The Digital Voice

General: Upgrade RAM on Acer Aspire One D250

2009-10-28T09:39:00.005-06:00

I love my new netbook. When netbooks were first released I thought they were a gimmick. I thought they were not a tool for serious users. Most people had laptops that had much more computing power. What I wasn't taking into account was “much more computing power” is usually too much for most tasks. So I've been traveling with my Aspire One D250 for the past 5 days, and its been great. Its a lot less strain on my shoulders lugging around this thing than lugging around my 17 inch Dell Vostro.

One of the things that has really kind of chafed me though was that it only came with 1Gb of ram. This is actually more than enough for simple web browsing and email reading. But in my case, there is a little nagging feeling in the back of my mind if I'm not getting the most out of my machine. Seriously, right now I have a Firefox instance open with Facebook, a Yahoo chat window open, Thunderbird open for email, and OpenOffice.org open while I type this article on a stock Windows 7 Starter (no default services shut down) and I'm still only using 833 Mb of memory. Still, I wanted to get the most ram for this thing that I could. With RAM being a fairly cheap commodity these days, it was a no brainer.

So I went down to the Office Depot and bought some ram for this netbook (OD being the only store close to where I was). They had a single stick of 2 Gb Kingston Valueram (KVR667D2SO/2GR) for 34 dollars at the time of this writing. Not a bad deal considering that it is 46 bucks on Amazon.

Installing the ram is fairly simple. Since I was traveling I had to run down to Radio Shack and get a cheap set of Jewlers Screwdrivers. And tiny philips head jewlers or flat head should work. Shut down the netbook, unplugged the power supply, remove the battery, and wait 5-10 minutes. You don't want any current running through this while you are working on it so you need to give any capacitors time to discharge. While the current in everything except the screen is fairly small and wont hurt you, its enough that it could short and destroy the netbook itself. I didn't remove any bios batteries, but that didn't seem to be a problem. I also typically ground myself with an anti-static wrist strap, however I didn't have one handy, so I touched some grounded metal to discharge any static that I had on me.

Flip the netbook over. There are three panels.

The one in the middle is the one you want to remove. It has a little picture of a memory stick on it so you will know it was the right one. Unscrew the single screw holding it in place. Popping the cover itself off took a little bit of gentle force because there are two tabs holding it in place. Just be careful not for force it too much, you dont want to break the plastic cover or try to force a knife or screwdriver under the slot and have it slip and nick any of the circuits inside.

With the cover off, there are two silver tabs on each side of the memory slot. Pull those out with the jewlers as a pry and the memory will pop up at an angle. Grab it by both sides (I try not to touch the memory stick itself just in case I have a little bit of static) and pull it out. Slide in the replacement stick at a slight angle. Make sure that the connections are under pins completely, and that the memory wont slide in any more. It has a notch and the slot has a key to make putting it in incorrectly very difficult. Once in place, push down until the two metal tabs lock into place. Replace the cover.

Turn on the machine. Hit F2 immediately to go into the BIOS and confirm that the bios recognizes that there is the correct amount of memory. Exit and save. Then boot normally and confirm that the OS sees the correct amount of memory.

Experience: iPod Touch Stuck on Apple Logo

2009-10-27T11:54:00.000-06:00

I hate it when technology that is supposed to make my life easier makes it more complicated. I iPod Touch is a perfect example. Such a great little device. It has my music, all my exercise videos such as P90X and Gimnastica Natural, and movies I watch on planes. With all the additional apps, the added utility of the device has just shot through the roof. I can check Facebook, Twitter, play Scrabble with my friends. I have the Kindle app on there and learned Spring from reading “Spring Recipies, A Problem-Solution Approach” over the course of a couple of nights while traveling. Needless to say, this device has become a major part of my life. I joke that it does everything I need but make phone calls (damned you AT&T and your exclusivity).

So, of course, the dream fades into reality when last night while playing Scrabble with my wife it reboots itself and gets stuck on the Apple Logo. Damned.

So, after a bit of research there are two ways to fix this.

Fix 1. On your computer, start iTunes. On the iPod Touch and press and hold the Power and the Menu button until the screen turns off. Plug the USB cable into your computer. Hold the Home button and plug in the USB cable into the iPod, or turn it on. You will get a notice on your computer that an iPod in restore mode has been connected. Do not click on restore just yet. Wait 5-25 minutes leaving it plugged in. All of a sudden, you will get a notice that you can send diagnostic information to Apple, the iPod will reboot, sync, and work.

When I did this, I did click on restore, and I was on my tethered cell phone, so the connection was slow in downloading the firmware update. The reset and work process above set in before the download was complete, so I didn't have to do a complete factory restore, losing everything on my iPod, which would have been bad because I can't restore anything being that I am on the road.

Fix 2. Follow the above, click on the Restore button, and let iTunes do a complete restore, losing everything on the iPod touch.

I don't know why I had this issue. I had plenty of battery life. I read on a few forums that leaving it there and not clicking restore will work. You've got nothing to lose in trying it. If it doesn't, just go through with the Restore procedure and reload your apps and music. For me, it was a pain because I didn't have a backup, violating rule #1 :|

General: Initial Impressions of the Acer Aspire D250 with Windows 7

2009-10-23T14:18:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I purchased an Acer Aspire One D250. I have been in the market for a netbook for a few weeks now, but have been holding out for one of two things, the Android D250 or the Windows 7 D250. since the Android version got such scathing reviews, I went with the Windows 7 version. While I really wanted an Android device, I will just wait for the Verizon Droid to come out to replace my beloved but aging HTC Vogue XV6900.

So, I’ve been messing with this for about a day now, and decided to write up my initial thoughts. What am I going to say about Windows 7 that hasn’t been said already? Not much. If your looking for a discussion about the technical merits of Windows 7, look elsewhere. There are better qualified people who have spent more time with it than I who can paint a better picture. This is more about my trials trying to accomplish some simple tasks with the D250 with Windows 7 and my impressions.

So the first thing to address is “why did I choose the Aspire One D250 over the other netbook models out there”? I did quite a bit of shopping and comparing. What I found is the majority of netbooks have the same exact configuration, the Intel Atom N280 running at 1.6Ghz, 1 Gig of ram, 10 inch screens, and 160 Gb hard disk. They come in all shapes and sizes, varying battery life, wireless and 3g networking options, but for the most part, the above core specs are the most common, give or take a few models that had much smaller SSD, or Celeron processors, or whatever. Basically, your average run of the mill netbook is similar to the laptop I just gave up due to lease expiring, except they are single core instead of dual core, half the ram, and a much larger hard disk. Besides, the ram for these things can be bought for 40-80 bucks online, so I can easily bump it up to 2 gigs if I choose.

What I found funny is that with most netbooks having an almost identical configuration, reviewers claims of one netbook being “blazing” vs “average” vs “slow” over another didn’t quite equate. Tech reviewers are typically idiots. How is one netbook with a 1.6 Ghz processor, 1 Gig of ram any faster or slower than another, give or take a few cycles based on bus architecture? Im not sure, and considering my low opinion of tech reviewers, I figured they didn’t either. If there is a difference, its so negligible that price became my determining factor, and the D250 won out in that area. AT&T had a few models that they subsidized for prices ranging from free to 50 bucks with a 2 year subscription plan, but I wouldn’t subject myself to AT&T’s horrible service, so paying full price was my forced route.

Unboxing it was like opening Christmas presents because I’ve wanted to get a netbook so that I wouldn’t need to carry around my rather unwieldy Vostro 1720. The first thing I noticed when starting up and doing the registration is that by default it throws McAfee Security Center with a 90 day trial. I personally don’t use McAfee, and haven’t since the days when they offered it as shareware on BBS systems alongside Commander Keen. Once the 90 day trial is over, I will ditch it.

Outside of that, the first startup took about 10 minutes to do all the filling in of user information. I skipped the networking setup as a later task, which I will cover later.

What follows below are my first impressions and my experiences trying to set up my network, looking around applications, and just playing around with it netbook.

First Impressions

My first glimpse of Windows 7 didn’t blow me away. It is more polished than Windows XP, and by polished I mean I have found that certain tasks are easier to do, and user interface is a little more intuitive once I get past my old dogmas.

For example, I’ve grown accustomed over the years to the Start Bar. I mean, me and the ‘ole Start Menu have been working in cohesion for almost 15 years. I know how to go to Start/Programs/Foo and click on the Bar icon. Second nature. So when I got into the new Start Menu in Windows 7 I was in for a bit of a shock. XP had a similar interface, but I always just set it back to classic mode. Vista might have forced the new interface on users, but I wouldn’t know because I skipped Vista entirely. So imagine my surprise when I couldn’t switch my Start Menu to classic mode. I’m stuck with this scrollbars within menus thing, and this bizarre shortcut thing on the right. That means change for me, and change scares me. Although, I do like the search bar, but Ill get to that later.

The taskbar is a direct rip-off of the OSX dock. I wont complain about it though, because I like the dock, and its not that far of a cry from the taskbar of old. It looks cleaner somehow, at least to me.

The resolution is a little off. I am too used to the 4:3 aspect ratio, even after using 16:9. 1024*600 just seems weird.

Changing the Background

The biggest shock to me is that I couldn’t change my background. This isn’t a groundbreaker to me since I never use wallpapers anyway. The first thing I always think when I see a picture of someones family on their desktop is “what a dork” or “soccer mom”, even when it’s a guys computer. This is a holdover from the days when having a wallpaper would be a killer on performance back in Windows 3.1. The habbit just stuck with me. But not having the option is bugging me. Granted its only in Windows 7 Starter that this limitation exists, but it still bugs me. Seriously. A feature available for almost 20 years in GUI’s is now crippled in Windows 7 Starter. But I can go to my default of a black background.

So how do I do this? I tried right clicking on the desktop and going into properties. Being a PC user since the time of the dinosaurs, I expected there to be a properties menu, but guess what? No properties.

My next instinct, go to control panel/display and change from there. So I go to the Start menu, and in that scarry right hand side is the control panel. I recognize that from XP, and I hated it then. I want my classic mode. But I digress. So I go into Control Panel.

And damnit, what do I get. 8 icons with a bunch of hyperlinks. Here is that damned philosophy of the OS developer trying to protect the user from themselves. I don’t want this stuff grouped into categories, I want it all layed out for me. Again, a habbit from as far back as Windows 3.1. Fortunately, to get what I want isn’t nearly as complicated as it was in older versions of Windows, having to switch to Classic view in Control Panel. Here I can just change the View By from Category to Large/Small icons. And look, there is Display.

The Display dialog is also different from what I’m used to. I want to change the color scheme, so I click on the “Change color scheme” link on the left hand side. No more tabs, apparently the new user experience are hyperlinks on the left.

The Window color and Appearance dialog looks like the old versions. Its good that Microsoft stuck with a consistent user interface in between dialogs, otherwise I’d get confused. (Your sarcasm detector should be going off). No, what’s interesting is I can set this to Windows Class, click on Advanced, and change my desktop color. Great. The Start Menu is still this bizarre new thing, but it looks familiar now, with the old fashion square button. And my black desktop. But if I try to do the same thing in Windows 7 Basic, no matter what I choose as my color, it defaults back to that stupid wallpaper. Argh. Oh well, mission accomplished, I have my black background.

What Applications Are Available?

So I navigated around to see what’s available.

I was greeted with a little pop-up from the Acer eRecovery console to create my system restore DVD’s. That’s when I noticed, there was no software in the box. Acer cheaped out on that and passed the buck on to the consumer to be responsible for creating recovery media. Apparently there is a hidden disk partition that boots a small version Windows in order to do a factory restore, but you have the option of creating external discs. Since my DVD burner was 1200 miles away at my office, I would just have to wait until I got home to do this. Sad, because it advises you that this should be the first thing you should do before using your computer. I guess they never considered that people buy things on business trips or when visiting family and leave their USB peripherals at home. Regardless, I will need to skip this step for now, but I will need to revisit it since I plan to wipe the drive clean and try Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Moblin, and would like to keep that option of going back to Windows 7.

So looking through the software selection, I have the much hated Microsoft Works. What’s sad is that this is probably going to be my productivity suite. Ironic because I have thought of as a joke since even my earliest computing experiences), but now that I own my own personal computer, I’m too cheap to pay for Office myself. A 90 day trial of Office 2007 is there, but I refuse to use that god awful Ribbon interface. I foresee OpenOffice making a home on this little guy at some point, which is fine because I have been using OO more and more for my home finance spreadsheets. I don’t have Exchange to anchor me to Outlook anymore, so Ubuntu is starting to look pretty good at this point. Ah Ubuntu, how I miss thee.

Anyway, the next thing I checked out was the Acer default software. Excluding the eRecovery tool, there is the Acer Updater, Welcome Center, Acer VCM, Games, and the Crystal Eye Cam. Acer Updater, I imagine, does what its name implies. I didn’t bother to run it. Welcome Center is just a tacky web page advertising the various programs installed on the machine, such as McAfee and Office. I didn’t want to do the Office trial when I started Office, why am I going to do it through the Welcome Center. VCM didn’t appear to do anything when I ran it. Identity Card shows you the information about your machine, such as Serial Number, Part Number and date of purchase. Useful during the registration process.

So the two fun things come next. I checked out the Crystal Eye Cam, which works surprisingly well. I have an external webcam that I picked up cheap for my Vostro, so having a webcam in the machine just like my wife’s Mac is nice. I think video chatting is in my future. One less device to carry in my backpack. It had a good picture for a low light area that I was testing it in, so I was pleased with that.

The games were something interesting that I hadn’t seen since the days of Packard Bells. You get this awful WildTangent interface, and these little “tokens” when you start the Acer Games application. There is a limited selection of games you can play, such as World of Goo, Zuma, Scrabble, and a few others, all set up as trial versions. I tried World of Goo. I was expecting the actual game, not some stupid picture of an arcade coin slot telling me I had a freebie and giving me the option to buy the full version. Oh Packard bell, I knew your involvement in the Acer Group would somehow manifest its ugly head. You bastards, I hated you when you were sold by Radio Shack, and I hate you now. I thought you had died and burned a long time ago. How wrong I am. This must be in partnership with WildTangent. Outside of Xbox Live, I have very little experience with these online gaming companies, such as Wildtangent or Gametap, so I was a little peeved. Piss off, its crap like this that makes people pirate. Since I own most of these games on other media (Scrabble on my iPod touch, World of Goo on the Wii), these will get removed very quickly to make space for more useful stuff. I remember a day when games came installed on machines as part of the package. I must be getting old.

