Man oh Man it can be though keeping a blog on the road, and some of yee may have noticed that as well this Blog, I have been keeping a Web development blog on Pride Design for the past while now, this blog deals mostly with the fanaticising (!) world of web development and the issues that I encounter while working with Pride developing our content managed websites - As there are only so many hours in the week and as I don’t think that duplicated content servers any purpose, I have decided that I will publish most if not all of my webby stuff on my pride blog from now on, and keep this blog for other software engineering and development stuff.

So if you get a chance why not pop over to my pride blog and take a look, but don’t forget to visit this blog as I am working on some very interesting non web-stuff at the moment too and hope to keep this blog up to date too - thanks!!

Pride Design (www.pridedesign.ie) has put the new Adare Bridal (www.adarebridal.ie) website live.  Once again we have been working closely with pride on the development of this site.  The site is built using drupal 6 and uses custom CCK types and drupal views to model (pun intended) and display all those fantastic designers and their bridal gowns!

The site is a full CMS solution, the client can add, edit or remove content on the site including designers, dresses, special offers etc. by just logging in and using a simple content administration interface.

I was making some mods to an old ASP .NET web app today when I discovered that I could no longer properly debug it - when I started the debugger, VS2005 would launch IE8 and load the app but would then just detach and exit debug mode!  I have been running IE8 for a few months now and figured that the problem might have something to do with IE8 and sure enough it did!!

I found this excellent post which details a simple fix for the problem - I can now happily debug again!  It seems that the fix prevents IE8 from spreading itself across multiple processes this was confusing the poor VS2005 debugger..

Just in case I forget how to do it - here a link to a post that tells you how to change the add to cart button in ubercart, http://www.pridedesign.ie/content/ubercart-style-add-cart-button

very handy indeed!

On Friday our good buddies (and design partners) at Pride Design (www.pridedesign.ie) flipped the big switch and put the new Cully and Sully website live, www.cullyandsully.ie.  We have been working closely with pride on the C&S site revamp and are very happy with the outcome.  The site is built using drupal 6 and involved quite a bit of hardcore Content Management System work which kept us both happy and very busy!!

Check it out and let us know what you think - www.cullyandsully.ie

I was on-site with a client at a pharamacutical production facility last week and they they showed me a strange problem that they were having with .NET Remoting running on a sub-network configured with a multihomed host that sits on both the sub-net and the factory ethernet.

The sub-network consisted of 11 Machine Vision inspection station PCs that happily inspect product on the production line and report their results and status asynchronously to a single ‘dashboard’ system running on the multi-homed host. We had developed the inspection stations with vanilla C++ and the ‘dashboard’ system in C# .NET, they all communicate via .NET Remoting.

The dashboard system connects to each of the inspection stations in turn and passes a remoting object of a shared interface, the inspection stations raise events across the sub-net by calling back on this shared interface.

All was well with tonnes of nice events being raised and received, until one day they all just stopped! The client was sure that nothing could have changed to cause this as the whole system was under qualification and therefore everything (software/configuration etc.) must stay static. However on further investigation it turned out that the dashboard PC had recently been added to the factory ethernet - and sure enough, once the factory network was whipped out and the dashboard restarted the events came flooding back!

Anyway it seems that when the dashboard system was connected to the factory network it communicated to the inspection stations using its factory NIC identity and IP address.  When the stations tried to callback they used this factory IP address and the callback events were lost as the PC knew of no  way to route the traffic onto the factory network (and hence back to the dashboard system).  On further investigation we found that the inspection station PCs (which were given static IP addresses) did not have a default gateway configured so we configured the dashboard’s local IP address as the gateway for each and the problem was solved!  This change ment that any network traffic destined for any network other than the local sub-net would be automatically sent to the dashboard system.

So, to cut a long and boring story short, if you’re having .NET remoting callback problems with a multihomed host take a look at the network configuration and make sure that t he PCs that raise the events are able to route them back to the receiver PC no matter which network it initially calls on..

Here’s something I was googling last week - How do you change the text of Drupal’s ‘Home’ breadcrumb to something else? Well, it turns out that a small mod to your theme may be required…

While using Drupal 6 to develop a web application we ran into a little snag with Drupal’s breadcrumbs, the app is to integrate in with our client’s existing web site, it will look and feel the same and the visitor should not really know that it is separate from the main website (which is not implemented with drupal).  With drupal this was all easy enough to achieve, but we hit a speed bump when it came to the web app’s breadcrumbs.  Breadcrumb navigation is very important for the new web application, but Drupal always calls the first breadcrumb ‘Home’ - this was a problem as ‘Home’ did not refer to the larger web site’s home page as would be expected, but instead to the first page of the web application.

