I have vista and have a little rouble with acrobat reader. So I thought I’d better get the latest version. Adbobe reader 8. Its 20mb. TWENTY MEG. For crying out loud how much code do you need to display some bloody text. Twenty bloody meg.
I was wandering around the petetions site again cos some are just funny.
I found this
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Photography/
It is properly explained on his web site. I have a child and have taken photos in public places of my son, but I have had council officers approach me about my use of a camera. I told them they could bugger off, they did I was bigger then them.
I recently went to my sons school play. We could take cameras and videos, I forgot both, a sensible policy applied by a very sensible school and headmaster.
However the story detailed in this man’s web site is very worrying and indicitive of an attitude to cameras at a time when everyone has access to cameras in many formats of varying quality.
I think that a lobby from photographers is a good idea to remind people of the rights we already have.
Take a look let me know what you think.
Scott Hanselman has a post telling us about OpenDNS.
I’m all for this service. I think it sounds great, but I did raise the issue about appropriateness of their adverts. The last thing I wanted was to alter family members machines to use this and then find a particular type of advert sneaks in.
I wouldn’t normally broadcast emails to the world but I thought this was such a great response from them that it needed to be shared. I think that their default position of not being a censor is very wise, besides there are tools for this, Vista can do a great censor job for your kids.
Once the policy and checks have been completed I will be switching my DNS to them.
Simon,
You’re right… we should put up such a policy.
We’re not a censor. You can visit any valid, non-phishing you want using OpenDNS. (Note: we’ve had requests for filters on things like adult or other categories. Those may come, but they will be opt-in choices, not default features like anti-phishing).
Back to your question: the ad networks we work with (we do not, at this time, run our own) do not allow inappropriate ads. That said, I need to (a) doublecheck their exact policies and (b) understand what might get through their filters.
This isn’t something I will be able to turn around on a dime, but now it’s on my list.
Cheers,
John Roberts
I’m not a car fan. It serves a purpose A->B and thats it. I have a motorbike for my speed thrill, and danger thrill for that matter, having been thrown of the handlebars of one* gives you a constant sense of fear even now ten+ years later. So it followed that car programs don’t really do it for me.
I remember catching the odd top gear in its old format and hating it I never once got through a whole episode. I avoided it ever since.
My mistake.
I recently caught two episodes of this “new” Top Gear an hour long show, the last episode was hilarious, all the car information for the petrol heads but presented with a lighter side for anyone else.
The last one I saw launched a “Plastic Pig”** in a space shuttle type launch. This was just brilliant, it almost worked, well not in the way that a car is an adequate replacement for a re-usable spaceship, but in achieving the goal of launching and returning to earth this unusual space-ship. To see it ignite and propel a Tamworth born plastic pig into the air was spectacular, (Look for it on YouTube I bet someone put it there). This and a previous episode I saw where they tried to lay a road in 24hours and other such features and add clarkeson’s excellent and often scathing car reviews makes this a program for those of us who don’t care about the number of horses in the latest supercar makes this a must see.
So If you’ve missed this program for the last five years I cannot recommend that you take a look you will be pleasantly surprised.
*Luckily quite early in my bike riding history on a small 125 doing 20mph it hurt, I bounced off the road, kerb and finally smacked into a post.
**A Plastic Pig is the rather deferential name given to a three wheeled car called the Reliant Robin. A car once built in my home town. Imagine living in a place (in)famous for the creation of such a nationwide joke. Like any ridiculous idea it had its supporters. I’m not one of them.
I was going to write a piece on Sharepoint and SAP webparts that I had written, however I doubt I could do the topic justice when there is already a guide to doing this out there
Technical Guidance for Connecting Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 to mySAP™ ERP
This is an excellent document and covers off everything you might need to know about making SAP web parts (and what I believe are flaws especially coming from an MS background).
The key thing to remember before you start is that you need (list for sharepoint people really)
1. A SAP system to connect to
2. A SAP Market place user and password (cannot download tools without this)
3. The SAP .NET Connector, version 2 of this was really easy (ish) to use.
4. An SAP developer key, without which you are not licensed to develop, it won’t prompt for it but you should have it.
5. A Sharepoint dev system
I did not follow the guide though, I referenced it but not having SAP experience I stuck to existing BAPI’s and very simple, if somewhat useless functionality, its a demo after all.