I went to the old trusty rusty games like Solitaire. Microsoft absolutely butchered it. Just butchered it. Why the hell do I keep getting prompted to restart the game when there are no more moves. And what’s with these stupid animations? There is something to be said for the quite simplicity of the original versions of Solitaire. Where is my winking Jack? And that’s not a euphemism. Minesweeper wasn’t that bad.

So, speaking of the old staples, I went into Wordpad and Paint. What the hell is with the Ribbon. Seriously. Why is Microsoft pushing this down our throats? Piss off Ribbon, your hated, and noone likes you. So, we now have a mix of user interfaces littered throughout Windows. The old fashion menu bar, and the ribbon. That’s intuitive; I can’t imagine how Aunt Tessie will react to that. “Where’s the File menu I’ve been using since the Great Depression?” I don’t know Auntie, I just don’t know…

I didn’t play with Windows Live. I will when I make that backup disc and am sure that I can connect to the Internet and if this thing gets littered with virii in less than 5 minutes, I can restore from a clean image.

Connecting to the Network

So, out of curiosity, I decided to check out how hard it is be to set up the network on my Craddlepoint Personal Hot Spot. Right-mouse click, choose wireless hotspot, and click connect. Seems easy enough. But in my case, I have a MAC address filter set up, so I need to find the machines MAC address. So, my next quest was to find my MAC address for the wireless adaptor.

The Run menu that I had grown so accustomed to is hiding in a tree of menus in this new and fancy Start Menu. But I did have this nice little Search menu at the bottom of my start menu. So I typed in cmd to see if it was the same as Run. Not exactly, a list of options came up, and cmd was in there. So I click on it, and sure enough, my old favorite, the DOS prompt, greeted me, and I got my MAC address through IPCONFIG.

So I wanted to try this search box out. I don’t think it was in XP since I used classic interface, and I wasn’t one of the three people who actually used Vista, so I have no idea if it was there. I figured, “Hey, lets go find the MAC address through the Control Panel”. So I typed Control Panel, and got a few options. I selected All Control Panel Items. Nice, there is my Control Panel with all my options.

Then I realized, I could probably type anything and skip having to go through the Control Panel to get to my network settings. So I typed in Network. Sure enough, I got my Networking options. Change… it scares me. But this is pretty cool. I’m slowly learning.

Next I typed in Mac Address. OK, so it’s not THAT smart. Let’s try Network Adaptor Settings then. I get the Devices and printers. Isn’t a printer a device? Perhaps it’s now a special category of devices. But I’m not here to split hairs over semantics. Anyway, I right click on the icon showing my computer, and choose network settings. Under the Network and Internet Window, I click on Change Adaptor settings. I then right click on my Wireless Network Connection and choose properties. If I hover over the “Connect Using” text box, my Mac address shows.

That was kind of convoluted. There has to be an easier way. I mean, I know to how use the command line and ipconfig to get it, I’ve only been doing it since Windows 95 OSR 2. But remembering my days as a PC tech and having to do over the phone tech support, I couldn’t help but think how is your everyday average user going to know. So I go into Windows Help and type in MAC address. First item is “Using command line tools for networking information”… right. I should have guessed. The more things change the more they stay the same. At least if I was guiding grandma to the command prompt, its easy enough to say click the Start Menu, and type cmd, then Start Menu, then click, then type cmd. Besides, grandma isn’t going to have a MAC based whitelist on her wireless router.

Finger Gestures

One thing I noticed is how unresponsive the touchpad is. That’s when I realized like a big dummy I left a sticker on there. Slap forehead dummy. When I look at the sticker, I noticed it had a bunch of pictures of two fingers making gestures. So I tried one, then I realized that these were finger gestures just like on my iPod Touch. Now, I’m sure this is old hat to a lot of folks, but seriously, I’ve never had a machine that I could do finger gestures on except the iPod Touch and the iPhones I’ve played with. So, all my familiars are there, the pinch to zoom in and out, two fingers swiping up for scroll, and two fingers going left or right to go back or forward in a browser. I like this.

Desktop Gadgets.

Noticing that my desktop context menus properties menu was missing, I did notice a thing called Desktop Objects. I decided to look into this thing. What I got was the exact same thing as the KDE 4 Widgets. And by KDE 4 Widgets, I mean that’s where I was first introduced to them. At first I was shocked by this in KDE 4, but I’ve grown accustomed to them, and they are a welcomed addition in Windows. These might have been in Vista, but again, I wouldn’t know.

Etc.

I do like Powershell. I will have to play around with the Powershell ISE a little more to see what I can do with it. The concept of Powershell was interesting when it was first released, and the idea of interacting directly with .Net objects in script is compelling. I do wonder just how bad this is crippled due to security concerns. I only played with it for a little bit, and despite the help file saying there was colored syntax highlighting, nothing was highlighting for me.

Doing a search for Pictures in the search bar brings back all folders and images. I can imagine this providing situations that are… embarrassing. Same with videos.

I like how light this thing is. While I can easily move my Vostro around on the fly with one hand if I am zipping from one side of a cubicle to another, its not even a though with the Aspire. I mean, it weighs 2 pounds. Im afraid I might accidently throw the thing when I lift it. Say goodbye sore shoulders from lugging the Vostro around in my backpack.

The button under the touchpad is a pain. It’s a single button, but click on the left hand side for left click, right hand side for right click. I saw a single button and assumed they were trying for the Mac type touchpad. I kept wondering why it was so hard to push the button before I realized that the center of the button is a pivot.

Conclusion

So far I like this thing. It will be a welcome relief to carry around such a lighter system for engagements where I don’t need to use the beefy power of the Vostro. For instance, I’ve been on an assignment the past three months where the client provided me with a desktop system. I only needed my laptop to browse the web and check emails. I could use my smartphone for that, but seriously, a PC is much nicer. That’s where the netbook fits in. It will also be nice for presenting at conferences since I’m typically just going through PowerPoint slides and taking notes during other peoples presentations. I don’t need a 17 inch screen and a dual core machine with 4 gigs of ram for that.

While this is just superficial, initial impressions of the device, I have a feeling its going to grow on me more. Once I get my usual tools installed, such as Eclipse, I will have more day to day interacting with it. While it wont be a replacement for the workhorse I have now, given that it has the capability to do multiple monitor setups, it will be nice for those cases where I don’t need all the computing power strapped to my back. If your considering a netbook, you should consider the D250.

Fitness: Real Sauna Sauna Suit

2009-10-14T15:17:00.002-06:00

I see more and more success stories about getting fit these days. It seems Fit is in. This is encouraging, especially with the dreary winter months coming, where we typically gain due to holidays and lower activity levels. I posted a number of years ago about my weight loss plan, eat less, exercise more. Pretty standard line of thought. I'm happy to say its almost 3 years later, and I've lost about 80-85 pounds going that route. I' floating around 205 at this point (my highest weight was at around 290 when I really got serious), give or take water intake. Still not at my target weight, but then again, its not a race, and I've got plenty of time.

So, one of the tools in my weight loss toolshed is the sauna suit. The one that I use and can honestly recommend in good faith is the Real Sauna sauna suit.

I got this thing almost 2 years ago while looking for something to help me get accustomed to extreme heat during exercise. I needed this for a number of reasons. First, I live in Texas, where we have 60 degree winters and 100+ degree summers. Second was this was a killer for me in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu when I started out and I found myself not being able to endure 5-15 minute matches due to overheating. I also wanted to encourage more sweat while increasing my water intake so I could flush my system of garbage.

So I went through a few different sauna suit, which were all pretty much junk. They all tore and none of them sized correctly. Plus, it looked like I was some kind of hobo wearing a garbage bag.
I came across the Real Sauna suit out of the blue while searching the internet. It was pricey, but it sounded durable, which was my main focus after going through a few other brands. At the time, they only had the gray hoodie. While not exactly stylish, it looked like a normal sweat suit so people wouldn't look at me like I was crazy. So I gave it a try.

So here are the activities that this thing has survived with me over the years:

Running
cardio kick boxing
general house work
Wii Fit
Wii Punchout
Dance dance Revolution
and Gimnastica Natural

It has survived being stuffed into a suit case over and over. It has survived multiple washes. It even survived my wife accidentally putting it in the dryer. Only within the past 3 months did the inner lining finally tear, which has forced me to order another suit. Now, take into consideration, thats over the course of 2 years of heavy use.

I only have 2 real gripes about the real sauna suit. First is that it is expensive. Second is that they do not sell the pieces individually. Since I did need to get a new pair of pants, I wanted to order just the pants. This wasn't an option on their site. So, while I did order another gray suit, I ordered the new one that does not have the hoodie in addition to the Navy blue one.

Word of caution. I learned the hard way to not wear the suit if it is over 80 degrees. I pushed the envelope and was wearing the suit when the temperature got into the upper 80s and 90's, and started to suffer the effects of severe dehydration and heat stroke. If your not accustomed to the heat, don't push it. This thing gets hot, and I mean really hot. If you wear this while exercising, you will pour buckets of sweat. I do. You can easily lose 5-10 pounds of water weight with one session, so when you take it off, don't take it off on your carpet. Second word of caution, hydrate like crazy. And I mean, drink lots of water. You will need it.

BIRT: Restoring a Report Design from a Report Document

2009-08-19T10:00:00.003-06:00

I often get asked to help with problems people have with their report designs. Of course, troubleshooting report designs can be a tricky endeavor. People use different data sources, and more often than not I don't have access to this. So, rather than ask people to send me a data extract, their report design, and any relevant icons or images, I typically just ask for the rptDocument, as generated by the report designer under the "Run/Generate Document" menu option.

From this format, it is possible to use as a data source using a special ODA I designed, extract the data using the BIRT Web Viewer to create a CSV in case the ODa gives me issues, and extract the original report design file. So, how do you extract the report design? This was a question asked on the BIRT Exchange, and this was the solutions I provided:

package birt.executor;

import java.io.IOException;

import org.eclipse.birt.core.exception.BirtException;
import org.eclipse.birt.core.framework.Platform;
import org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.EngineConfig;
import org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.EngineException;
import org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.IReportDocument;
import org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.ReportEngine;

public class RestoreReportDesign {

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            String birtHome = "C:/Libraries/birt-runtime-2_3_2/ReportEngine";
            
            EngineConfig engineConfig = new EngineConfig();
            engineConfig.setBIRTHome(birtHome);
            
            Platform.startup(engineConfig);
            
            ReportEngine re = new ReportEngine(engineConfig);
            
            IReportDocument doc = re.openReportDocument("C:/Contracts/MyReportDesign.rptdocument");
            
            doc.getReportDesign().saveAs("C:/TEMP/extractedReportDesign.rptdesign");
            
            doc.close();
            Platform.shutdown();
        } catch (EngineException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (BirtException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

}

BIRT: Using Reflection to get Total Page Count

2009-07-16T15:10:00.002-06:00

I could have sworn I had posted this previously. My mind must be slipping.

A common question that comes up in the newsgroups for BIRT is how to access the total page count during render time. You would think this is an easy question to answer, however it has proven more difficult than originally thought. There is an Auto-Text item already in BIRT that will display the total page count, but none of its properties are accessible publicly.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. To get access to the total page count, you need to get access to the Report Document Reader created after the Run Task has completed. This is stored in the application context, but in a private field. So how do we get access to the report document? By using Java Reflection. Below is an example of how to get access to the Report Document Reader stored in the app context. This needs to be put into the beforeFactory event, which means it is only available at Render Time.

var rciClass = reportContext.getClass();

var fieldFromScript = rciClass.getDeclaredField("context");
fieldFromScript.setAccessible(true);

var execContext = fieldFromScript.get(reportContext);

// Now, we have the exeuctionContext. We can get the currently rendering
// report documents location

var doc = execContext.getReportDocument();

if (doc != null) {
var pageCount = doc. getPageCount();

reportContext.setGlobalVariable("totalPageCount", pageCount);
}

So now you can use the totalPageCount variable anywhere in the Render phase. So keep in mind, you can’t add this to a report because the report element are created during run time, this is only used to affect Render operations. You could create a report item extension to display it, and to demonstrate that, I dropped a chart since charts are created at render time. The chart will display the text “Page Count” on the X Axis, and the bars will go up to the actual page count.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<report xmlns="http://www.eclipse.org/birt/2005/design" version="3.2.17" id="1">
   <property name="createdBy">Eclipse BIRT Designer Version 2.3.2.r232_20090202 Build &lt;2.3.2.v20090218-0730></property>
   <property name="units">in</property>
   <method name="beforeRender"><![CDATA[var rciClass = reportContext.getClass();
          
var fieldFromScript = rciClass.getDeclaredField("context");
fieldFromScript.setAccessible(true);

var execContext = fieldFromScript.get(reportContext);

