Sysrc’s tech blog

eRomania

The portal eRomania launched by the Romanian Ministry of Communications and Informational Society (new name) in the presence of the Prime Minister Emil Boc (my GOD!) is meant to be tool for ”a more efficient way of governing, offering quality services based on the needs and realities of the Romanian society”…

Of course it was launched without being completed, with an expensive media campaign … Today it officially collapsed…

BELLOW IS THE PERFECT FACE OF eRomania: “DATABASE CONNECTION FAILED”

Oh and btw, the little time the website was on - the information found on it was a miserable copy of wikipedia …

DEAR GOVERMENT, HOW MUCH DID YOU PAY FOR THAT CRAP!?!

UPDATE: Now http://www.romania.gov.ro/ is up again…enjoy…

Microsoft puke add

I liked Microsoft’s commercial which had Seinfeld and Bill Gates in it…but the latest IE 8 add is at least weird if not disgusting all together… DO NOT WATCH IF YOU HAVE A SENSIBLE STOMACH!

Without “superman” talk in the end the girl may as well be a Firefox lover groused out by the new IE…

www.mcti.ro

Last year the National Agency for Communication Reglementation in Romania had a bidding to find a specialized company to rebuild it’s website…In the request notebook they wanted a lot of things pretty much every web module you could possible think of (many of them useless for their activity)…and also they wanted that the bidder would give up the source code and not use open source software…

It was obvious for some people in the business that the so called public bidding had a winner prior to it being announced … the winner implemented the awesome website using DOTNETNUKE…

Today is the third day since the Ministry for Communication and IT doesn’t have a website at all…a HUGE ministry with hundreds employees with IT background (I suppose that is why it’s called …for communication and IT) has NO IDEA or CAN’T repair it’s website!!! MY GOD…

Doesn’t NULL COUNTRY sounds about right? I think Yahoo has heard of us…

UPDATE: It seems the ministry changed it’s name and domain name also…the page was moved at http://www.mcsi.ro/ without any announcement … good job !

Null country

Sounds cool…NULL COUNTRY…It has a very … MAD MAX ring to it..

WebRequest and Unable to read data from the transport connection Error

Weird thing just happened, a Windows Service responsible for grabbing some data form an online XML source, suddenly stopped working after two years of continuous functioning…

First I thought that the remote XML had changed somehow but the service returned
“Unable to read data from the transport connection: The connection was closed.”

The code that connected to the remote XML was pretty low-tech:

WebRequest wRq = WebRequest.Create(remoteUri);
WebResponse wRs = wRq.GetResponse();
Stream strm = wRs.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(strm, Encoding.UTF7);
XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
xDoc.Load(strm); //IT WAS CRASHING HERE


After some research it seems that the remote side closes the connection prior to it being finished…
I had to change the code as follows and the problem was solved:


CookieContainer CC = new CookieContainer();
HttpWebRequest wRq = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(remoteUri);
wRq.Proxy = null;
wRq.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
wRq.KeepAlive = false; //THIS DOES THE TRICK
wRq.ProtocolVersion = HttpVersion.Version10; // THIS DOES THE TRICK
wRq.CookieContainer = CC;
WebResponse wRs = wRq.GetResponse();
Stream strm = wRs.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(strm, Encoding.UTF7);
XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
xDoc.Load(strm); //NO LONGER CRASHING HERE


Windows Mobile Tip - storage card 2

If you have a Windows Mobile 6 device, you use it with a storage card for a period of time and for some reason (I don’t know - your HTC DUAL TOUCH screen stops working and you don’t want the service guys to copy the content of your card) you start it without a storage card then reinsert the initial card, all the programs installed on that card will stop working ( and NO the card is not broken) because Windows Mobile already has a Storage Card folder and has created a Storage Card 2 folder although it’s the same card…

So the solution is to enter the windows explorer and rename the Storage card folder into Storage card something then do a reboot of the device…

Wasn’t it smarter if they have created a checksum on the card, so when you would insert cards the link between installed programs and card would be maintained trough that checksum?

Why is debugging so important…

Debugging, next to application design is probabile the most important thing in the development process.

If you’re writing code, you shoud really know all the debugging tools available for the environment you’re working on and also best practices on how to aproach known bugs.

One of the things most programmers are really bad at is testing their code…The quantity of poorly tested code or untested code tends to increase where development teams are larger, if you tell a programmer that a testing team will be responsabile of testing the code, the initial debugging process drops to 0, and the code is often send almost untested to the testing team.

Why is that? Probably because programmers are like parents “their child is the best and the brightest”… Also because programmers like to write code not to browse through existing one…”New code is the only code”

When you are debugging try to think the code you’re testing will run the robot bellow.

NOTE TO SELF

BE QUIET IN THE DATACENTER - SERVER AT WORK!

Grandma proof laptop

default : return “motherfucker”

Google translation episode 2 - bad words translation…

A friend showed me a funny Google translation http://translate.google.com/translate_t#ro%7cen%7cRomania%20e%20pizdoasa%0A so I started investigating .

It seems someone went to great lengths to translate romanian slang. The funny part comes when they didn’t know how to translate a certain word … “when in doubt - return motherfucker”. :)))