Morten Bock

Deciding on a new camera

Morten Bock — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 01:22:19 +0100

For a while now, I have been thinking of changing my camera system. As I know that a lot of you out there on the different social networks who are into photography, I thought i would gather a small blogpost with my thoughts, and see if any of you would enlighten me with your inputs :-)

Why change?

My current camera system is an Olympus E-520 with the standard 14-42mm and 40-150mm lenses. My main issue with this equipment is that it does not seem to perform too well under indoor and other low light conditions. This seems to be confirmed by the review ad dpreview.com. So instead of spending meoney on new lenses for this system, I thought I would try to do a complete swap to improve the performance.

The candidate

The items that I am looking at currently are the following, which fall within the total budget of about DKK 7.500.

Canon EOS 600D
Price DKK ~4.700
http://www.dpreview.com/products/canon/slrs/canon_eos600d

I want to stay at the entry level houses for now, and i looked at the 500D, 550D and 600D. I would be tempted to go with the 500D which is available at a bargain price currently, but I really would like to get the flip-out screen that comes with the 600D, and which I have been missing quite a few times on my current Olympus.

Canon 18-135mm f3.5-5.6
Price DKK ~2.200
http://www.dpreview.com/products/canon/lenses/canon_18-135_3p5-5p6_is

Canon 18-200mm f3.5-5.6
Price DKK ~3.500
http://www.dpreview.com/products/canon/lenses/canon_18-200_3p5-5p6_is

I want an all purpose lens for a certain degree of flexiility when travelling. With my current system, I seem to be changing lens constantly, where these two lenses would each covere the combined range of the Olympus lenses. I am considering the 135mm lens because it should give a better quality image, but still maintain a fair amount of flexibility and at a lower price.

Canon 50mm F1.8
Price DKK ~800
http://www.dpreview.com/products/canon/lenses/canon_50_1p8_ii

At this price I really like the idea of a fixed fast lens, and this one seems to have gotten a lot of nice reviews. it should be able to handle the low light scenarios really well, and should provide some interresting options for depth of field experiments.

Feedback

That concludes my findings so far. I would love to get your feedback and experiences with this or similar equipment, and any other advice you might offer in the search for my new kit :-)

Using inline macros in the Umbraco editor

Morten Bock — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:16:53 +0100

I've seen the question asked a lot of times on the forum, and it's not always easy to give a good answer to it. "How do I create a macro that works inline in the editor". By default when inserting Macros in the editor, it will force a <p> ir <div> tag to be created around it, which means that the macro will always be a block of content.

In some cases however, it is nice to be able to insert a macro that just creates a single word or phrase inside a sentence. It could be a price of a product, a user specific property, or whatever you might need.

So I came up with the below solution. Of course it has benefits and drawbacks. In short:
Benefit:
- Inline macros

Drawbacks:
- You do not get a nice way of entering data for macro parameters
- The preview snippet is static from the moment you insert it in the editor

At the bottom you will find a link to a complete zipped umbraco install that has been set up with this, so you can have a play with it. It's using SQL CE, so should be easy to get up and running.

If you can live with this, then read on :-). First let's take a look at what the result will look like. When you insert a snippet in the editor it will look like this:

In this case my snippet will write the name of the page, and when rendered in the frontend it will look like this:

So, how does this work? There a three parts that we need to set up
1. Create a previewable macro
2. Create an aspx page that renders the preview snippet for the editor
3. Configure the TinyMCE editor to use the snippets with the Templates module

Step 1: Previewable macro

Create a macro with a "preview" parameter. In this case I'm creating an xslt macro, but works just fine with razor or usercontrols as well.

Make the macro aware of a preview state

Step 2: Snippet page

Create an aspx page that will render the macro snippet as well as the macro in preview mode.

My snippet page looks like this. I added the snippet class to a span to make it appear green in the editor. Be aware that this is all in one line to avoid too many spaces in the output when rendered.

Now, for the TinyMCE to be able to reach the page, we need to exclude it from the urls that Umbraco handles. We do this is by adding the folder to the web.config:

Step 3: Enable the templates module in TinyMCE

First we add a few thing to the tinyMceConfig.config file.

The command

The plugin

Allow the umbraco:macro tag as valid html

And add configuration for the templates, so the editor knows which snippets it can get and from which urls.

Then we disable the tidy function in umbracoSettings.config, because that will throw an error when it sees the umbraco macro tag.

Now, go to the Richtext Editor datatype, and enable the newly added templates module.

