Sean Kearney's Blog

New Developer Rig Ordered and Shipped!

Sean Kearney — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:00:00 GMT

In my last post I wrote what I planned on building for my home developer rig.

A few changes were made.

* I went with an extra hard drive and I will run RAID 0.

* I measured the compartment in my desk where I planned on putting my case and lo and behold it was too small for the Antec case I Picked out. I had to settle on a smaller box, which will probably mean more noise, but no option here.

* I went with an nVidia card as opposed to an ATI card. Too many people I talked to had problems with them.

* Swapped out the PSU for one that is supposed to be quiter.

Here is the system I ordered. If UPS stays on track I will be having a Friday geek night!

Qty.	Image	Product Description
1		COOLER MASTER Gladiator 600 RC-600-KKN1-GP Black SECC Body ; Mesh Front bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail Model #:RC-600-KKN1-GP Item #:N82E16811119206
1		ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail Model #:P6T Deluxe V2 Item #:N82E16813131365
1		ZOTAC ZT-98GEY3P-FSR GeForce 9800 GT 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail Model #:ZT-98GEY3P-FSR Item #:N82E16814500079
1		COOLER MASTER RS-700-AMBA-D3 700W ATX12V V2.3 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply - Retail Model #:RS-700-AMBA-D3 Item #:N82E16817171037
1		Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80601920 - Retail Model #:BX80601920 Item #:N82E16819115202
1		CORSAIR XMS3 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model HX3X12G1600C9 G - Retail Model #:HX3X12G1600C9 G Item #:N82E16820145235
1		CORSAIR Flash Voyager 16GB Flash Drive (USB 2.0 Portable) Model CMFUSB2.0-16GB - Retail Model #:CMFUSB2.0-16GB Item #:N82E16820233042
1		SABRENT CRW-UINB 68-in-1 USB 2.0 Internal Card Reader w/ USB 2.0 Port supports SDHC/VISTA - Retail Model #:CRW-UINB Item #:N82E16820300608
2		Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM Model #:WD3000HLFS Item #:N82E16822136322
1		ASUS VK266H Black 25.5" 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor - Retail Model #:VK266H Item #:N82E16824236046
1		Sony Optiarc 24X DVD/CD Rewritable Drive Black SATA Model AD-7240S-0B - OEM Model #:AD-7240S-0B Item #:N82E16827118030
1		COOLER MASTER V8 RR-UV8-XBU1-GP 120mm Rifle CPU Cooler - Retail Model #:RR-UV8-XBU1-GP Item #:N82E16835103055

New Home PC / Developer Rig

Sean Kearney — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:45:00 GMT

In honor of Windows 7, and my increasing frustration with my 4 year old DELL computer, I figured I would pony up and build myself a nice developer rig. Even though it is my home computer my typical usage is work related; Visual Studio(s), SQL Server, IIS, Virtual Machines, etc... My wife's typical usage is email and web browsing. We are not gamers at all; not even solitaire! The most graphic intense application I use would be Google Earth.

I was initially thinking RAID 0 15K rpm SAS drives with the new ASUS MB, but that bumped my cost up way too much. Plus, the performance benefit of RAID 0 doesn't outway the issue of losing one drive loses all data factor. So I decided to go with a single 300GB 10K RPM SATA drive. I don't need much in the way of disk space since all music, video, doc's, etc... are sitting on a file server (that needs to be upgraded).

The last PC I made was about 7 years ago. It was a beast of a machine with Dual SCSI CD drives and a DVD drive. Does one really need more than one optical drive these days? I don't remember the last time I needed to duplicate a disc.

Here is what my initial thoughts are. Starred rows are the upgraded components that I am not sure are worth it for my usage. This doesn't include monitors, which I desperately need, but will be holding off on.

Any comments would be appreciated. I want to get this project rolling ASAP!

Motherboard	ASUS P6T Deluxe V2	$290
RAM	CORSAIR XMS3 12GB	$259
Video	Sapphire HD 4770 512 MB	$109
HDD	Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000 RPM	$230
DVD	Sony Optiarc DVD/CD Burner	$30
Card Reader	SABRENT CRW-UINB 68-in-1 USB	$13
* CPU	i7-950	$570
- CPU	Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz	$270
CPU Cooler	COOLER MASTER V8	$55
- Case/PSU	Antec Sonata III 500	$110
* Case	Antec P183	$155
* Extra Fan	Antec 75003 120mm Case Fan	$13
* PSU	Antec earthwatts EA500 500W	$70

	"Cheap"	$1,366
	Expensive	$1,739

Harvesting data from a Coveo index

Sean Kearney — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:51:00 GMT

I’ve been working peripherally with Coveo for the past couple years now. It hasn’t been until recently that I’ve actually needed to start diving into the “API” to try and harvest the data. This, however, proved to be more difficult than one would expect from a Search product!

