John Luif

I can see!  but no X-Ray vision.  Now I’m on the constant regiment of drops, ointment and pills for the next week then tapering off over the next month.  With PRK protective contacts are put into your eye which must be left in 4–5 days which is really annoying especially when you open yours eyes the first thing in the morning, ouch.  These contacts are necessary because there is basically an open wound on the eye; unlike Lasik which cuts a flap then shoots the laser into your eye.

As I said in my last post I have Keratoconus which does put some risk into having this surgery.  I start out at the beginning of the year seeing doctors.  All but one (Dr. Beyer) said the would not touch my eyes because of the Keratoconus.  This naturally had me a bit unsettled about the whole thing but after doing a lot of thinking and research I decided to take the risk.  Dr. Beyer has done many more PRK surgeries than other doctors in the Denver/Boulder area which made me feel much more comfortable.  The experience of the doctor does matter but the real workhorse in any laser eye surgery is the laser.  Some lasers are not as advanced and can not treat people very well that have a large amount of astigmatism.  One other point about lasers, for me it made a big difference knowing that the doctor owned the laser and was not renting it.  Many doctors rent lasers; I’m fine with renting cars but not lasers to shoot into my eye.

What is the risk you may ask.  Well for me I will have a cornea transplant sometime in my life due to the thin cornea caused by Keratoconus.  PRK could speed that up or slow it down, there is not enough research out there yet to tell what may happen.  So basically I figured that if it turned out I needed a cornea transplant sooner well at least I had some good years with good eyesight.  One thing to note is that Keratoconus is not always treatable with PRK, there is a point at which the cornea and/or the astigmatism is too great for todays lasers to handle.  But the one good thing is that corrective eye surgery has come a long way in the past five years and I’m sure will come a lot further next five giving hope to those that have to but up with glasses or hard contact lenses.

This afternoon I’m going to get my eyes zapped.  I’m really looking forward to it but this is a bit risky. I’m getting PRK done because I have Keratoconus which results in a thin cornea which means I’m not a candidate for Lasik.  This finally means I can go snow boarding without hitting trees (for those that do not know I broke my femur some years ago hitting a tree)

I’m hoping for 20/20 but I could live with X-Ray vision if it happens.

This week I upgraded to Vista RC2 and also made the jump to office 2007. Everything is running smooth except for the occasional crash in IE7 which is a C++ runtime error. Having some issue with BlogJet and security so I'm using the Windows Live Writer Beta.  The only sore spot I hit was the Cisco VPN though I did find a beta version (4.8.01.0410) that works on Vista.

I was worried about VMWare running as fast as it was on XP and I was presently surprise when my machine seems to multi task even better than before.  So far so good.

UPDATE:  Just did a reinstall of BlogJet and it is working fine now.  Must of been the upgrade from RC1 to RC2.

WMIUtilities.zip (36 KB)

I don’t work with WMI too often so when I do my brain has to remember what the hell I’m doing.  I searched around for some WMI utilities and found WMI Code Creator.  This is ok but did not quite give me what I wanted.  What I was looking for was Query Analyzer but for WMI.  Using the code in WMI Code Creator as a guide I quickly made a utility to write WMI queries.  Thus enters WMI Query Analyzer.

UPDATE:  One thing I forgot to mention.  You can double click on the items in the Classes tree view and it will add the text to the Query window.

Another common task is going from SID to User and User to SID.  I made another quick utility called SIDFinder that does just that.

WMIQueryAnalyzer does everything that SIDFinder can do because all SIDFinder does is execute WMI queries;  but I figured since I already had this made I would post SIDFinder out here as well.

WMIUtilities.zip (36 KB)

You can use Reporting Services ReportExecutionService web service to render a report as a Pdf but what then? You have a bunch of bytes with not much way to use them. You could use them in a web site by redirecting them to the output stream and if the user has a Pdf reader they can use it.  You could also save the bytes to disk then use Process.Start(<filename>) and again if the user has a Pdf reader it will open the pdf.

The same is true when you want to use Pdf bytes in code; a sdk is needed to work with them.  Thus enters PDFRasterizer.NET and PdfKit.NET from Tall Components.  I personally try and stay away form anything with "acrobat" in the name.  Using the PDFRasterizer.NET provided a very straight forward way of printing pdf’s with very little code.  I first tried rendering images from reporting services but decided to standardize on using Pdf’s since at some point our project had to have pdf’s why not have everything be pdf’s.  The refactored code from printing images to printing pdf’s using PDFRasteriser.NET removed many lines of code and was much cleaner.

I used PdfKit.NET to merge pdf documents.  Using reporting services many different reports were rendered then PdfKit.NET was used to merged all these pdf’s together.  Merging pdf’s was a cake walk using the PdfKit.NET API and I was ready to move onto something else.  I’m a strong believer in not reinventing the wheel, take the ten minutes to research the problem and most likely you will find someone has ran into the same problem and how they solved it, this is the case with finding Tall Components.

My one complaint with PDFRasterizer and PdfKit is they both have “Document” classes but they are not the same and they do not implement a common interface.  So the only way to go from PdfKit “Document” to a Rasterizer “Document” is to write it out to a stream and read it in to the other “Document”.  I do wish you could go from one document to another but I do understand why Tall Components made this separation because they wanted two separate products but at the very least they could of named the classes something different.