I also added my own editorStyles stylesheet, but that is standard umbraco stuff :-)

And that is it. Now the macro can be inserted to your text without having to be in a <p> tag. Neato.

I hope this is useful for you. Let me know if you can see any other drawbacks than the ones that I mentioned at the beginning.

Get the demosite here: InlineMacroDemo.zip

F7 broken in VS2010

Morten Bock — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:14:21 +0100

I just had a small problem when working on a web project in Visual Studio 2010. It seems that the F7 shortcut by default will only switch you from MarkupView => CodeView. But not the other way. The only way to get back is SHIFT+F7, which will take you to DesignView instead of Markup, and let's face it, no one wants to go there.

So, the solution is:

1. Go to Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard
2. In the "Show Commands Containing" box, write "View.ToggleDesigner"
3. In the "Press Shourtcut Keys" box, press F7.
4. Click "Assign"
5. Click "OK"

Now it should all be back to normal, or at least the way that I like it.

Launced new blog

Morten Bock — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:09:56 +0100

Last week I helped launch a new blog based on Umbraco. I used the excellent ImageGen package to generate the images for the galleries and it is working perfectly :-)

Tech wise, it is not feature complete yet, but it is already filled with nice tips about nice design, art and furniture for your home (in danish...)

Go visit http://livingsweetliving.dk/ to check it out.

How to edit Chrome thumbnails

Morten Bock — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:52:25 +0100

I just wanted to shared this tip, if anyone else wants a bit of control over the thumbnails that show up in the "New tab" page of Chrome.

For me, it was annoying that it had saved the http://twitter.com/ url, because the front page has the stupid login box where you have to get your mouse going. Instead, I want it to go to http://twitter.com/home which has a much better login box.

This is not supported by chrome, as far as I can tell, so I went digging. And I found a small file that contains the tabs. In my case (On XP in danish) it is here:

C:\Documents and Settings\Morten Bock Sørensen\Lokale indstillinger\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

UPDATE:
I now upgraded to Windows 7, and here the file is found in:
C:\Users\Morten Bock Sørensen\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

Open it with your favorite text editor, and look near the bottom. There is a list of "pinned_urls" in what looks like Json to me. I just changed the link I needed from:

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {

"direction": "ltr",

"index": 2,

"title": "Twitter / Home",

"url": "http://twitter.com/home"

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {
"direction": "ltr",
"index": 2,
"title": "Twitter / Home",
"url": "http://twitter.com/"
},

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {
"direction": "ltr",
"index": 2,
"title": "Twitter / Home",
"url": "http://twitter.com/home"
},

And off we go :-)

Just remember to do this while Chrome is closed, otherwise it will overwrite your changes.

Importing Wordpress posts to Umbraco

Morten Bock — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:58:33 +0100

As you may have noticed, my blog has changed a bit this week. I finally got around to porting it to Umbraco. I did this for several reasons, but mainly because I feel at home with Umbraco, and I can tweak it to do just about anything I want. Wordpress on the other hand is PHP, and I just suck at that. So there you go...

Anyhow, after setting up my document types in Umbraco I needed to figure out how to get all my old content into the new site. Wordpress offers to export the entire content as xml, so that part was easy. The exported file was 3Mb, mainly because of some sort of screwed up tags back from when I was using the Ultimate Tag Warrior (I will miss the cool plugin names from Wordpress), which spit out a whole lot of empty tags.

The exported format is basically an RSS feed, but with some extra elements added by wordpress. One of those is an <excerpts:encoded> element, which does not have a namespace declaration at the top, thus making it invalid xml. So I needed to fix this before handling the file in my import routine. I just added it to the rss element:

<rss version="2.0"
    xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
    xmlns:excerpt="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/excerpt/"
    xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:wp="http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/">

Sweet, now the xml is all nice and tidy and ready to be imported. So, how to do the import? Well, I decided to do it through the Umbraco API using a dashboard usercontrol. To get the content from the XML file, I chose to go with Linq2Xml which is pretty neat for navigating through the XML file.

First thing I did was to disable some Lucene lock, because it made my import fail due to the number of operations done. I also set the script timeout value a bit high just to be sure:

Server.ScriptTimeout = 300;
Lucene.Net.Store.FSDirectory.SetDisableLocks(true);

Now, to load the Xml file. Pretty easy. I later added the possibility to enter the XML in a textarea instead, thus the commented out line:

XDocument loaded = XDocument.Load(Server.MapPath("~/usercontrols/wordpress.2009-08-01.xml"));
//XDocument loaded = XDocument.Parse(wpxmltextbox.Text);

XNamespace wpns = XNamespace.Get("http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/");
XNamespace contentns = XNamespace.Get("http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/");
var q = from c in loaded.Descendants("item")
        where (string)c.Element(wpns + "post_type") == "post"
        select c;

So now I got all my blogposts in the variable "q". time to feed them into Umbraco. It's not too nicely structured, but it does the job, and it's a one time deal, so no need to go crazy here.

