Stuff of za day

"Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance. The connection will be closed." error

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:19:00 +0000

After creating a new MVC3 web application in Visual Studio 2010, running it and trying to log in (or do any operation that needs MembershipProvider access) throws the following exception/error:

Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance. The connection will be closed.

If everything worked fine an aspnetdb.mdf file would have been created in the App_Data folder with the necessary structure.

I do not know why but the solution is deleting the

c:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Data\

folder entirely.

Sabaton - Ghost division

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:59:00 +0000

Lyrics (from Elyricsworld)

Fast as the wind
The Invasion has begun
Shaking the ground
With a force of 1000 guns

First in the line of fire
First into hostile land
Tanks leading the way
Leading the way

Charging the lines with a force of a furious storm
Fast as the lightning phantom's swarm
200 miles at nightfall taken within a day
Thus earning their name, earning their fame

They are the Panzer Elite
Born to compete
Never retreat
(Ghost Division)
Living or dead
Always ahead
Fed by your dread

Always ahead as the Blitzkrieg rages on
Breaking morale with the sound of blazing guns

First in the line of fire
First into hostile land
Tanks leading the way
Leading the way

Leaving a trail of destruction through a foreign land (Waging war with conviction)
Massive assault to serve the Nazi plan (Wehrmacht's pride ghost division)
Communication's broken
Panzers are far away
Thus earning their name, earning their fame

They are the Panzer Elite
Bound to compete
Never retreat
(Ghost Division)
Living or dead
Always ahead
Fed by your dread

Pushing the frontline forth with a tremendous force (far ahead, breaks resistance)
Crushing the way for Panzer Corps (shows no fear, self-subsistence)
First in the line of fire
First into hostile land
Tanks leading the way
Claiming the fame

They are the Panzer Elite
Bound to compete
Never retreat
(Ghost Division)
Living or dead
Always ahead
Fed by your dread

Panzer Elite
Bound to compete
Never retreat
(Ghost Division)
Living or dead
Always ahead
Fed by your dread

Firefox middle click tab opening not working

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 06:50:00 +0000

Since yesterday I cannot open a new tab by middle-clicking or Ctrl-clicking on a link in Firefox. I tried a lot of things to get rid of the problem (restart browser, restart computer, disable plugins installed lately) but nothing worked.

Disabling Tab-Mix-Plus made the issue go away but it turns out that Tab-Mix-Plus wasn't the (only) cause. To fix the problem download the latest Greasemonkey version 0.9.11. This makes the issue go away and you can continue using Tab-Mix-Plus.

Happy as a clam.

Blog template tweaks

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:10:00 +0000

I tweaked the template of the blog a little so the share buttons will appear correctly.
The red color will not go away because it's the color that defines my (C) South Park avatar.

Reading and writing to Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 from C# without Excel installed

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:35:00 +0000

I am sure this will come handy especially in my ResxCrunch project:

Reading and writing to Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 from C# without Excel installed

Dig-N-Rig free game

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:20:00 +0000

Dig-N-Rig is a very interesting addictive free game. The most interesting thing about it is the entirely text/ASCII based interface which is surprisingly beautiful, rich, responsive and mouse-friendly.
The goal of the game is to mine down more and more into towards the center of the Earth and collect minerals in the process which can be used to upgrade your stuff and rig. Your mining is assisted by vertical and horizontal conveyor belts so in the end you will have a nice system of these.
I finished the game in 4 hours but I am sure it can take longer if you are not taking the shortcuts that I took: instead of building conveyors and vacuuming minerals towards them I drilled down very deep, built a horizontal conveyor there then ground the whole section above the conveyor belt. This way the minerals that fell down were automatically transported up, no need for vacuums. In the end all I had was a very tall vertical belt and one horizontal at the bottom.

Download the Dig-N-Rig game for free

Game of thrones violin cover (free mp3)

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Download the free mp3

Metal tip of the day: Accept - Metal Heart

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:59:00 +0000

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Le Gallienne)

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 11:20:00 +0000

I was never much into poetry but this poem is the best piece of lyre I have ever read.

To all of us the thought of heaven is dear--
Why not be sure of it and make it here?
No doubt there is a heaven yonder too,
But 'tis so far away--and you are near.

Men talk of heaven,--there is no heaven but here;
Men talk of hell,--there is no hell but here;
Men of hereafters talk, and future lives,--
O love, there is no other life--but here.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Le Gallienne) on WikiSource

Lego catapult

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 09:30:00 +0000

I built a Lego catapult that is capable to wind itself after pressing a lever. When the catapult is fully wound it automatically disconnects the motor from the winding gear using a gearbox and stops the motor.
Meanwhile the winding mechanism is held in place by a stick that stops the gear attached to the winding axle from rotating backwards so it doesn't unwind until the release is pressed.

You can see the full annotated gallery on Flickr.

Clairvoyant Fail

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:26:00 +0000

Vertically center content with CSS

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 07:31:00 +0000

I found a very easy and effective way to center a div vertically with CSS: http://www.vdotmedia.com/blog/vertically-center-content-with-css/

Basically it makes the div behave like a table then sets the vertical alignment to middle.

#container
{
width: 100%; height: 100%; display: table;
}



#position

{
    display: table-cell;
    vertical-align: middle;
    width: 100%;
    text-align: center;
}

OnRowCommand does not fire in ASP.Net gridview

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:22:00 +0000

All of a sudden all the command buttons stopped working in a gridview in my project. The OnRowCommand event did not fire.
Turns out last week I set the EnableViewState property of the grid to false. Never disable the ViewState of a gridview!