// Now, we have the exeuctionContext. We can get the currently rendering
// report documents location

var doc = execContext.getReportDocument();

if (doc != null) {
   var pageCount = doc.getPageCount();

   reportContext.setGlobalVariable("totalPageCount", pageCount);
   params["PageCount"].value = pageCount;
}
]]></method>
   <property name="iconFile">/templates/blank_report.gif</property>
   <property name="layoutPreference">auto layout</property>
   <property name="bidiLayoutOrientation">ltr</property>
   <parameters>
       <scalar-parameter name="PageCount" id="80">
           <property name="hidden">true</property>
           <property name="valueType">static</property>
           <property name="dataType">string</property>
           <property name="paramType">simple</property>
           <property name="isRequired">false</property>
           <property name="controlType">text-box</property>
           <property name="defaultValue">-1</property>
           <property name="distinct">true</property>
           <structure name="format">
               <property name="category">Unformatted</property>
           </structure>
       </scalar-parameter>
   </parameters>
   <data-sources>
       <oda-data-source extensionID="org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc" name="Data Source" id="7">
           <property name="odaDriverClass">org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.sampledb.Driver</property>
           <property name="odaURL">jdbc:classicmodels:sampledb</property>
           <property name="odaUser">ClassicModels</property>
       </oda-data-source>
   </data-sources>
   <data-sets>
       <oda-data-set extensionID="org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc.JdbcSelectDataSet" name="Data Set" id="8">
           <list-property name="columnHints">
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
                   <property name="displayName">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">LASTNAME</property>
                   <property name="displayName">LASTNAME</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">FIRSTNAME</property>
                   <property name="displayName">FIRSTNAME</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">EXTENSION</property>
                   <property name="displayName">EXTENSION</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">EMAIL</property>
                   <property name="displayName">EMAIL</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">OFFICECODE</property>
                   <property name="displayName">OFFICECODE</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">REPORTSTO</property>
                   <property name="displayName">REPORTSTO</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="columnName">JOBTITLE</property>
                   <property name="displayName">JOBTITLE</property>
               </structure>
           </list-property>
           <structure name="cachedMetaData">
               <list-property name="resultSet">
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">1</property>
                       <property name="name">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
                       <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                   </structure>
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">2</property>
                       <property name="name">LASTNAME</property>
                       <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   </structure>
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">3</property>
                       <property name="name">FIRSTNAME</property>
                       <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   </structure>
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">4</property>
                       <property name="name">EXTENSION</property>
                       <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   </structure>
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">5</property>
                       <property name="name">EMAIL</property>
                       <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   </structure>
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">6</property>
                       <property name="name">OFFICECODE</property>
                       <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   </structure>
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">7</property>
                       <property name="name">REPORTSTO</property>
                       <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                   </structure>
                   <structure>
                       <property name="position">8</property>
                       <property name="name">JOBTITLE</property>
                       <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   </structure>
               </list-property>
           </structure>
           <property name="dataSource">Data Source</property>
           <list-property name="resultSet">
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">1</property>
                   <property name="name">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
                   <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">4</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">2</property>
                   <property name="name">LASTNAME</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">LASTNAME</property>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">12</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">3</property>
                   <property name="name">FIRSTNAME</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">FIRSTNAME</property>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">12</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">4</property>
                   <property name="name">EXTENSION</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">EXTENSION</property>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">12</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">5</property>
                   <property name="name">EMAIL</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">EMAIL</property>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">12</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">6</property>
                   <property name="name">OFFICECODE</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">OFFICECODE</property>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">12</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">7</property>
                   <property name="name">REPORTSTO</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">REPORTSTO</property>
                   <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">4</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="position">8</property>
                   <property name="name">JOBTITLE</property>
                   <property name="nativeName">JOBTITLE</property>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
                   <property name="nativeDataType">12</property>
               </structure>
           </list-property>
           <property name="queryText">select *
from CLASSICMODELS.EMPLOYEES</property>
           <xml-property name="designerValues"><![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<model:DesignValues xmlns:design="http://www.eclipse.org/datatools/connectivity/oda/design" xmlns:model="http://www.eclipse.org/birt/report/model/adapter/odaModel">
 <Version>1.0</Version>
 <design:ResultSets derivedMetaData="true">
   <design:resultSetDefinitions>
     <design:resultSetColumns>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>EMPLOYEENUMBER</design:name>
           <design:position>1</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>4</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>10</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>EMPLOYEENUMBER</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>EMPLOYEENUMBER</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>11</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>LASTNAME</design:name>
           <design:position>2</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>12</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>50</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>LASTNAME</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>LASTNAME</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>50</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>FIRSTNAME</design:name>
           <design:position>3</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>12</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>50</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>FIRSTNAME</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>FIRSTNAME</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>50</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>EXTENSION</design:name>
           <design:position>4</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>12</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>10</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>EXTENSION</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>EXTENSION</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>10</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>EMAIL</design:name>
           <design:position>5</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>12</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>100</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>EMAIL</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>EMAIL</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>100</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>OFFICECODE</design:name>
           <design:position>6</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>12</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>10</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>OFFICECODE</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>OFFICECODE</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>10</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>REPORTSTO</design:name>
           <design:position>7</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>4</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>10</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>REPORTSTO</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>REPORTSTO</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>11</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
       <design:resultColumnDefinitions>
         <design:attributes>
           <design:name>JOBTITLE</design:name>
           <design:position>8</design:position>
           <design:nativeDataTypeCode>12</design:nativeDataTypeCode>
           <design:precision>50</design:precision>
           <design:scale>0</design:scale>
           <design:nullability>Nullable</design:nullability>
           <design:uiHints>
             <design:displayName>JOBTITLE</design:displayName>
           </design:uiHints>
         </design:attributes>
         <design:usageHints>
           <design:label>JOBTITLE</design:label>
           <design:formattingHints>
             <design:displaySize>50</design:displaySize>
           </design:formattingHints>
         </design:usageHints>
       </design:resultColumnDefinitions>
     </design:resultSetColumns>
   </design:resultSetDefinitions>
 </design:ResultSets>
</model:DesignValues>]]></xml-property>
       </oda-data-set>
   </data-sets>
   <styles>
       <style name="report" id="4">
           <property name="fontFamily">"Verdana"</property>
           <property name="fontSize">10pt</property>
       </style>
       <style name="crosstab-cell" id="5">
           <property name="borderBottomColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderBottomStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderBottomWidth">1pt</property>
           <property name="borderLeftColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderLeftStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderLeftWidth">1pt</property>
           <property name="borderRightColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderRightStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderRightWidth">1pt</property>
           <property name="borderTopColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderTopStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderTopWidth">1pt</property>
       </style>
       <style name="crosstab" id="6">
           <property name="borderBottomColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderBottomStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderBottomWidth">1pt</property>
           <property name="borderLeftColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderLeftStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderLeftWidth">1pt</property>
           <property name="borderRightColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderRightStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderRightWidth">1pt</property>
           <property name="borderTopColor">#CCCCCC</property>
           <property name="borderTopStyle">solid</property>
           <property name="borderTopWidth">1pt</property>
       </style>
   </styles>
   <page-setup>
       <simple-master-page name="Simple MasterPage" id="2">
           <property name="topMargin">0.25in</property>
           <property name="leftMargin">0.25in</property>
           <property name="bottomMargin">0.25in</property>
           <property name="rightMargin">0.25in</property>
           <page-footer>
               <text id="78">
                   <property name="contentType">html</property>
                   <text-property name="content"><![CDATA[<value-of>new Date()</value-of>]]></text-property>
               </text>
           </page-footer>
       </simple-master-page>
   </page-setup>
   <body>
       <table id="9">
           <property name="width">100%</property>
           <property name="dataSet">Data Set</property>
           <list-property name="boundDataColumns">
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
                   <property name="displayName">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["EMPLOYEENUMBER"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">integer</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">LASTNAME</property>
                   <property name="displayName">LASTNAME</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["LASTNAME"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">FIRSTNAME</property>
                   <property name="displayName">FIRSTNAME</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["FIRSTNAME"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">EXTENSION</property>
                   <property name="displayName">EXTENSION</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["EXTENSION"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">EMAIL</property>
                   <property name="displayName">EMAIL</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["EMAIL"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">OFFICECODE</property>
                   <property name="displayName">OFFICECODE</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["OFFICECODE"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">REPORTSTO</property>
                   <property name="displayName">REPORTSTO</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["REPORTSTO"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">integer</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">JOBTITLE</property>
                   <property name="displayName">JOBTITLE</property>
                   <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["JOBTITLE"]</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">Column Binding</property>
                   <expression name="expression">"Total Pages: "</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">Column Binding_1</property>
                   <expression name="expression">reportContext.getGlobalVariable("totalPageCount")</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
               <structure>
                   <property name="name">Column Binding_2</property>
                   <expression name="expression">params["PageCount"].value</expression>
                   <property name="dataType">string</property>
               </structure>
           </list-property>
           <property name="pageBreakInterval">4</property>
           <column id="53"/>
           <column id="54"/>
           <column id="55"/>
           <column id="56"/>
           <column id="57"/>
           <column id="58"/>
           <column id="59"/>
           <column id="60"/>
           <header>
               <row id="10">
                   <property name="fontWeight">bold</property>
                   <property name="textAlign">left</property>
                   <cell id="11">
                       <label id="12">
                           <text-property name="text">EMPLOYEENUMBER</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="13">
                       <label id="14">
                           <text-property name="text">LASTNAME</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="15">
                       <label id="16">
                           <text-property name="text">FIRSTNAME</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="17">
                       <label id="18">
                           <text-property name="text">EXTENSION</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="19">
                       <label id="20">
                           <text-property name="text">EMAIL</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="21">
                       <label id="22">
                           <text-property name="text">OFFICECODE</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="23">
                       <label id="24">
                           <text-property name="text">REPORTSTO</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="25">
                       <label id="26">
                           <text-property name="text">JOBTITLE</text-property>
                       </label>
                   </cell>
               </row>
           </header>
           <detail>
               <row id="27">
                   <cell id="28">
                       <data id="29">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">EMPLOYEENUMBER</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="30">
                       <data id="31">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">LASTNAME</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="32">
                       <data id="33">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">FIRSTNAME</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="34">
                       <data id="35">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">EXTENSION</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="36">
                       <data id="37">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">EMAIL</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="38">
                       <data id="39">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">OFFICECODE</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="40">
                       <data id="41">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">REPORTSTO</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
                   <cell id="42">
                       <data id="43">
                           <property name="resultSetColumn">JOBTITLE</property>
                       </data>
                   </cell>
               </row>
           </detail>
           <footer>
               <row id="44">
                   <cell id="45">
                       <property name="colSpan">8</property>
                       <property name="rowSpan">1</property>
                       <extended-item extensionName="Chart" name="NewChart" id="81">
                           <xml-property name="xmlRepresentation"><![CDATA[<model:ChartWithAxes xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:attribute="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModelAttribute" xmlns:data="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModelData" xmlns:layout="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModelLayout" xmlns:model="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModel" xmlns:type="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModelType">
 <Type>Bar Chart</Type>
 <SubType>Side-by-side</SubType>
 <Block>
   <Children xsi:type="layout:TitleBlock">
     <Bounds>
       <Left>0.0</Left>
       <Top>0.0</Top>
       <Width>0.0</Width>
       <Height>0.0</Height>
     </Bounds>
     <Insets>
       <Top>3.0</Top>
       <Left>3.0</Left>
       <Bottom>3.0</Bottom>
       <Right>3.0</Right>
     </Insets>
     <Row>-1</Row>
     <Column>-1</Column>
     <Rowspan>-1</Rowspan>
     <Columnspan>-1</Columnspan>
     <Outline>
       <Style>Solid</Style>
       <Thickness>1</Thickness>
       <Color>
         <Transparency>255</Transparency>
         <Red>0</Red>
         <Green>0</Green>
         <Blue>0</Blue>
       </Color>
       <Visible>false</Visible>
     </Outline>
     <Visible>true</Visible>
     <Label>
       <Caption>
         <Value>Bar Chart Title</Value>
         <Font>
           <Size>16.0</Size>
           <Bold>true</Bold>
           <Alignment>
             <horizontalAlignment>Center</horizontalAlignment>
             <verticalAlignment>Center</verticalAlignment>
           </Alignment>
         </Font>
       </Caption>
       <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
         <Transparency>0</Transparency>
         <Red>255</Red>
         <Green>255</Green>
         <Blue>255</Blue>
       </Background>
       <Outline>
         <Style>Solid</Style>
         <Thickness>1</Thickness>
         <Color>
           <Transparency>255</Transparency>
           <Red>0</Red>
           <Green>0</Green>
           <Blue>0</Blue>
         </Color>
       </Outline>
       <Insets>
         <Top>0.0</Top>
         <Left>2.0</Left>
         <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
         <Right>3.0</Right>
       </Insets>
       <Visible>true</Visible>
     </Label>
   </Children>
   <Children xsi:type="layout:Plot">
     <Bounds>
       <Left>0.0</Left>
       <Top>0.0</Top>
       <Width>0.0</Width>
       <Height>0.0</Height>
     </Bounds>
     <Insets>
       <Top>3.0</Top>
       <Left>3.0</Left>
       <Bottom>3.0</Bottom>
       <Right>3.0</Right>
     </Insets>
     <Row>-1</Row>
     <Column>-1</Column>
     <Rowspan>-1</Rowspan>
     <Columnspan>-1</Columnspan>
     <Outline>
       <Style>Solid</Style>
       <Thickness>1</Thickness>
       <Color>
         <Transparency>255</Transparency>
         <Red>0</Red>
         <Green>0</Green>
         <Blue>0</Blue>
       </Color>
       <Visible>false</Visible>
     </Outline>
     <Visible>true</Visible>
     <HorizontalSpacing>5</HorizontalSpacing>
     <VerticalSpacing>5</VerticalSpacing>
     <ClientArea>
       <Outline>
         <Style>Solid</Style>
         <Thickness>0</Thickness>
         <Color>
           <Transparency>255</Transparency>
           <Red>0</Red>
           <Green>0</Green>
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         <Definition>&quot;Page Count&quot;</Definition>
       </DataDefinition>
       <SeriesIdentifier></SeriesIdentifier>
       <DataPoint>
         <Components>
           <Type>Orthogonal_Value</Type>
         </Components>
         <Separator>, </Separator>
       </DataPoint>
       <LabelPosition>Outside</LabelPosition>
       <Stacked>false</Stacked>
     </Series>
     <Grouping>
       <Enabled>false</Enabled>
       <GroupingInterval>0.0</GroupingInterval>
       <GroupType>Text</GroupType>
       <AggregateExpression>Sum</AggregateExpression>
     </Grouping>
     <SortKey/>
   </SeriesDefinitions>
   <Orientation>Horizontal</Orientation>
   <LineAttributes>
     <Style>Solid</Style>
     <Thickness>1</Thickness>
     <Visible>true</Visible>
   </LineAttributes>
   <Label>
     <Caption>
       <Value></Value>
       <Font>
         <Alignment/>
       </Font>
     </Caption>
     <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
       <Transparency>0</Transparency>
       <Red>255</Red>
       <Green>255</Green>
       <Blue>255</Blue>
     </Background>
     <Outline>
       <Style>Solid</Style>
       <Thickness>1</Thickness>
       <Color>
         <Transparency>255</Transparency>
         <Red>0</Red>
         <Green>0</Green>
         <Blue>0</Blue>
       </Color>
     </Outline>
     <Insets>
       <Top>0.0</Top>
       <Left>2.0</Left>
       <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
       <Right>3.0</Right>
     </Insets>
     <Visible>true</Visible>
   </Label>
   <LabelPosition>Below</LabelPosition>
   <MajorGrid>
     <LineAttributes>
       <Style>Solid</Style>
       <Thickness>1</Thickness>
       <Color>
         <Transparency>255</Transparency>
         <Red>196</Red>
         <Green>196</Green>
         <Blue>196</Blue>
       </Color>
       <Visible>false</Visible>
     </LineAttributes>
     <TickStyle>Across</TickStyle>
     <TickAttributes>
       <Style>Solid</Style>
       <Thickness>1</Thickness>
       <Color>
         <Transparency>255</Transparency>
         <Red>196</Red>
         <Green>196</Green>
         <Blue>196</Blue>
       </Color>
       <Visible>true</Visible>
     </TickAttributes>
   </MajorGrid>
   <MinorGrid>
     <LineAttributes>
       <Style>Solid</Style>
       <Thickness>1</Thickness>
       <Color>
         <Transparency>255</Transparency>
         <Red>225</Red>
         <Green>225</Green>
         <Blue>225</Blue>
       </Color>
       <Visible>false</Visible>
     </LineAttributes>
     <TickStyle>Across</TickStyle>
     <TickAttributes>
       <Style>Solid</Style>
       <Thickness>1</Thickness>
       <Color>
         <Transparency>255</Transparency>
         <Red>225</Red>
         <Green>225</Green>
         <Blue>225</Blue>
       </Color>
       <Visible>false</Visible>
     </TickAttributes>
   </MinorGrid>
   <Scale>
     <MinorGridsPerUnit>5</MinorGridsPerUnit>
   </Scale>
   <Origin>
     <Type>Min</Type>
     <Value xsi:type="data:NumberDataElement">
       <Value>0.0</Value>
     </Value>
   </Origin>
   <PrimaryAxis>true</PrimaryAxis>
   <CategoryAxis>true</CategoryAxis>
   <Percent>false</Percent>
 </Axes>
 <Orientation>Vertical</Orientation>
 <UnitSpacing>50.0</UnitSpacing>
 <Rotation/>
</model:ChartWithAxes>
]]></xml-property>
                           <property name="outputFormat">PNG</property>
                           <property name="height">2.0833333333333335in</property>
                           <property name="width">7.927083333333333in</property>
                       </extended-item>
                   </cell>
               </row>
           </footer>
       </table>
   </body>
</report>

BIRT: Creating an SWT Emitter

2009-07-07T00:55:00.003-06:00

I had shown a proof of concept of this idea at EclipseCon, albeit in a very simplified manner by coupling an emitter to a TreeView component in SWT. But this guy took it a step further and has taken it a step further and has an emitter that outputs directly to an SWT table. This opens the door for all sorts of cool opportunities, such as customized action handlers for interacting directly with SWT components.

