Blue Onion Software

Friday Links #58

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:31:12 GMT

Programming Computers

John Robbins' Blog : Paraffin3.1: New and Improved! - Produce Windows Installer XML (WiX) fragments of files in your installations. The big feature of Paraffin is that is automates the management of your files because it keeps consistent the component ids and GUIDs as well as file and directory ids as you add files to your installer.

MonoTouch – Mono - Allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on the iPhone and can take advantage of the iPhone APIs.

CodeRush Xpress for C# and Visual Basic inside Visual Studio 2008 - Mark Miller – A (very good) detailed summary of all CodeRush functions.

jLinq 2.2.0 Released! - LINQ style query language for Javascript. Feels like jQuery for data.

Using your Personal Computer

HashTab for Windows 3.0.0 - HashTab is a Windows shell extension which adds a tab called "File Hashes" to the Windows Explorer file properties. The tab contains the MD5, SHA1 and CRC-32 file hashes. I love this little guy!

Lifehacker - Firefox 3.5 Officially Available for Download - Firefox 3.5 – In case you were living in a bottle (or on vacation like I am), the latest and greatest from Mozilla is released.

Science and the Environment

Technology Review: Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries - lightweight, high-energy batteries that can use the surrounding air as a cathode.

First Electronic Quantum Processor Created - Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Most complete Earth map published - The resulting Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99% of the Earth's surface, and will be free to download and use.

Blackest Black Ever: Ultra-thin Material Absorbs All Light - It appears to be a paradox: ultra-thin material that absorbs all the incident light. Nonetheless, it does exist.

Can A New Implant Coating Technique Create A New Six Million Dollar Man? – I wonder if it makes the cool sound effect from the series as well?

On the Web

Lifehacker - Gmail Attachment Size Upped to 25MB – I missed that it went up from 10MB to 20MB.

Never Miss Twitter Updates of your Less Active Friends – An alternative to the “River of News” format of standard Twitter clients. Cool idea.

Taking Full Screenshots of Web Pages Was Never This Easy! - Open the web page that you want to capture, go to the address bar of the browser and type "aviary.com/" just before the http:// part of the URL.

Twitter Blog: Following and Followers Page Improvements – Additional actions have been added to the following and followers pages.

Stuff I just Dig

Zero-power wasted, green phone charger - A greenbox works like a fridge light: it powers the charger only when you open it. Close the box, and its hidden switch disconnects the charger from the mains.

Universal Chargers are a Good Start: 5 More Things That Need Conformity - Starting next year, Apple, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and RIM will begin making handsets with a standard phone charger based on the micro-USB connector.

Ten-Foot Aston Martin Cygnet Gets 50 MPG - The ultra-luxury car will be two feet shorter than a Mini Cooper, and come as an accessory to your regular Aston Martin. I might even be able to afford it.

Two-Wheeled Robotic Table Balances Drinks, Segway-Style - The Table Robot wheels itself around on two wimpy but miraculously balanced wheels.

Microsoft 'mega data centers' to support Azure, Bing | Microsoft – Site in Dublin uses cool climate to keep data center cool. Other sites use cargo containers to house servers with higher density and better cooling.

Pick of the Week

Ultramon - Does lots of things but I use it for only one purpose. It adds a taskbar to the second (or third) monitor. Why Windows does not support this feature natively is anyone's guess.

AdSensor Updated

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:41:41 GMT

AdSensor is a Windows Vista/Windows 7 Sidebar gadget that monitors your AdSense account. Now you can keep track of your Internet riches without logging into the AdSense Web page. You can read more about it here.

This update adds 4 new backgrounds that you can select using your mouse wheel. Changes in http requests should make it more robust. Enjoy.

Available on the downloads page.

Friday Links #57

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:36:34 GMT

Programming Computers

Regular Expression Library – A Silverlight regular expression tester.

“wordwrap” for JavaScript - James Padolsey - This function emulates PHP’s wordwrap.

Using your Personal Computer

10 Useful Firefox Extensions to Supercharge Firebug - Though Firebug is already fully packed with features out of the box, several extensions out there can enhance its utility. In this article, you will find the 10 best Firefox extensions for Firebug that will make your life, as a developer or designer, easier.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Microsoft Security Essentials Public Beta – Microsoft’s new security product has been meeting with favorable reviews. Here’s an in depth review of the beta.