DocumentType dt = DocumentType.GetByAlias("BlogPost");
User author = User.GetUser(0);

foreach (XElement item in q)
{
    string posttitle = (string)item.Element("title");
    string legacyurl = ((string)item.Element("link")).Replace("", string.Empty);
    string legacyid = (string)item.Element(wpns + "post_id");
    string posturlnodename = Server.UrlDecode((string)item.Element(wpns + "post_name"));
    string postbody = (string)item.Element(contentns + "encoded");
    string posttags = string.Empty;
    DateTime createdate = DateTime.Parse((string)item.Element(wpns + "post_date"));

    int i = 0;
    foreach (XElement tag in item.Elements("category"))
    {
        if ((string)tag.Attribute("domain") == "tag" && !string.IsNullOrEmpty((string)tag.Attribute("nicename")))
        {
            if (i > 0)
            {
                posttags += ",";
            }
            posttags += (string)tag.Attribute("nicename");
            i++;
        }
    }

    Document doc = Document.MakeNew(posturlnodename, dt, author, 1049);
    doc.getProperty("blogPostTitle").Value = posttitle;
    doc.getProperty("blogPostBody").Value = WordpressPostParser.ParseCodeBlocks(WordpressPostParser.ChangeImageUrls(WordpressPostParser.CreateParagraphTags(postbody)));
    doc.getProperty("blogPostLegacyUrl").Value = legacyurl;
    doc.getProperty("blogPostLegacyID").Value = legacyid;
    doc.CreateDateTime = createdate;

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(posttags))
    {
        umbraco.editorControls.tags.library.addTagsToNode(doc.Id, posttags, "default");
        doc.getProperty("blogPostTags").Value = posttags;
    }

    doc.Publish(author);
    umbraco.library.UpdateDocumentCache(doc.Id);


    //comments here...
    foreach (XElement comment in item.Elements(wpns + "comment"))
    {
        if ((string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_approved") == "1")
        {

            string commentAuthor = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author");
            string commentEmail = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author_email");
            string commentUrl = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author_url");
            string commentIP = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_author_IP");
            string commentBody = (string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_content");
            DateTime commentDate = DateTime.Parse((string)comment.Element(wpns + "comment_date"));
            
            Document commentdoc = Document.MakeNew(commentAuthor, DocumentType.GetByAlias("BlogComment"), author, doc.Id);
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthor").Value = commentAuthor;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthorEmail").Value = commentEmail;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthorURL").Value = commentUrl;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentAuthorIP").Value = commentIP;
            commentdoc.getProperty("blogCommentBody").Value = commentBody;
            commentdoc.CreateDateTime = commentDate;

            commentdoc.Publish(author);
            umbraco.library.UpdateDocumentCache(commentdoc.Id);
        }

    }

}

I am using some external methods to parse the body text of the posts. This is because Wordpress doesn't save html, but puts in linebreaks and renders paragraph tags at render time... brrrr... There are also some [source] tags leftover from the syntax highlighter plugin that I need to change:

These are the three methods I am using to parse the text:

public static string CreateParagraphTags(string postbody)
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    sb.Append("<p>");
    sb.Append(postbody.Replace("\n\n", "</p><p>"));
    sb.Append("</p>");
    return sb.ToString();
}

public static string ChangeImageUrls(string postbody)
{
    string parsedstring = Regex.Replace(postbody, "src=\"/wp-content", "src=\"/media/images", RegexOptions.Singleline);
    return Regex.Replace(parsedstring, "href=\"/wp-content", "href=\"/media/images", RegexOptions.Singleline);
}

public static string ParseCodeBlocks(string postbody)
{
    Regex regPattern = new Regex(@"(\[source(.*?)\])(.*?)(\[/source\])", RegexOptions.Singleline);
    Dictionary<string, string> replaceValues = new Dictionary<string, string>();

    int i = 0;
    foreach (Match match in regPattern.Matches(postbody))
    {
        string code = match.Groups[3].Value;
        if (code.Contains("<"))
        {
            code = code.Replace("<", "&lt;").Replace(">", "&gt;");
        }
        postbody = postbody.Replace(match.Value, string.Format("[[[replacecode{0}]]]", i));
        replaceValues.Add(string.Format("[[[replacecode{0}]]]", i), "<pre>" + code + "</pre>");
        i++;
    }

    foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> replaceValue in replaceValues)
    {
        postbody = postbody.Replace(replaceValue.Key, replaceValue.Value);
    }

    return postbody;
}

It's not perfect. For example it added some strange <p> tags inside my code blocks, but no more than I could handle by doing manual updates. For these methods I added some unit tests. It is just so much nicer to work with RegEx when you have tests to see if you are breaking existing matches while changing this stuff.

