I seem to be obsessed with the weather lately. So are a lot of other people judging from the amount of weather-related widgets and "parts" for public portals. One of my favourites was a Yahoo widget that showed the precipitation RADAR imagery from Environment Canada's web site. Unfortunately, the widget stopped working last year when Environment Canada changed how the web site worked.

So, I took a look at the Yahoo Widget SDK and it seemed like an easy-enough technology to develop with. The main widget file is an XML document that allows you to lay out window areas with text blocks and images. It also allows for the description of timer events and preference settings. The programmatic aspect of the widget is controlled with simple javascript, though as I learned the hard way, it's not really the same as using javascript in a web page. For example, there is no Image() object in a Yahoo widget. The Image() object is not an intrinsic javascript construct - it is actually part of the browser's HTML document object model. So don't try pre-loading any web graphics the good old fashioned way.

Still, once you get the hang of it, developing a widget is pretty straight-forward. I'm not really a fan of the absolute positioning required for text blocks, but the technology is simple to understand. I was able to develop most of the Weather RADAR widget in a weekend. Not that this widget is particularly complex, but it's not totally simple either.

Some of my favourite features of this widget are:

• It automatically refreshes with the latest RADAR image every 10 minutes. This is how often Environment Canada updates the image on their web site.
• Similar to the actual web site, the user can select which "overlay" images to display on top of the RADAR image. The overlays consist of markers for cities, roads, rivers and more.
• Double-clicking on the RADAR image will toggle the animation of the image.
• The image can be resized from 25% to 175% of the original image size.

If you're interested, you can download this widget from my Duotronic site: http://www.duotronic.com/weatherWidget.

I was rummaging through Digg this morning and I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw a headline on the front page that Amiga OS 4 had just been released. Ars Technica even posted a 6-page review of the new release. I haven't used an Amiga since 1997, but it appears this release has done a decent job updating the OS. I lost touch with the Amiga world after '97, but this review points out that a company released new Amiga hardware a few years ago based on the PowerPC platform. Unfortunately, that didn't last and you can no longer buy new hardware to run this OS on. This kinda makes me chuckle because it is SOOOO reminicent of how the Amiga world worked.

So now I'm taking a few moments to stroll down memory lane. Ahh, the good ol' Amiga - I tell ya, that was some machine in its day. I owned an A500, A3000 (my personal favourite computer of all time), A3000T and an A4000 that got "frankensteined" into this ludriocrously huge enclosure to run a Video Toaster and Video Flyer system (now THOSE were really fun days - until the money ran out). Absolutely wicked graphics and sound capabilities for the late '80s and early '90s. I remember all the "demo" disks I used to download off of BBS systems (the Internet was barely getting off the ground back then) that were just so totally amazing with crazy colourful motion graphics and stereo sampled sound. Completely useless, yes, but awsome eye-candy that made the jaw of my PC friends hit the ground on a regular basis. Some of my favourite games still come from that platform: Silk Worm, Speedball, and Araknoid. In fact, my professional career in computers started with the Amiga (and almost died with it, too) before I was forced to switch to PCs.

Computers really haven't been as much for me since those good ol' days. <sigh>  Thanks for all the memories, Amiga.

If you've installed SharePoint Services (2003 or 2007) on your web server, you will likely find that many of your ASP.NET sites no longer work properly or at all. Even if the ASP.NET is not in the "managed path" of the SharePoint server, it still causes extreme grief. I had hoped that this would be "fixed" in the 2007 release of SharePoint, but apparently it is not.

To get around the problem, you can start with this Knowledgebase Article:

How to enable an ASP.Net application to run on a SharePoint virtual server

which basically tells you to reset the <trust> level to "Full" and re-add all the standard ASP.NET httpModules and httpHandlers. Nice - this is always what I wanted to do just to get my damn sites working again. Notably missing from this article, however, is the new ASP.NET 2.0 "Profile" feature, which also uses an HttpModule to automatically link a profile with the currently authenticated user. If you're using the Profile feature on your site, be sure to also add this line to your <httpModules> section:

<add name="Profile" type="System.Web.Profile.ProfileModule" />

Hopefully this little tidbit of information will save you the half-a-day of grief I just spent tracking down an "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error when trying to access the Profile object. I knew it was likely a SharePoint issue, but I danced all around the web.config before I was able to figure it out.