The Bear Developer

Chap Timeline: Changing the Background of Given Dates

2014-10-07T14:38:00.001+08:00

Using the awesome Chap Timeline control I needed to change the background of given dates not in the timeline area but in the timeline scale.

Based on the implementation by GitHub user Auwnch, I managed to change it from highlighting areas in the timeline to highlighting areas in the scale.

See his implementation here https://github.com/auwnch/chap-links-library-addition/blob/master/example29_date_class_names.html

The conversation lives here: https://github.com/almende/chap-links-library/issues/132

Set my "top" to 0 when the scale is on top.
Set height to 50px (which is the height of the scale)
Also had to set the z-index to -1 for those background colour classes so that it sits neatly behind the labels.

This allows me to use Chap Timeline to shade/highlight the background of dates in the scale

Hopefully this image below makes sense.

Optus & NFC Payments on the Nokia Lumia 930

2014-07-15T13:42:00.002+08:00

Another feature that seems more like a myth is the lack of "PayPass" or "PayWave" ability using the NFC technology. Another sad strike for the Nokia Lumia 930 running Windows Phone 8.1.

Optus doesn't advertise anything about offering a new secure SIM card that allows this to occur (except for a press statement from 2012 when they were thinking of giving it a go).

My bank doesn't have anything specific on it either.

I am able to use the Wallet app on the phone to add in my MasterCard... but that is as far as I can get. I wonder what will happen if I just walk up to a payment terminal and hover it around the NFC area?

Apps I have to Learn to Live WIthout in Windows Phone 8.1 (Nokia Lumia 930)

2014-07-15T09:51:00.000+08:00

Just a list of apps that I relied on with my iPhone that I will need to learn to go without on my new Nokia Lumia 930 running Windows 8.1

A lot of these hopefully have a native app in the works. In the mean time, I know for a fact that a lot of them don't have mobile-friendly interfaces that I can get away with in using the mobile browser.

In terms of a device/platform deal-breaker... this is as real as it gets

Social

Snapchat
HipChat (official)
Instagram (non-beta)

News

Flipboard

Finance

Storage

Productivity

Health & Fitness

RunKeeper

Others

No Pebble watch support
No Chromecast support
No Apple Remote support (obviously)
Google Authenticator

Oh and on the subject of ToDo lists... I wish something awesome existed on the phone. The iPhone Reminder app was great and it worked well with multiple Exchange/Office 365 lists. A third party one, such as Wunderlist would have been amazing but sadly there is no official app.

Can't Copy Text Messages from iPhone to Nokia Lumia 930

2014-07-15T07:56:00.001+08:00

I've been trying to figure out how to copy text messages from my iPhone 5 running iOS7 to the latest Nokia Lumia 930 running Windows 8.1

Unfortunately, to add to my issues of moving from my iPhone 5 running iOS7 to the new Nokia Lumia 930 running Windows 8.1 is that I cant get the text messages to copy across. This one really let me down after reading that it was possible using the Nokia "Transfer My Data" app along with bluetooth.

Unfortunately... the whole thing is a scam.
Nokia's Transfer my Data app now supports text message transfer from iOS and Android

The iPhone from the 4 days and iOS6 should be able to support the MAP bluetooth profile which allows for text message access.

In fact, the only way I could get "Text messages" to even show (with 0 found) was to go into the paired Windows Phone on my iPhone so I could turn on"Show Notifications". Only "Sync Contacts" was on by default.

The following is what I see:

Move iCloud Contacts into Office365/Exchange for Windows Phone

2014-07-14T22:47:00.001+08:00

I am lucky enough to host my personal e-mail and calendar within Exchange using Office 365. Unfortunately all of my contacts were saved on my iPhone within iCloud. This had to change with my migration from the iPhone to a Nokia Lumia 930 running Windows Phone 8.

First thing first - there are two ways to do this. If you simply want to save them locally on your phone (in Outlook on your Windows Phone) then you can use the Nokia Transfer My Data app to do it. If you want to get them into exchange... then this is the guide for you.

Export Your Contacts to vCard

Log into iCloud and open up your contacts
Select all of your contacts using CTRL + A
Click on the cog in the bottom left and 'Export to vCard...'

Convert vCard to CSV

Sadly this step is required. Outlook does not allow you to import a vCard file that contains multiple vCards. Horrible... I know.

Follow this guide to figure this one out
http://www.howtogeek.com/175778/how-to-import-contacts-into-and-export-contacts-from-the-windows-contacts-folder/

Import CSV Into Outlook

This is as simple as importing the new CSV and making sure all the fields map up. Once these have been imported into your Exchange contact folder, you should see them popping up on your phone (and other exchange-connected devices) within minutes.