Science and the Environment

Slashdot Science Story | Spaceport America Begins Construction - After getting their FAA license and securing funding, the 27 s quare mile development project has officially begun. The target date for completion is the end of 2010.

Electric cars seen as killer app for smart grid | Green Tech - Forward-looking utilities are gearing up to tap into the stored energy that plug-in electric vehicles can provide using smart-grid technology.

Light Sensor Breakthrough Could Enhance Digital Cameras - New research by a team of University of Toronto scientists could lead to substantial advancements in the performance of a variety of electronic devices including digital cameras.

IBM working on battery breakthrough - IBM announced today that it is developing a next-generation rechargeable battery capable of storing 10 times more energy than today's top lithium-ion batteries.

Strongest Evidence Yet that Saturn's Moon Has Liquid Water | Popular Science - In 2005, scientists found the first signs that Saturn's moon Enceladus might have a salty ocean beneath its icy outer shell. New evidence -- based on analysis by the NASA Cassini spacecraft, currently passing near Saturn -- reveals a high level of a sodium compound that could indicate the presence of water.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Oldest musical instrument' found - Scientists in Germany have published details of flutes dating back to the time that modern humans began colonising Europe, 35,000 years ago.

Slashdot Hardware Story | Beamed Space Solar Power Plant To Open In 2016? - The Pacific Gas and Electricity Company, per this 'interview' with the CEO of Solaren on their affiliated site, announced PG&E's plans to buy 200MW of base-load power from a Solaren beamed space solar power plant by 2016." I wish the skeptic in me would be quiet.

On the Web

jQuery TOOLS - The missing UI library for the Web - a collection of the most important user-interface components for today's websites. This single JavaScript file weighs only 5.8 Kb.

10 impressive Adobe AIR apps | Webware – CNET - Since Adobe Systems relaunched its AIR marketplace, I've been spending some considerable time there. There are so many great apps, it's hard to pick just a handful worth talking about.

Ext - A foundation you can build on – Ext Core is a lightweight, high-performance cross-browser JavaScript library for building dynamic web pages.

jLinq - Javascript Query Language - jLinq is a Javascript library that lets you write queries against arrays of javascript objects. jLinq is completely extensible so you can write your add-ins and they will work with the rest of the framework without any additional programming!

Stuff I just Dig

Slashdot Technology Story | Kodak Kills Kodachrome – Sorry Paul Simon, but some really has taken away your Kodachrome.

XML Aficionado: Wireless charging… - WildCharge has announced that they will begin shipping their WildCharge Skin for the iPhone in July: the skin is a protective gel cover for the iPhone that also includes the contact module and charges the iPhone once it is placed on the WildCharger Charge Pad.

Map Label on Package – From KK LIfe Stream - “I thought this was pretty clever. I just received a package from FedEx. On its label was printed a map to my house. So instead of installing a GPS in every truck, FedEx prints out a map label. If the driver can't find the delivery place, they just look on the package itself. Brilliant!”

Toolmonger » Blog Archive » FYI: Why Tape Measure Claws Move Around – Only a tool geek like me would find this cool. Today a friend asked me a question that the folks at Stanley tell me they hear all the time: why does the claw — you know, the little catch at the end of your short tape measure — move back and forth? Is it just poorly attached? The short answer: no, the loose claw is no accident of manufacture. It’s loose on purpose.

Pick of the Week

Evernote - Take notes? This program organizes notes without getting in your way. Great for TODO lists. My only compliant is that the keyboard shortcuts are a bit odd.

Converting URLs to Hyperlinks in JavaScript

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:14:18 GMT

I hunted around for a JavaScript method to convert URLs in a text stream to hyperlinks and came up short. I wrote this quickie method that works for the limited data I’ve thrown at it. There are likely more robust methods but darn if I could find one.

function convertUrlsToLinks(text)
{
    var matchUrl = /(ftp|http|https):\/\/(\w+:{0,1}\w*@)?(\S+)(:[0-9]+)?(\/|\/([\w#!:.?+=&%@!\-\/]))?/gi
    return text.replace(matchUrl, '<a href="$&">$&</a>');
}

OK, JavaScript guru’s. Is there a better way?

