Obstructed Graph » General

Plancast Upcoming Widget

Robert Schultz — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:28:57 +0000

I added the Plancast upcoming widget to my blog. If you check out the Upcoming area, you can see all the events I’m planning on attending. Pretty cool.

Blog Name Has Changed to Obstructed Graph

Robert Schultz — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:38:27 +0000

I changed the name of my blog from “Life is a Unit Test” to “Obstructed Graph”. Utilizing the “graph” portion because I want to focus this blog more on development and the whole social graph aspect of development and social networks.

Blog is Back in Business

Robert Schultz — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:49:34 +0000

My blog has been down for the past week or two, because I was switching hosting providers. I switched from GoDaddy Hosting to a much better one called Softsys Hosting. They have excellent customer service and a very good and cheap hosting plan. Plus, their control panel is very slick ad clean.

I have another blog I am working on as well at the moment, which will be music related stay tuned.

GoDaddy Hosting Sucks

Robert Schultz — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:31:38 +0000

I’m thinking of switching my hosting provider today from GoDaddy. Too many problems and my site keeps going down every so often. I got some recommendations but if anyone could give me any additional Windows hosting providers that’s be stellar. I need to go with Windows because I host other ASP.NET projects as well.

Blog Maintenance

Robert Schultz — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:10:51 +0000

Excuse me for the maintenance, doing some work on the blog today and tomorrow. Nothing to see here. This blog is a work in progress always so I’m just trying to maximize the features to my best ability.

Interacting with Hardware Using Internet Explorer

Robert Schultz — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:12:15 +0000

Today most of us think of applications solely interacting with the browser in a very sand-boxed, high-level way. Because normally today our browsers hardly ever interact with our local file-system or hardware in any way since it presents a high security risk for your users.

But what about behind a corporate intranet? A lot of times companies will need to interface with more advanced features of the browser and interact with related hardware. This is a situation I’ve come to face and am curious about some of the options. We need a way for the browser to communicate with connected hardware such as printers, cash drawers and things like that. This is what we’ve thought of so far.

VB6 COM / ActiveX

This is how it’s been done in the past but it just doesn’t feel right. VB6 is an unsupported product, and is almost impossible to even find the updates for it (SP6 download returned a 404 on microsoft.com). Also to make any changes to your code you need to have a copy of VB6 installed always and will have to support this for the lifetime of your product.

But on the plus side, everyone running a modern day version of windows will have the VB6 runtimes installed already. But what if Microsoft cancels support of ActiveX in the future? And also there are still libraries out there that work with Vb6 and still supported.

Adobe Flex

I haven’t done much testing with Adobe Flex, but I do know it has printing support. But then, how flexible and robust is it? Are their security and permission issues when needing to interface with the local devices?

Silverlight

I believe this option is not feasible since Silverlight 3 still doesn’t have access to printing which we need. Even though you can give user access now to local files it’s still not to the point of full trust.

ClickOnce WinForms Application

From a developer point of view, I think this is the best option. You get to determine the trust the application requires, which gives you a sandbox environment retaining the ability to work with locally connected devices still. But you lose the ability keep the user within the browser 100% since they’d need to launch the application. But then again you get to provide automatic updates and a efficient user interface. Also with this option we could use WPF and more advanced features of the .NET framework.

What have you done in these scenarios? Has anyone else ever found alternatives to interface with hardware directly in the browser?

I Stopped Being So Lazy

Robert Schultz — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:06:32 +0000

And I finally gave in and migrated my blog over to a fully hosted WordPress account. I don’t know why I waited so long, it is 10x better having it hosted. I cannot believe the nice featured the WordPress team has rolled into the admin for finding new themes and plugins. Awesome!

Is It Wrong to Tell Homeless You're "Broke"?

Robert Schultz — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:06:49 +0000

I had went to the store tonight and before I had went in I saw a lady standing outside against the wall. Let me remind you I live in downtown Fresno and this is the liquor store that has been featured on Cops when they were in town.

Now, when I got out I saw her and so I thought about giving her some money on my way out. As I left the store I clinched a $1 in my hand and walked out. But when I glanced back and looked at her she had a look of desperation, but not in a good way. She looked as if she was waiting for drugs or that she was on them. Bad.

After that I just got in my car an left without giving her any money. Is that wrong? I initially wanted to. But I also don’t want to help people out if it would just go to drugs. I try to do my good deeds when I can.

Lack of Updates

Robert Schultz — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:58:37 +0000

Sorry I have been lagging on my updates, most of my recent time has been spent on Twitter. Please follow me at http://twitter.com/robertschultz if you use it too! I promise some new content is coming, I just need to keep my focus. Good content isn’t easy to come up with, eh.