Allison Nighswander

This site includes academic coursework, my resume, and projects I have done for work. This also serves as a place to post code and other programming-related information that I have found useful.

I also offer professional web development services for individual and small businesses.

Thumbnails Disappearing in Network Folders (Windows)

February 08, 2010

I have had the problem of my image thumbnails appearing and then once all of them on screen were loaded they would disappear. This occurred for network folders on Vista.

The solution that worked for me was editing the following registry key, changing the value to 0.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer/DisableThumbnailsOnNetworkFolders

Life Update

August 20, 2009

I've decided to not only post programming issues/solutions I've come across but also blog a little about what is going on in my life.

This year has been one full of personal accomplishments. Last November I got my drivers license and this May I bought my first car, a 2008 Kia Spectra. After being without a car so long, it's been nice to be able to go wherever I want when I want. However, I have noticed that it's made me a bit lazy. When I didn't have a car I had to walk more. I usually park about 1.5 miles from where I work and there's a shuttle bus that goes between the two. I've started to walk to/from work on some days.

About a month ago (July 26) I got married to the most wonderful man, Michael Christiansen. We had a very low key wedding. He's in the army so we wanted to do the wedding before he deployed. We plan on having a ceremony with family and friends when he gets back from deployment.

I am working at a company called Medical Mavericks. I've been there for about four months now. I do C#/ASP.NET programming. I enjoy working in the medical field.

http://www.heatherhonecker.com/2009/07/oh-happy-day

Specified cast is not valid (C#)

March 20, 2009

When you get this message or the "Specified Cast Exception" when using Linq, the most common reason I have found was that the table in the dbml wasn't updated after updating the table structure.

Binding a DropDownList with a Stored Procedure (C#)

March 12, 2009

DropDownList ddlPhoneType = new DropDownList();
ddlPhoneType.ID = "ddlPhoneType";
ddlPhoneType.DataSource = dcDune.crmGetPhoneTypes().ToList();
ddlPhoneType.DataTextField = "name";
ddlPhoneType.DataValueField = "phoneTypeID";
ddlPhoneType.DataBind();
pnlPhone.Controls.Add(ddlPhoneType);

Update the Year in a DATETIME field (MySql)

October 22, 2008

UPDATE tablename SET column=column-INTERVAL YEAR(column) YEAR+INTERVAL new year YEAR WHERE ID="ID";

Fatal error: Uncaught SCA_RuntimeException: Instantiation of unknown type (PHP)

September 03, 2008

Fatal error: Uncaught SCA_RuntimeException: Instantiation of unknown type :http://Reward Reseller thrown in C:\...\Reward\SCA\Bindings\local\Proxy.php on line 138
This error is generated when using SCA for PHP. The cause of this error is most likely due to missing targetNamespace="http://Reward" in the xsd file

Backup an entire database to a file (MySql)

July 14, 2008

mysqldump --opt -u username -p database name > backup.sql

Fatal error: Call to a member function bind_param() on a non-object (PHP)

July 01, 2008

The cause of this error is most likely due to the statement object returning false when attempting to be created. The cause of the statement object returning false is that the SQL statement is incorrect. Try running the same SQL command line and see if you get errors there.


$updateStatement = "UPDATE $db_table SET refID = ? WHERE trans_num = ?";

$stmt = $mysqli->prepare($updateStatement);

if(!$stmt) echo "error"; //Will print "error"

$stmt->bind_param("ss", $newTransNum, $originalTransNo); //This fails

//The SQL statement is wrong (there is no field trans_num in the table)

Format to two decimal places (PHP)

June 18, 2008

I was looking all around for this and even tried to do it manually, but I found this function number_format. I used it to make sure that a dollar amount was to have two decimal places. Original amount: 5.3
$newAmount = number_format(5.3, 2)
$newAmount = 5.30.

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.number-format.php

Firefox 3 Released (Firefox)

June 17, 2008

Today marks the launch of Firefox 3 (10 AM Pacific Time). Mozilla is trying to break a world record for the most downloads. My co-worker is hosting a launch party today at 7PM at his apartment at RIT.

http://seanhayes.name/2008/06/17/firefox-3-launch-party-rit/