You see, Coveo wrote a lot of fancy controls (complete with AJAXy functions) that work intimately with their index. They have an “interface editor” that is supposed to help you customize the way these controls function and look. In a perfect world you will tailor your interface using this editor, drop a single user control on your page and you are up and running. However, there are times when these stock controls just don’t cut it; you will either want to change the look, or function, to drastically to be handled with the interface editor. I found myself in such a position.

Coveo lists a few APIs in its online help section (Search Interface API, Converter API, Connector API, and Security API), but none of them tell you how to get access to the raw data!

Before Coveo I was using Lucene for various projects and it had a decent API that you can use to get access to your search results. You were then responsible for rendering these results. This is what I would have expected in terms of an API from Coveo. The Coveo Search Interface API is nothing more than a collection of the aforementioned ASP.NET controls that you can try to use in your Interface. I wasn’t able to find any samples about how to get my data with some API calls, there was however, some MSDN style class documentation.

After some playing around I was able to perform a search using the following code. You need to specify the Collection ID you want to search on as well as the Query to perform. The results will then be populated into the resultArray object. There are many parameters you can set on the SearchBuilder object, which you can read about in the doc. This code will be used in an upcoming post about how to write an autocomplete text box with jQuery and Coveo.

using Coveo.CES.Web.Search;
using Coveo.CES.Web.Search.Controls;
using Coveo.CES.Web.Search.Providers;

// ....

ICESSearchProvider provider = SearchUtilities.CreateDefaultSearchProvider();
SearchBuilder builder = new SearchBuilder();
builder.AddCollection(1234); // add your collection id here
builder.Provider = provider;
builder.ExpandQuery = true;
builder.RetrieveFirstSentences = false;
builder.ExcerptSize = 0;
builder.FilterDuplicates = true;
builder.AddBasicEx pres sion("Search for Me");

if (builder.ExecuteQuery)
{
    QueryWrapper newQueryWrapper = QueryWrapperFactory.GetNewQueryWrapper(builder);

    int totalResults = newQueryWrapper.TotalCount;
    ICESResult[] resultArray = newQueryWrapper.GetResults(0, 100);
}

Coveo with Sitecore Media

Sean Kearney — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:27:00 GMT

Out of the box, Coveo does a pretty good job of crawling your website and providing search capabilities. In this particular installation we aren't using the "Sitecore connector" we are simply letting coveo do its thing walking the site. We encountered an issue where Sitecore media library items, mainly PDF files, were not making it into the index. We figured it must be a filter of some sort blocking access to it and this proved to be the case.

Sitecore media (by default) serves media library items with a generic handler extension of '.ashx' and Coveo is configured to ignore all unknown filetypes. What you need to do is go to the "Document Types" tab of your index and add a type for .ashx files. I simply called it "Media Library" and entered in the extension of '.ashx' and left all options as the default. I rebuilt the index and we were all set.

Sitecore FieldRenderer Control and OverrideFieldValue

Sean Kearney — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:28:00 GMT

The FieldRenderer Control (Sitecore.Web.UI.WebControls.FieldRenderer) has a method called OverrideFieldValue that takes a string and is supposed to be shown instead of the real fields value, but it doesn't work.

It seems a fix would be to add in a new pipline that accounts for this preset value.

Here's the code:

public class GetOverriddenFieldValue
    {
        // Methods
        public void Process(RenderFieldArgs args)
        {
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");

            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(args.FieldValue))
                args.Result.FirstPart = args.FieldValue;
            else
                args.Result.FirstPart = args.Item[args.FieldName];
        }
    }

You then need to drop this in the Pipline in the web.config file so that we can modify the value on the way out.

Look for the following node:

<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.RenderField.AddBeforeAndAfterValues, Sitecore.Kernel" />

Now add the following above that:

<processor type="Your.Namespace.GetOverriddenFieldValue, Your.Assembly" />

The bug has been logged with Sitecore so hopefully they release an official patch.

Editors, Sitecore, and SEO

Sean Kearney — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:32:00 GMT

Editors (and some sysadmins) that have been around IIS web sites for a few years seem to have a little trouble grasping what Sitecore can do for them. More specifically, they have trouble grasping what it is they don't need to do anymore!

In the purest sense, file based web sites running on IIS serve up the HTML from... you guessed it. Files. These files are typically (and hopefully) organized in folders and there is usually a "default document" whether it be default.htm, index.asp, home.aspx, etc... With Sitecore the concept of folders and default documents goes right out the window. Every item in the site tree can be a page including the "folders!" This can make for a very search engine friendly site.

