Random Ramblings

Over the past few days I have been gathering quotes to do a PC rollover.  Amongst this I had a discussion with one of the rep’s about the use of wide-screen monitors, specifically in a business/corporate environment.

Now I get the attraction for a home user, with many PCs acting as a media centre, thus the call for wide screens to watch DVDs and other visual media.  I’ve had a wide-screen on the past 2 notebooks and am in the process of purchasing some new wide-screens for my PCs.

However, I don’t see the point in having a wide-screen monitor sitting on an office desk.  There are going to be no wide-screen formatted media being shown on these monitors, and the software we use on them has been developed for standard aspect monitors, thus the use of a wide-screen monitor would seem redundant.

What also troubles me is that wide-screen monitors are usually cheaper than the equivalent “size” standard screen.  While I do get that it does take time for business to catch up to the consumer, just think of the number of corporates using Windows Vista, I don’t see why people who prefer standard screens should have to pay a premium over the wide-screens.

The next time we do a rollover, chances are standard screens will be long and buried and thus I thought long and hard about it, but I have had to accept wide-screen monitors in this order. The equivalent size is around $40 more expensive for a standard screen, which is not much but in an order of 50 it’s the cost of a PC in savings.  But I’m still uneasy about the whole thing.

Ok, so I’ve tried to stay out of the debate regarding the filter but I’ll say it now. I’m not a huge fan of the idea.  That’s for the same reasons as the rest of those opposed (will slow the internet down, overblocking will occur, a form of censorship etc).

But I’m noticing a worrying trend with the government whenever a concern is raised about the filter.  Rather than try to respond directly to the concern, the person involved will dodge the question and spin the same old rhetoric about the benefits of the policy.  There isn’t even the slightest hint of the person addressing the concern.  Senator Conroy is the worst offender and in question time he repeatedly runs out of time when spinning the same speech. However when a concern was raised by a constiuent within the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s own electorate (see letter to Mr Rudd here, and the response here) , the staffer alsofailed to respond directly to the concerns but at least they acknowledged them, saying “I am aware that the proposal for ISP filtering has has attracted some criticism from those, like yourself, who are concerned that it will lead to censorship of the internet.”  The letter then continues with 2 or so pages of the same old fluff we’ve all heard before.

My issue with the whole thing is that the government is supposed to be elected to govern by the people, for the people.  The ALP has stated that the filtering proposal was part of their platform for the election, and therefore since they were elected into government, they have a “mandate” to implement their policies. I’m not aware of the filtering policy being publicised much, if at all, so therefore, does the government really have such a mandate to implement their policy?  If the general public are raising concerns, then the government should, as part of their responsibility to act in the interests of the people in their electorate(s), address them and not await the results of a trial of such policy before commenting.  It’s such an obvious abuse of power, and it’s not what I want the government that I elected to represent me to continue doing.  It could be said that both sides do abuse this power, but in reality they should be listening to the people they have been elected to serve, and not push their own agenda, regardless of any such percieved mandate.

Now that almost the whole of my working time is spent developing the new online system, I’ve been toying with a number of different structures for the pages.

I first had separate pages for each function, which worked well, but made the the tree a little messy.  I then moved to having one individual page for each of the three user views (administrator, staff member, and client).  All of the controls and functions were contained within that single page.

This was also working well, until I had to create a control which dynamically loads another control (using the Page.LoadControl function).  For the postbacks to work and the events contained within the dynamically-loaded control, this had to be done in an OnInit method.  Which means every single time the page loads on postback (which just to get to that control from login was at least 3), this method must be called.

One of other goals of having the one page per user view idea would be to have a consistent look and feel in each of these views.  I noticed a friend’s tweet about Master Pages, and checked it out in my ASP.NET “bible”, and thought it should be easy enough to implement.

I set out to implement it as a test which again worked incredibly well.  But, I came across a need to access a property of the Master Page from the Content Page.  Yes, I could cast the call to Master (such as (MasterPage)Master.SomeCustomProperty), but there’s actually a directive in ASP.NET to automatically provide this cast to all calls to Master.

Simply add <%@ MasterType VirtualPath=”~/path/to/MasterPage.Master” %> to your content page and any call to Master will automatically be of the type specified in the VirtualPath property.

As part of the Master Page migration, I have created a Content Page for each of the areas within the user view structure, and I’m still contemplating whether to split these into the individual functions.  This means I will have come full circle from the first idea, but at least I’d have a consistent look and feel and will be able to easily modify the display.