Not sure why I didn't think of passing in the composite as a render option as I went about it in a different way, but this is definitely cool stuff. With a little modification to handle groups, you can do all sorts of cool interactive report interfaces using RCP or RAP :)

Technology Musing: Devices that Have Changed My Adult Life

2009-07-03T15:51:00.001-06:00

This week, me and my wife went on a cruise. As an experiment, I decided that while I was on this cruise, I wouldn’t use any technical gadgets. I didn’t bring my laptop, turned off my cell phone, and only used my iPod when I went to the gym. So while I had this opportunity to get away from technology, I had the opportunity to reflect on the gadgets that have made the biggest impact on my recent life. By no means is this a reflection of my life as a whole, because things like the original NES aren’t on here, just a relfection of devices from the last 10 years or that have changed my outlook on technology or my life in some significant way.

IPod:
About 5 years ago I was a PC fan boy. I had that mentality for years, dating back to the early 90’s. It was so rabid in fact that I laughed when Apple announced the launch of the iPod. I laughed that this feeble device was Apples attempt to stay relevant. I wasn’t sold on Macs. I thought the iMac was a “cute” little device, and I did like the Adobe suite of software, but I wouldn’t even consider it on anything except a PC.

At the time of its arrival, there were other MP3 players out on the market. In fact, I had a cute little 256M player that I worked out with up until 2003, with the thought of an iPod so distant, that it was laughable. All that changed in 2006, when I broke down and bought my first iPod Video. Ever since, this little device has changed my life.

When I first bought it, I was able to load up every single MP3 I owned, with room to spare for tons of movies which I used to work out. Previously I had a PC I configured to “hide” on a network to provide music for everyone at work. All that fit on a 30 Gig hard drive. My new iPod fit all of this, plus movies. It was awesome.

So how had this device changed my life. Quite simply, since that first iPod video, I bought a iPod Nano for my workouts, and when that died two weeks ago, I broke down and bought an iPod touch. Now the Touch has all my flashcards for studying various subjects, podcasts, movies and videos (especially my P90X videos for working out, Kenpo 5.0 videos, and Royler Gracies takedown DVD’s), not to mention my music collection. I still have the iPod video sitting in a video unit. I store my contacts and calendar for casual use on it.

Out of everything, I think the iPod has been by far the single most life changing device I own. I’ve learned a second language because of my iPod. I no longer listen to commercial radio because of my iPod. I use Nike+ as a motivation to run everyday. In fact, I’ve lost almost 80 pounds over the past 3 years, mostly due to listening to music while running with my iPod.

The iPod changed my perspective so much, that I convinced my wife to buy a Macbook, and I will probably end up buying one of my own. Now consider that, 5 years ago, I wouldn’t touch a Mac, 5 years later I’ve bought 5 Apple products (3 iPods, 1 iPod for my wife, and her Macbook). I’d have to say, that’s a pretty big change.

HTC Touch.

Before I bought a smart phone a few years ago, I relied on some very bare bones PC’s. It wasn’t until I started to hack my Razr that I started to think about getting a phone that did “just a little bit more”. I had played around with Pocket PC’s for years, but I just didn’t get that into them because it was just a big bother to carry around multiple devices. All that changed when I bought my XV6900.

Now, this device has become the digital center of my life, more so than my laptop. I’ve become one of those obnoxious people who are constantly texting, checking emails, and can’t seem to pry myself away from it.

I use it when I’m in airports and need Internet access. I use it for business and personal calls. I keep track of my daily schedule, upcoming events, and contacts with it. I play chess on it. And its always attached to my hip. I don’t even have a land line now because of this device.

Laptop:

Another one of those 5 years ago changes. 5 years ago I was anchored to a desk by a big old PC. Since I turned consultant, I couldn’t imagine going back to a PC. I like the freedom of being able to work anywhere, and staying connected to all my devices with a handful of cables. I like that option of being able to dock at my home office, and having a dual monitor setup off of a single laptop, then being able to pick up, go to my living room, and plop in front of the TV and work at the same time. This was freedom that wasn’t afforded with the desk anchor, and I think my productivity suffered as a result of being stuck in one place. Now, whenever I have an idea, I can just open my laptop and work on it.

George Foreman Grill:

Yeah, I’m serious. This is definitely a gadget that changed my life. Used to be I was a real fast food kind of guy. The George Foreman Grill actually changed that. Now, I prefer to cook at home since it takes only about 10 minutes to grill a steak, without a lot of the fat. With the combination of the Reveo Marivac Food Tumbler, I eat better, healthier than I ever did before. I keep track of recipes, marinades, and wines that go good with them. Plus, its seems to REALLY impress my wifes friends that I can cook, so keep that in mind, chicks dig guys who can cook.

Xbox 360:

When I was a kid, I was a video game junky. I mean, I was really into video games, which is in part why I had such a horrible physique into young adulthood. I turned away from video games for several years, but was re-introduced with the Xbox and the PS2. So, up until that point, I was just a solo player. Since the 360’s release, I couldn’t imagine a game that didn’t have multiplayer capabilities. The 360 has become the media center for the whole house, with its Netflix movie hookup, ability to play DVD’s, music, hook up to the MP3 server in our house, movie rentals from the 360 video service, and so forth. In fact, the only thing my PS3 does is play blue ray, for some reason it just hasn’t caught on as a gaming device in my house hold. A huge change in moving the media device from the PC to the living room for me.

Nike+: Update to Site Requires Additional Exemptions in AdBlock Plus

2009-06-25T15:38:00.003-06:00

I wrote previously about needing to add an exemption for Nike Plus if you are running Firefox with AdBlock Plus. Two days ago Nike did some updates to the Nikeplus site, and the original issue of just getting a white screen came up again. Turns out, there is a new domain needed to add to the exemption list.

So, adding a new exemption like so will get around this:
@@http://nikerunning.nike.com

I will need to investigate further, I am fairly sure you can a wildcard, like either @@.nike.com, or maybe @@*.nike.com to get around this, the only concern for me are ads that come from the Nike domain...

BIRT - Highlight Chart Series on MouseOver Event

2009-06-17T23:33:00.001-06:00

One of the most common requests I hear with BIRT charting is that people want interactive charts. So, when someone mouse over a series in a Pie Chart, they would like to see that series jump out, or highlight. I’ve heard this request over and over again.

The problem is that BIRT charts render charts as single images. So, when you render a chart, it renders a JPG or a PNG file, and when it displays in the browser, it displays with an image map to handle interactivity. This makes doing a highlighting chart series very difficult. Typically the solutions that is given is to use the SVG output for charts. While this will work, I don’t like the solution for a number of reasons. First, the behavior is not consistent. Secondly, SVG is not a standard format. In some browsers it requires a plugin.

So, I took a page out of history to come up with a solution. This harkens back to the yesteryear of the good old image swap Javascript. The solution is simple. Basically, BIRT will render the chart multiple times, once for ever series in the chart. It does so by using a script in the initialize tag (this needs to be done during the generation phase, I used Initialize in this example). The script reads the parent chart, makes a copy, and modifies the explosion expression to explode only a single series. Once completed, a Javascript on the client side will retrieve the chart images by ID and store them in an array. The Chart interactivity will then call a swap function when the user mouse-overs that particular series, causing it to swap. The example report below leave room for improvement, but it is a workable example of how this can be accomplished. I combined this example with an example on BIRT Exchange that shows how to highlight of table rows that correspond to the chart series. This gives it a little extra umph.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<report xmlns="http://www.eclipse.org/birt/2005/design" version="3.2.17" id="1">
    <property name="createdBy">Eclipse BIRT Designer Version 2.3.2.r232_20090202 Build &lt;2.3.2.v20090218-0730></property>
    <property name="units">in</property>
    <method name="initialize"><![CDATA[var reportDesignHandle = reportContext.getReportRunnable().getDesignHandle();
var re = reportDesignHandle.findElement("NewChart");

var pieChart = re.getReportItem().getProperty("chart.instance");

for (var x = 1; x <= 20; x++)
{
    importPackage(Packages.org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util);
    var chartCopy = EcoreUtil.copy(pieChart);
    
    var outerSeries = chartCopy.getSeriesDefinitions().get(0);
    var innerSeries = outerSeries.getSeriesDefinitions().get(0);
    var pieSeries = innerSeries.getSeries().get(0);
    pieSeries.setExplosionExpression("valueData == " + x);
    pieSeries.setExplosion(5);
    
    var eih = reportDesignHandle.getElementFactory().newExtendedItem("chart-" + x, "Chart");
    eih.getReportItem().setProperty("chart.instance", chartCopy);
    eih.setBookmark("\"Chart-" + x + "\"");
    
    re.getContainerSlotHandle().add(eih);
}]]></method>
    <property name="iconFile">/templates/blank_report.gif</property>
    <property name="bidiLayoutOrientation">ltr</property>
    <data-sources>
        <script-data-source name="Data Source" id="7"/>
    </data-sources>
    <data-sets>
        <script-data-set name="Data Set" id="8">
            <list-property name="resultSetHints">
                <structure>
                    <property name="position">0</property>
                    <property name="name">id</property>
                    <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                </structure>
                <structure>
                    <property name="position">1</property>
                    <property name="name">count</property>
                    <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                </structure>
            </list-property>
            <list-property name="columnHints">
                <structure>
                    <property name="columnName">id</property>
                </structure>
                <structure>
                    <property name="columnName">count</property>
                </structure>
            </list-property>
            <structure name="cachedMetaData">
                <list-property name="resultSet">
                    <structure>
                        <property name="position">1</property>
                        <property name="name">id</property>
                        <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                    </structure>
                    <structure>
                        <property name="position">2</property>
                        <property name="name">count</property>
                        <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                    </structure>
                </list-property>
            </structure>
            <property name="dataSource">Data Source</property>
            <method name="open"><![CDATA[count = 0;
id = 0;]]></method>
            <method name="fetch"><![CDATA[if (id < 20)
{
    id++;
    count++;
    
