List<Position> result;

 // insert the questions into a structure to make them easy to search

 while ((line = data.ReadLine ()) != null) {

   string[] words = line.Split(delimiters, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

   wordPosition = 0;

   foreach (string word in words) {

     if ((result = noSig.Find(word)).Count != 0)

       significant = true;

     else

       significant = false;

     Position p = new Position (lineCount, wordPosition++, significant);

     wordTree.Add (word, p);

   }

   lineCount++;

 }

Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.  Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital.  One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end.

He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.

Edna promptly jumped in to save him.  She swam to the bottom and pulled him out.  When the Head Nurse Director became aware of Edna’s heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable.

When she went to tell Edna the news she said, ‘Edna, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is you’re being discharged, since you
were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love.  I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness.

The bad news is, Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him.  I am so sorry, but he’s dead.’

Edna replied, ‘He didn’t hang himself, I put him there to dry.  How soon can I go home?’

Today is Mental Health Day!  You can do your bit by remembering to
send an email to an unstable friend…

Done my part!!!

One of the more imaginative Nigerian schemes, to be sure, but still full of typos. Maybe I could get rich just getting hired out to make their emails look more realistice. A 1% fee should be a nice additional income, right?

Here’s the text of the email:

A while back my 6 month old laptop stopped booting up. Lights would come on, but nothing would ever happen. Wouldn’t even boot off of a CD.

So, I send an email, exchange a couple of things with this support person and before I even completely finished running the tests he suggested, I got an email that said they were sending a box for me to ship the laptop back in.

Box comes, I send it out, 5 or 6 days later I have it back with the memory replaced.

Great service, no questions, excellent experience.

Then there was today.I’ve had an HP PSC 750xi for several years now. I don’t even remember how long and it’s just sat here on the desk and copied, printed, and scanned with nary a hickup. The last few months it’s been showing signs of aging though.

Sometimes the scanner doesn’t want to initialize when the printer is powered up. It’s gotten very finicky about accepting ink cartridges, sometimes rejecting them between jobs when the printer hasn’t even been powered down. This morning I look and all the lights on the front are doing the “fast busy” flashing and it’s showing me an error on the display “b8000d08″.

I’m pretty sure that this means it’s the “end of life” for this particular machine, but since I got such great service from HP the last time I thought it might be worth the small effort to send in an email and just confirm it. After all, if it’s a small thing then it’s cheaper to fix it, but I’m guessing that on something like this it’s more expensive to fix than to replace.

Off goes the email and I get a response back: You didn’t put what the OS is that the computer is running that the printer is connected to.

Of course not – when a machine has failed internally it can’t possibly matter what OS the attached box is running. Still, I figure someone is following a script and I’ll not advance to the next stage without an answer, so I reply that I’m running Linux.

I get a response with the following:

I appreciate your patience and coopereation.

Ken, please go through the below weblink for Linux Support Overview. This document provides details about the Linux Operating System, Linux drivers for HP All-in-One products, and resources to locate additional information.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=bpu00658

Please copy the entire URL and paste it in a new window of Internet Explorer and press Enter.

OK, so I haven’t actually looked at the URL yet (and I’ll update this if I’m proven wrong), but after telling her that I’m running Linux, why on earth would she suggest that I paste the URL into Internet Explorer?

*sigh*

Apress / http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430215905
ISBN:978-1-4302-1-590-5

A Review

I had a chance to review this recently published book and my overall impression is very positive. The author has spent time getting to know the program and how it works.

In a series of chapters he explains each of the components and uses a project paradigm to show the common features of each of the parts of the office suite. This not only shows how the different aspects of each program work with each other, but also gives an idea of a workflow that can be used to develop similar projects. While this workflow may not work for you, it is a base to start from and sometimes getting started is the hardest part.

After starting with straightforward projects he graduates into more complex methods of not only using the programs by themselves, but also how the parts of the office suite can work together. He is very good at showing some of the more esoteric things that can trip you up.
Throughout the book he notes how OO.o differs from Microsoft Office, where they’re similar, and there’s a section that discusses some tests involving importing and exporting files between the two office suites. He finishes up by talking about some of the common extensions that can be used to make life with OpenOffice easier and more productive.

There are a couple of factual errors that I found, but those relate more to cross platform considerations and not so much with the program usage itself.

I will note that the most jarring thing I found that increased the difficulty of reading this book is the lack of “calling out” program specific references (like dialog items, etc) by the use of a different font. For me, it broke up the rhythm of reading the text. I realize that, being a programmer, that may just be a style that I am used to seeing in technical books and it could very well be normal for this kind of application centric book.

