One of the more confusing things I’ve encountered while working with AX 2012 Retail is the Database Utility. It’s got this wonderful simplistic interface complete with connectivity testing aimed at getting your databases up and running. The unfortunate part is, It doesn’t always work.

Error Message: "All the Identification settings are required."

This silly error message ‘All the Identification settings are required.’ is not very clear when the UI is presented this way.Continue reading

The other day I was working on setting up an AX 2012 Retail environment when I countered this error when setting up the Retail Store Connect instance:

Error happens when validating database My_Store_Database.

That’s great, what error happened? What’s wrong? Tell me and I’ll fix it for you!Continue reading

Update:
I have made a small standalone plugin for chrome that gives you more control over the size: you can download TubeSizer here.

Some of you are like me, and we have large monitors and when I say monitors I mean MonitorS! I run two 24″ Monitors @ 1920×1080 side by side and like to work on multiple things at once. One of the things I often do is throw up videos on my one monitor while working on the other (I’m doing it as I write this). What this means is fullscreen mode is out! The reason is because YouTube’s fullscreen often (sometimes not) will un-fullscreen the second you click on something in the other monitor. Also, fullscreen mode obstructs the navigation bar and in my case the task bar (as i watch movies on the right where my task bar is).

What this leaves is YouTube out of fullscreen, and YouTube’s “Large Player”. The problem is, YouTube’s default size is miniature at this resolution, one may think CTRL+Scroll (Zoom in the browser) is the natural solution to this, however this poses some problems. The zoom technique employed by most browsers is a software solution; this means the processor is scaling everything up on the fly as we go, while I have a pretty fast machine, this can sometimes produce a slight lag when viewing.

So basically I’ve loaded up Stylebot (For Chrome), a user.css implementation (Firefox users may already know about user.css) that basically allows me to have custom styles for certain websites!

The following script:

/** Obsolete as of Oct 2012 **

div.medium {
    width: 1280px;
    height: 720px;
}

.medium #watch-player {
    height: 720px;
    width: 1280px;
}

**/

Update, As of October, 2012 Youtube changed their theme enough to break this script, below is the updated CSS:

.watch-medium #watch7-player {
    height: 720px;
    width: 1280px;
}

Will make the “Large Player” of youtube be 1280×720 by default instead of 960x500ish. This is a comfortable viewing size that doesn’t sacrifice the ability to access the rest of youtube easily.


Before anyone mentions it, this doesn’t set the video quality of the playback to 720p by default, it only makes the viewport that size for playback. The benefit of this is that any video card accelleration the browser applies to the video viewport (FLASH or HTML5) will be applied to the 720p viewport and playback is smooth.

YouTube Default "Large Player"
Before Styles
YouTube Mofidied (720p) "Large Player"
After Styles

I recently was on stackoverflow.com and ran across an interesting question by a fellow tasked to produce a “project” under any stack he wanted. He chose to use a LAMP Stack with CodeIgniter at the core. In his question it seemed that he might have been confused about how to use the view. This is something I have seen before, both in confusion and misuse. I have always felt like there was a hole in the explanation of views on the issue of Theming.

Continue reading

Default Programs Editor
Windows before the advent of Vista had a wonderful tool, buried deep within the folder options you had the option to fully customize and edit file type associations. This feature, while crude offered a realm of possibility for a simple developer or a computer enthusiast to create useful & productive shortcuts for file-types they worked on frequently. I recently have been getting into the habit of crunching my png files for my web development (for the obvious reasons since photoshop makes fat PNGs). I had been using a program called PngMonster, a simple gui interface for a small library of png compression & optimization command line utilities. After getting frustrated with the simplicity of the program, I decided it was time to find a better way. I did some research into the program, a well known utility PngCrush was responsible for most the heavy lifting in the process and a simple PngCrush pass was about 1-5% bigger than the result of all 6 tools included.Continue reading

No more 1&1Dear 1&1,

I’ve been a loyal customer of your shared hosting service for seven years. You’ve provided me with a place to base my web-ventures & hosting experience. You gave me incremental upgrades to my account free of charge for years, and for the better part of the seven years I’ve used your services I’ve been fairly pleased. Despite the warnings and the sob-stories I’ve heard from other people using your service, I decided to trust you because of your track record with my account.

  • I can put up with your mediocre technical support.
  • I can put up with your $0.12/mo. price increase on my package.
  • I can put up with your crummy control panel.
  • I can put up with your late and barely supported PHP5 implementation.
  • I can put up with your reluctance to let me control my domains when associated with a site.
  • I can put up with your e-mail spam.
  • I can put up with your strange Data Center Location (Backwater area of Pennsylvania?)
  • I can put up with your mediocre network routing to your location.
  • I can put up with your crappy billing department hours.

What I cannot put up with, is you adding services to my account, charging me for them, and not even bothering to notify me. You don’t get to charge me for services I did not ask for; you don’t get to modify my package without my knowledge. You don’t get to get away with this.

You know what else you don’t get to do?

You don’t get to host my site anymore; you don’t get to charge my credit card any more. We’re through, no more, it ends here. As of this moment I am now hosted by HostGator, a very capable hosting company from Texas. I will no longer have ties to 1&1 Hosting, they’ve lost a longtime loyal customer over some very stupid business practices & shady dealings. I’ve filed a complaint with the BBB, transferred my domains, and moved on. It is my hope that 1&1 Internet falls victim to the repercussions of practicing bad ethics and is forced to shut down so nobody else will have problems like I have.