Inflexible ASP.NET Calendar control

The ASP.NET Calendar control forces developers to use Saturdays and Sundays as the weekend. Now, although this may seem insignificant, a lot of developers require a calendar control to display working and non-working days and they need to define these as the 'weekend' days. Also, some parts of the world observe the weekend on Friday and Saturday, or Thursday and Friday, or just Friday.

There is an awkward way - by overriding the DayRender event and resetting the styles for Saturday and Sunday, and applying the styles for the days you want to mark as non-working days.

Either way, when I'm developing a calendar control, I know what I'm going to build into it.

The Joys of Distance Interviewing

I'm having a first solo at recruitment and so I asked a co-worker about her experiences at hiring new staff. She mentioned about an online interview she took for .NET. She's into PHP and open-source technologies so she got a question off the Internet. The reply was the answer pasted from the same website!

MSDN: About Enterprise Architects

There's an interesting blog article on MSDN about Enterprise Architects. Check it out:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb945098.aspx

You may also want to take a look at some other blogs by Microsoft Architects:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa699386.aspx

Resource files in Java

Just as we have resource files when developing with .NET, Java can read from resource files located in a directory listed for the class path.

You can use one of the following two statements depending on the context from which you want to read the resource file:

[className].class.getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream
("filename"); //to call from a static context

this.getClass().getResourceAsStream("filename"); //to call from a non-static context

Bridging Business and I.T.

In many firms, the department working on the core business shares little with the I.T. division and they talk completely different languages. Here's a little comic that I found at: http://www.insurancebroadcasting.com/Cartoon_2.gif

Findstr to grep on Windows

If you've been using grep all week only to come home to an PC running Windows, you're probably missing a part of your life when you leave your Linux workstation.

If you've been in the dark on the Findstr command line utility for Windows, you'll certainly love my blog for this. If you're on a text file containing huge amounts of text, such as a log file (I've got a log4net log that generates a few hundred lines every hour... that is after disabling the memcache logging) you can get Findstr to search for all lines with a particular word. Findstr does regular expressions too. It's got many of the options that grep does - printing filenames for matches, printing lines that do not match, and multiple file search.

iPod Touch picky about its electrons

I just came across a blog post by Daniel Schneller about his iPod Touch being very picky about where it gets its electrons from. It can get charged via a USB port and gets charged while running Windows or MacOS but not when running Linux. The fix was to install a driver, but it seems pretty odd anyway. I connect my iMate Jasjar to the computer (irrespective of which OS is running) and sometimes to the DVD player.

I can understand people being cautious about where they get their money from to avoid counterfeit but why would an iPod touch want to know where it gets its electrons from?