Check out this guide to get stepped through this process
http://www.howtogeek.com/175795/how-to-import-multiple-contacts-into-outlook-2013-from-a-single-vcard-.vcf-file/

Switching from iPhone 5 to Nokia Lumia 930

2014-07-14T22:37:00.000+08:00

So I have decided to do something absolutely crazy. I've decided to move on from my iPhone 5 and try to use the new Nokia Lumia 930 as my every-day smart phone.

I stayed with Optus - they haven't done anything wrong by me over the past 6 years. It is a $60/month business plan with unlimited voice and text. Only 2GB of data - which unfortunately seems to be the way the plans "getcha" these days. Phone repayments are only an extra $9/month.

My immediate thoughts around the screen is that the clarity is fantastic, the brightness is just right, and the size is the 5" that I wish the iPhone always was.

My immediate regrets? Don't expect a teenager, elderly person, or a general technology illiterate to be able to pick this up and start using it. Things are hidden. Menus can be intricate. I'm guessing it will take me a while to find where everything is. It makes me realise that the UI/UX that goes into iOS is simply amazing.

The other regret is around the lack of apps. There are some that I use quite often that I won't be able to use, unfortunately. I'm hoping that the bigger screen means that I won't mind using the browser version. I mean, come on, Instagram is some boring ol' Beta !

I'm going to try and document some of the bits and pieces that annoy me and the ways I migrated my life across to the new Nokia. Wish me luck.

ASP MVC Bundling - Fix CSS relative paths to images

2014-04-30T10:12:00.004+08:00

Bundling in ASP MVC 4 and 5 is an awesome feature that allows the framework to clump together all the resources that a page needs in a neat minified manner.

One of the issues you start to get when you begin to see when you create these virtual "bundle" URLs for you to access the particular bundles you need is that relative references will break. In the CSS files, for example Bootstrap 2 or jQuery DataTables, there are usually relative references to icons and such. Bundling will break them.

MVC4 has a fix for this that will automatically update the relative paths within the bundled CSS documents so that the images are rendered correctly. All you need to do is use the CssRewriteUrlTransform class when you "include" a CSS file to your bundle.

Example:

            bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/Content/jquery-datatables/styles")
                            .Include("~/Content/jquery-datatables/css/jquery.dataTables.css", new CssRewriteUrlTransform())
                            .Include("~/Content/jquery-datatables/css/dataTables.colVis.css")
                            .Include("~/Content/jquery-datatables/css/dataTables.tableTools.css"));

Setup NAS Drive Mount in Ubuntu

2013-05-15T19:06:00.001+08:00

Essentially what I want to do is mount my Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive to a folder in my filesystem. It doesn't have to be a NAS drive as this technique I have found to work with Windows shares too. For this I am using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I've used this same technique in Ubuntu 10 and 11 over the years also.

The reason? I want SABnzbd+ to copy downloaded files straight to a NAS drive instead of keeping them on my Usenet downloader VM that I have running.

If you only want a temporary mount and don't want it hanging around permanently then check out this little guide I put together.

My assumptions here is that you have guest access to the network shares (ie, don't require a Username and Password).

Here it goes...

1. Ensure that you have SMBFS installed. Although I've read it's outdated - it works.

sudo apt-get install smbfs

2. Create a directory where your mount can be accessed. I happen to use "/mnt" however you can also use "/media"

sudo mkdir /mnt/movies

3. Edit your FSTab file so we can add in the mount

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

4. Add a new line to represent your new mount

//<IP-or-domain-name>/<share-name> <your mount location locally> cifs auto,uid=<linux-user>,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0775,dir_mode=0775 0 0

In context:

//192.168.0.60/Media/Movies /mnt/movies cifs auto,uid=myuser,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0775,dir_mode=0775 0 0

5. Time to test it all out! Execute a command to create your new mount and deal with any errors if they pop up.

sudo mount -a

Quick and easy way to get a network share accessible via the filesystem in Ubuntu. Let me know if you have any other ways of doing it

Temp Mount NAS Drive in Ubuntu

2013-03-11T23:26:00.002+08:00

I needed to mount a NAS drive in Ubuntu so that it could be accessible via the file system. It was only temporary. If you want to do something permanent then try this guide here that I wrote.

First thing I had to do was install Samba

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Then all I had to do was run this command (which can also be done in a boot script)

sudo mount -t smbfs //<NAS-IP-Address>/<optional-dir-on-nas> /mnt/<new-folder-name> -o rw

An example of how I used it:

sudo mount -t smbfs //192.168.0.10/movies /mnt/mymovies -o rw

Reset Team CIty 7 Password on Windows

2013-02-18T09:03:00.001+08:00

I installed Team City 7 on Windows using the .exe installer option.
Sadly I forgot my password after leaving this on hold for a few weeks.