    row["id"] = id;
    row["count"] = count;
    return true;
}

return false;]]></method>
        </script-data-set>
    </data-sets>
    <styles>
        <style name="report" id="4">
            <property name="fontFamily">"Verdana"</property>
            <property name="fontSize">10pt</property>
        </style>
        <style name="crosstab-cell" id="5">
            <property name="borderBottomColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderBottomStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderBottomWidth">1pt</property>
            <property name="borderLeftColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderLeftStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderLeftWidth">1pt</property>
            <property name="borderRightColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderRightStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderRightWidth">1pt</property>
            <property name="borderTopColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderTopStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderTopWidth">1pt</property>
        </style>
        <style name="crosstab" id="6">
            <property name="borderBottomColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderBottomStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderBottomWidth">1pt</property>
            <property name="borderLeftColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderLeftStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderLeftWidth">1pt</property>
            <property name="borderRightColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderRightStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderRightWidth">1pt</property>
            <property name="borderTopColor">#CCCCCC</property>
            <property name="borderTopStyle">solid</property>
            <property name="borderTopWidth">1pt</property>
        </style>
    </styles>
    <page-setup>
        <simple-master-page name="Simple MasterPage" id="2">
            <property name="topMargin">0.25in</property>
            <property name="leftMargin">0.25in</property>
            <property name="bottomMargin">0.25in</property>
            <property name="rightMargin">0.25in</property>
            <page-footer>
                <text id="3">
                    <property name="contentType">html</property>
                    <text-property name="content"><![CDATA[<value-of>new Date()</value-of>]]></text-property>
                </text>
            </page-footer>
        </simple-master-page>
    </page-setup>
    <body>
        <table id="9">
            <property name="width">100%</property>
            <property name="dataSet">Data Set</property>
            <list-property name="boundDataColumns">
                <structure>
                    <property name="name">id</property>
                    <property name="displayName">id</property>
                    <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["id"]</expression>
                    <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                </structure>
                <structure>
                    <property name="name">count</property>
                    <property name="displayName">count</property>
                    <expression name="expression">dataSetRow["count"]</expression>
                    <property name="dataType">integer</property>
                </structure>
            </list-property>
            <column id="23"/>
            <column id="24"/>
            <header>
                <row id="25">
                    <cell id="26">
                        <property name="colSpan">2</property>
                        <property name="rowSpan">1</property>
                        <extended-item extensionName="Chart" name="NewChart" id="29">
                            <xml-property name="xmlRepresentation"><![CDATA[<model:ChartWithoutAxes xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:attribute="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModelAttribute" xmlns:layout="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModelLayout" xmlns:model="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModel" xmlns:type="http://www.birt.eclipse.org/ChartModelType">
  <Type>Pie Chart</Type>
  <SubType>Standard</SubType>
  <Block>
    <Children xsi:type="layout:TitleBlock">
      <Bounds>
        <Left>0.0</Left>
        <Top>0.0</Top>
        <Width>0.0</Width>
        <Height>0.0</Height>
      </Bounds>
      <Insets>
        <Top>3.0</Top>
        <Left>3.0</Left>
        <Bottom>3.0</Bottom>
        <Right>3.0</Right>
      </Insets>
      <Row>-1</Row>
      <Column>-1</Column>
      <Rowspan>-1</Rowspan>
      <Columnspan>-1</Columnspan>
      <Outline>
        <Style>Solid</Style>
        <Thickness>1</Thickness>
        <Color>
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Color>
        <Visible>false</Visible>
      </Outline>
      <Visible>true</Visible>
      <Label>
        <Caption>
          <Value>Highlight Chart</Value>
          <Font>
            <Size>16.0</Size>
            <Bold>true</Bold>
            <Alignment>
              <horizontalAlignment>Center</horizontalAlignment>
              <verticalAlignment>Center</verticalAlignment>
            </Alignment>
          </Font>
        </Caption>
        <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>0</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>255</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Background>
        <Outline>
          <Style>Solid</Style>
          <Thickness>1</Thickness>
          <Color>
            <Transparency>255</Transparency>
            <Red>0</Red>
            <Green>0</Green>
            <Blue>0</Blue>
          </Color>
        </Outline>
        <Insets>
          <Top>0.0</Top>
          <Left>2.0</Left>
          <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
          <Right>3.0</Right>
        </Insets>
        <Visible>true</Visible>
      </Label>
    </Children>
    <Children xsi:type="layout:Plot">
      <Bounds>
        <Left>0.0</Left>
        <Top>0.0</Top>
        <Width>0.0</Width>
        <Height>0.0</Height>
      </Bounds>
      <Insets>
        <Top>3.0</Top>
        <Left>3.0</Left>
        <Bottom>3.0</Bottom>
        <Right>3.0</Right>
      </Insets>
      <Row>-1</Row>
      <Column>-1</Column>
      <Rowspan>-1</Rowspan>
      <Columnspan>-1</Columnspan>
      <Outline>
        <Style>Solid</Style>
        <Thickness>1</Thickness>
        <Color>
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Color>
        <Visible>false</Visible>
      </Outline>
      <Visible>true</Visible>
      <HorizontalSpacing>5</HorizontalSpacing>
      <VerticalSpacing>5</VerticalSpacing>
      <ClientArea>
        <Outline>
          <Style>Solid</Style>
          <Thickness>0</Thickness>
          <Color>
            <Transparency>255</Transparency>
            <Red>0</Red>
            <Green>0</Green>
            <Blue>0</Blue>
          </Color>
          <Visible>false</Visible>
        </Outline>
        <Insets>
          <Top>0.0</Top>
          <Left>0.0</Left>
          <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
          <Right>0.0</Right>
        </Insets>
      </ClientArea>
    </Children>
    <Children xsi:type="layout:Legend">
      <Bounds>
        <Left>0.0</Left>
        <Top>0.0</Top>
        <Width>0.0</Width>
        <Height>0.0</Height>
      </Bounds>
      <Insets>
        <Top>3.0</Top>
        <Left>3.0</Left>
        <Bottom>3.0</Bottom>
        <Right>3.0</Right>
      </Insets>
      <Row>-1</Row>
      <Column>-1</Column>
      <Rowspan>-1</Rowspan>
      <Columnspan>-1</Columnspan>
      <Outline>
        <Style>Solid</Style>
        <Thickness>1</Thickness>
        <Color>
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Color>
        <Visible>false</Visible>
      </Outline>
      <Visible>true</Visible>
      <ClientArea>
        <Outline>
          <Style>Solid</Style>
          <Thickness>0</Thickness>
          <Color>
            <Transparency>255</Transparency>
            <Red>0</Red>
            <Green>0</Green>
            <Blue>0</Blue>
          </Color>
          <Visible>false</Visible>
        </Outline>
        <Insets>
          <Top>2.0</Top>
          <Left>2.0</Left>
          <Bottom>2.0</Bottom>
          <Right>2.0</Right>
        </Insets>
      </ClientArea>
      <Text>
        <Value></Value>
        <Font>
          <Alignment/>
        </Font>
      </Text>
      <Orientation>Vertical</Orientation>
      <Direction>Top_Bottom</Direction>
      <Separator>
        <Style>Solid</Style>
        <Thickness>1</Thickness>
        <Color>
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Color>
        <Visible>true</Visible>
      </Separator>
      <Position>Right</Position>
      <ItemType>Categories</ItemType>
      <Title>
        <Caption>
          <Value></Value>
          <Font>
            <Alignment/>
          </Font>
        </Caption>
        <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>0</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>255</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Background>
        <Outline>
          <Style>Solid</Style>
          <Thickness>1</Thickness>
          <Color>
            <Transparency>255</Transparency>
            <Red>0</Red>
            <Green>0</Green>
            <Blue>0</Blue>
          </Color>
          <Visible>false</Visible>
        </Outline>
        <Insets>
          <Top>0.0</Top>
          <Left>2.0</Left>
          <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
          <Right>3.0</Right>
        </Insets>
        <Visible>false</Visible>
      </Title>
      <TitlePosition>Above</TitlePosition>
    </Children>
    <Bounds>
      <Left>0.0</Left>
      <Top>0.0</Top>
      <Width>561.75</Width>
      <Height>351.75</Height>
    </Bounds>
    <Insets>
      <Top>3.0</Top>
      <Left>3.0</Left>
      <Bottom>3.0</Bottom>
      <Right>3.0</Right>
    </Insets>
    <Row>-1</Row>
    <Column>-1</Column>
    <Rowspan>-1</Rowspan>
    <Columnspan>-1</Columnspan>
    <Outline>
      <Style>Solid</Style>
      <Thickness>1</Thickness>
      <Color>
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>0</Red>
        <Green>0</Green>
        <Blue>0</Blue>
      </Color>
      <Visible>false</Visible>
    </Outline>
    <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
      <Transparency>255</Transparency>
      <Red>255</Red>
      <Green>255</Green>
      <Blue>255</Blue>
    </Background>
    <Visible>true</Visible>
  </Block>
  <Dimension>Two_Dimensional</Dimension>
  <Units>Points</Units>
  <SeriesThickness>10.0</SeriesThickness>
  <GridColumnCount>0</GridColumnCount>
  <SampleData>
    <BaseSampleData>
      <DataSetRepresentation>'A','B','C','D','E'</DataSetRepresentation>
    </BaseSampleData>
    <OrthogonalSampleData>
      <DataSetRepresentation>6,4,12,8,10</DataSetRepresentation>
      <SeriesDefinitionIndex>0</SeriesDefinitionIndex>
    </OrthogonalSampleData>
  </SampleData>
  <Interactivity>
    <Enable>true</Enable>
    <LegendBehavior>None</LegendBehavior>
  </Interactivity>
  <SeriesDefinitions>
    <Query>
      <Definition></Definition>
    </Query>
    <SeriesPalette>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>80</Red>
        <Green>166</Green>
        <Blue>218</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>242</Red>
        <Green>88</Green>
        <Blue>106</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>232</Red>
        <Green>172</Green>
        <Blue>57</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>255</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>64</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>192</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>170</Red>
        <Green>85</Green>
        <Blue>85</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>0</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>192</Red>
        <Green>192</Green>
        <Blue>192</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>255</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>192</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>7</Red>
        <Green>146</Green>
        <Blue>94</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>0</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>255</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>192</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>0</Red>
        <Green>255</Green>
        <Blue>255</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>0</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>192</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>192</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>0</Green>
        <Blue>255</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>64</Green>
        <Blue>64</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>64</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>80</Red>
        <Green>240</Green>
        <Blue>120</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>0</Red>
        <Green>64</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>0</Green>
        <Blue>64</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>0</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>64</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>128</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>128</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>255</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>0</Red>
        <Green>64</Green>
        <Blue>0</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>0</Red>
        <Green>0</Green>
        <Blue>0</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>255</Green>
        <Blue>255</Blue>
      </Entries>
      <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
        <Transparency>255</Transparency>
        <Red>255</Red>
        <Green>128</Green>
        <Blue>0</Blue>
      </Entries>
    </SeriesPalette>
    <SeriesDefinitions>
      <Query>
        <Definition></Definition>
      </Query>
      <SeriesPalette>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>80</Red>
          <Green>166</Green>
          <Blue>218</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>242</Red>
          <Green>88</Green>
          <Blue>106</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>232</Red>
          <Green>172</Green>
          <Blue>57</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>255</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>64</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>192</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>170</Red>
          <Green>85</Green>
          <Blue>85</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>192</Red>
          <Green>192</Green>
          <Blue>192</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>255</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>192</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>7</Red>
          <Green>146</Green>
          <Blue>94</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>192</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>255</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>192</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>192</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>64</Green>
          <Blue>64</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>64</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>80</Red>
          <Green>240</Green>
          <Blue>120</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>64</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>64</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>64</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>128</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>128</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>64</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>0</Red>
          <Green>0</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>255</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Entries>
        <Entries xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>255</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>128</Green>
          <Blue>0</Blue>
        </Entries>
      </SeriesPalette>
      <Series xsi:type="type:PieSeries">
        <Visible>true</Visible>
        <Label>
          <Caption>
            <Value></Value>
            <Font>
              <Alignment/>
            </Font>
          </Caption>
          <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
            <Transparency>0</Transparency>
            <Red>255</Red>
            <Green>255</Green>
            <Blue>255</Blue>
          </Background>
          <Outline>
            <Style>Solid</Style>
            <Thickness>1</Thickness>
            <Color>
              <Transparency>255</Transparency>
              <Red>0</Red>
              <Green>0</Green>
              <Blue>0</Blue>
            </Color>
            <Visible>false</Visible>
          </Outline>
          <Insets>
            <Top>0.0</Top>
            <Left>2.0</Left>
            <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
            <Right>3.0</Right>
          </Insets>
          <Visible>true</Visible>
        </Label>
        <DataDefinition>
          <Definition>row[&quot;count&quot;]</Definition>
        </DataDefinition>
        <SeriesIdentifier></SeriesIdentifier>
        <DataPoint>
          <Components>
            <Type>Orthogonal_Value</Type>
          </Components>
          <Separator>, </Separator>
        </DataPoint>
        <LabelPosition>Outside</LabelPosition>
        <Stacked>false</Stacked>
        <Triggers>
          <Condition>onmouseover</Condition>
          <Action>
            <Type>Invoke_Script</Type>
            <Value xsi:type="attribute:ScriptValue">
              <Script>swapImage(categoryData);&#xD;
highlight(categoryData);</Script>
            </Value>
          </Action>
        </Triggers>
        <Explosion>0</Explosion>
        <ExplosionExpression></ExplosionExpression>
        <Title>
          <Caption>
            <Value></Value>
            <Font>
              <Size>16.0</Size>
              <Bold>true</Bold>
              <Alignment/>
            </Font>
          </Caption>
          <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
            <Transparency>0</Transparency>
            <Red>255</Red>
            <Green>255</Green>
            <Blue>255</Blue>
          </Background>
          <Outline>
            <Style>Solid</Style>
            <Thickness>1</Thickness>
            <Color>
              <Transparency>255</Transparency>
              <Red>0</Red>
              <Green>0</Green>
              <Blue>0</Blue>
            </Color>
          </Outline>
          <Insets>
            <Top>0.0</Top>
            <Left>2.0</Left>
            <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
            <Right>3.0</Right>
          </Insets>
          <Visible>true</Visible>
        </Title>
        <TitlePosition>Below</TitlePosition>
        <LeaderLineAttributes>
          <Style>Solid</Style>
          <Thickness>1</Thickness>
          <Color>
            <Transparency>255</Transparency>
            <Red>0</Red>
            <Green>0</Green>
            <Blue>0</Blue>
          </Color>
          <Visible>true</Visible>
        </LeaderLineAttributes>
        <LeaderLineStyle>Fixed_Length</LeaderLineStyle>
        <LeaderLineLength>10.0</LeaderLineLength>
      </Series>
      <Grouping>
        <Enabled>false</Enabled>
        <GroupingInterval>1.0</GroupingInterval>
        <GroupType>Text</GroupType>
        <AggregateExpression>Sum</AggregateExpression>
      </Grouping>
    </SeriesDefinitions>
    <Series>
      <Visible>true</Visible>
      <Label>
        <Caption>
          <Value></Value>
          <Font>
            <Alignment/>
          </Font>
        </Caption>
        <Background xsi:type="attribute:ColorDefinition">
          <Transparency>0</Transparency>
          <Red>255</Red>
          <Green>255</Green>
          <Blue>255</Blue>
        </Background>
        <Outline>
          <Style>Solid</Style>
          <Thickness>1</Thickness>
          <Color>
            <Transparency>255</Transparency>
            <Red>0</Red>
            <Green>0</Green>
            <Blue>0</Blue>
          </Color>
          <Visible>false</Visible>
        </Outline>
        <Insets>
          <Top>0.0</Top>
          <Left>2.0</Left>
          <Bottom>0.0</Bottom>
          <Right>3.0</Right>
        </Insets>
        <Visible>false</Visible>
      </Label>
      <DataDefinition>
        <Definition>row[&quot;id&quot;]</Definition>
      </DataDefinition>
      <SeriesIdentifier></SeriesIdentifier>
      <DataPoint>
        <Components>
          <Type>Orthogonal_Value</Type>
        </Components>
        <Separator>, </Separator>
      </DataPoint>
      <LabelPosition>Outside</LabelPosition>
      <Stacked>false</Stacked>
    </Series>
    <Grouping>
      <Enabled>false</Enabled>
      <GroupingInterval>1.0</GroupingInterval>
      <GroupType>Text</GroupType>
      <AggregateExpression>Sum</AggregateExpression>
    </Grouping>
  </SeriesDefinitions>
</model:ChartWithoutAxes>
]]></xml-property>
                            <property name="outputFormat">PNG</property>
                            <expression name="bookmark">"Chart-Main"</expression>
                            <property name="height">4.885416666666667in</property>
                            <property name="width">7.802083333333333in</property>
                        </extended-item>
                    </cell>
                </row>
                <row id="10">
                    <property name="textAlign">left</property>
                    <cell id="11">
                        <label id="12">
                            <text-property name="text">id</text-property>
                        </label>
                    </cell>
                    <cell id="13">
                        <label id="14">
                            <text-property name="text">count</text-property>
                        </label>
                    </cell>
                </row>
            </header>
            <detail>
                <row id="15">
                    <expression name="bookmark">row["id"]</expression>
                    <cell id="16">
                        <data id="17">
                            <property name="resultSetColumn">id</property>
                        </data>
                    </cell>
                    <cell id="18">
                        <data id="19">
                            <property name="resultSetColumn">count</property>
                        </data>
                    </cell>
                </row>
            </detail>
            <footer>
                <row id="20">
                    <cell id="21">
                        <text id="31">
                            <property name="contentType">html</property>
                            <text-property name="content"><![CDATA[<script type="text/javascript">
/**
Javascript for setting up hte image swap from all the chart instances
**/
    imageArray = new Array();
    mainImageSrc = document.getElementById("Chart-Main").src;
    
    for (x = 0; x < 20; x++)
    {
        currentImage = document.getElementById("Chart-" + (x + 1));
        
        imageArray[x] = currentImage;
        
        currentImage.style.display = "none";
    }
    
    function swapImage(num)
    {
        mainImage = document.getElementById("Chart-Main");
        
        mainImage.src = imageArray[num - 1].src;
    }
    
    function showMain()
    {
        document.getElementById("Image-Main").src = mainImageSrc;
    }
</script>]]></text-property>
                        </text>
                    </cell>
                    <cell id="22">
                        <text id="30">
                            <property name="contentType">html</property>
                            <text-property name="content"><![CDATA[<!-- Dummy tag to get parent nodes -->
<div id="tableAnchor"></div>

