With that out of the way, lets get down to it, rarely do I write about anything other than food and in a strange far out way this will be related to food.  For quite sometime now my passion for technology and food have collided and I have been working on building out my Digital Cook book and working on and iPad app to accommodate it.  Recently while I was out of town the server on which the majority of this application resided bit the dust or at least the drive with the data one did.  As a person who should know better I have no excuse, but, none the less the data was not backed up.  There was one copy of the database and the data in it.  Fail.  With options running out and not wanting to pay to have the data professionally recovered I took a last ditch effort to recover the data myself.  Much to my surprise it worked.

Thankfully when I built the machine I used identical drives I had laying around.  Because of this I could swap the platters from one drive to the other and that is what I did.  I took the platter (the CD looking thing that lives inside a hard drive and holds all the data) and installed it in the working drive, after removing its platter.  I then tore into my network attached storage chassis, removed the drive in there and plugged in my Fraken-drive.  Bam, disk spun up and Windows recognized it.  Pulled my data off and let out a squeal of delight.  All of my hard work has been saved.  As a by product I have some pictures and videos of the process someone is bound to appreciate.

Moral of the story is BACK UP YOUR DATA.  I will be doing that first and foremost on my new server configuration to avoid the sense of panic upon realizing you have to start over.

The iPad looks great, in fact, I want one and will be buying one as soon as it is feasible.  In the mean time I am left to wonder, as a foodie-geek or geek-foodie or food nerd or whatever I am, how will this work as a cookbook?  Will the screen stand up to some abuse?  Can I wipe it off with a rag when I get oil, grease and juices on it?

Starting at $499 it is a rather expensive toy and an even more expensive cookbook but it holds promise if it will stand up to the abuse of living in a kitchen.  In the mean time I have downloaded the SDK and hope to begin plugging away shortly to hook the iPad into my existing recipe database.

Time will tell whether or not the iPad will catch on but with Apple’s cult following surely they will sell millions of these devices in its first year of availability, however, with a  built in stand by battery time of a month it seems that Apple has already counted on these devices not being used daily.  Perhaps CraigsList will end up flooded the used iPads for cheap.

I am working on an application to organize my recipe collection and publish it online, no shock, I even code in food.  Anyhow, in order to put measurements into the application I am using a DataGridView and put the measurements in like 1 3/4 or 2/3, the idea was that on save those numbers would then be converted to decimals and saved in the database.  This is where my problem began when I bound my DataGridView to my data from my Stored Procedure, pandamoniam.  The DataGridView then expected that all the input would be in decimal format, so I decided to capture the validating event for that cell which ended up looking like this:

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        private void dgvIngredients_CellValidating(object sender, DataGridViewCellValidatingEventArgs e)
        {
            //this is the amount column
            if (e.ColumnIndex == 0)
            {
                dgvIngredients.CancelEdit();
                dgvIngredients[e.ColumnIndex, e.RowIndex].Value = parseFraction(e.FormattedValue.ToString().Trim());   
            }
        }

Now this worked awesome for the first row in the DataGridView however, subsequent new rows in the DataGridView resulted in blanks when the validation completed, most frustrating.  So after hours of threatening my computer with harm. I arrived at a solution although not as graceful as I had hoped, I needed to intervene on one more event, the RowsAdded event as follows:

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        private void dgvIngredients_RowsAdded(object sender, DataGridViewRowsAddedEventArgs e)
        {
            dgvIngredients.CommitEdit(DataGridViewDataErrorContexts.Commit);
        }

And BAM it works.  Not exactly what I had in mind but better then converting fractions to decimals by hand.

Using ASP .Net 3.5 with VB.Net (C# would be preferred but someone started the app, besides it translates easy enough).

I have a .Net XML sitemap file:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" >
	<siteMapNode url="Default.aspx" title="Home"  description="">
 
		<siteMapNode title="Membership"
					 url="~/Membership.aspx"
					 description="Membership Management"
					 roles="Admins"/>
 
		<siteMapNode url="CustomerSearch.aspx"
					 title="Customer Search"
					 description="Customer Search"
					 roles="Admins"/>
 
		<siteMapNode title="User" description="Display/Search for user" roles="IT">
			<siteMapNode title="User Search"
						 url="~/userLookup.aspx"
						 description="Search for Users"
						 roles="Admins"/>
 
			<siteMapNode title="Create User"
						 url="http://external/createUser.asp?window=new"
						 description="Create a new user"
						 roles="Admins"/>
      		</siteMapNode>
    	<siteMapNode title="Logout"
					 url="~/Logout.aspx"
					 description="Logout"
					 roles="Admins"/>
 
	</siteMapNode>
</siteMap>

And an ASP.Net Menu control:

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<asp:Menu ID="Menu1" runat="server" DataSourceID="SiteMapDataSource1" 
                            Orientation="Horizontal" BackColor="#E9E1EA">
                        <LevelMenuItemStyles>
                            <asp:MenuItemStyle CssClass="topMenuItem" Font-Bold="True" 
                                Font-Underline="False" ItemSpacing="25px" VerticalPadding="4px"/>
                        </LevelMenuItemStyles>
                        <DynamicHoverStyle BackColor="#E9E1EA" />
                    </asp:Menu>

This is what I was given from here, it was pretty simple once my brain started to function again, I fired an event as the menu item’s were bound, checked for a parameter in the url passed in from the site map and if it was present I added the target of   ‘_blank’ to that menu item. And BOOM it worked, simple and a little more ghetto than I usually strive for but ultimatly an acceptable solution.  So here is what is looks like in code.

First thing you will notice is in my XML two of the menu item urls contain ‘window=new’, well this is the url parameter that my method is looking for, here is the XML in question:

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<siteMapNode title="User Search"
		url="~/userLookup.aspx"
		description="Search for Users"
		roles="Admins"/>
 
<siteMapNode title="Create User"
		 url="http://external/createUser.asp?window=new"
		 description="Create a new user"
		 roles="Admins"/>

Once I got that figured out I added the event action to the ASP:

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<asp:Menu ID="Menu1" runat="server" DataSourceID="SiteMapDataSource1" 
                            Orientation="Horizontal" BackColor="#E9E1EA" OnMenuItemDataBound="topMenu_menuItemDataBound" >
                        <LevelMenuItemStyles>
                            <asp:MenuItemStyle CssClass="topMenuItem" Font-Bold="True" 
                                Font-Underline="False" ItemSpacing="25px" VerticalPadding="4px"/>
                        </LevelMenuItemStyles>
                        <DynamicHoverStyle BackColor="#E9E1EA" />
                    </asp:Menu>

Once that was ready to go I wrote up the VB that lives behind the scenes, its pretty simple really:

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Protected Sub topMenu_menuItemDataBound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As MenuEventArgs) Handles Menu1.MenuItemDataBound
    If (e.Item.NavigateUrl.Contains("window=new")) Then
        e.Item.Target = "_blank"
    End If
End Sub

There is probably a more elegant way to do this but for the time period I had and the need it was perfect, if we ever need to expand this I would probably just create my own sitemap that had target as an attribute and then build an alternative menu builder to take into account target.