Short:
If all of a sudden the OnRowCommand stops firing in your ASP.Net GridView make sure that the EnableViewState property of the grid is set to true.

Fun facts about Mallorca

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 13:24:00 +0000

Mallorca has exactly 3 pieces of seagulls
The official language of Mallorca is German

Floating Point / Single to Hexadecimal (IEEE 754)

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:28:00 +0000

public string FloatToHex(float valueToConvert)
{
   byte[] byteArray = BitConverter.GetBytes(valueToConvert);
   Array.Reverse(byteArray);
 
   return BitConverter.ToString(byteArray).Replace("-", "");
}

Output example: 12345.6 -> 4640E666

Solution came from VB.NET Hexadecimal to Floating Point / Single (IEEE 754)
What is IEEE 754 Floating-Point Arithmetic Standard?

Elegeion - Scars

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:54:00 +0000

Burning Black - Reborn From My Sins

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:44:00 +0000

Artillery - Damned Religion

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:43:00 +0000

Lyrics

Your morals are not my morals
Your religion means nothing to me
Your two faced lying high priests of power
Take your gospel stay away from me

Your truth is not my truth
Your point of view means nothing to me
Your double talking jive motherfuckers
Take your bullshit stay away from me

False messiah legions of fire !
Religion is in your blood,
Religion is your drug, religions in your head
Can never get enough

Your twisted rhetoric it takes you higher
The lord you worship is the false messiah
The lives you prey on can't defend themselves
You use them up and make their lives all hell

You cheat and lie you use the weak and poor
Your so called master is a lying whore
Your evil empire is a cancer cell
You too will die and burn forever in hell

Your dreams are not my dreams
Your holy war means nothing to me
Your narrow minded no brain way of thinking
Your damned religion stay away from me

Stryper - 4 Leaf Clover

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:23:00 +0000

We've been on the outside looking in before
We've lived on the inside with a closed locked door
We've slept in the corners of the open floor

We go round and round and round and round and round and round and round

There's no strength in a unicorn
No luck in a 4 leaf clover
There's no life unless it's born
And no death when it's over

We've listened with open ears yet closed our minds
We've loved without any tears from our own eyes
We've gone to the parties in our cheap disguise

We go round and round and round and round and round and round and round

There's no strength in a unicorn
No luck in a 4 leaf clover
There's no life unless it's born
And no death when it's over

TED talks: Question motivations

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:10:00 +0000

Vodafone 360 synch with Nokia E51

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:05:00 +0000

Vodafone 360, formerly ZYB, an online service which I mostly use to store my contacts, has problems with SMS sending to my Nokia E51.
Usually I abandon a service after I encounter a serious error but this one is very important to me because it is the only solution to extract a usable contact list from all the stupid services I use on the internet.
So without the service sending me the application in SMS I cannot synchronize my phone with the service. I contacted them. After several email-based discussions they manually validated my phone number and sent me the following instruction list:
If you are still unable to download "360 People", below are SyncML settings that you can use to sync your profile.

"Please carry out the steps below to manually configure a Nokia E51 to synchronize contacts via SyncML.

1. Press the Menu key.
2. Select Tools.
3. Select Sync.
4. Press Options; a pop-up menu will appear.
5. Select New sync profile; if the handset asks to copy values from an existing profile, press 'No'.
6. Select Sync profile name.
7. Enter 'People'.
8. Press OK.
9. Select Applications.
10. Select Contacts.
11. Highlight Include in sync, then press Options to change the value to "Yes".
12. Select Remote database.
13. Enter 'contacts'
14. Press OK.
15. Press Back.
16. Press Back again.
17. Select Connection settings.
18. Select Host address.
19. Enter 'http://sync.vodafone360.com'
20. Press OK.
21. Select User name.
22. Enter your [360 username]
23. Press OK.
24. Select Password.
25. Enter [Your 360 Password]
26. Press OK.
27. Press Back.
28. Press Back again.
29. Select 'People', a pop-up menu will appear.
30. Select Synchronise; a pop-up menu will appear.
31. Select a valid data connection."

I followed the steps and the synchronization worked perfectly.
They still have a lot of issues they need to repair but the service is usable.

I hope I helped someone!

Modifying the ASP.NET Request Queue Limit

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:55:00 +0000

Replace <processmodel autoconfig="true" /> in machine.config with <processmodel enable="true" requestqueuelimit="15000" />

See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd425294%28office.13%29.aspx

Shrinking Microsoft SQL Server Log file

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:21:00 +0000

It works, trust me. And when I say me, I mean Microsoft :).

SQL Server 2005:
BACKUP LOG MyDatabase WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
DBCC SHRINKFILE(MyDatabase_log, 2000)

SQL Server 2008:
ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET RECOVERY SIMPLE
GO
DBCC Shrinkfile(MyDatabase_log, 2000)

Defquon.1 Festival 360 Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:56:00 +0000

Thanks to @czikatihi

Women with beautiful faces: Dina Meyer

noreply@blogger.com (Vencel Biro) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 19:01:00 +0000

Heavily airbrushed photographs of women leave me cold. Sometimes I express this to other people and I have to prove my point. The only thing that could matter on a photograph remains the face.
So I am starting an article series to create a collection I can show to people. My first pick: Dina Meyer. She starred in Starship Trooprs, NCIS and The Mentalist.