<script>    
    // Get the table object itself
    var o = document.getElementById("tableAnchor");
    while(o != null){
        if (o.tagName == "TBODY")
            break;
        o = o.parentNode;
    }
    
    // Add the mouseover event to each of the table rows
    for (var i = 1; i < o.children.length; i++) {
        var ro = o.children[i];
        ro.onmouseover = function(){highlight(this.id);swapImage(this.id);};
        ro.onmouseout = function(){unhighlight(this.id);};
    }
    
    // Highlight function is called from mouseove events (see above)
    // and also from chart mouseover events.
    var g_previousHighlight = "";
    function highlight(category) {
        // Remove previous highlight (if any)
        if (g_previousHighlight > "") {
            var o = document.getElementById(g_previousHighlight);
            o.style.backgroundColor="";
            
        }
        
        // Apply new highlight
        var o = document.getElementById(category);        
        o.style.backgroundColor="#8080ff";
        g_previousHighlight = category;        
    }
    
    function unhighlight(category) {
        // Remove previous highlight (if any)
        if (g_previousHighlight > "") {
            var o = document.getElementById(g_previousHighlight);
            o.style.backgroundColor="";
            
        }
        
        // Apply new highlight
        var o = document.getElementById(category);        
        o.style.backgroundColor="#FFFFFF";
        g_previousHighlight = category;        
    }


</script>]]></text-property>
                        </text>
                    </cell>
                </row>
            </footer>
        </table>
    </body>
</report>

BIRT: Accessing the Report Context in Java Chart Event Handler

2009-05-18T15:07:00.002-06:00

After Googling this, it seems that this is a common question that has no posted answers. seriously, thats annoying. I hate when that happens.

Anyway, so what I needed was to set a property in the report context that could be accessed withing a chart event. Now, if I was using the Javascript handler, something like the following would be sufficient:

context.getExternalContext().getScriptable()

However, this does not return anything close to a context in a Java event handler. The
context.getExternalContext()  returns a BIRTExternalContext object, this is not a public accessible class. And getScriptable
returns a NativeJavaObject. So, in a way that is not documented anywhere, you can do the
following to get access to an IReportContext object from within a Java Event handler for charts:

Object o = icsc.getExternalContext().getObject();
IReportContext context = (IReportContext)o;

Thats it. Not sure why this is not documented anywhere since it seems to be asked a bunch.

Electronics: Goodwill is an Electronics Goldmine

2009-05-09T19:09:00.003-06:00

Seriously. Especially old, outdated stuff. And if your looking for wall warts, you just can't beat Goodwill. We went in there looking for 80's cloths for a theme party, I walked out with 3 9 volt, 500 mA wall warts for less than 3 bucks. Cheapest I could find them online was about 3 bucks a piece. Radio Shack sells them for about 20 bucks. I'm sure everyone who is an electronics tinkerer already knew this, and I'd heard it years ago, but I was blown away. Worth keeping in mind for the microcontroller projects.

Sguil: Issue with Reverse DNS

2009-04-29T14:18:00.004-06:00

I had an interesting issue with SGUIL. Interesting in the sense that the developer had no idea why I was having this issue, and could offer no insight. I had a rather “square peg, round hole” solution to fix it.

In version 0.7 of Sguil, the Reverse DNS option would not work on my machine, both with the External DNS option checked, and without it checked. In both instances I would get the following error:

The odd thing was this function worked just fine in previous versions of Sguil. So, to fix this, I went back to the IP address lookup used in the previous versions of Sguil. I edited the /sguilRoot/client/lib/extdata.tcl file to look like so:

#
# GetHostbyAddr: uses extended tcl (wishx) to get an ips hostname
#                May move to a server func in the future
#
proc GetHostbyAddr { ip } {

#    global EXT_DNS EXT_DNS_SERVER HOME_NET

#    if { $EXT_DNS } {

#        if { ![info exists EXT_DNS_SERVER] } {

#            ErrorMessage "An external name server has not been configured in sguil.conf. Resolution aborted."
#            return

#        } else {

#            set nameserver $EXT_DNS_SERVER

#            if { [info exists HOME_NET] } {

              # Loop thru HOME_NET. If ip matches any networks than use a the locally configured
              # name server
#                foreach homeNet $HOME_NET {

#                    set netMask [ip::mask $homeNet]
#                    if { [ip::equal ${ip}/${netMask} $homeNet] } { set nameserver local }

#                }

#            }

#        }

#    } else {

#        set nameserver local

#    }

#    if { $nameserver == "local" } {

#        set tok [dns::resolve $ip]

#    } else {

#        set tok [dns::resolve $ip -nameserver $nameserver]

#    }

#    set hostname [dns::name $tok]
#    dns::cleanup $tok
#    if { $hostname == "" } { set hostname "Unknown" }
#    return $hostname
if [catch {host_info official_name $ip} hostname] {
  set hostname "Unknown"
}
return $hostname
}

This took care of my problem. My only guess is that there is something with the ActiveTCL implementation of the DNS library on Windows that prevented this from working. I am not sure what the advantage of using the DNS library instead of the TCLX host_info command is due to my lack of experience in TCL/TK.

But this does illustrate an important point. Since Sguil was written in a scripted interpreted language (TCL/TK), making a change to my instance was trivial. Edit a file, and I had my issue resolved. Had this been in a compiled language, I would have had either compile the source, which would have taken more time, or gone back to the developer, submit a bug fix, and wait. In this case, it is fortunate that the tool was not developed that way.

Security: NSM Illustrated

2009-04-23T14:51:00.004-06:00

I haven’t posted any security related posts in a while. Richard Bejtlich recently wrote an article illustrating a general event model of an analysts reaction using just an IDS vs an NSM based operation. I thought it would be a great opportunity to illustrate that process with an example to go along with the "Elvis" slides. The following is based on an incident, and will illustrate the NSM investigative process and using data to respond to the incident and make a business decision to modify network policy.

I’m cleaning out old events that have accumulated, and setting back up our sensor after an OS update deprecated some of the shared libraries used by Snort and SANCP. Once I got everything up and running, I saw a whole slew of SSH connection attempts kicked off by Snort. This is a fairly common event, and based on experience I know this is just an automated scan looking for open SSH ports and trying to brute force them.

Now, if this was only an IDS setup, I would only see an alert that an attack was underway. The only information I would have available would be the alert, and any logs. However, because Sguil was designed around the NSM principles, I had more information than that.

The first thing I did was query the event table for the potential attackers IP, and I can see that the connection attempts started at around 6:00 AM, and went on for 23 minutes. At this point, I have a pretty good idea that this is some sort of brute force attack, but not enough information to be sure. I need to investigate further.

The next thing I do is query the SANCP table for this IP address to see all the sessions the attacker has generated. More hits come back for this than alerts, which indicate there were connection attempts that did not trigger alerts because they did not match any of the signatures in Snort. This is an important distinction as to why an IDS or IPS system are not foolproof and shouldn’t be seen as security silver bullets. There were no sessions prior to this series of events, so this is our attackers first visit. In the below screenshot you can see there is a single session before 6:00 AM. This is probably the scan looking for live targets to attack. After this single session with no data sent or received, the connection attempts begin. I can tell by the source and destination data size that nothing more than the initial key exchange and login attempt ever gets done before closing the connection.

I investigate further and pull a transcript, which is a full content of the session. As expected, the data is encrypted because it is SSH traffic. But that doesn’t dead-end the investigation, I still have log data to analyze. I grep the auth.log file on the system in question with the IP address of the attacker. Sure enough, I see that this attacker is indeed trying to brute force our machine with different user and password combinations. The first log entry for the attackers IP shows that they did not send anything, solidifying my original theory that the first session in the SANCP query was to look for live targets.

This illustrates an important point. No 1 tool can handle everything, or give enough of a picture. As I understand it (and it may be a little off, I learned this stuff almost 8 years ago now), it's using all the tools at your disposal to get a big picture view of whats going on in your network, and be able to gather evidence as to make informed decision. Somewhat like Business Intelligence, but in a security perspective.

So at this point, being that I am a decision maker, I decide to block this IP from accessing the system further. I implement an IPTables rules to block them from any further connection attempts. To further reduce exposure, I may disable password authentication, and do white list rules to allow only known machines to connect. I could have blocked this at the firewall, but I didn't, which leads to the next scenario.

Now, this would have been the end of it, except I started to see alerts trigger from another one of our systems. Apparently this other system also had it’s SSH port exposed for remote logins. At this point, I am now aware of a policy violation on the network. So, while this was the exact same attacker just moving on to the next IP address in their scan, I have an entirely different scenario. I have information that leads me to make the decision to modify the firewall rules to close the firewall hole that is exposing this second machine.

Programming: Using the Google Java App Engine to Build my Time Warner Cable Petition Site

2009-04-13T23:30:00.002-06:00

Google recently announced the Java version of its Google App Engine. Interesting timing because I just so happened to have a need for an app server to host a small application I was looking to build. Despite criticism that it only includes a subset of the Java standard, it turned out to do everything I needed it to do.

The project I was looking to build was an online petition against Time Warner Cables recent announcement of Tiered Pricing based on consumption. Despite their attempts to justify such an action, I wasn’t buying it and saw through the BS. I wont get into the details, its covered much more in depth elsewhere on the net, as well on the petition site.

What made the Google App Engine so attractive is that it supported GWT natively right out of the box, and it supported its own data store, so that I can let visitors sign up, and write reports on the number of sign ups and type of sign ups.

So the first thing I did was download the SDK and install it into Eclipse. The thing I noticed immediately with the Eclipse plugin is that it has the option for two SDK’s, the GWT SDK and the App Engine SDK. These plugins are real nice because they let create these kinds of projects and deploy directly to the App Engine from within Eclipse. This is nice. The GWT project creation is on par with the Instantiations GWT Designer minus one glaring detail, the UI Designer. And I have found, the two don’t exactly play nicely with each other. No big deal, however. I created a separate project to design the layout of my forms in GWT Designer, and copy and pasted into my GWT/App Engine project. While this was a bit of a pain, it allowed me to keep my GUI designer.

The rest was simple. A few static page content, and by setting my RootPanel using the RootPanel.get(elementId) call, I was able to integrate my GWT components right into my static HTML pages. What I did here was something like this. I had a DIV tag in my HTML page called “content”. Instead of using a call like:

RootPanel rootPanel = RootPanel.get();

I did something like:

RootPanel rootPanel = RootPanel.get(“content”);

And my GWT based form is integrated into my static HTML page. And by commenting out the inherits line in the project.gwt.xml file, I was able to not have GWT force its styles onto my form, using the styles available in the static HTML files instead, keeping the form consistent with the rest of the site.

One other difference between the GWT Designers handling and the GWT Plugin of projects is that in the Google plugin, all static content is stored in the project/war directory. With GWT Designer, you get a public folder under the module directory. Threw me for a loop for a second, but I digress.

Next experiment will include a BIRT ODA to report off the data store using the Google Remote_API and trying to integrate the BIRT engine directly into an App Engine based project

Electronics: Pulsing/Breathing LED

2009-03-30T16:03:00.000-06:00

A few months ago I was looking to create a “pulsing LED” effect. What I was using this for was for a Halloween effect where I was placing a series of different colored ultra-bright LED’s under some beakers filled with water and dry ice, creating the Mad Scientists lab. One of my stated goals was to do this without using a microcontroller since I hadn’t gotten into microcontrollers yets.

I ended up using this project: http://www.rabidhardware.net/index.php?id=5

This essentially makes a scewed triangle wave, where the rise time is quicker than the fall time, creating a “breathing” effect.

There are a couple of other circuits that do similar things:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How_to_blinkbreathing_style_LED_while_you_are_p/

http://www.cpemma.co.uk/throbber.html

Of course, making a variable duty cycle PWM program with a microcontroller might end up better next time since I can control more LED’s with less.

Gripe: Nike+ does not work in Firefox with AdBlock

2009-03-14T18:55:00.002-06:00

A little aside before we get to the problem and solution.

Since the beginning of the year, I have hit the exercise full throttle again. I seem to do this in year intervals, where I will go nuts, lose a sick amount of weight over the course of 6 - 8 months, then lose steam. Not sure why that is, but the upside is that I haven't gained back any of the weight I've lost since I started this cycle (so far I have lost 70 -75 pounds over the course of 3 years) due to the diet I layed out previously.

One of the exercises I have been doing a lot of is running. While it has played hell on my knees, I have seen tremendous results from this. When I started really running last year, I could barely make a 1/4 of a mile. Now I regularly run anywhere from 3 - 6 miles a day at least 4 times a week. So since I have been so impressed by the results, I just keep at it.

This past weekend I ran in a 5K charity run for Multiple Sclerosis. Its one of the diseases, along with Parkinson's disease, that scares the hell out of me. Since one of my friends was diagnosed with it, I felt obligated to run. Sad how something has to hit home before we actually take action on something.