All in all I recommend this book for those people that may be familiar with the Microsoft Office suite and are contemplating switching to a freer alternative or to those that are just starting out with an office suite and want a good background in how to use the features of this type of software.

I’ve had the base done for a while now. It was made by trimming 2×4s to square up the edges, notching the legs to put supports acrss and then screwing the two sides together with some other supports. It’s pretty sturdy. I had started a top before, but used plywood and 1/4″ hardboard. That combination ended up warping on me. In one of the other magazines there was a plan for a much fancier router table and his top was made of two glued up 3/4″ MDF pieces. I’m sticking with my original plan, but using the MDF as the base for the top.

I wrestle the MDF sheet (and wrestle is the word – 3/4″ MDF is a heavy item to move around) and get my measurements done, grab a straight edge and some clamps, cut them out. Still enough left over to make some jigs and it’s much easier to handle now.

I grab my can of contact cement, which isn’t as full as I thought it was. I was pretty sure I had already bought another can, but you can only spend so much daylight trying to find that stuff. Off to Lowes it is to buy more cement and some cheap paintbrushes for spreading it. Back home again, finish getting it glued up and stuck together. A bit harder to put the pieces together than other contact cement work I’ve done as the pieces are so stiff. Because of that I’m off just a little, so it’s clamp and saw time again to straighten it all out.

I’m back inside now to get cleaned up and do some web work as we’re going out later this afternoon. Now I just need to put the hardwood edge on it and stick the formica on top and bottom. After that it’s the slots for the t-track and the opening for the router.

Since I’ve two pieces of MDF glued together I don’t think I’ll be having the warp issue this time.

Hmmm, since all I cut today was MDF, is it more proper to say I made some sawdust or that I redistributed some sawdust?

A bit of background – I had to give up flying after I had the two discs in my neck fused as I no longer had the range and motion I needed to be safe flying. I was about one flight away from soloing and it was a dream I had had for years.  Well, I needed something else to fill my time and I’d always had an interest in woodworking, but not much interest in doing big projects.

I’ve always been fascinated by puzzles. I used to be able to solve a Rubic’s Cube, but I haven’t done that for years. I decided to start working on puzzles and somewhere in the search for information I ran across this Charles Neil guy and he made the mistake of being helpful so I decided to stick around for a while.

When Sherri published up their problems with Brightcove dropping the free video hosting I sort of volunteered to look into hosting the videos and things sort of grew from there.  I’m a programmer by trade, but I usually work on the behind-the-scenes software. I’ve been doing this programming thing a long time (my first computer was programmed by flipping toggle switches on the front panel) so I’m much more comfortable with doing things from the command line and not from a fancy interface.  The original site that Sherri worked on was all done in FrontPage and I just couldn’t see myself working there, so when we got into talking about separating the education part of their current (old?) site from the furniture side of things, it grew into a whole new site.

Since I’m a Linux and open source sort of person and web sites that require you to have a certain browser to run I decided to write the new site using standard web protocols, like CSS and XHTML. Yeah, I know, technical details that no one else really cares about. I’m proud of the fact though that there’s not one table on the site.  Content is done in HTML and making it pretty is all done in CSS. It does explain why a couple people had problems at first as they use IE6 which has only a passing knowledge of standards. I found some code that translates between web standards and what IE6 understands and I think most, if not all, of those issues have been resolved.

The new site should make things easier for Sherri to manage as it’s written to run against a database and to automatically change things when they should be changed. You’ll note, for example, that the video normally changes every day, but when Sherri uploads a new one she can set in the database how long she wants it to display. It will run that long and then automatically go back to changing every day. Same thing for the quotes and contests.

Right now I’m working on a Video Jukebox to replace the Brightcove player. It won’t look the same but hopefully things will be easier to find. They should really be easier to find once the keywords and search features are implemented. We went live when we did because of a couple of reasons: first, it makes it easier for Sherri to manage things and second, because she could start putting up new videos on the front page again.

The links point back to the old pages for now because it allows us to continue with development and get the new features up and running without having to wait for the entire site to be complete.

Finally, I asked Sherri if it would be OK if I added a ‘Site design by…’ thing to the Contact Us page or some such. I didn’t want to impose, as I did this as a friend, not in order to capitalize on the experience. I guess my timing was bad because I ended up in the newsletter this month :) That being said, if you like what you see and you have a need for some design work for a web site, let me know and we can look at the details.

Thanks.