Asynchronous XMLHttpRequests in JavaScript

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:29:25 GMT

XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is a DOM API that can be used inside a web browser scripting language, such as JavaScript, to send an HTTP request directly to a web server and load the server response data directly back into the scripting language. Once the data is within the scripting language, it is available as both an XML document, if the response was valid XML markup, and as plain text. (Thank you Wikipedia).

Generally, you’ll want to make these calls asynchronously so you don’t block the UI thread. Most examples go something like this.

var xhReq;
function ajax()
{
  xhReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
  xhReq.open("GET", "sumGet.phtml?figure1=5&figure2=10", true);
  xhReq.onreadystatechange = onSumResponse;
  xhReq.send(null);
}

function onSumResponse() 
{
  if (xhReq.readyState != 4)  { return; }
  var serverResponse = xhReq.responseText;
  ...
}

Since the callback does not provide the original request object, the request is saved in global variable. Yuck! Also, if you have more than one request you’ll need more than one global variable. Double Yuck!

Fortunately, JavaScript supports closures so you can use an anonymous method inline as follows.

function ajax()
{
  var xhReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
  xhReq.open("GET", "sumGet.phtml?figure1=5&figure2=10", true);
  xhReq.onreadystatechange = function() 
  {
    if (xhReq.readyState != 4)  { return; }
    var serverResponse = xhReq.responseText;
    ...
  };

  xhReq.send(null);
}

Even though xhReq is local, it can still be referenced in the callback function because of something called a “Closure”. Not all languages support closures, but JavaScript is one of them. In this case, the “Closure” allows us to use xhReq in our callback function even though the callback function will execute long after the ajax function finishes.

For simple callbacks, this is a good way to go since it keeps the logic together. However, there are times when you may want to have the callback in a separate, named function because it is lengthy or so it can be reused by other code. It may look like your stuck, but the answer is simple. Use an anonymous function to call your named function and pass the request object as a parameter.

function ajax()
{
  var xhReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
  xhReq.open("GET", "sumGet.phtml?figure1=5&figure2=10", true);
  xhReq.onreadystatechange = function() { onSumResponse(xhReq); };
  xhReq.send(null);
}

function onSumResponse(request) 
{
  if (request.readyState != 4)  { return; }
  var serverResponse = request.responseText;
  ...
}

We can now call ajax() as often as we wish without worrying about side-effects to global variables and our callback function is “local” to invocation of the request.

It may look a little odd to write functions as parameters to functions, but once you get use to it, it can make for better, more useful code.

Friday Links #56

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:03:54 GMT

Programming Computers

Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework - The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK. For more information on the Windows SDK, visit our MSDN Developer Center.

Episode 33: Getting the Scoop About Olso and M with Shawn Wildermuth : Deep Fried Bytes Technology Podcast - In this episode listeners will get some real world examples and use cases for using Oslo and M along with a clearer understanding about DSLs and what the future may hold.

VS Addin: Fast Add Reference Dialog - No more Coffee Break! – The buzz is that this extension rocks. Haven’t tried it myself yet but anything has to be better the current VS implementation.

CodeProject: A Project Dependency Graph Utility For Visual Studio 2008 – Here’s what looks to be another cool addin for VS 2008. The author, Marc Clifton is well regarded and has several very good article on Code Project.

TestDriven.Net 2.22 RTM - What’s New? – If I could only have one addin in Visual Studio, this would be it.

Using your Personal Computer

Use The Command Prompt To Open And Display Folder Contents In Windows Explorer – It’s as easy as “start .”

InfoQ: Opera Unite Gives the Power Back to the People - Opera Software has just released the latest version of their browser, Opera 10 Beta 1, incorporating a server technology called Opera Unite allowing users to directly connect to each other to share data and communicate without an intermediary running the necessary services for them.

Science and the Environment

Riversimple to Unveil Open Source Car in London This Month - The company plans to unveil its first car in London later this month, a small two-seater that weighs roughly 700 pounds. If you agree to lease one for 20 years (yes, 20), Riversimple will throw in the cost of fuel for the lifetime of the lease.

First floating wind turbine buoyed off Norway | Green Tech - Siemens and energy company StatoilHydro installed what they call the first large-scale floating turbine. The Hywind turbine will still have a ballast that is tied to the sea floor with cables.

