Branko Culina

Those genius's at the Sydney FC boardroom have masterminded another stroke of brilliance, they've fired the head coach Branko Culina. I can see why, after all he raised his hand and stepped up to the plate to coach Sydney FC six weeks out from their Asian Champions League campaign when no one would touch Sydney having just crashed out of the season two finals series. His predecessor Terry Butcher left him with a demoralised broken team that resembled more of a pub team playing hopeful long balls and giving the ball away like it was a hot potato. But in a short space of time Culina organised the team, reinforced the principle of possession based football, utilised his old NSL connections to arrange a number of competitive matches with NSW Premier League teams and the transformation was remarkable. Sydney FC played their best brand of attacking football in the Asian Champions league and us fans saw a glimpse of what our team might become. Culina was hailed as the saviour.

After nine rounds of season three Sydney FC are sitting in sixth spot, not meeting the expectations of their fans, coaching staff, players and most importantly the powers that be. Those powers that be have swung their axe blindly like some prehistoric dim witted neanderthal who dose not know how to cope when things are going bad.

What knee jerk reactionary logic has driven this decision? "We're sixth on the table after nine rounds even after spending one million dollars on a Brazilian World Cup winner". Sure that's a valid excuse when removed from reality. The reality Branko has had to deal with is the million dollar Brazilian Juninho has torn the ligament from his shoulder hampering his ability, Patrick is facing a season ending knee injury, Enfield is out for the season requiring knee surgery, Corica is serving a two match ban thank to a dubious red card, the best locally bred players have been plucked away for national team duties on three separate occasions along with a litany of other disruptions and health issues to manage.

It's the board of Sydney FC that needs to fall on their swords, they are the ones that are restricting the development of what can potentially be the biggest club in Australia. They don't seem to understand that a championship side needs time to develop with the right mix of people at all levels of the organisation. How many coaches will they sacrifice on their board room table before they realise it's them?

Changing style sheets on the fly

Came across some useful code to dynamically change style sheets on a web page.

var styleSheet;

for (i = 0; (styleSheet = document.getElementsByTagName('link')[i]); i++)
{
if (styleSheet.href.indexOf('target.css') >= 0)
styleSheet.href = '/Stylesheets/replacement.css';
}

Printing an iFrame

Recently I had a user request to print out the main display window in our content management system from the left navigation window. I remembered doing this years ago but could not get the script right from memory so I hit the web. This was a common problem yet most of the suggestions did not work for me or countless others. Eventually I remembered something about needing to access the top level window in the window hierarchy when making a call from one frame to another and produced the following script that worked like a charm:

window.top.frames[1].focus();
window.top.frames[1].print();

You need to bring focus to the frame/iframe you want to print before calling the print method otherwise the frame that has focus will print out instead.

3.0

No not Web 3.0 bub, it's season 3 of the A-League mon ami. The start of a new season is a time of hope for all football fans, the hope that your team might be the last one standing by seasons end (Sydney FC in my case). A new season is a clean slate where past disappointments are buried into the bitter cold black earth like contaminated waste

Season 3 promises to be the best season yet. Every team in the league has beefed up their squads substantially and there's a distinct Brazillian influence on the league this season so the highlight reel should be jam packed with stunning goals.

Trying to pick a winner based off team rosters is incredibly difficult as many sports writers have pointed out, but like them I'm going to put down my predictions for season three. Here is the table as I see it standing at seasons end:

1. Adelaide United
2. Sydney FC
3. Melbourne Victory
4. Newcalstle Jets
5. Central Coast Mariners
6. Brisbane Roar
7. Wellington Phoenix
8. Perth Glory

I think Adelaide will be the team to beat, I was impressed by their pre-season cup performance and they have individual players who will create headaches for many defenders and goalkeepers.

Tonight kicks off season three with Sydney up against central coast and I'm buzzing with anticipation.

Lets see what $1,000,000 buys Sydney.

My prediction for tonights match is a Sydney win with a scoreline of 3-1. I'm hoping for some Brazillion magic along with a Brosque special.

Manipulating Controls from Threads

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/757y83z4(VS.71).aspx

Delegate tutorial

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288459(VS.71).aspx

Error getting state of database

Rarely am I moved to make a tech contribution after solving a tricky technical problem, mostly because the solution is already out there you just need to let your fingers do the walking via Google. But recently I came across a problem whose solution had a very faint Internet footprint so I decided to add another record for the search engines to index to hopefully help out a developer who might also be flummoxed by the same MCMS2002 SP2 hotfix problem.

After applying the post SP2 MCMS2002 hot fix the "Database Configuration Application" produced the following error. "Unable to query the condition of the selected database. The selected database may be corrupt. Please select either an existing MCMS database or an empty database. Automation error -2147221101"

The solution to this problem was to overwrite the local "_dca.ini" (found in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Content Management Server\Server\Setup Files\SQL Install") file with the copy on the server containing the MCMS Database and MCMS installation.

This article (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=913401) basically contains the solution I used but it describes the solution for a different error message.