To reset it all I had to do was run a simple command in a prompt after stopping the Team City Windows Service.

Change into the directory where Team City is installed (C:\TeamCity was mine)

[TC-Install-Dir]\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\lib

Execute the following command. Replace "admin" with your username and put your new password at the end.

..\..\..\..\jre\bin\java -cp server.jar;common-api.jar;commons-codec-1.3.jar;util.jar;hsqldb.jar ChangePassword admin mynewpassword12

Now after restarting the Windows Service you should be able to log in!

403 Forbidden for CSS Bundles in ASP MVC on Azure

2013-02-16T00:54:00.001+08:00

IISExpress has been giving me a false positive when using the bundling feature of ASP MVC 4. It turns out that if the name of your bundle matches the path in the file system then IIS on Azure will throw the 403 Forbidden error. This was happening with my CSS.

My CSS stylesheets that I was using for my web application were stored in the following location within the MVC project:

/Content/css

In BundleConfig.cs I had the following:

            bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/Content/css").Include(
                "~/Content/css/bootstrap.css",
                "~/Content/css/bootstrap-responsive.css",
                "~/Content/css/site.css"));

I really actually had to use:

             bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/Styles/css").Include(
                "~/Content/css/bootstrap.css",
                "~/Content/css/bootstrap-responsive.css",
                "~/Content/css/site.css"));

I also had to update the reference to my CSS Style bundle in _Layout.cshtml

@Styles.Render("~/Styles/css")

This was one of those "GOTCHA" moments that thankfully some digging into some forum threads managed to solve. The name of the bundle turns into a virtual directory that the browser can request from. If it resembles a physical folder structure then it will throw back the 403.

Deploy Different GitHub Branch to Azure Website

2013-02-14T11:07:00.002+08:00

Here is the situation: I am hosting an ASP MVC 4 application in Microsoft Azure as an Azure Website. I have setup automatic deployment where my Azure Website will automatically deploy the latest committed codebase from my GitHub repository that I have linked to it.

Some related reading:

How to Setup ASP MVC Application in Azure and Deploy with GitHub

The Steps

Once you’re Azure Website has been setup, go into the management portal
https://manage.windowsazure.com/
Click on the Web Sites menu
Select your website to open the dashboard for it
In the top menu bar click on CONFIGURE
Scroll down to the Git section where you will find the Deployment Trigger URL and the Branch to Deploy
Type in the name of the branch that you want to deploy automatically to your Azure Website from GitHub

The theory here is that myself and the other developers will work on the web application and eventually these changes will wind up in the master branch. Once we are happy with the state of the master branch we will then merge it into a release branch. The release branch will contain a snapshot of master at a point in time where we are quite confident of it being in the live production environment. Therefore, we will setup the Azure Website to automatically pull the release branch out of GitHub.

If you have any other strategies for deploying to Azure from GitHub then please put them in the comments!

Turn IDENTITY_INSERT On in SQL Server

2013-02-14T10:54:00.001+08:00

The Error

Cannot insert explicit value for identity column in table 'MyTableName' when IDENTITY_INSERT is set to OFF.

The Solution

Simple really. Wrap your INSERT statement in a SET IDENTITY_INSERT ON and OFF statement. Check out the example:

SET IDENTITY_INSERT MyTableName ON

INSERT MyTableName (IdColumn, col2, col3, ...)
VALUES (1, col2value, col3value, ...)