CT Scan Nearly As Good As Regular Colonoscopy / Science News – Having just had one of these the CT option would have been much more pleasant.

Most Efficient And Stable Source Of Pure White Light Ever Achieved - Researchers are reporting the first use of a fundamentally new approach in the quest to snare the Holy Grail of the lighting industry: An LED (light-emitting diode) — those ultra-efficient, long-lived light sources — that emits pure white light.

Slashdot Science Story | "Definitive Evidence" For Ancient Lake On Mars - A UC Boulder research team has discovered evidence of a shoreline on Mars of a 3 billion year-old lake 80 square miles in area and 1,500 feet deep (roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain).

On the Web

Imagine Google Living Inside Your Home - If Google were a real human being who happened to live in the same apartment as you, will that make your life any easier? Well, this video might give you a clue.

Explore Google Search – Google posts a page about it’s search features in response to the recent surge in popularity of Microsoft’s Bing search.

Lifehacker - Microsoft's Browser Comparison Chart Offends Anyone Who's Ever Used Another Browser – Insulating and irritating are the two words that come to mind when I read this chart. Microsoft FTL.

Asp.Net vs php : speed comparison - Why is the myth that php is faster than Asp.Net so prevalent? Asp.Net is faster than php, here are the facts.

Stuff I just Dig

World's Smallest VGA Display is Literally the Size of a Thumbnail | Popular Science - tiny displays to make sharp, high-end electronic viewfinders in HD video and still cameras.

Wikipedia as a Printed Book - Seriously! – This Wikipedia book has some 5,000 pages and it’s a compilation of 400+ featured articles all picked from Wikipedia. Now this is some serious bookage…

Pick of the Week

Ted Notepad - TED Notepad is a chrome-less freeware text editor. It offers 197 text-processing functions, innovative features and other advanced tools. All of them on hotkeys; all designed for quick advanced editing. This light-weight portable notepad replacement fits on any USB flash disk and loads instantly with no installation required. What I like about this editor is how darn fast it starts. Faster startup than Notepad. Lacks regular expression search/replace and syntax highlighting but the speed more than makes up for it.

Simply Weather Update

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:42:56 GMT

A couple of nice tweeks for this release. First, the layout has been improved to handle languages other than English better. Dutch turns out to be a challenging one to fit in Simply Weather’s small format. Here’s an example.

Check out the translation of “Humidity”. Also, the current conditions are sometimes long enough to wrap (otherwise it would over write the current temp).

I’ve also added a new “dark” background. Also, backgrounds can be changed using your mouse wheel. Don’t work if you can’t remember all this. The settings dialog has all the information you need.

The current temp in Celsius was missing the “degree” symbol (fixed). The weather images are cached locally in case Google changes the locations on me again. Enjoy.

Friday Links #55

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:57:19 GMT

Programming Computers

Unit Testing is Not a “Figure It Out Later” - If someone tells you to wait and do it later on the “next project”, it’s really not their decision. Unit testing is for programmers and is done while you code. It’s a decision done by the programmer because he/she cares about better code and less bugs for the good of the team, the business, and its users.

Guy Burstein : Getting Started with jQuery in Visual Studio 2008 – How to add add jQuery IntellSense in Visual Studio 2008, and how to add jQuery to a simple Web Application inside Visual Studio 2008.

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : What does the optimize switch do? - What optimizations the C# compiler performs when you specify the optimize switch. Answer, not much. The jitter does all the heavy lifting.

ASP.NET MVC and SOLID Programming Principles June 2009 : Steve Smith's Blog – Steve gave this talk for us at the Ann Arbor .NET users group. Confirms what I’ve experienced over the last year of unit testing and inversion of control.

Science and the Environment

Slashdot Hardware Story | "Colossal Magnetic Effect" Could Lead To Another Breakthrough In Storage Tech - Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage.

Solar-Powered Infinium Race Car| Popular Science - More spacecraft than automobile, Infinium is plastered in black photovoltaic strips capable of drinking sunlight at rates rivaling the solar cells found on spacecraft. A specially-designed electric motor encased in one of the car’s three wheels peaks at 98 percent efficiency. The 50 lb lithium battery is 1/3 the size of the Chevy Volt’s and supplies the car for up to 200 miles without a drop of sunny fuel.

