February 2006 Entries
Google has (out of the blue as far as I can tell) decided to take on the free web hosting services. So cool! Their new feature, Google Pages (pages.google.com) lets you author online or upload your own pages. It works very well as much as I've played with it so far. Just a couple of buttons for WYSIWYG, or a button to switch to HTML view. It's a very templated approach with their browser-based tool, but they are nice templates, and probably fine for most people. The editing is intuitive and powerful enough. ...
I got an email the other day from Adam Marciniec letting me know that he has made some enhancements to the Time Tracker application to support Excel export. What a great idea! Then today I get an email from someone else asking about adding Excel support. For anyone else interested, you can read more about the enhancement, and download the code directly from Adam's great blog. It's always nice to see someone enjoying my code!
On another note, I also have updated my code. It would be nice to merge the Excel changes into my code...
My recent article with the wallpaper cycler made use of application settings to retain the location of the pictures folder, whether to recurse into subfolders, and other options. You can run the application and immediately change the wallpaper using the system tray notification icon. As it turns out, I had a bug in my implementation. I used the Properties pane to associate my user interface fields with application settings. In my code then, I assume that all data transfer is two ways throughout. While this is true in the general case, it turns out that...
Michael H. sent me a comment yesterday stating that my "Tricking Out Your Applications" code had a bad flaw. Recall that I show the use of a System.Threading.Mutex object in the Main method in order to prevent more than one instance of the application from running. Michael noticed that, while this works in Debug mode, it does not work in Release mode. Weird, I thought. I tried it myself, it worked fine, and I let him know there must be something else at fault (like any American, my first instinct is self-preservation -- it's not my...
The Files and Settings Transfer wizard (F.A.S.T for short) is a common utility used to copy files and application settings from one computer to another. It can even be used as a limited backup tool on a computer. After choosing what to backup, the files are consolidated to one or two big ones which can then be burned to CD, copied to USB flash drive, etc. I got a new laptop yesterday, so the first thing I did was run the wizard on the old laptop, then bring the files to the new laptop. Unfortunately, I was completely out of...