So there you have it. Posts imported and ready to go. It's so easy I don't know why I didn't get around to it before :-)

Natur-Energi bruger ufine metoder

Morten Bock — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:26:52 +0100

Jeg vil gerne lige gøre mit til at advare mod selskabet Natur-Energi der tilsyneladende ikke har meget respekt for forbrugernes rettigheder. Flere andre har også have uheldige oplevelser med dem, som f.eks. Tonni, der blev svindlet med nog bil streamer værk: http://ekstrabladet.dk/kup/vagthundene/article1195722.ece og John der åbenbart skulle skifte selskab fordi han var med i en spørgeskemaundersøgelse: http://24.dk/user/johnsmedehus/perma/2009/07/19/det_er_da_halvfarligt_at_deltage_i_sprgeskemaer_p_netet

Og Mogens har her på facebook beskrevet noget der meget godt ligner den situation vi også er i: http://www.facebook.com/wall.php?id=59887513919

Humlen i det hele er at Natur-Energi synes det er helt OK at de hijacker dit el-abonnement uden at fortælle det til dig. Det eneste du skal gøre er bare lige at gøre dit og dat for at vise at du "støtter grøn energi", og hvem gør ikke det? Det glemmer bare helt at fortælle at de selv er et el-selskab der har tænkt sig at overtage leverancen af strøm til dig. Og vupti, så får du en faktura. Hvis du prøver at ringe til dem, ja så får du lov at vente i 10 minutter til noget musik før linjen bare bliver tavs. Fedt...

Så hvis du støder ind i en Natur-Energi mand på gaden eller i dit storcenter, så stik ham lige en på kassen fra mig, og så skynd dig videre inden de får fat i din adresse!

Jeg har i hvert fald tænkt mig at sende et anbefalet brev med en opsigelse, og så kan de ellers stikke deres faktura et sted hen hvor solen aldrig skinner. Lorteselskab!

Update: Fandt lige et link der beskriver at det alligevel ikke nytter at købe skidtet: http://www.elsparefonden.dk/presse/arkiv/presseklip_archive/ni.2008-11-07.4088459089

Update 2: Jeg kan se der stadig er en del trafik på denne artikel. Hvis du har erfaringer med Natur Energi osm du har lyst til at dele, eller hvis du har lyst til at læse mere, så kig in på Trustpilot hvor du kan se andre brugeres mening om selskabet, og skrive din egen anmeldelse: http://www.trustpilot.dk/review/www.natur-energi.dk

Update 3 (November 2011):
Det ser ud til at Natur-Energi har taget feedback til sig, og de har som resultat af det tilsyneladende lukket deres gadesalg ned. Du kan læse mere om deres tiltag her: http://blog.natur-energi.dk/presse/svar-paa-natur-energi-bruger-ufine-metoder . Det er godt at se at det rent faktisk nytter noget at gøre opmærksom på problemerne, og håber ikke at der er flere der ryger i samme situation som vi gjorde.

Zyxel P-660R-D1 client list duplicate entries

Morten Bock — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:36:02 +0100

This is mainly just a "note to self" about how to solve this problem if I come across it again.

Problem is that somehow the web interface for the router allowed me to enter the same ip/mac address to the "client list" table. This of course is not great, and for some reason there is no "delete" button on there. It just gave me an "ERROR: Duplicate MAC Address!" message. So I had to do a lot of digging to find a way to delete it.

In short:

1. Telnet to the router
2. Go to the Command Line if you are not already there
3. Type this command: "ip dhcp enif0 static delete all"

I found this in a CLI reference for another zyxel router (PDF).

I hope this might help out others in the same situation :-)

Thoughts about Umbraco as a modular CMS

Morten Bock — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:03:52 +0100

Umbraco is the friendly CMS. At least when you are a developer or an editor. It's just one of those things that grow on you when you get into the mindset of using the ultra flexible framework that it is. Still, once in a while, a new user comes by and can not understand why it is so hard to create a site using the existing packages. That makes me wonder. Because as time goes by, the new users seem to warm up to the concepts.

