IT Werkz Sometimes

Got a very wobbly version of my resume up on the net with the help of Dreamweaver CS3 and have just about made it look the same as the Word version. Suppose I shouldn’t complain about its shakyness as I’ve only been using Dreamweaver for a week, in anger, and it is a big mutha of an application.

The HTML side is quite straightforward but the CSS side is complex with seemingly 50 ways to do anything. If a DW professional looked at the page they’d laugh as it needs so much tidying up, which I’ll do in the next few weeks as I get to know the app better.

The app I was testing and that was finally signed off to go live 6 weeks ago has returned with a vengeance. When it was put live it failed. There was an SQL Server issue. Odd as it worked in pre-prod OK. Since then someone’s been hacking away at it to sort the SQL Server issue and finally gave the app a clean bill of health. The PM then wanted me to have another look at it. I wasn’t keen as I’d made a point of blocking the darn thing from memory. Had a go at it and it failed all over the shop with various errors. This was not what was wanted. They were hoping for more of a rubber stamping exercise. Sorry sunshine, no can do. Sent off a list of crashes which resulted in a meeting of 4 of us to discuss them. This was going to be one of those meetings where the app is held up to a light in the hope that an angle can be found where it looks perfect. Well they tried but no angle could be found.

Eventually it was decided that I would rerun the tests with specific data and the same data would be used to test the app in live (Thought it hadn’t gone live. Ed) and also in the test environment but on an XP PC rather than Vista which we and the users use. This was getting desperate but if it ran OK on XP then someone could blame Microsoft even though it is our responsibility to make our own apps Vista compatible.

Everyone ran their tests and the first to report back was the XP tester and he had found two issues and they were different to those I had found. Also out of the issues I had found three of them had disappeared and the final issue, which I had only experienced with one test case, happened in five test cases.

If any application needs rewriting it’s this one.

My resume, which I had seriously rewritten recently and which needed to be displayed with the same look on my own domain’s web site, needed to be created in Dreamweaver and uploaded. I have my own domain but the company that provides me with that domain I don’t actually have any web space with but instead I use the web space provided by my ISP (Confusing or what. Ed).

How it works is that anyone that goes to my domain is forwarded to my ISP’s provided web space. For instance if anyone went to www.johnsmith.com they would be routed to and displayed page www.isp.com/johnsmith/index.htm. I checked my own domain’s URL to see what was displayed and it was my old resume that was on my web space hosted by my old ISP, which we stopped using a year ago.

I could try and phone them and get them to lose my old web space but I wasn’t sure how easy that would be bearing in mind that I was likely to get put through to a very confused call centre in another country. To stop the old resume being displayed I pointed my own domain’s URL at my web space with the current ISP, and finding that wasn’t easy. I set that up and then when I went to www.johnsmith.com I was displayed a default web page displayed by my current ISP. The default web page was displayed because I hadn’t yet uploaded a page to my web space.

I started Dreamweaver CS3, set up a site and told it about my current IPS’s web space, username and password. Created a ‘site under maintenance’ web site and attached a picture to it and uploaded it from within DW to the web space. On the 2nd attempt it worked. Dunno why it didn’t work the first time, just nothing happened. My other PC was showing the web space with the current default page. Hit F5 on that PC to refresh the page and, yippee, it showed my ‘site under maintenance’ web site with the picture.

Flushed with that success I thought I’d use Synctoy v2 to synchronise my iTunesmusic folder with another drive. My old iTunesmusic folder was on my XP PC and iTunes on that had been painful for several months as it kept showing missing music and podcasts, not that they were actually missing. I think this was probably an XP problem dealing with 40,000 files. Having moved iTunesmusic with its tracks, movies, podcasts and applications from the XP to the Vista PC, and it working for the last month, I’ve started uninstalling non-essential stuff on the XP PC. I had already uninstalled iTunes and the music folder was on its own 450gig USB drive so I formatted that and plugged that drive into the Vista PC with no problems. Now I had an empty drive to backup my iTunesmusic folder with Synctoy.

Downloaded Synctoy and let it install itself and the setup stalled. In fact the setup failed so badly I had to reboot Vista. Except it wouldn’t reboot, except in a restore mode. I ran the restore, which worked and retried installing Synctoy and this time it worked OK. Started it up and created a couple of folder pairs to sync. The first folder pair didn’t contain much data so ran that which sync’d ok. Started the 2nd folder pair, which was the iTunesmusic folder and that started OK and so far has sync’d 12,000 files. Couple more days to go.

Installed Coldfusion MX7 on Vista successfully.

It even started up but that is the limit of my testing. Dreamweaver 8 also installed OK and ran. Macromedia Fireworks installed but an odd Vista message was displayed stating that due to an incompatibility during the install process that the color system was changing to Vista Home Basic, from Home Premium. Interesting.  

Microsoft Expressions, a Dreamweaver like app, needless to say installed ok. And Apache 2.2.4 said it installed OK but was lying. I was displayed at least one message stating that there was an error.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition which went on OK but does come with some baggage called SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. The installation of that came a cropper and gave out some messages about compatibility and stopped installing though staying within the setup process.

There were some patches to download. Downloaded the first 35mb patch (you call a 35mb file a patch? Ed) but it got stuck and abandoned the install and then displayed a message that there was another SQL Server installation running.

True, that was the original install of SQL Server which when it realised that patches were needed helpfully paused the install so that the patches could be downloaded and installed. They never tested that that’s for sure. Exited out of the SQL Server setup reran the first patch which went OK and then downloaded the second patch which was also installed OK.

Quote of the day

‘The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining’ John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)