With traditional web sites there can be many urls to get to the same content. For instance. http://example.com/Products/Default.aspx and http://example.com/Products are the same to us programmers, but to a search engine they are different! IIS is configured so that if a request comes in to http://example.com/Products/ it will look at the file system try to find a preconfigured default document. In this case, it locates the default.aspx file and serves up the content.

If we were implementing this system in Sitecore we would configure the system such that "Products" isn't a plain 'ole folder; we make"Products" a page, which can have child pages! This will result in urls like:
http://example.com/Products.aspx
http://example.com/Products/Widget.aspx

Taking this one step further... Sitecore 6 + IIS7 support turning off the .aspx extension in its urls! This would generate urls that look like:
http://example.com/Products
http://example.com/Products/Widget

In order to disable .aspx extensions for Sitecore 6 sites running in IIS7:
1. Search for "addAspxExtension" in the web.config and set it to false.
2. Search for "<System.WebServer>/<Modules>" node in web.config and add an attribute runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"

Moved Domain Name

Sean Kearney — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:01:00 GMT

Almost two years after I thought about phasing out my online moniker I have done it. I have officially moved the carknee.com domain to seankearney.com. Redirects are in place and there shouldn't be any noticable change for the few people that read this site. The Feedburner feed is unchanged and will remain unchanged for the near future. Maybe at some point I will move to rss.seankearney.com, but not yet.

Photo Management and Backup

Sean Kearney — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:54:00 GMT

This is a follow up post to "Photo Management" on how I am starting to organize my digital images. After looking around at some of my options (Picasa, Adobe products, buying an iMac, …) I have decided to take the cheap way out. Here is my current workflow, which is a work in progress.

I pull the images from my camera manually and dump them to a temp directory and rename the files from the standard IMG_9753.jpg to the date they were taken on. I then create new directories on my NAS for the Year\Month\[Event|Description] as in “H:\Media\Pictures\2008\11\Party”. I move the files to their new homes on the NAS and fire up Picasa. Once in Picasa I go and “Tag” the images with the people in the picture and any other pertanent info. My final step is to backup my media to Amazon S3.

Maybe I am showing my age a bit, but I have a an issue venturing to far from the old 8.3 DOS file names so I chose the format of yyyy-mm-dd#hh-mm-ss.jpg. In order to do this little task I found a decent piece of software called called AmoK Exif Sorter. The program worked so well I decided to go back and rename ALL my images going back to 2004, which is when I got my first digital camera that stored date/time in the Exif data.

Overall I use Picasa at a very high level. I simply tag, view, and upload my photos using it and that is it! Picasa provides some import and file rename functions, but they weren’t working they I would have liked. I am starting to see that the more work you put in the bigger the benefit you will get out of it though. I spent an hour tagging all the images taken of my son since August and the search capabilities of Picasa work great!

I still have some pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit so well, but this will be a good starting point. I am currently using a Linksys NSLU2 with a USB drive for my NAS. Ideally this will be upgraded to something else, I just can’t decide what yet (ReadyNas, Windows home server, etc…). I failed to mention that I manually backup my single drive NAS to RAID 1 drives on my development server in my home, but I am going to give the Microsoft SyncToy a try for this task. The Amazon S3 backup is extremely important! Every important file you own, not just images, should be backed up offsite! I came close to learning the hardway.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Sitecore Diagrams Part 2

Sean Kearney — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:54:00 GMT

We have been doing some pretty fun work with Sitecore 6 here at Hedgehog Development... I started doing some work with Sitecore Template Diagrams a while back and I got to talking with some colleagues and we decided to take this to another level. While I can't get into the specifics (just yet) about the entire project I can show you the diagrams being generated!

The previous version of the diagrams were simply jpg files being generated on the web server. While they were useful for seeing quick representations of your templates, it wasn't too interactive. This new version is tied to the serialization of items in Sitecore and therefore allows you to work outside of a Sitecore context. It is a Windows user control with the ability to move the items around and the future possibility of editing, updating, etc...

This particular screen shot is showing Sitecore template items of sample web site. As you can see we are showing some basic properties of the item as well as building up the sections and fields of the template. We can also enable showing standard values as well as non-template items (content) however, the graphs aren't as much fun.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what is happening here. As soon as I get clearance I will share more.

Photo Management

Sean Kearney — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:07:00 GMT

I am running into a problem. I have never been much of a picture taking kind of guy... that is, until I got a dog and a son. Now I am snapping pictures like a mad man with my Canon Xsi and amassing thousands of pictures named IMG_9321.jpg. I need help!!!!