SET IDENTITY_INSERT MyTableName OFF

How to Setup ASP MVC Application in Azure and Deploy with GitHub

2013-02-14T09:22:00.002+08:00

Sign up for Azure
Log into the Management Portal
https://manage.windowsazure.com/
Click on the Web Sites menu
Click New
Ensure that you are in Compute à Website and then choose one of the options. We are going to pull our source code from Git. Click here to see how you would set it up for FTP.
Click on Custom Create
Fill out the details.
- Your URL is a unique name for your website
- You will be able to associate your own domain name to it. See how to do that here.
- I’m using the Pay-As-You-Go subscription so I get charged monthly. Currently you need to commit to at least $500 of annual services to get charged in 6 or 12 month internals.
- I’m going to choose the East Asia region. This one gets the best ping from where I’m based. Feel free to choose the closest one to you
- My ASP MVC application is database driven and therefore I will need to setup a new SQL database in Azure for it to use. Select “Create a new SQL Database”, otherwise, choose the Azure SQL database that you have already pre-configured
- In my Web.config I have my DB Connection string stored as the default “DefaultConnection”. If you have a different connection name then use that here
- I want to publish my ASP MVC application to Azure from a Git repository GitHub. I’ll check that box so I can go through and set that up later too
- Click next
Up next we will configure the new database (or provide details to connect to the existing database if that is what you chose in the previous step)
- The name implies the name of your new SQL Azure database
- If you have already setup an SQL Azure server in Azure then select it, otherwise, choose New SQL Database Server
- Specify the administrator credentials that you will use with your new database
- Choose the region. I’ll choose the same one as my website
Now we can choose what source control we want to use to deploy our ASP MVC application to Azure. I’m going to choose Git, however, you can also choose Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). Mine is hosted in GitHub, however, I’d be in luck if I was using BitBucket or CodePlex for it also.
The website will configure itself and then it should appear in the list of websites. By clicking into it you can explore monitoring information, usages, and settings.

If you would like to deploy a different branch in your GitHub repository (instead of master) then check out this guide.

If I am missing anything or you have any other tricks to try then please comment below!

Wirelessly Share Internet Connection on Windows

2013-02-12T08:39:00.002+08:00

Whether it be sharing WiFi at a hotel or allowing other devices to leach from your 3G dongle, everyone has had the need to create their own WiFi Hotspot with their Windows machine. There are always some hacky ways or failed-promise apps out there that can try and do it, however, this is the only simple one that has worked for me.

http://virtualrouterplus.codeplex.com/

It runs on any PC running Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012.

Library of Javascript Libraries

2013-02-10T23:16:00.002+08:00

If you are ever looking for a javascript library then check out jsdb.io

It allows you to find a javascript library you are looking for and even give you an idea in how you could do something cool client-side just by browsing through some of them.

Pimp Your Dev Space: Startup Vitamins

2013-02-10T23:08:00.001+08:00

I think if you're trying to deck out any developer office, room, cave, etc then you need to checkout Startup Vitamins at http://www.startupvitamins.com/

There are heaps of cool posters, quotes, and coffee mugs directly related to what we do. I've got my "Get Shit Done" poster delivered to Australia in a week and ready to be put up in my developer lair.

Essential Wordpress Plugin: Email Address Encoder

2013-02-01T10:50:00.000+08:00

This is an essential plugin for any Wordpress site. We live in a horrible internet-world where any e-mail address on a web page is in danger of being poached by spammers. To combat this there are a variety of different techniques. This is one of them.

Email Address Encoder automatically finds ANY e-mail address as the page or post is being rendered in Wordpress and encodes them into decimal and hexadecimal. The browser can render this to the user as if nothing was different.

Check this screenshot out where I have the e-mail address above and the source below:

Within days of launching a Wordpress site I've seen spam hit the e-mail addresses being advertised on it pretty hard. This is an awesome step in combating this Internet filth.

My Favourite Wordpress Contact Form

2013-01-23T22:28:00.000+08:00

They are dime a dozen, ugly, and done is so many different ways. Contact Forms that allow website users to e-mail you need to die - I don't like them. Who doesn't have an e-mail client setup on their device these days?

When I do give in to the need for a contact form (for the elderly and technically-impaired) I traditionally use Contact Form 7 purely because it is simple, easy, customizable, and gets the job done.

You simply add a new contact form template and configure what fields the user is to see and how they behave. From there you can format the e-mail message you receive and what responses the user gets for a wide range of issues/successes that the form can experience.

CAPTCHA is also available with the help of the plugin called Really Simple CAPTCHA.

It seems to be well rated and highly downloaded. Would be interested in hearing about any other decent ones out there too!

Conditional Bootstrap Row Background Classes with RAZOR

2012-12-12T11:39:00.002+08:00

If you are having an issue writing RAZOR in ASP MVC to conditionally change the background colour of a table row using the Twitter Bootstrap classes then this is the way that I got it done.

You need to make sure you use @Html.Raw() to print your <tr> open and close tags otherwise the RAZOR compiler won't recognise what is happening and will throw an error.

    if (item.WasOkay)
    {
        @Html.Raw("<tr class=\"success\">") //Green for success
    }
    else
    {
        @Html.Raw("<tr class=\"error\">") //Red for failed
    }

Make sure you also close your row tag like so

@Html.Raw("</tr>")

Pair Programming: Get out of my space!

2012-12-10T11:25:00.000+08:00

There is good sides and bad sides to Pair Programming. In my experience with it over the past two months I've both enjoyed and cringed.

