Massive week of code writing, only a few call-outs.

I've got a new toy, well, have here a potentially new toy, I haven't decided yet... A 100baseFX switch. I can interface stuff with the 2924XL-M Cisco with the fiber modules at last. I am having my doubts about it though. It appears to be slow - for example, there is a 50ms ping from the Fiber switch to the Border Router. It's on 100MBit Copper and it's only one hop, technically no hops. I guess that's to be expected with two media conversions in the middle. The other thing that is bothering me is some corrosion on the 100baseTX uplink socket. There is also some corrosion on the inside of the chassis. My primary concern is port 4. It gets "phantom" connections indicating 100baseFX full duplex with traffic (Green and Orange Lights on) with only it's "dummy" (The fiber ends are protected by a rubber dummy that fits into the socket and seals the socket from external dust etc) in. I've been messing about in the switch's configs to try to speed things up, including setting full-duplex, updating via TFTP the onboard software and also configuring some other bits and pieces like auto-negotiation and trunking. Turning all the crap off basically and making it "just" switch the data. I'm going to try some of it's multimedia and streaming stuff later, I believe it has a "low-latency" configuration.

I've been umming and aaahing all week over wether or not to buy it. But as of tonight I have all the info. So, we will see!

Lots of code on the main form I've been working on in our Sugar project. Finally All the data comes out where it needs to be, now I need to make it save it back in (if its changed). I've done a lot of javascript validation and such, learned a lot. The rest of the forms will be much easier. I love YAHOO YUI though, it would have been much harder to do without it. The events and popups in particular, this is a big-mother of a form for loan pre-aproval. They want to know incomes to underpants colour pretty much, so it needs lots of keyup and lostfocus events for validation.

There are mostly two events per numeric field, blur and keyup. I'm primarilly using keyup for addition and updating total fields, although it validates as well. Blur is pretty much zeroing empty fields so everthing looks nice. YAHOO tooltips. Bloody excellent. I'll definately be using them again in other projects. The really cool bit is you can put full CSS+HTML into a nice looking popup on a mouseover that times out like a real tooltip. This is without crappy CSS based rubbish and DIV hiding and showing that takes about 20 lines of HTML and CSS and JAVASCRIPT. These are so simple, the customer loves them! Simpler code, plus you can stick DHTML in them if you want to. I'm using hard-coded content at the moment for them. 1 line, define the content, 2nd line, define the popup with the ID of the element you want to mouse-over. Beautiful!

What a huge week! Finally we're out of the unit. Been so busy I haven't even blogged.

Liam's first birthday today! We had Mum, Dad, Jen and Chris over for a bbq. We got him an Elmo cake because he absolutely loves Elmo! He got a lot of presents too! A nice reversible jacket from Grandma, A big Elmo that talks from us (It's nearly as big as him and he loves it!), Jen and Chris got him some bath toys and another toy. I'm going to have to come back here and edit this because linking people to stuff isn't working. I'm pretty tired! He had a great day too. He was also tired and cranky at home time for everyone... Liam had lots of attention all day. He even managed to snaffle some icing on his cake with a quick grab, he wasn't too fussed on the taste of it (what taste?!). It was that piped on icing that doesn't taste like anything...

The HTPC crapped it's self today after I tried to install .NET framework 3.0 without SP2 on there. I eventually sorted it out though. I'm currently working on installing the software that this whole thing was for! The problem was at first, after attempting an install of the HTPC software, the start menu and task bar weren't started and neither were any of the services. A very broken box. So I tried to install SP2. Same problem. So I did some digging scrying of logs and it seemed that the RPC service not starting was the core of the boggle. So, I checked all the permissions in safe mode and re-booted. It worked. So, now I am going to try the rest of the software and probably another .NET install over the top because I'm not sure if the first one even completed.