When I have been in positions where I recommended Umbraco to companies, they always ask if there are a lot of plugins/addons/modules (take your pick), and I have always answered that Umbraco is not as such a modular CMS. Not because it is not possible, but because it is often really fast to build the functionality that you want, instead of installing a module that might not fit your needs 100%, and then spend time trying to squeeze your ideas into that module.

With V4 of Umbraco a lot of effort has been but into making it easier for the new users by giving them the Runway site that supports Modules. This is cool, and probably will get some to hang in a bit longer than otherwise, which again gives them time to warm up to the concepts of Umbraco. But I am wondering if plug'n'play modules on a larger scale would be the way to go?

The upside would probably be a wider adaption in small site installations, and maybe a more active marketplace for commercial modules through the package repo. But is it the right way to go?

Personally I hope that Umbraco remains on the current balance between flexibility and availability of modules. I like the concept of starter sites which gives a great foundation on a blank Umbraco install. But I am not a big fan of packages that hook directly into the existing site. I do love the packages that simply supply some new functionality, that you then have to spend a little time configuring, which in turn gives you lots of control.

So the question remains: How much of an Umbraco enthusiast should you need to be, in order to be able to extend your site with existing packages?

I do not have the answer to that, but I am really looking forward do discussing this and much more at the Core/MVP retreat and Codegarden in June. See you all there!

Setting up membership in Umbraco

Morten Bock — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:33:43 +0100

I played around with the membership features of Umbraco tonight, and I thought I would share my findings. Mostly because it is just incredibly easy to do without even compiling any code. Just pure templates and a single entry in the web.config file is all it takes.

I started by installing the Runway package, to get a basic website.

First of all, I set up my members area with a member type and a member group:

Now I need to tell asp.net which Member Type I want to use when creating new users. Find this line in the web.config file:

<add name="UmbracoMembershipProvider"
  type="umbraco.providers.members.UmbracoMembershipProvider"
  enablePasswordRetrieval="false"
  enablePasswordReset="false"
  requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"
  defaultMemberTypeAlias="WebsiteUser"
  passwordFormat="Hashed" />

Edit the attribute "defaultMemberTypeAlias" to the Member Type you want. In my case it is "WebsiteUser".

Now we are ready to create the Sign Up form. I do this in a new template, which is just a copy of the Runway Textpage, but I add the following after the body text:

<script runat="server">

protected void CreateUserWizard1_CreatedUser(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Roles.AddUserToRole(CreateUserWizard1.UserName, "BasicUsers");
}

protected void CreateUserWizard1_ContinueButtonClick(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Response.Redirect("/member-area.aspx");
}

</script>

<asp:CreateUserWizard ID="CreateUserWizard1" OnContinueButtonClick="CreateUserWizard1_ContinueButtonClick" OnCreatedUser="CreateUserWizard1_CreatedUser" runat="server">
    <WizardSteps>
        <asp:CreateUserWizardStep ID="CreateUserWizardStep1" runat="server"></asp:CreateUserWizardStep>
        <asp:CompleteWizardStep ID="CompleteWizardStep1" runat="server"></asp:CompleteWizardStep>
    </WizardSteps>
</asp:CreateUserWizard>

Inside the script block I react to two events. When the user is created, I add him to the "BasicUsers" group, which is the one I will give access to my members area. The other method simply redirects the user to the member area when he finishes the signup wizard. (EDIT: Petr suggested that you use ContinueDestinationPageUrl="/member-area.aspx" instead of the redirect method, which I agree with)

Now users can sign up for membership, but we also want them to be able to log in. So we add this to the subNavigation div in the Runway Textpage template:

<asp:LoginView ID="UmbracoLoginView" runat="server">
    <AnonymousTemplate>
        <asp:Login ID="Login1" runat="server"></asp:Login>
    </AnonymousTemplate>
    <LoggedInTemplate>
        Welcome
        <asp:LoginName ID="LoginName1" runat="server" />
        <asp:LoginStatus ID="LoginStatus1" runat="server" />
    </LoggedInTemplate>
</asp:LoginView>

That is all the code that is needed. All that is left is creating content:

The login page is just a textpage with some text about logging in. The Sign Up page is using my new template with the CreateUserWizard control on it. The Member Area page has Public Access set like this:

That is all there is to it. Pretty easy huh? Feel free to post any questions in the comments, and I will try and answer to the best of my ability.