Using your Personal Computer

Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits : Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 2: Text Editor - Many people have reported that editing with the new editor is slower. I’ve experienced the same thing myself so I certainly do not want to accuse people of hallucinating but I thought it might be interesting to understand why that might happen, especially since this new editor is supposed to be better than the old.

Virtual Disk - Desk Topmost - Floats the desktop on top instead of minimizing all the windows. Interesting concept.

McAfee and Symantec fined over automatic subscription renewal – I’ve always thought of these programs more as viruses because of their aggressive renewal tactics. Apparently, the New York State agrees.

Lifehacker - Lifehacker Speed Tests: Safari 4, Chrome 2, and More – Confirms what I’ve experienced. Chrome fast, Internet Explorer slow.

Lifehacker - ViGlance Converts the Vanilla Taskbar into a Windows 7-like Superbar – Works surprisingly well. Nice feel and effects. Portable app. Just download and run.

Stuff I just Dig

Toolmonger » Blog Archive » It’s Just Cool (Or Hot): H2Glow - It makes your water glow as it flows out of the tap, blue if it’s safe to touch and red if it gets too hot.

Lifehacker - DIY Magnetic Fridge Pen - MacGyver Tip -If you've got a grocery list that lives on your refrigerator but never seem to have a pen nearby, reader Jay details how he made his own magnetic Bics on the cheap and easy.

What Really Prompts The Dog's 'Guilty Look' – Surprise, the dog doesn’t feel guilty at all. It’s just us projecting. Wonder how much grant money that cost?

Search Me - The New York Times > Magazine – Really cool pictures of data centers. Sort of like center folds for geeks.

PIck of the Week

Foxit Reader - For straight up reading and printing of PDF's, Foxit is the way to go. It's fast, light and does not assimilate your system compared to the Borg like Adobe Reader. Sumatra Reader is another one to keep an eye on.

jQuery Delay Function

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:16:34 GMT

Oddly, jQuery does not have delay function. The usual technique, from what I gather, is to use the animate function. Most examples use the opacity property as an animation target.

$(selector).animate( { opacity: 1}, 3000, function() { /* callback */ });

This works beautifully, but it does affect the “opacity” setting. Most of the time, it’s not an issue, unless you’re working on an element with a non-default opacity.

Interestingly, “animate({ }, 3000)” doesn’t work.

Then I tripped across this code at http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/jquery-delay-plugin/

$.fn.delay = function(time, callback){
    // Empty function:
    jQuery.fx.step.delay = function(){};
    // Return meaningless animation, (will be added to queue)
    return this.animate({delay:1}, time, callback);
}

Nice, but then some comments on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316278/timeout-jquery-effects allowed me to modify it even further.

$.fn.delay = function(time, callback)
{
    return this.animate({ opacity: '+=0' }, time, callback);
}

The “plus equal zero” tip supplies an animation target that does nothing without having to create the step delay function.

As a function, it’s chainable, so you can get some cool effects with little effort.

$("#status).fadeIn("fast").delay(3000).fadeOut("slow");

How did we ever program without the Internet?

Improving your code with LINQ and Lambdas

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 14:38:20 GMT

I’m surprised at how much code I review that still does not take advantage of the newer constructs of C#. Here’s an (admittedly contrived) example.

static void Main()
{
    var names = new[] { "name1", "name2", "name3", "name4", "name5", "name6", "name7" };
    var count = 0;
    foreach (var name in names)
    {
        if (name.Contains("name"))
            count += 1;
    }
    Console.WriteLine(count);
}

Now compare it to this.

static void Main()
{
    var names = new[] { "name1", "name2", "name3", "name4", "name5", "name6", "name7" };
    Console.WriteLine(names.Count(name => name.Contains("name")));
}

Which would you prefer to maintain? Which one more clearly communicates the intent of the program?

If that’s not enough to convince you, consider that extension methods like Count() are static, which allows for further optimizations and parallel execution opportunities.

If you consider yourself a pro, you owe it to yourself (and your fellow developers) to keep on top of these things. Read books, pair program, embrace the changes and learn from others. People smarter than you and I have spent countless hours thinking about these things and improving them. Shouldn’t you take advantage of those efforts?