Wednesday, February 23, 2011

CheckedListBox Mutual Exclusive Selection

I thought that this would be a simple property setting in the CheckedListBox, but no I guess not. I assume that the individual only wants to select one item, and that item should be both selected and checked.

Here's how I did it:

private void checkOnlySelection(CheckedListBox cbox)
{
Object selectedItem = cbox.SelectedItem;
if (selectedItem == null)
return;
for (int i = 0; i < cbox.Items.Count; i++)
{
Object o = cbox.Items[i];
bool match = o == selectedItem;
cbox.SetItemChecked(i, match);
}
}

Just call this method in the SelectedIndexChange event handler and it will do the trick.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Career Aptitude Tests - Nature vs. Nurture

If they ever develop a really good test for career aptitudes, what correlations they would find? Gardeners <-> biologists, mechanics <-> computer programmers, waiters/tresses <-> actors/actresses? But every waiter is an aspiring actor so it would be hard to separate nurture vs. nature. Are they called waiters/resses because they're all waiting to become actors/tresses?

Orange Peel Plant Food

Cut up orange peels added to the soil really give house plants a growth spurt. Grapefruit and lemonade also work, but not vinegar, so it's something in the citrus (vitamin C?) and not the acidity.

Blues and Folk and Rap

Blues, folk, and rap are pretty similiar. Structured chord progressions, and in the foreground, the guitar solo is speaking for blues, the singer's voice is speaking for folk, and the rapper's words is speaking for rap.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Media Sync Problem on Blackberry

I tried to use the "Media Sync" on the Blackberry Desktop software and got an error

Media Services are Not Available.

You need to turn on mass storage mode from the connected Blackberry device to use this feature. This may require you to reconnect your device.


Here's a link on the blackberry site for a fix.

In theory, yes. But when the device reset, and I clicked on "Media Sync", I once again got the "Media Services are Not Available" message. Maybe next time I'll get a Nokia or Samsung (IPhones are cool but way outside my budget until I get off my contract).

The article then says to go to Microsoft Support and look up KB 297694. This has a hotfix -- for Windows XP only. I've got Windows 7. And the "Contact Us" link doesn't actually have any specific category for technical issues - only one for non-technical issues, instructions to contact your manufacturer, or specific categories (like IPhone) that aren't related.

Now I'm not only getting the runaround within a company, they are coordinating their runaround strategies to send me to another companie's runaround department.

Someone suggested just going back to version 5.0. Having worked in this industry, I can guess what happened: the guy who wrote the software and understood it moved on to another job, within or outside the company, and the new programmers are being managed according to the latest approach (structured programming? agile? foobarius?) and no one really knows how the software works.