PI-OSI Soft

Just joined a presentation by OSISoft on their products and activity. Seems like information management is all the rage right now. The presentation shed some light on the important of data analysis, a byproduct of what they’re doing. OSI Soft serves as a tool for data collection, it’s up to the end user to make full use of what has been dumped into the system. 

Our company has been using PI ever since 1999, but I doubt that whatever gathered has been used for analysis. I started to see some initiatves kicking in on performance monitoring. It must be going well since the initiatives is headed by a manager.  My deprtment doesnt even have a proper leader. 

One of the other system link planed for EALIS Seek is to PI. The idea is just like PTW link; graphical representation of information, in this case the information is the live data from PI. From the meeting it seemed that PI has already something like what we are trying to do. But It seems that the sample that they are showing is not running as web web application, it was running on on of their windows client, PI_Book. I forsee that their method will involve redrawing/export all of the drawing into PI_Book. For us we already have a system handling the drawings, and we’re trying to keep that as a reference at the same time update will be done onto it. Duplication onto a different system will just just complicate matters, an unwanted overhead on our side.

The code from PTW-link implementation can be used here, the only difference will be on the database connection code.

Notepad.exe what would I do without you.

What is your most loved windows application; windows, office, ie, iis,.. for me it’s the notepad. I’ve been using notepad to write everything for the EALIS Seek development. I did use Macromedia Dreamweaver (trial) early on, just to get the ball rolling. My HTML and Javascript was a bit rusty (non existant) when i started the initiative myself, so I needed something to guide me, so Dreamweaver did come handy early on.. I don’t think the management will let me by a license for Macromedia, because we are not in the IT business and we are not trying to get into it, we only provided O&M services. 

Notepad was also used to write the asp script. EALIS Seek runs on IIS VB, not .net. With ASP code scatterd over the page, dreamweaver very much loses it’s purpose WYSIWYG. I know there’s an option to tie dreamweaver to an ASP server but it wasn’t fast enough. It was way much faster to edit the code with notepad and run the page as soon as the asp file is edited. Microsoft has VB Studio, they even have the free one express edition, I did try using one express, but just couldn’t get myself into it. 

When SVG comes into play on the conversion program, notepad also helped to edit the SVG files textually since it’s XML. It beats any single purpse XML editor out there, i know nothing is parsed in notepad. But when you know where everything is you don’t need the structure help to locate item. The downside of an xml editor is it parse the XML file prior to any work being done, with a SVG files averaging around 5 MB, the time taken for parsing seems like a lifetime compared to opening it with a notepad.

So Microsft for windows 7 I dont mind if you left aero, media player etc. Just don’t take away notepad.

EALIS.net redesign.

Our website ealis.net is on course of a remake. The original/current one is my hack job prior to a convention that we attended. It serves general  information EALIS. Since it was a hack job, it was pretty much very ugly. But that’s what you get in a one man army kind of operation. The domain name was registered just 2 weeks prior to the confrence. I took 3 days to complete everything (which was nothing much). 

It seems that the boss ask one of our contractor for a quotation last week. The price was reasonable enough, but come to think of it, I could do a better job (that my original work/not the contractors) if I even get half of the contractor asking price. Corporate Malaysia blows.

PTW links.

Looking into the possibilities of linking the system to another system, our permit to work system. This wouldn’t trouble me much, as the groundwork has already been laid out, or is it framework. The only thing left is themeans of a database connection, it’s either from them or i wrote something of my own. Since PTW is very critical to the plant I’ll try to use whatever handed to me by the vendor. The aim for the EALIS – PTW link is to represent information graphically, from any of the system drawings that lies in EALIS.

Not much can be gather on NiSoft from the web. Maybe they will shed some light when I meet them later.

Absolute positioned divs problem on IE

There seems to be a problem on displaying an absolute positioned dives inside a an absolute positioned divs. It seems that ie only renders the portion of the internal div within the confine of the container divs, setting overflow to visible on both divs stil result to nothing. the only solution is to have a bigger div for the container div with no background.

SVG – The standard that nobody use or care about.

