Digits Domotica Blog » Tools

Switch to WordPress as Blog Engine

Robert Hekkers — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:50:10 +0000

I was never really satisfied with my former Blog engine dasBlog, so i decided to switch to WordPress. Main concern was ofcourse how to get all my posts from dasBlog to WordPress. With some links and some tools i managed to get the most important posts over to WordPress without having to type them all over

http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/23/breaking-up-moving-blog-engines/

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DasBlogML

Drill down charts for Gas usage

Robert Hekkers — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:27:11 +0000

I purchased Chartdirector recently. Not being satisfied with the charting software i used so far, i decided to go for this product after trying several others. I think i made the right choice

While moving to Chartdirector, i read all kinds of stuff about clickable charts, a feature i couldn’t use before. This could be a really good opportunity to try and do something about not being able to keep track of detailed information on data that was getting “old”. So i decided to create a page with 4 clickable charts to get from a year-based chart down to an hour-based chart:

Clicking on one of the bars above will instantly update a chart that displays the data for all the months in the selected year.

Clicking on one of the bars of the chart above, will instantly update a chart that displays the data for all the days in the selected month.

Clicking on one of the bars above will instantly update a chart that displays the data for all the hours in the selected day.

And that is where it ends, gas usage information is stored on an hourly basis, so here you are at the level at which the information is stored, just with 3 clicks…

Delaying startup execution

Robert Hekkers — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:35:15 +0000

I run my Domotica-VM on Windows 2003. I call it the Domotica-VM, but it does much more than that; SQL Server 2005 and IIS are also running in that same VM. I still had an issue to resolve there, which was adding a startup-delay to my Domotica application.
Whenever the VM booted, my Domotica app just started to fast, immediately trying to connect to the SQL Server, which was just to busy at that moment to accept connections, resulting in a messagebox saying it couldn’t find the SQL Server. So i had to build in some sort of delay for starting up my Domotica app. First let SQL Server go through it’s process of starting up, and then my Domotica application.
The standard Windows 2003 Task Scheduler doesn’t have a delay feature, so i searched for some handy little piece of software that could take care of automatically starting up my Domotica application with a delay of let’s say half a minute.

I found an appllication called Xecutor that could do just that. It’s small, and it removes itself from memory when it has completed its tasks; just what i needed. Very neat. I’ll send them a postcard