Microsoft's Signifi(g)ant Mistake in Silverlight with .NET Keynote!

While viewing the videos of Silverlight with .NET here, I came across a 'Signifi(g)ant' mistake in a slide of Jamie Cool's presentation on 'Building Silverlight Applications using .NET - a spelling mistake - Signifigant! See the screenshot.

Insignificant? Yeah, in all probability but with all kinds of new tools & technology coming out lately from M$'s stable including Silverlight, Expression Studio etc. based on their much hyped WPFE, one would expect their powerpoint's spelling checker to live upto the hype of it's fellow tools ;) Or, is it that Mr. Cool wasn't much cool about the outcome of the keynote and the new tools, and hence the mistake? Well, time will tell if it was a 'Significant' mistake!

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How to show Images uploaded on Blogger in a Modal Window using Lightwindow

If one has been following this post, he/she would be happy that 'phydeaux3' suggested the possible cause and a solution to the problem. phydeaux3's original comment in full body & soul can be viewed here.

Quoting phydeaux3's comment:

"Actually, the problem most likely resides in the peculiar way blogger image hosting works. By default, the large linked image is in a format (I'm using yours as the example and only showing the last relevant bits of the url)

/s1600-h/mpro.jpg

If you view that image directly, you'll find that Picasa Web Albums (which is the actual image host for blogger) makes this NOT an actual image file, but an html page, with an image embedded in it (view source). What that means is, the large image cannot be used as in in an image tag, but only viewed directly. But if you cut out the -h in the folder name
s1600/mpro.jpg
That gives an image that CAN be used in an image tag, and presumeable in your scripts as well (but cannot be viewed directly, as it will prompt for a file down load..yeah it's odd). So remove the -h from the last folder name and try it.

(there also may be referrer restrictions on images larger than 800px in size, but I haven't messed with it lately)."

Here, I put the above to the original test (without '-h' in the target url):
Without a doubt, it works! Hail phydeaux3 :)

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Lightwindow fails to run with Images uploaded on Blogger

Modal Window (Box) utility, Lightwindow - based on Prototype & Script.aculo.us libraries - fails to pop-up on clicking the (image or text) link if used with an image uploaded on Blogger. At least, it does not in my case. It works in case of other links (e.g. click on Lightwindow, Prototype etc. links).

To illustrate the point, here is an image uploaded on Imageshack (Click on it : works clean as a whistle!)...

Read the full story...

Now, here is an image uploaded on Blogger (Again, click on it - Caution: the page would behave abnormally & you might have to close or reload the page!)...

I hope, I am not the only one with the problem and someone would have the brains to sort this out. I guess, the problem is with how 'lightwindow' deals with the URLs or may be not! Nevertheless, it's a great library, and this little problem should not stop anyone from donating towards 'buy macbook pro' cause :P

P.S. It's worth noting that ModalBox, another lightwindow like library, also fails in the above case!! (May be the problem is with Prototype or Scriptaculous as ModalBox also uses both :|)

Update: We've a solution - suggested by 'phydeaux3' in the 'annotations' below - here is a link to a working demonstration.

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Adsense incompatible with Blogger?

When I tried to insert 'Google SiteSearch' code generated through Google Adsense into the template of my Blog on the recently revamped Google's Blogger - it gave the following error on saving:

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: Attribute name "checked" associated with an element type "input" must be followed by the ' = ' character.

Since, the new Blogger had been in beta earlier - I suppose these quirks have already been discussed and thus, I got the solution i.e. to write: checked = "true" to get rid of the problem in the SiteSearch's auto-generated code. But, the bigger question is "Is the adsense generating non-standard code?"

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