Upgrading Ubuntu Intrepid to Jaunty

When it comes to upgrading Operating Systems I’m not known as an early adopter, I normally wait a while for others to have the headache of encountering and resolving problems. However, in a moment of madness I decided to upgrade my fully functional Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) installation to 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I’ve read a few blog posts where users have upgraded and then found that thier sound no longer works or that thier display crashes or won’t hit the previous resolution so I made sure that I had a backup of my /home directory and exported a list of my installed applications.

Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in …

Another thing that you think would be straight forward but turned out to be quite frustrating. I have written Web Services in the past without any problems but recently when I was writing one specifically for Excel (2007) I could not get it to link properly.

Running the web service in VS2005 resulted in the test page we all know and love and the Invoke button worked fine! Taking the URL and pasting it into Excel resulted in a “Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in…” error!

It turns out that this is by design – sort of. Basically the HTTP Get and HTTP Post protocols are disabled by default (not the case in .NET 1.0). Enabling them in is simple matter of adding the following to the system.web section of the web.config:

<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <webServices>
      <protocols>
       <add name="HttpGet"/>
       <add name="HttpPost"/>
      </protocols>
    </webServices>
  </system.web>
</configuration>

TaDa! it worked.

If you want some more information then click here to go to the Knowledge Base article [KB819267]

Calling Code-Behind Method from JavaScript

While this page is still popular I have blogged about an alternate method for sending data from client to server using Javascript. You may want to check that out while you are here.

It shouldn’t be too hard should it? You want to use some Javascript on the client-side to call a method on in the Code-Behind of your aspx page – how hard can that be? Surely it must be possible. I was developing a DotNetNuke module (so the code below is VB.NET and not C#) which would allow the user to search for locations using Virtual Earth and store the latitude and longitude (as well as the zoom level) in a database.

The problem is that the Virtual Earth API is a Javascript (and hence Client-Side) technology and in the normal scheme of things cannot access .NET code on the server. So how do you do it? How do you get a Javascript function to call a Server-Side method – Is it even possible?

Problems with the WAMP Stack

Had an interesting problem at work today trying to configure the WAMP Stack on a Vista PC. I needed this configuration to evaluate the Joomla CMS application for an internal project. I had some minor experience with Joomla and the LAMP stack on a Ubuntu Linux system but as it didn’t fit my needs I never got very far into it. Now I had a change to continue my climb the learning curve and get paid for it – neat huh!

Recording Internet Radio Stream with Ubuntu

A friend of mine recently started co-presenting a show on a local radio station but due to the timings I was unable to listen to it live. I thought about trying to record it off the radio but this was not going to be straightforward as I would not be in when the show started or finished – and this is the 21st century for heavens sake, why was I thinking about going back to cassettes and ‘pressing play and record as the same time’? Surely there had to be another way, preferably one that meant I could get the show in MP3 format so that I could listen in the car, at the gym or at work. A podcast was what I needed but unfortunately the radio station in question did not produce one. However, they did provide an live stream – great, now what is the equivalent to pressing play and record at the same time on a computer?