I have my photos organized in a X:\[year]\[month]\[event] folder structure, but as time goes on I am forgetting what happened when. When my cat loving friends come over, I want to show them a picture of Wilson eating the neighbors cat, but I can never find it. (joke)

I had tried Picasa in the past and it looked promising. I am tempted to get the latest version and give it another shot, but I am wondering what my other options are. I did a little looking around and then started thinking... why not get a mac? Did I really just think that?

I will surely try the free Picasa before jumping ship and spending $2k plus on a macbook pro, but that macbook may come in handy for, say, trying .net development?

It's a sad day for DMB fans

Sean Kearney — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:33:00 GMT

What sad news. LeRoi Moore, The Dave Matthews Band saxophonist has died.

I have been a DMB fan since the mid ninetees when they first broke out and to be honest, they were all I listened to for many, MANY, years. I have slowly began to venture away from them over the last couple years, but to this day DMB rules my iPod. Being a sax player (although I haven't touched an axe in years) LeRoi was my favorite musician in the band. I have seen them in concert a few times and LeRoi's solos were always something to look forward to.

"LeRoi Moore on the saxophone"... no more. Sad.

Upgraded Digital DJ Pool

Sean Kearney — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:18:00 GMT

DigitalDJPool.com is the online equivalent of a "record pool" more commonly known now as a "Digital Pool." For those who aren't aware, a record pool is a source for DJ's to get promotional music from record labels for use in clubs/radio/etc... The record labels provide the music to "the pool" and the pool can then provide feedback to the label. Now that MP3's are being used more than vinyl, DigitalDJPool.com provides DJ's with promotional MP3's rather than shipping crates of records!

The new site has streamlined some of the major issues members have reported in the past:

New, simpler, rating system
Longer previews
Grouped tracks
and more

DigitalDJPool.com has been around for a few years now and it was due for a major overhaul! The site was originaly powered on the Community Server 1.0 platform and has been upgraded to most of the major CS release up to now. As of now it is running on Community Server 2007.1. If you check out the site you will notice that it isn't using much of Community Server's features and you are correct. As the site has grown we realized that the end users want to download music, not blog or participate in other community oriented things. We weren't ready to jump ship on CS with this release, but it is the most likely scenario. We have a professional license, but with the never ending increase in license costs it doesn't seem like a good path to continue down.

iPhone Part Deux

Sean Kearney — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:02:00 GMT

This isn't an iPhone review blog post. There have been hundreds in the last hour since it was announced.

Wow. It has been about 16 months since the I first wrote about the iPhone coming out; I still don't have one. I've read the reviews, played with it, and liked it, but as I wrote, I wasn't going to spend $400+ on a phone. For $199 (maybe cheaper with a 2 year contract) I'll take two please. For $200 you get a fully capable web browser, pocket GPS, email, camera, yada, yada, yada, and, oh yea. a phone too!

July 11th I will finally get rid of my Razr!

Sitecore Template Diagrams

Sean Kearney — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:00:00 GMT

With Sitecore templates, unlike C#, you are allowed to inherit from multiple bases. This allows Sitecore developers to be extremely flexible in their implementations, but as with most applications, flexibility adds complexity.

My current Sitecore project has hundreds of templates, inheriting from upwards of five base templates, with up to 6 levels of inheritance! On a single person "team" managing these templates and their inheritance might be doable, but once you have five developers adding or changing templates, fields, sections, bases, etc... it can get out of control and hard to manage really fast! What we needed was the equivalent of a class diagram to lay out or templates and their hierarchy.

Using some good 'ole graph theory -- and some assemblies found on the net -- I now can look at template diagrams like this:

Each box represents a Sitecore template.
The "Number:" can be ignored
The Text at the top is the name of the template
The 2nd row of Text, which isn't indented, is the field section
The indented row of text is the field name

So, the "Highway Marker" template has the following fields:

Color
Text
Side.Height
Side.Length
Number of Sides

Obviously, I can not share the actual template structure of my current project, and this is an extremely trivial example. If you want to see what can be generated from your complex structure drop me an email.

Sorry, but I can not share the code either.

My life will be forever different!!!

Sean Kearney — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

So, in my last post title, "My life may be forever different," I shared with you that I am getting a dog. I did get the dog, and his name is Wilson. Has my life been changed, absolutely. Having Wilson has been a fun experience with its doses of pain and adjustment. But, I digress, this post isn't about Wilson and how my life has changed. This post is about how my life will surely change...

My wife and I are expecting to be parents this year.

Woo Hoo