So to start with, as a sharepoint developer I suggest you leave SAP alone to start with.
Get the SSO working, if you’ve not done this then it might present some problems. In the guide it stores the SSO credentials in SSO but also in WebPart properties, this is not something I recommend, If you have secure data store it only in credentials. I believe it was most likely done this way as Custom ToolParts can be scary, but using a custom part can ensure better security by not storing that SSO information outside of the secure SSO components. Also because you are using a toolpart you can add validation, something I achieved by calling the ExistenceCheck method on the User BOR (BAPI_USER_EXISTENCE_CHECK), this might not be the correct SAP way but it appeared to work. Examine your SSO definitions do you need group login or user login. *Update: Whilst I still think using WebPart properties as in the example is wrong, Just as bad is the toolpart, both methods end up posting the credentials over port 80 which is bad. The correct and only way is to call the GetCredentialEntryUrl() method and ensure that SSL is configured for your SSO. This does not give you the ability to validate your settings as my toolpart did but it guarentees security. If your not fussed about the very few times that those credentials are passed over http then the toolpart method I described is a better solution and the credentials are not accessible via the web part properties, whilst I havent tried to find them in the database they were not designed to be secure like credentials.
Once you have the web part working and the SSO working, work on a web service for the web part to get its data from, Displaying the data in the web parts is easy for any sharepoint developer now, just pass the credentials over the web service via SSL.
As I said earlier instead of using the guide’s example try your own. I decided to do a webpart that searched vendors (BAPI_VENDOR_FIND), this is an existing BAPI and once you understand the basics of BAPI calling (it is kinda weird MS guys) you can then just struggle getting the data out and in a sensible format and deal with errors etc in an MS way for your webpart to handle.
This post is not meant to be a guide so comes with no code, its a pointer to the guide and to hopefully point out what I think is an error in the guide regarding SSO but mainly to give you a hint of don’t blindly follow that guide as you will need ABAP skills to create the custom RFC ZIBF_OPEN_PO_NEW, stick to something already there.
However here are some videos showing the parts I wrote in operation, the data is IDES and obviously copyright of SAP
VideoOne : A web part that searches for vendors via a postback then uses AJAX and sharepoint to display the Vendor and list of PO’s
VideoTwo : Two connected web parts that searches for vendors via a postback then passes the vendor ID to the second to display the vendor and PO’s then allowed a drilldown to PO items
On occasion I like to mess with javascript. I write javascript for IE, its where I started so I’m comfortable there. But as we all know you sometimes have to make it compatible with other browsers and rightly so (to a point).
I only bothered with making things work in firefox, opera and the others can take a running jump. So last time I did anything I found the javascript debugger for firefox and installed it. It worked and it didnt (sometimes) not exactly a visual studio experience but it got the job done.
Looks like a new kid on the block though and it looks good, I haven’t had a piece of work to try it out on but it provides the functionality of a debugger, a network monitor (fiddler equivalent), and a dom interogator (IE Dev toolbar equivalent).
From first glances I like this tool, so if your in the firefox dev pit give it a whirl.
Again and again I beat my head against a brick wall cos of page lifecycle and event firing in .NET.
The amount of times I’ve made the same error.
Don’t stick DataBind calls in the bloody render method.
Two days. Two days hunting for that one, sliding bits of code about before I spotted it.
Most of .Net web is coding by convention and leads to errors like this, perhaps FxCop in 2005 could spot stupid mistakes like this, after all if it spots typos why not something more fundemental !
It’s inspiring isn’t it.
The snow is nice though.
This year I’m having a change, not sure how much of a change it will be but a change all the same. I have moved away from my beloved web development / sharepoint comfort zone into the new scarey, and sometimes archaic, world of SAP.
I will be developing SAP workflows and user exits BADI’s, BAPI’s and ABAP and lots of other things I know absolutely nothing about. So expect to see SAP things here from now on.
Or will you ? I’ve been here two and a bit weeks now, and because of all the planning required, I have no development to do yet, and because we are doing JIT training so knowledge doesnt just stagnate in your brain I have little to do, so what does a sharepoint / web developer do with his time in the early stages of SAP. Try and learn SAP from documentation designed to drive you on expensive courses and try writing web parts that connect to SAP. I managed it too. From the limited subject matter out there and the talk I had at PDC you’d think it was hard.
It is.
It is because its SAP.
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