Milamsoft

Not About Organization

2012-01-24T22:00:00.000-05:00

Reading My Other Pants's recent blog post got me thinking. How do I keep myself organized? This is something I continually struggle with. I have tried several things. And some of those things sort of work for me. And I think I know what the problem is. It's a lack of motivation and accountability. First, motivation. It's hard to see results quickly when you first start using a new organization

As it turns out, you CAN change the back button title in a UINavigationController

2012-01-20T12:17:00.001-05:00

Long have I wished to change the back button title in a UINavigationController. Long have I failed. I found forum posts out there saying it's not possible, and I became discouraged. I found forum posts out there saying you need to set self.navigationItem.backBarButtonItem.title property. When that didn't do anything, I became discouraged. Others said to change the view's title when changing

"Get Better" - Failure Behind a Curtain Helps You to Shine in the Spotlight

2011-10-21T19:52:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'll bite. This post is part of a weekly Blog Battle started by some of my coworkers. The idea is that each week, a title is chosen and everyone writes a post based on not a topic, but just the title, and let each author interpret it in his own way. The title for this week is "Get Better". I've been reading the book The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler, which includes a chapter called

Fifth Third Bank ATM Fees BS

2011-09-30T10:47:00.000-04:00

Okay this isn't related to anything my blog is about, but it's such BS I can't not say anything about it. Up until recently, my checking account with 5/3 Bank was pretty nice. I got some interest, there were no fees, no minimum balance. And somewhat recently they even starting reimbursing me the fees for up to two non-5/3 ATM withdrawals. How cool is that? So I made a withdrawal at a non-5/3

Xcode can do strange things sometimes

2011-09-07T10:28:00.000-04:00

I am really not sure what caused this, but I can tell you what was wrong. I'm building a navigation-based iPhone app at work. I'm making custom UITableViewCells for a UITableView. When this particular table view was getting created, I set the text of a couple of labels. Both labels were connected properly in Interface Builder. The first label got set properly. But trying to set the second label

Good to know

2011-03-29T11:52:00.000-04:00

Every now and then, maybe once every few months, I will notice that while I am typing, the 'z' and 'y' keys have switched. Not only that, but some others switch as well. It's quite frustrating, especially since I have trouble remembering the not-so-obvious solution between occurrences. It was obvious to me that I switched keyboard language. The simple answer: press Alt+Shift to change your

C#: Inspecting a nameless exception

2011-03-18T13:06:00.010-04:00

Finding the answer to this eased a great pain for me today. C# allows you to catch an exception like this: try { if (Installation_State == InstallationState.Installed) { // Some code that may throw an exception } } catch (Exception) { Installation_State = InstallationState.Not_Installed; } When I'm debugging in Visual

Rescuing your data from that dead hard drive

2010-10-11T15:36:00.003-04:00

Recently I put myself in a position where a good chunk of my memories ended up on a failing external hard drive. Windows refused to recognize that there was anything attached to USB, while Ubuntu acknowledged the drive, but wouldn't mount it. I needed a way to get my photos, videos, and other assorted files back before the drive died forever. Here's how I did it. gddrecue By searching Google, I

Google Fiber

2010-03-22T09:09:00.005-04:00

I am officially showing my support for Google Fiber in Carmel, Indiana. To anyone living in Carmel, it should be clear why we deserve Google Fiber: Carmel is a thriving city on the north side of Indianapolis. It is growing at an incredible rate. Business growth is encouraged by the local government, and there is no end in sight. The new Carmel City Center is an excellent example of this. Carmel

Ubuntu: Moving directories to new partitions

2009-08-26T20:47:00.004-04:00

A couple of months ago my laptop's hard drive crashed and I didn't have a Windows recovery disk so I reformatted and installed Ubuntu 9.04. The default configuration (which I assumed would be reasonable) gave my root partition only 4GiB of space, and it ran out quickly. My first fix was to move /home to a new partition with plenty of space. That worked for a while, but as I kept installing new

Email From Ruby on Rails

2009-08-14T09:05:00.009-04:00

Who knew that sending an email using ActionMailer and TLS would be so difficult? It turns out that ActionMailer isn't equipped to work with SSL connections to SMTP servers. There is, however, a plugin created to get ActionMailer to work with TLS: http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/actionmailer_tls. The official documentation for ActionMailer can be found here and a good tutorial can be found

Email From Your iPhone App

2009-08-05T09:44:00.001-04:00

Programming your iPhone application to setup an email for the user to send is easy, as long as you don't mind it quitting your application. The following code will open the Mail application with a new email ready to be sent with the given email address, subject, and email body. NSString *emailLink = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:address@example.com?subject=My Subject&body=%@", [@"This is

Emulating the iPhone in an iPhone Web App

2009-07-16T09:49:00.028-04:00

I've been working with iUI, a CSS- and JavaScript-based framework for building websites that appear just like iPhone applications on the iPhone. You can use the same TableViews, TabBars, swiping actions, and even landscape/portrait mode. With this framework, it is possible to create a web application that looks very similar to an iPhone app that uses the iPhone's built-in controls and features.

IIS Windows Authentication Problem on the Domain

2009-05-15T08:13:00.005-04:00

I was involved in setting up an IIS web site that uses Windows Authentication for users on the domain. When testing it out before full deployment, it was discovered that Firefox would send Windows credentials to the server as expected, but Internet Explorer just kept asking the user to enter username and password.It turns out that happened because the users were accessing the web page using the

SQLite and the iPhone

2009-05-06T08:48:00.003-04:00

I'm pretty new to iPhone development, so when I ran into a problem with implementing an iPhone app with a SQLite database, I naturally went to Google for answers. Alas, Google did not have the answer for me! If anyone else runs into this problem, hopefully I can help them solve it. The Problem "EXC_BAD_ACCESS": "Unable to disassemble sqlite3Prepare." This happened when calling sqlite3_prepare_v2

Adobe Flex and Browser Maximize/Restore

2009-04-14T22:23:00.015-04:00

So after much research and trial and error, it seems that Adobe Flex does not support detection of browser maximize and minimize actions! This is frustrating because the Flex app I'm working on now has some panels in it that resize automatically when resizing the window, but they do NOT resize when the browser is maximized or restored. It seems that the resize event isn't fired for these objects

Combining Windows Authentication with Forms Authentication in ASP.NET

2009-04-06T12:13:00.006-04:00

The problem I am working on now involves combining Windows Authentication with Forms Authentication in IIS. This took a good deal of trial and error, so I'll post my solution here. I started with the solutions found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972958.aspx http://aspadvice.com/blogs/rjdudley/archive/2005/03/10/2562.aspx Overview It seems most implementations will involve the

Microsoft Certifications and ComputerTraining.com

2009-04-02T21:03:00.031-04:00

Microsoft Certifications are a great way to certify your expertise. I, myself, am a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in .NET Framework Application Development.Soon after I earned my certification, a friend of mine decided he'd like to try. He'd heard about ComputerTraining.com and PC Pro Schools, and how "you can get your Microsoft certification in just six months!" That sounds great and

Adventures in Software

2009-04-02T20:41:00.009-04:00

I began my programming career in JavaScript, which quickly transformed into a love for Java back in its 1.1 days. My education consisted of C++ and Java, but I always wanted to know what else was out there. I taught myself C and little bit of Assembler. I learned Scheme and Prolog. I used Notepad as my main code editor.Then I learned C# and I learned to love Visual Studio. Microsoft technologies