Once of the main things that really bothers me about it are for those times when you just want to be alone! I want to sit at my desk, quietly, and perhaps with my headphones on whilst I look over code, find the cause of the bug, or code-out some new functionality. I want to get into my zone!

Although this "introverted" behavior is the reason why we have paired programming, because it is argued that "the zone" is dangerous and you tend to lose sight around what you're doing, sometimes it is healthy. If I have had a horrible day, if I have things on my mind, or if I'm just not feeling very kind/social then I just want to be left alone. Nothing worse than that feeling where you are screaming "shut up!!" in your head whilst working with your pair.

I'm not an introverted person by nature. I'm quite the opposite. I'm loud, out-spoken, and not afraid to talk. However, that is where programming and getting buried in work gives me my escape from all that - a chance for me to not listen to my own voice and cool off from human interaction.

The times where I do feel happy and I'm quite okay with being with a pair whilst programming, I actually quite enjoy it. Sometimes (given the right task) it actually allows me to produce better code that I'm a lot more proud of.

Team City: Unmet "DotNetFramework4.0_x86" exists

2012-12-05T09:32:00.004+08:00

I have recently started using Team City on a Windows Server 2008R2 machine.

After trying to run a build on the local build agent I was getting the error:

unmet "DotNetFramework4.0_x86" exists

After some searching I found that the best way to resolve this was to:

Go into Services and stop the Team City Build Agent service
Delete folders out of your Team City Folder:
\buildAgent\plugins\
\buildAgent\system\
\buildAgent\tools\
Start the Team City Build Agent again
The Build Agent will download the necessary files and then come back to life after 5 - 10 minutes.

Worked for me!

Strip Decimals If Whole Number in ASP MVC Razor

2012-11-02T22:11:00.000+08:00

Had an interesting one to solve today. I want to strip away unnecessary numbers after a decimal place if a C# decimal value was a whole number. Instead of heading off and writing a helper method I wondered how I would do this inline with Razor.

This is essentially how I would want it to react:

Value: 2.5 --- Display: 2.50
Value: 5 --- Display: 5
Value: 2.45 --- Display: 2.45

The following would achieve this, however, it would round any other values to two decimal places.

@string.Format(item.DecimalNumber % 1 == 0 ? "{0:0}" : "{0:0.00}", item.DecimalNumber)

This could be turned into an extension method easily enough.

Fixing Wordpress Admin 404 and Too Many Redirect Error

2012-11-01T19:14:00.003+08:00

After implementing directory password protection for Wordpress' "wp-admin" in cPanel you may notice that you get a 404 or Too Many Redirects/Redirections error in your browser.

Essentially this issue is as easy as adding the following line to your .htaccess file

ErrorDocument 401 default

To do this in cPanel you need to need to do the following:

Head into your cPanel File Manager
Pro Tip: Ensure that "Show hidden files" is checked - otherwise you will not see the .htaccess file!
Navigate to your "wp-admin" directory and locate your ".htaccess" file. Edit this file.
Add in the following at the bottom:
ErrorDocument 401 default
Save the file and give it a try!

Password Protect Wordpress "wp-admin" in cPanel

2012-11-01T19:12:00.002+08:00

The Scenario

I'm getting sick and tired of issues with my cPanel hosted Wordpress. I ensure that I install all the updates for everything, use only secure themes and plugins, as well as use a plugin that scans the security vunerabilities within my installation. Somehow someone gets in and screws something up.

I've decided to bite the bullet and do what they recommend - password protect the wp-admin directory so they need to get through two layers of security. It also makes sure that they (the bots and hackers) can't touch anything admin related.

Before going on I recommend keeping a password manager like LastPass or keeping a KeePass file - that way you can use super-secure passwords without too much hassle!

The Step by Step

First thing first: Head to cPanel and and go into "Password Protect Directories"
Next you'll want to find where your "wp-admin" folder is in the tree that it gives you and select it.
Don't worry about the top section just yet. We will get to that in a sec.
First, add a new user to the directory. The username can be whatever you like (eg, "wordpress-admin") and make sure your password is something secure. Click "Add/Modify Authorized User".
Once the user has been added you can now activate the directory password and name the directory (eg, "Secure Admin"). Click Save.
Navigate to www.yourwordpressblog.com/wp-admin and check if it works!

The Issues

One of the common issues you may face is error 404 or another error in regards to too many redirection. I address the quick and easy fix for this in the following blog: Fixing Wordpress Admin 404 and Too Many Redirect Error

The Conclusion

Hopefully by following this I can keep those bots and hackers at bay! Make sure you keep your Wordpress installations secure so that these guys don't get any satisfaction from screwing up all your hard work.