So to the point. A lot of the people at the run were using those Nike+ Ipod adapters. I had looked into these last year when I started running. But now I figured since we are in a media manufactured recession (its NOT real people, stop listening to the news, and go out, invest and spend) and the economy needs a little cash pumped into it, and I was challenged to join a team to compete on miles, I broke down and bought one.

Now to the problem. So if your reading this, you probably already have a Nike+, use Firefox, and ran into the same exact issue I did. You use Firefox as your default browser, and when Itunes attempts to sync your miles, or even connect to Nike+ site, all you get is a blank page. Chances are pretty good your using Adblock Plus. And thats the problem. Adblock is filtering the Nike+ site in Firefox.

There are two ways around this. You can temporarily disable Adblock. That is a short term fix, and very annoying. Thanks to an offhand comment I found in this thread, I found the long term solution is to add an exception to allow the Nike+ site in.

To do so, do the following:

Under the Tools menu, click on the AdBlock Plus Preferences menu item. If you don't see it, you can go under Tools > Add-Ons > and click on the Options button for Adblock Plus.

Click on the Add Filter button.

Add the following Filter.
@@http://nikeplus.nike.com

Thats it. Click Apply, and now you can use Nike+ inside of Firefox, assuming you have Flash installed.

Electronics: Microcontrollers and the DIY LED Heart for Valentine's Day

2009-02-15T18:43:00.008-07:00

I’d been looking to continue my old hobbies in electronics. I’ve been building small circuits when I have free time to sit at the workbench and fiddle with the old soldering iron and breadboards, but I’ve really wanted to get into the world of microcontrollers. Well, thanks to a “Slashvertisement”, I came across the DIY LED Heart Valentine Card from Nerkits.com.

Figure 1. The Microcontroller based Valentines Card.

Pretty much, most of the details are on their site. The project requires the USB Nerd Kit, wire strippers (I use a set of auto-strippers that I bought several years ago, when you have to strip wires a lot and quickly they are great to have, and it’s a pain to use the old fashion kind), and some basic construction tools. I used a piece of foam/cardboard I picked up from Walmart to build the heart, a Exacto knife to cut the hole for the LED Faceplate, and a drill to drill holes for the LED’s. To hold everything together, I used Gorilla Glue, which had a fortunate side effect of causing the Styrofoam in the board to bubble up before hardening, which worked great to hold all the circuit pieces onto the poster board.

Putting the circuit together was simple. I first followed the directions in the Nerdkit PDF file to build the base circuit (in the Nerdkit PDF, this is all the way up to step 10, which includes building the circuit, attaching the LCD screen, and attaching the programmer, and compiling and installing some test programs). From there, the rest of the project involved wiring up the LED’s as indicated in this template:

A little hint, to do the wiring from LED to LED, I used an old fasion wire wrap tool. This took maybe 15-20 minutes to completely wire the entire common wire run across the back of the template. To do the individual connections, I again, used a wire wrap tool to connect two posts in the LED’s, then I would only need to connect a single wire from the MCU to the pair.

Figure 2. Wire Wrap. Notice the single large white wire connecting to the post at the bottom of the image. Much easier than taking two wires from each post and trying to connect them in the middle. A single wire wrap takes like 5 seconds to complete.

Because this was going into a permanent card, I ended up soldering everything onto a circuit board. I ended up using a simple 6” circuit board from Radio Shack. The reason I chose this board is because it had the two side rails for both +5V coming from the voltage regular and a ground, had a 7mm center divide for the MCU, and to has a layout similar to the breadboard included in the Nerdkits kit, with numbered sides, so I could follow the instructions exactly. I also connected two 16 pin IC sockets back to back in place of the MCU during construction, this way I could solder everything to the board without the microcontroller in place and I wouldn’t have to worry about damaging the chip due to heat from the soldering iron. I could plug in the chip when I was done with construction.

The only modification I made to the circuit was to solder an additional four wires to act as “Posts” for the MCU programmer. I put 1 wire on the +5V rail, 1 on the ground, and 1 wire on each of the appropriate pins for the programmer to work. Then, if I needed or wanted to change anything, I would only need to flip the switch to set the chip into programming mode and attach the USB programmer to the posts using alligator clips (if I had time, I would have used some sort of connectors).

So how did it work? Initially, I ran into some issues. The code provided would cause the MCU to lock up unless I changed the delay timing. Thanks to the excellent support from Nerdkits, I was able to determine this was not a problem with the code, but with the version of AVR (the programming environment) for Windows that I was using. Once I updated to the newest version of AVR, everything worked perfectly.

So how would I rate my experience working with the Nerdkits tools. I am actually very impressed. There are a lot of Microcontroller kits out there (Basic Stamp, Adafruit). I got the USB Nerdkit for 80 dollars. A Basic Stamp kit runs about the same price at Radio Shack, the Adafruit kit run from anywhere from 30 bucks on up, depending on what you need (the equivalent to what I got from Nerdkits is about 65 bucks, minus the LCD screen and guide). So what attracted me to Nerdkits (besides the Slashdot advertisement), and what will keep me going back to them? Most importantly, the excellent support. I sent their support a message around midnight on Saturday. I had a response waiting in my Inbox on Sunday morning when I woke up. I can’t get that kind of support from most big vendors, including ones that I've spent thousands of dollars on server equipment and have "Gold" support with, so to get that from a small shop is incredible. Not only that, I had a follow up message a few hours later with the fix. In the message the guy said he played around with it and figured it out. This wasn't some dope in a call center reading from a script, but an actual guy (according to their site, an MIT engineer) who took the time to replicate and troubleshoot the issue, and on a Sunday. I can’t get that kind of support from people I know personally. I liked the included tools. The IDE used to program is an open source one, so I can play around with it, and maybe try to port the compiler over to something like Eclipse if I want to. The instructional material was easy to follow, and their are tutorial videos on their site. I had my initial kit up and running in less than 2 hours by following their instructions. The example kits are fun, and I like the fact that I can write code in C for the microcontroller. While I know BASIC and could have managed on a BASIC Stamp, I prefer C, especially for doing things like bit-shifting and working with registers on the microcontroller. And the end result is a lot simpler than the BASIC stamp modules bulky modules.

I’ve been wanting to build a few mini-moving lights for a Halloween project, and most of the components are already built in examples on their site (a combination of their Servo-Water gun (using 2 axis instead of 1) and some PWM ultra-bright Red, Blue, and Green LED’s will work for what I want). Overall, I am very impressed and happy with my experience from these guys.

And most importantly, the wife loved it :)

Figure 3. This looks a lot more complicated than it really is. I used ribbon style wire to go to each LED pair, and all green wires to connect to the LCD (hence the bundle of green wires). I lost the batter clip I bought, so I ended up using Duct Tape to hold the battery in place.

Tech: Fixed TV for Father In-Law (DTD1363-CAR)

2009-01-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

I spent the better part of the morning re-kindling an old love of mine, Electronics. I’ve been dabbling with electronics off and on for 15 years now. In fact, Electronics was an early career path for me before I decided to settle on programming. But, just like many other fields that I’ve had hobbies in, I find myself going back to electronics every now and then.

So this morning I tackled something I haven’t done since the early part of the decade, repairing televisions. My father-in-law brought me a television that he bought for his son a couple of years ago. This set is a Disney Cars TV/DVD combo unit (model # DTD1363-CAR). It’s a cute little unit, shaped to look like Lightning McQueen. And much like McQueen in the movie when he’s got no gas, it would run for about 5 minutes, then shut off. Kind of heart breaking for a 6 year old. Having working in a TV/VCR repair shop in college, I agreed to take a look at it for him.

What I ended up finding was some cold solder joints around the flyback/horizontal output transformer. It’s a big ugly unit with a large red cable running from the top into a suction cup in the CRT. I read a lot of silly suggestions on Fixya (http://www.fixya.com/support/p520372-disney_dtd1363_car_13_tv_dvd_combo), but the flyback cold solder joints suggestions led me to the visually inspect the joints. Sure enough, there were dull, porous solder joints around the transformer. To fix this, I removed the old solder using a solder sucker, prepped the area with small amount of solder rosin, and re-soldered the connections. I also re-soldered a few other spots on the board that looked suspect. So, what would have cost him about 70 bucks at a TV repair shop took me about 45 minutes. Hardest part was figuring out how to open up the case on this thing, which involved removing the plastic lugnuts in the tires that were hiding the screws holding the trim pieces in place. Outside of that, there wasn’t much else to fixing this. Keep in mind, this TV is indeed a piece of junk though, as are most TV/DVD combos. This is the problem with electronics manufactured in 3rd world countries where old plants are half-assed retrofitted to mass production, and there are poor QA standards, air quality standards, and so forth. I had a TV that my parents passed on to me that lasted well over 15 years, and we ended up selling it at a garage sale. I bet that thing had the tube zapped, it is still kicking out there.

Be wary of self diagnosis on TV’s. We used to pick up old sets from people who would throw out good sets because the picture on the tube would shrink to a “line in the middle” or a “dot in the middle”. So of course, people would assume the picture tube went bad and it would be too expensive to fix. 9 out of 10 times, however, it was a deflection circuit, and the part would cost about 30 bucks to fix it.

Maybe I should go pick up broken TV’s from Craigs list, fix them, and sell them for a little extra money. Not sure I want that kind of headache again.

Games: Little Big Planet

2008-11-07T18:57:00.000-07:00

I try not to blog about gaming too much since there are far better sources for this kind of material, some better, some worse, but thats all a matter of taste. I do have to say though, as an avid gamer, Little Big Planet has knocked my socks off. I picked this game up mainly due to hype, and half expecting to be let down. Truth be told, when I got the game home and couldn't update to the latest version (at this time, 1.03), I was really disappointed since it wouldn't allow me to see user created content. So I was left with the stock levels.

I won't bore you with the details about "Sackboy" since the main character and his possible customizations are covered very well in depth by the many gaming rags on the market. I will say he is cute and clever, as is the control scheme for him. I can't help myself but to have him disco dance ala Saturday Night Fever after every level.

The stock levels showcase the games physics and themes really well. It has a very animatronic theme going, with characters being voiced by little speakers, and movements being done by something right out of a Rube Goldberg invention. They are challenging, with a very silly backstory behind many of the different levels.

Once the gremlins with the network, be in on my end or Sonys end finally cleared up and I was able to update, I got to see where LBP really shines. User created content always ends up enhancing a game, and showcasing possibilities that the developers couldn't imagine. In this case there is no exception. I played around with user levels, some of which were mere mechanisms to earn trophies, but others were clever, challenging platformers that brought me back to the yesteryears of the NES. I had one level where I was doing a mock prison break, another where I was going through the American Gladiators obstacle course, and one where I played basketball while wearing a rocketpack.

So, those are the facts, so whats my opinion. I can openly say this, and all naysayers be damned. This is the first game where I have actually smiled and enjoyed playing. I haven't even gotten into level creation, just playing, and this is easily one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I have had in a long time. Finally, something that breaks away from the tired first person shooters, dystopian futures, survival horrors, and the getting very thin rhythm games (although I did pick up Gears of War 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, and Rock Band 2, so apparently I still have some demand for these games). Easily the best game for the PS3, and I look forward to seeing what else the community can cook up.

GWT: Calling GWT Classes and Methods from Regular Javascript

2008-11-06T02:16:00.000-07:00

My current project involves us working with a group who uses a custom built web framework that works on top of Dojo. Since I prefer to use GWT, even for strictly client side Javascript due to the debugger, I needed something that would allow me to create a somewhat functional Javascript based library. Out of the box, doing so in GWT is a bit of a pain, involving the need to create native JSNI mappings to the GWT methods. This is ugly, and one of the reasons I like GWT is because the code can be much prettier in development, even if it is not in deployment. I would prefer a much more efficient way, where the creation of the publically exposed methods are hidden for the most part during the development. This would normally take some function of the compiler to do this, but the clever folks behind the GWT Chronoscope project figured out a way to do this using Generators. They were even nice enough to release the fruits of that work free of charge.

Now, I will give you fair warning, download the sample code from the SVN repository. The documentation for this is non-existent, and the only way you can figure anything out is by looking at the samples. Here I will try to give you a good idea how to implement this in your own code by using a real simple proof of concept.

In the following example, I am going to create a new GWT module that will expose a simple Hello World return to a DOM object whose ID will be passed in. I will be doing so in a GWT project in Eclipse, and my runtime stuff will be done using the Instantiations GWT Designer, although you can do this in any GWT IDE you like. This will be compiled against GWT 1.5.2.

The first thing you need to do is add the library for GWT-Exporter into your projects classpath. In my case, I am using the Alpha release for version 2.

Once added, I create a simple module with a blank onModuleLoad. Normally in the onModuleLoad, we want to load and prepare out Ajax based stuff, but in this case, I don’t want anything yet, I will add a little code to jumpstart the export process in a bit. First, I want to create a class that looks like so:

package com.digiassn.blogspot.client;

import org.timepedia.exporter.client.Export;
import org.timepedia.exporter.client.ExportPackage;
import org.timepedia.exporter.client.Exportable;

import com.google.gwt.user.client.DOM;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.Window;

@Export
@ExportPackage("helloworld")
public class UpdateWithHelloWorld implements Exportable {
 @Export
 public void UpdateMyDomObject(String id)
 {
     DOM.getElementById(id).setInnerHTML("Hello World");
 }
}

Also note the annotations for package and Export. This tells the generator that this class is to be exported, and that it is accessible by that package name.

With that class there is a slight problem. The Exportable class is not set up properly in the GWT Modules XML file. So I need to modify my ExporterExample.gwt.xml file to contain the Exportable class. Be sure to add in the option to export, otherwise it won't export your classes.

<module>
  <inherits name="com.google.gwt.user.User"/>
  <inherits name='com.google.gwt.user.theme.standard.Standard'/>
  <entry-point class="com.digiassn.blogspot.client.ExporterExample"/>

  <inherits name="org.timepedia.exporter.Exporter"/>
  <set-property name="export" value="yes"/>
</module>

Now I can go ahead and update my onModuleLoad to tell the GWT-Export to export UpdateWithHelloWorld for outside Javascript to use.

package com.digiassn.blogspot.client;

import org.timepedia.exporter.client.Exporter;

import com.google.gwt.core.client.EntryPoint;
import com.google.gwt.core.client.GWT;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.Window;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Button;

/**
* Entry point classes define <code>onModuleLoad()</code>.
*/
public class ExporterExample implements EntryPoint {
   public void onModuleLoad() {
       try {
           Exporter export = (Exporter)GWT.create(UpdateWithHelloWorld.class);
           export.export();
       } catch (Exception e) {
         Window.alert("Exception " + e.toString());
       }
   }
}

For now, I want to open my public HTML page, and create two things, the DIV tag that will be updated, and a small Javascript method that will call my GWT class. I use the following as a small test.