Have you heard about SVG? .. Have you see any page that are using SVG? .. Better yet have you ever develop anything that uses SVG? ..

Most people will gave up on the first question, some will stop at two and there will be very very few that can say yes to three. Well I’m one of the unlucky few who decided to develop something with SVG. Why I ended up with SVG, simple reason, that it is free.

The other similiar technology are flash and silverlight. Well flash, chances are your browsers are already installed with the latest flash drivers. Since this is a comercial product the support and documentation must be swell. Downside, well you have to pay for it (Adobe AIR), it used actionscript (i’m not into language that is single purpose). Silverlight is in a way free, the fact that it is XML (just like svg) means I can just wrote something in vb and spew out silverlight media, it is also faster that SVG. On the downside, last time I checked no right click (just like flash; context menu is their own), something is not wright about the textblock, no arbitrary size text box, .

So I basically ended up with SVG just because it is the freest of them all. It has bad support, somehow slower as the drawing gets bigger and more complex, supported on most browser (ie need adobe SVG) , its in XML so I can literally  write my drawing.

1st browser support. Except for IE, the other modern browsers have their own intenal SVG engine. For ie we need the Adobe SVG plugin. All of the internal SVG renderer performs poorly in term of speed, compared to the Adobe SVG. But the best one by far to me was Google Chrome. This could also be the fact that Chrome have the best Javascript engine. With firefox being the worst. Safari so-so.

Adobe SVG plugin, is the best solution to render svg images on screen, and it works on all browsers. But the ironic part is that it only work best with IE. The reason being on all the other browsers, the browsers can’t have access to the SVG Dom through getSVGDocument;. Without this each svg rendered with adobe SVG in firefox, safari or chrome are being confined to themselves. Event and action cannot be passed back and forth between HTML DOM and SVG DOM. Which blows. Even worser is that Adobe is pulling the plug on SVG this coming January (2009). What’s the point of having SVG anymore when they already have Macromedia.

While doing this I also realised that you cannot uninsall a plugin in Chrome,. How aa? Since chrome has the best internal SVG renderer I decided to revert back to the original renderer. Hmm not much can be found in the option page. Tried about:plugins and it register adobe SVG as a plugin. So I tried uninstalling Adobe SVG, run chrome again about:plugins Adobe SVG is still listed. Hmm Chrome you sir is a true beta.

So SVG is in a sad state. Major browser are pledging support with sub-par engine. The best engine Adobe SVG is about to be pulled from the intenet. Ive picked the wrong technology.

innerHTML vs DOM

There has been a lot of argument on the net with regards to innerHTML and DOM. Most of the argument ended up with mentioning innerHTML is not cool but it gets the job done very fast. I’m for one a believer of innerHTML, why write ten lines of codes when you can sum everything into a string and dump it anywhere.

But on my attempt to put multiple iframe within a page I realised that everytime I add new content with innerHTML (this is on ie),  the whole node in centext will be parsed again and each image and objects were being reloaded again. This problem will not obvious be obvious at first especially on a lite page. But some of the iframe that I was working with contains sizeable svg object. So by adding a new object to the body tag (which could probably be another svg object) thorugh innerHTML I realised that ie will reload the last item and loads the new item. This will go on when a third item is added it will reload the last two svg and load the new one. And on

I’ve tried to look for an answer on how innerHTML actually works, but came with no answer. Most of the discussion on the net is on the comparison between DOM and innerHTML.

The funny thing is that when using a proper DOM technique the problem was gone completely. But if you ask me about innerHTML vs DOM, I would go “try innerHTML first then do DOM”.

IE z-index problem on multiple iframe.

Noticed that IE is displaying wrong stack order of multiple iframe that resides in multiple div. The stacking order is being displayed perfectly in Chrome and Firefox. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that all of these iframe content are using the same resources and id.

Update: Realized that this is also got something to do with ie transperency, by setting the body transperency of each document that is placed within the iframe to a value, the problem seems to be fixed.

First Post

This page will serve as my notepad. I’ll try to log my finding on the development of EALIS Seek here. The technology in context is the basic html, javascript, iis/asp/vb, mssql,  svg & web browsers.

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