So how do we change the ‘Home’ breadcrumb text to something else, say the title of our web application?  It turns out that there’s no easy way to do this through settings, but thanks to this thread we can see that it is possible via a small change to the active theme. The modification hooks into phptemplate_breadcrumb(), it removes the existing primary breadcrimb (’Home’) and then inserts a replacement with the new text.

So to make the change, edit your theme’s template.php file, and search for the function called:

phptemplate_breadcrumb()

rename it to:

original_phptemplate_breadcrumb()

Then paste in the following, changing ‘New Home Text’ to what ever you want your ‘Home’ breadcrumb to be called.

function phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb)
{
  if (!empty($breadcrumb))
  {
    // remove the exisitng Home link
    $old_home_link = array_shift($breadcrumb);

    // insert the new link
    array_unshift($breadcrumb,
                   l(t(‘New Home Text’), ‘<front>’));

    // Get the original function to
    // output the breadcrumb
    return original_phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb);
  }
}

With this theme modification in place the breadcrumbs should display with the new text in place, bit of a pain but at least it’s do-able!

Hats off to gwen for the tip & code!

If you’re using the TinyMCE wsywig editor in drupal then you may find that the editor’s background color gets set to that of your website rather than being the more normal white-ish color - this can cause the wysiwyg editor look like the proverbial dog’s dinner and depending on your websites background color/image, can make reading the text very difficult.

Well, the good news is that it’s easily fixed - in Drupal, go to Adminsiter/Wysiwyg menu and for each import format with which you are using TinyMCE, click ‘edit’. Once in the settings editor click on the ‘CSS’ section and in the ‘Editor CSS’ drop-down choose ‘Editor default CSS’ and save. Do this for each import format and the editor’s background should revert to a calming white.

I ran into a problem while attempting to get an Auxiliary display to work on a Machine Vision system I was developing with a Matrox Solios Frame Grabber and a (dual head) Matrox Millenium P650 graphics card.  The plan was to have each vision station (in a Parmacutical AOI setup) output all of the images it acquired from its cameras to a massive 15 input digital video recorder (DVR) via its Auxiliary display port - in this way the client would have a record of all image acquired and processed on each of their 11 inspection stations   Anyway, while trying to initialise the display from code via a call to:

MdispAlloc(milSys, M_DEFAULT, "M_PAL", M_AUXILIARY,&milAuxDisplay);

Matrix Mil always reported that no system capable of supporting an Auxiliary display could be found - no matter how I changed the millions of possible settings, the auxiliary display would always fail to initialise - loads of hours later I became seriously worried that the Millenium P-Series graphics cards do not provide Auxiliary display support to Matrox Mil!

Well, it turns out that the P-Series graphics cards do provide Auxiliary display support to Mil, but in order to get it to work (in my case) an update needed to be applied to the Matrox graphics card driver - In my case I installed the update contained within m800du09.zip, once applied the Auxiliary display worked just fine!

So anyway the moral of this story is that if you’re trying to get an Auxiliary display to work with Mil and you’re getting this error message no matter what you do - get on to Matrox and ask if there are any updates for your graphics card drivers and install them straight away!

PS  As the Mil documentation says, in order to get the Auxiliary display to work you will first have to disable the ‘dual-head’ functionality of your Matrox graphics card.  Now, with the newer Matrox graphics software ‘dual-head support’ is no longer called ‘dual-head support’, instead go into the Matrox ‘Power Desktop’ settings, and set the ‘Multi-Display Setup’ option to ‘1 Display (no feature display)’.

PPS It seems that where the Auxiliary display is concerned, the Matrox drivers are not very good at cleaning up their resources when the calling process ends - it is very important that you call MdispFree() on the Aux. display when your process is shutting down otherwise when you try to re-launch the process you will get the above error message every time you try to allocate the display until you reboot your system!

Have you ever noticed that sometimes no debug output whatsoever appears when you call a debug output function like dprint_r() from the PHP code that you’re working on?  For example, if you call one of the debug dump functions from the default argument handler for a block view (see earlier post) you won’t see a blessed thing! It seems that there are plenty of situations in the drupal processing lifecycle where output debug information will not get through for display on a page…

So what’s to be done? life without debug information can get very difficult and frustrating, but not to worry as in these difficult cases we can always log our debug info to a file using file_put_contents() (as suggested here), for example if you wanted to dump information about a variable called $my_variable you could call:

file_put_contents("./drupal.debug",
                 print_r($my_variable, TRUE),
                 FILE_APPEND);

Then simply read the contents of the file drupal.debug, not pretty and not perfect but a whole lot better than nothing!