I ran across this site and since I’ve found some stuff there that I find that I like I thought I’d post up a short blurb about it here.

This music is all free because it’s uploaded by the artists under a Creative Commons license. The site is Jamendo. Of course, because it’s freely licensed you won’t find any mainstream artists (at least not that I’ve seen in the short time I’ve been on the site.)

Still, I’ve found some nice things to listen to.

You have to understand that I’ve been programming a long time (the first program I wrote I had to flip the toggle switches on the front panel to toggle in the 0’s and 1’s), but just about everything I’ve done has been command line based. Mostly utility programs, programs that operate behind the scenes, programs that are used by other developers or systems people – in short, nothing graphical in nature. This is a whole new issue for me.

So, of course,  the first thing you do is hit Google, or the C#/GTK# pages looking for a tutorial on how to do this. I found a problem here – there are a lot of tutorials, but they’re relatively static. That is, they show how to put a button and a text display on a page, press the button and update the text display. Those tutorials work, but they don’t expand well.

I’m working on programs that put up a display, take some input, and then go off and do some work. This work is supposed to give feedback to the user so they know what’s happening. The tutorials I found don’t do that.

Thus was born this tutorial in which I use Glade# to develop the interface and then use GTK# to run a simple little program that picks a number between 1 and 10,000 and then tries to determine what that number is. While it’s guessing, it’s updating the GUI to show the current guessed number and how many guesses it’s taken so far.

I don’t claim that this is extensible to the most complex program, it’s worked for this tutorial and now I’m off to implement this method in a larger program to see how well it works there.

I’ve included links to a MonoDevelop and a VS2005 solution. Please download and give them a try. Feedback is most welcome.

Hopefully someone will find this useful.

MonoDevelop Solution for the tutorial

VS2005 Solution for the tutorial

“A command line? What’s that?”  you might ask. I understand that most of the programs you run always start up with a GUI that you can then use to set up all your parameters. This is not always the Right Thing to do. A lot of what I program are utility programs that do things to files in a scripted (or batch) mode. GUIs, in this case, just get in the way.  Thus the command line – you tell the program what to do when you start it up and it never talks to you again.

For example:

 playMP3 --directory /myhome/music --background true

The convention is that a long name option has two preceding – (dash) characters and a short name option (a single character) has a single preceding dash character.

There are certainly a lot of options out there for doing this sort of thing, but I can be sort of an odd person – if I’m using a language, I want to use the language;  not write in a language I’m comfortable in and just use the syntax of the new language.

That may be a difficult concept to visualize if you’re not a programmer. Hopefully someone can comment and give an example in the non-programming world, but I can give a programming example. I once worked with a programmer that had done most of his work in COBOL and he was very good at it. Times change, and he needed to be programming in C. C is not like COBOL at all. It is, after all, meant to do different things.This person wrote C programs and they compiled and they worked

However, one look at his source and you could tell that his mind was still writing COBOL. He wasn’t taking advantage of many of the features that C has and the program was structured as if it were in COBOL. He got the job done, but it could have been done better.

So, to get back on track, I was looking for an assembly that could do command line processing that externally looked like all the other command line processing I was familiar with, but internally it was written as a C# program.

I searched Google and found a lot of candidates, but one named Command Line Parser Library seemed to fit the bill very well. I downloaded and compiled it, sorted out the documentation, and started using it.

Well, I’m an iterative developer and as I expanded the utility program I was writing I found that this particular assembly was not capable of doing one thing I needed it to do. No worries, there are a lot of choices out there so I went back to Google and did some more looking. I found that the assembly I was already using really was easy to use and was so close to being what I needed that I contacted the author and talked to him about it.

He asked me to make an entry on the web site and he’d try to sort out how to accomplish what I needed. He already had a similar feature, used for trailing arguments, but I needed to be able to do things just a bit different. If he didn’t have the time and/or inclination to add this feature then I was prepared to delve in to the code to add it myself.

However, just today he released a new version with my feature added. Very cool.

He apologized for it taking so long, but since I knew he was working on it, the time it took hadn’t bothered me. Not having this feature hadn’t been holding me up because I  had a lot of other development to work on. Now I can go back and update the code and take advantage of this newly added feature.

Why am I blogging about this? Just because I think it’s important to acknowledge that a substantial amount of good work is going on in the small development shops. If he’s like me (and it sounds like he is) the definition of “development shop” is him sitting in front of his computer in the basement or spare room whenever you have the time to work on writing code for fun. He’s not getting paid for this, he’s scratching an itch and that’s something I can identify with.