October 2006 Entries

GMail + Reader = Crazy Delicious!

Talk about overused!  I love that expression though.  I won't use it again though.  I promise.  If you use GMail and keep track of your RSS feeds in Google Reader, you really need to check out this Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox -- actually created by a Google engineer!  It gives you another link alongside Inbox, Drafts, etc. for your feeds.  It's a great fit, and he claims a way to see how it works without actually upgrading core GMail code.  If it's popular enough, it may become a first class feature.  Give it a try -- it really works well!...

Mindstorms

So my sons, Damian (12) and Gabriel (9) decided to build a twin catapult today.  Gabriel saw a similar project in the back of the monthly Lego magazine so they sat down to give it a try.  They did a great job, and then programmed the NXT brick to operate.  They went with a sound sensor wait block to activate one catapult, then another sound to activate the second catapult.  Finally, a third sound resets the two catapults and loops.  If the button is pressed at the end of the loop, it plays a tone and exits.  Straight-forward, and it works! ...

Using the Clipboard

Who knew how easy it could be?!  With .NET 2.0, just use the [System.Windows.Forms.]Clipboard class to get and set clipboard data.  Check for data using the Contains methods: ContainsText() ContainsAudio() ContainsFileDropList() -- Drag-and-drop file names... ContainsImage() ContainsData() -- Check for arbitrary data types specified using DataFormats values Next, call the corresponding Get method: GetText() GetAudioStream() GetData() GetDataObject() -- Nice for interchange within applications GetFileDropList() GetImage() You can also call Set methods...

Google does code search

Well it's about time!  After they started hosting source code and projects, I expected to see it happen.  After Krugle came on the scene and did an awesome job of source code search, I expected to see it happen.  I guess it just seems like a no-brainer for company like Google.  They certainly took their time, but the work looks good so far. They have advanced options to enter search criteria as a regular expression, choice of language, license, packages, filename matching, and case-sensitivity.  It works pretty well.  I don't think that the results are on par with Krugle yet,...

Working with dates and times

Here's a simple tip for the day.  If you've ever wanted to make it easy for a user to select a date and time in a UI, you've probably realized that you need two DateTimePicker controls.  The way the controls are rendered, you can edit both the date and the time in one control, but it's a little neater with the separation.  There is a trick or two though, and it would actually be a good candidate for combining into a single UserControl. First of all, each control needs its Format set.  Keep in mind that each control contains a...