Reddnet Scribbles

It has been just over a year since I introduced TicketDesk over at CodePlex. While it hasn't taken the world by storm or anything, it did generate a lot more interest than I would have expected. There are several companies using TicketDesk in production environments, and there have been a few thousand downloads from other people that may be using it too.

While TicketDesk isn't generating the kind of download numbers that I'd want to base a software startup on, for an open source project it is what you might call "wildly successful".

If there was a major failure on my part with bringing TicketDesk to the public, it would be that I didn't do a good job explaining the ideas behind the overall design. So let me take a stab at explaining the philosophy behind TicketDesk.

The general idea behind TicketDesk was to take my 15 years or so of experience, much of it spent being frustrated by help desk issue trackers, and use that experience to design a different kind of help desk system; one that avoids those problems.

And believe me, I have a very long list of complaints with help desk systems!

I suppose the best way to explain it is to discuss the fundamental design idea then illustrate how TicketDesk implements them.

So... I've moving to a new place, but I need to keep electricity turned on at the old place for a while. 

Another undocumented "feature" I ran into when playing with the MVC.

I have an ajax action link that sorts a list on the page. To accomplish this, the link performs an ajax request to the controller's Sort action and in the end redraws the part of the page contianing the list's data with the new sort settings. 

No biggie... except that when using Mozilla Firefox, it never worked right. The list would be redrawn, but would always contain the entire page's content including the menus, headers, and all the other stuff.

This was another one of those things I had hoped would magically go away with the RTM of the MVC framework... but when it didn't I had to go figure it out.

I chased my tail for a while last week after the final release of the ASP.NET MVC framework went RTM. I'd been having a few "issues" getting my app working right, especially in IE 8.

I'd been hopeful that the RTM releases of either IE 8 or the MVC framework would magically fix these problems for me, but after both went to RTM last week I discovered that I was going to have to tackle the problem myself.

The main problem was that, in IE 8, I was unable to update a table when I was using Ajax  to fetch a partial view containing the table's contents. I had been planning to use this technique to handle paging and sorting of the table's data and for an auto-refresh of the data periodically.

This worked fine on other browsers, but with IE 8 this always threw an unusually crytpic and unformative Javascript error (an "unknown exception") and the update would not complete.

I did finally get to the bottom of the problem...

The Sci Fi Channel has always been one of the most confusing failures in American Television. Now, they have decided that the reason for the suckitude must just be the name of the channel.

So they are changing the name to "Syfy". Somehow they think that this move will make their crappy shows appeal to a broader range of people.

Reading an article at TV Week about I have to say, the reason this network sucks has never been clearer...

Hey, Orange Juice vendors! Listen up!

Please stop putting shit that isn't made from oranges in my fucking juice already!

See these two cartons?

One of these contains a beverage that tastes yummy.

The other contains a beverage that tastes like someone took a shit in it.

Can you tell the difference? 

And why the fuck do you insist on putting this crap in OJ anyway?

If you are going to put crap that isn't orange in your orange juice, then at least have the decency to make sure the package is CLEARLY marked!

It doesn't matter what you put in there. Calcium, Vitamins, Omega-3, whatever.... if you put something in there that isn't made from a god-damned orange then... well....  it fucking is NOT "100% Orange pure & natural not from concentrate" then is it?

But if you are going to put crap in some of your OJ lines, then please at least have the decency to make it VERY obvious what is in the carton. A tiny little sub-text is NOT clearly marked. So what will happen is that I'm going to accidentally pick up the wrong one, shell out $4 for it, get it home, then puke OJ all over the counter.

That does the fuck NOT build brand loyalty there guys!

One of the most annoying things about Vista for me is the way it constantly tries to "guess" what kinds of files are in a folder and then change how windows explorer displays the contents of the folder.

This is especially annoying since I tend to use the "Details" view in windows explorer. 

There is a really simple application that can fix this problem right up for you though...

I've just published the stable release for TicketDesk 1.2 over on CodePlex!

This release took much longer than I'd hoped, but it does significantly improve on the previous release in nearly every functioinal area.

I'm please to announce that the next major release of the TicketDesk Help Desk Issue Tracking and Support System is on track for a Mid-February release.

I've already put an alpha version of the new release on CodePlex while I wrap up a few loose ends and finish up some cross-browser testing..

If you are a developer using Windows Vista, you are may be a tad annoyed by the lack of a built-in SMTP server. I was too, but after I found Antix SMTP Server for Developers (download mirror), I was actually grateful that Microsoft didn't deliver a built-in option.

The Antix SMTP server has become one of those utilities that I just "can't live without" and it is a whole lot better for developers than any other SMTP server I've ever used.

The reason may suprise you though.... it's because the Antix SMTP server can't actually send emails.

Confused? Read on...