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Wrapper HTML for ExporterExample</title>
        <link type="text/css" rel='stylesheet' href='ExporterExample.css'/>
    
        <script language="javascript" src="com.digiassn.blogspot.ExporterExample.nocache.js"></script>
        
        <script language="javascript">
            function updateText()
            {
                var hello = new helloworld.UpdateWithHelloWorld();
                hello.UpdateMyDomObject("updateMe");
            }
        </script>
    </head>

    <body>
        <div id="updateMe">I show nothing right now</div>
        <input type="button" onclick="updateText();">
    </body>
</html>

And whala, when I click on my button, it will update my DOM code using the GWT. This demonstrates that a GWT based class and method are called from and outside Javascript.

You got to hand it to the guys over at Timepedia, this is a pretty cool little library. Now it is possible for me to do any Javascript based development, debugging, and re-use of components with my development in GWT for reliability and cross-browser support, and use in non-GWT based calls.

General: Using VI to Insert String Before a Line and Append Strings After a Line

2008-10-30T16:54:00.000-06:00

I am an avid supporter of VI in the tex editor wars. Always have, always will. With that said, I have to admit, I was a bit embarrassed when I needed to a simple task of adding a string to the front and end of a whole list of lines (tables names I had pulled from a database) and I couldn’t remember the VI commands to do so. What I needed was to add “drop table “ and “;” to the front and end of each line, respectively. The commands I ended up using were:

:1,$s/ ^ /drop table /
:1,$s/$ / ; /

Strange, I’ve been using VI for years, and never needed to do that before. I am so used to my small set of commands, I never bothered to expand out and learn everything else that VI could do.

Here is a list of sites that have useful VI commands, shortcuts, and tutorials:
http://andrewfraser.wordpress.com/2007/01/12/useful-simple-vi-commands-for-dbas/
http://www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif
http://tnerual.eriogerg.free.fr/vimqrc.pdf
http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html#modes

ASM: Revised Chekerboard program, now with flashing squares

2008-10-26T14:12:00.000-06:00

I revised by checkerboard ASM program to have the white colored squares fade in and out. I wanted to do this for a few reasons. It shows a palette shift, which I have demonstrated previously, but it also shows how to do a time delay in ASM. The time delay turned out to be a little trickier than I thought. I tried using the DOS Get Time interrupt, but if you don’t test all the registers it returns and try to get away with just the DX register, you end up with unacceptably long delays when minutes change or hours change. I ended up using the system BIOS call to get the system clock ticks. The same problem will arise after midnight, but that can easily be overcome by testing the appropriate flag which gets set when midnight occurs. Again, I have included comments, and I also included the addresses that DOS Debug displays. If I do anymore ASM programs, I thing I will use an assembler going forward. Its easier than having to specify jumps by address, which change when I add something new to a program.

--initialize video mode to 320x200x256
13F2:0100 B81300        MOV     AX,0013
13F2:0103 CD10          INT     10
point data segment and extra segment to video memory
13F2:0105 B800A0        MOV     AX,A000
13F2:0108 8ED8          MOV     DS,AX
13F2:010A 8EC0          MOV     ES,AX
13F2:010C 31FF          XOR     DI,DI
--initialize registers with values of palette to use
--use word instead of bytes for the stosw instruction
13F2:010E B80F0F        MOV     AX,0F0F
13F2:0111 BB0000        MOV     BX,0000
--initialize to the number of veritical squares
13F2:0114 B90800        MOV     CX,0008
13F2:0117 51            PUSH    CX
--start execution, logic is explained in previous post
13F2:0118 B9C800        MOV     CX,00C8
13F2:011B 51            PUSH    CX
13F2:011C B91400        MOV     CX,0014
13F2:011F F3            REPZ
13F2:0120 AB            STOSW
13F2:0121 50            PUSH    AX
13F2:0122 89D8          MOV     AX,BX
13F2:0124 5B            POP     BX
13F2:0125 59            POP     CX
13F2:0126 E2F3          LOOP    011B
13F2:0128 50            PUSH    AX
13F2:0129 89D8          MOV     AX,BX
13F2:012B 5B            POP     BX
13F2:012C 59            POP     CX
13F2:012D E2E8          LOOP    0117
--get ready to ramp down the white palette entry
--do this 3fh times
13F2:012F B93F00        MOV     CX,003F
13F2:0132 B3FF          MOV     BL,FF
13F2:0134 FECB          DEC     BL
--initialize with the port to tell video card we are changing
--a pallete entry. This should be changed at some point to
--actually retrieve the pallete entry to change
13F2:0136 BAC803        MOV     DX,03C8
13F2:0139 B00F          MOV     AL,0F
13F2:013B EE            OUT     DX,AL
--increment dx by 1, to point to the port to actually
--set a pallette entry
13F2:013C 42            INC     DX
13F2:013D 88D8          MOV     AL,BL
--output the new pallette entries
13F2:013F EE            OUT     DX,AL
13F2:0140 EE            OUT     DX,AL
13F2:0141 EE            OUT     DX,AL
--we need a slight pause so this is effect is visible, otherwise it
--just looks like ugly staticy squares, so save our registers
13F2:0142 50            PUSH    AX
13F2:0143 53            PUSH    BX
13F2:0144 51            PUSH    CX
13F2:0145 52            PUSH    DX
--we want to test this by a single clock tick, 1/18 of a second, which
--we will use DI to compare against
13F2:0146 BF0100        MOV     DI,0001
--call int 1ah, function 00, which will get a clock tick, to initialize 
--out testing value and set in BX
13F2:0149 B400          MOV     AH,00
13F2:014B CD1A          INT     1A
13F2:014D 89D3          MOV     BX,DX
--cal again to get current value
13F2:014F CD1A          INT     1A
--subtract stored value from current value. If it is greater, than we have
--surpassed our delay time, and we need to keep moving, otherwise, test again
13F2:0151 29DA          SUB     DX,BX
13F2:0153 39D7          CMP     DI,DX
13F2:0155 77F8          JA      014F
--restore registers
13F2:0157 5A            POP     DX
13F2:0158 59            POP     CX
13F2:0159 5B            POP     BX
13F2:015A 58            POP     AX
--loop back to palette shift beginning
13F2:015B E2D7          LOOP    0134
--do the same thing as the palette shift above, but in reverse order, ramping
--the values up
13F2:015D B93F00        MOV     CX,003F
13F2:0160 FEC3          INC     BL
13F2:0162 BAC803        MOV     DX,03C8
13F2:0165 B00F          MOV     AL,0F
13F2:0167 EE            OUT     DX,AL
13F2:0168 42            INC     DX
13F2:0169 88D8          MOV     AL,BL
13F2:016B EE            OUT     DX,AL
13F2:016C EE            OUT     DX,AL
13F2:016D EE            OUT     DX,AL
13F2:016E 50            PUSH    AX
13F2:016F 53            PUSH    BX
13F2:0170 51            PUSH    CX
13F2:0171 52            PUSH    DX
13F2:0172 BF0100        MOV     DI,0001
13F2:0175 B400          MOV     AH,00
13F2:0177 CD1A          INT     1A
13F2:0179 89D3          MOV     BX,DX
13F2:017B CD1A          INT     1A
13F2:017D 29DA          SUB     DX,BX
13F2:017F 39D7          CMP     DI,DX
13F2:0181 77F8          JA      017B
13F2:0183 5A            POP     DX
13F2:0184 59            POP     CX
13F2:0185 5B            POP     BX
13F2:0186 58            POP     AX
13F2:0187 E2D7          LOOP    0160
--check if there is a key press. If not, keep going, otherwise, stop
--running the program. 
13F2:0189 B406          MOV     AH,06
13F2:018B B2FF          MOV     DL,FF
13F2:018D CD21          INT     21
13F2:018F 749E          JZ      012F
--reset video mode
13F2:0191 B80300        MOV     AX,0003
13F2:0194 CD10          INT     10
--return to DOS
13F2:0196 B8004C        MOV     AX,4C00
13F2:0199 CD21          INT     21

Java: Multi-Part Form Request using Apache Commons HttpClient

2008-10-24T13:40:00.000-06:00

I previously wrote about how to do a simple HTTPUrlConnection request to a web page. This has served me well for quite some time. However, I ran into an issue on a recent project where I needed to do POST request and do a Multi-Part form to post large XML feeds to a service an a web appliance. This is where using HTTPUrlConnection broke down for my needs. While it is possible to do a Multi-Part POST using these classes, it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

This is where the Apache Commons HttpClient libraries came into play. Using the more robust Apache Commons libraries, I was easily able to throw together a Multi-Part form POST. There is one slight caveat when using HttpClient, you will need to include the Apache Commons Logging and Apache Commons Codec libraries in your classpath. Even if you do not use them in your implementation, HttpClient apparently uses them internally.

Below is a simplified example of using the HttpClient libraries to do a Multi-Part form POST. I commented out the sections relating to Cookies and posting Files since I was using XML strings.

package com.digiassn.blogspot;

import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;

import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpException;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpStatus;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.PostMethod;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.multipart.ByteArrayPartSource;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.multipart.FilePart;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.multipart.MultipartRequestEntity;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.multipart.Part;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.multipart.StringPart;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.params.HttpMethodParams;

public class ApacheHttpClientRequest {
      private URL serverAddress;
      private String multiPart;
      private String result;
      private String originalURL;
    
      /**
       * Main constructor
       *
       * @param urlString
       * @param queryString
       * @param mainReferenceIn
       */
      public ApacheHttpClientRequest(String urlString)
      {
          try {
              //This is only used to test the URL as a valid URL, serverAddress is not actually used anywhere
              serverAddress = new URL(urlString);
              originalURL = urlString;
          } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
          }
      }
    
      /**
       * This method will connect to server, and return the results of the push
       * You must set Query first, which is the contents of your XML file
       */
      private void executeQuery()
      {
          PostMethod filePost = null;
          HttpClient client = null;
          try {
              //create new post method, and set parameters
              filePost = new PostMethod(originalURL);
              filePost.getParams().setBooleanParameter(HttpMethodParams.USE_EXPECT_CONTINUE,
                      true);
        
            
              if ((multiPart.equals("")) || (multiPart == null))
              {
                  throw new Exception("Query is null");
              }
            
              //create bytearray multi-part source from the query
              ByteArrayPartSource targetFile = new ByteArrayPartSource("data", multiPart.getBytes());
            
              //instead of a ByteArrayPartSource, the following could just as easily be used
              //to include a file
              //File f = new File("");
              //FilePartSource fileSource = new FilePartSource(f);
            
              Part[] parts = {
                      new StringPart("firstParameter", "value"),
                      new StringPart("secondParameter", "value"),
                      new FilePart("data", targetFile)
              };
            
              //Create the multi-part request
              filePost.setRequestEntity(
                   new MultipartRequestEntity(parts, filePost.getParams())
                   );
            
              //connect to server
              client = new HttpClient();
              client.getHttpConnectionManager().getParams().setConnectionTimeout(5000);

              //the Cookie Handler, if your using manual cookies
              //filePost.getParams().setCookiePolicy(CookiePolicy.IGNORE_COOKIES);
              //filePost.setRequestHeader("Cookie", "name=value");
            
              //execute and return status
              int status = client.executeMethod(filePost);
              if (status == HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
                  System.out.println("Upload success");
              } else {
                  System.out.println("Upload failed: " + HttpStatus.getStatusText(status));
              }
          } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
          } catch (HttpException e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
          } catch (IOException e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
          }
          catch (Exception e)
          {
              e.printStackTrace();
          }
          finally
          {
              //set objects to null and garbage collect, not normally necessary but
              //some issues popped up in the multi-threaded environment with memory consumption if this
              //was not included
              filePost = null;
              client = null;
            
              //force garbage collection. Expect to take a hit here in performance, may not be necessary
              Runtime r = Runtime.getRuntime();
              r.gc();
          }
      }
        
      //below here are the gets and sets
      public void setMultiPartString(String query) {
          this.multiPart = query;
      }

      public String getResult() {
          return result;
      }
    
      public URL getServerAddress() {
          return serverAddress;
      }

      public void setServerAddress(URL serverAddress) {
          this.serverAddress = serverAddress;
      }
}

ASM: Drawing a Checkerboard

2008-10-23T03:47:00.000-06:00

Someone asked a question on a C++ Newgroup about how to draw a checkerboard. Of course, I wasn't satisfied doing this in C++, and I've been looking for a ASM task to do just for practice. This is what I whipped up really quick. The following example will set the video mode to 320x200x256 VGA mode, and draw a black and white checkerboard.

The comments don't belong, I just added them so it is easier to follow. The following was done using DOS Debug.

--Initialize to 320*200*256 color mode
MOV     AX,0013
INT     10
--Point the data and extra segments to the video memory directly and clear the DI register
MOV     AX,A000
MOV     DS,AX
MOV     ES,AX
XOR     DI,DI
--Set AX to the first pallete entry (using 2 byte for the STOSW instructions instead of one)
--Set BX to second one. We will swap these after our checkerboard rows are done
MOV     AX,0F0F
MOV     BX,0000
--initialize CX, our outmost loop, to the number of rows to draw
MOV     CX,0008
PUSH    CX
--set CX, the middle loop, set to the number of times we need to draw a line pattern for the square
--The way it works is like this, there are 8 pattern breaks in a line (black white alternations).
--we need to repeat that alternation 25 times in order to make a single increment of that alteration
--on the veritcal plane, so 25 * 8 = 200
MOV     CX,00C8
PUSH    CX
--set Cx to the number of horizontal pixels in a square, which is 20 (320 / 8) = 160, which
--is the 320 / 2 since we are using a word instruction, not a byte instruction
MOV     CX,0014
--copy what is in AX to video memory 20 times
REPZ
STOSW
--swap the pallete bytes
PUSH    AX
MOV     AX,BX
POP     BX
--get the value of our middle loop
POP     CX
LOOP    011B
--we are at the end of a single verital iteration, swap the pallete entries and go again, until
--the outtermost loop is at 0
PUSH    AX
MOV     AX,BX
POP     BX
POP     CX
LOOP    0117
--wait for keypress
MOV     AH,10
INT     16
--reset video mode
MOV     AX,0003
INT     10
--return to dos
MOV     AX,4C00
INT     21