix

cook according to directions, but use these ingredients instead:

-replace half the water (and optionally all the pork) with pork stock

-replace canned tomatoes with a few shots of Huy-Fong SriRacha sauce (or try tabasco)

-add a whole lime instead of a lemon

-throw in a whole chopped union (instead of just 1 cup)

-Add chili pepper and garlic as instructed, and the contents of the little mix pack

 

This stuff feeds 14 people (or two bachelors) and costs like a buck. And tastes GREAT.

 

 

 

WPF Printing Performance and PDF

Printing in WPF has been a big thorn for me over the last few years, it just feels like you have to learn everything the hard way through extensive trial and error… and better write it down or you’ll be re-learning it again later.

One hard lesson for me has been printing a lot of vector based graphics in a particular application. Early on the data would wind up rasterizing for various reasons and creating massive rasterized data pages, which when sent to the printer would cloe things way down and create ugly printouts (someone has a case of the jaggies). Even PDF printing suffered from this, so instead of a nice lightweight PDF with some lines and text drawn on the page, it would barf out a giant file with every page represented in ugly rasterized pixels.

The first thing to make sure of if you fighting this is to make sure any element you are printing doesnt use any form of transparency (opacity). I had an element sneak back into my app recently which had text printed with a background color with opacity set to 35%. Not sure if this is the fault of WPF, PDF, or the particular Acrobat software I’m using, but even a single element with this opacity setting on a page will cause the entire page to be rasterized… not just the element itself, as one might expect.

The other side effect of this rasterization is slow printing. Even printing to a local PDF file can take over a minute PER PAGE on my high-end laptop. So if your print times seem astronomical, you’re likely running into this same issue.

I recall a number of other weird issues encountered in the past, I’ll copy them here if I can find them again. But for now, note to self: NO opacity variations.

 

Update:

I found out today another item that can cause rasterization – if you have a canvas with clipping turned on, and items hanging out beyond the edge of the canvas. Doesnt seem to always do it though, it might only occur if the items clipped by the canvas extend beyond the edge of the printed page. I experienced this again today and now I’ll have to figure out yet another workaround for it.

100 grams to lbs

100 grams is 0.22046 pounds. You’re welcome!

 

Just curious if I make this post, what would big daddy G do with this phrase? That being 100 grams to lbs, specifically.

If you found this post by searching for this phrase, I’d be curious to know what you were trying to convert for.. add a comment below (keep it family safe!) I personally did a search for it while comparing some mountain bike parts and couldnt recall just how much weight we’re talking about when shaving some ounces off here an there. And yes, I understand the irony of my trying to save a few ggrams of bike weight when I myself could stand to drop a few… kilograms?… myself 😉

 

screwturn wiki on .net 4 and extensionless urls

Screwturn wiki is (pretty) good software, but unfortunately seems to be mired in some of the older asp.net technologies. There are a LOT of moving parts under the hood, so trying to modernize it might be a challenge. I wanted to update it enough to run on .Net 4.0, and specifically to enable extensionless URL’s.. why have that silly ashx hanging off the end of each url nowdays? This has proven to be a bit of challenge due to the aformentioned many moving parts, so following is my current progress on this attempt-  the target website for this will remain nameless for now, to protect it from your prying eyes 😉

 

1. download the source version of screwturn

2. open it is visual studio 2010 and upgrade the project to .net 4.

3. when you try to compile, there’s a number of tests that fail and prevent compilation. they appear easy to fix, theyre all just parameter names that have changed, so update them to match.

4. compile and run the app. create a couple pages. notice when you go to the pages, they end in .ashx.

5. open the Core project, the Settings.cs file, and find the PageExtension propterty. edit it to return “” instead “.ashx”

6. open Core\ReverseFormatter.cs edit the Regex named PageLinkRegex to remove the \.ashx portion (verify this is needed)

7. open core\urltools.cs, RouteCurrentRequest() – change the line-

  if(ext != “ashx” && ext != “aspx”) return;

so that “ashx” is now “”

in the same method, find if(ext.Equals(“ashx”)) and change it to “”

 

It makes sense to remove the /MainPage url as well, since it is the same as / .

8. remove the static link to MainPage in /public/sidebar.cs, or just edit it out via the admin panel, find and edit the sidebar. any other places it shows up in static content can be edited this way.

9. dynamic links generated for the mainpage need to be fixed too. (I have not completed this yet, will update here when done. Add a comment if you find a quick way to do this)

 

x. You might need to backup the web.config and rename the web.release.config file to web.config instead, seems the 4.0 upgrade mixes things up a bit.

x. To enable .net 4.0, in the web.config, make sure the compilation tag has targetframework=”4.0″ and the provdierOption name=”CompilerVersion” = v4.0

x. Comment out (or delete) all the sectiongroups at the top of the web.config… these don’t like .net 4 for some reason.

x. enable “unsafe” posts of html – editing pages will blog up on save currently, due to XSS restrictions in 4.0.  Add requestValidationMode=”2.0″ to the httpRuntime tag in web.config

 

Many places in the web.config still reference 3.5 control versions, so I may try to upgrade some of these in the future, but things are running for now and that’s good enough.

 

 

Please add any feedback you have regarding this, thanks.  

 

Next episode: how to convert screwturn to mvc 3 and razor. I kid, i kid!