January 2007 Entries
My son, Damian, competed last Summer in the Bassmaster CastingKids competition in Iowa and took 1st place at the state level. CastingKids is all about using a hookless lure to practice casting towards targets on the ground. The actual competition was held as an event at the Iowa State Games. He had practiced quite a bit and was very excited to have won. Just over a week ago (January 18-19) Damian competed at the regional (semi-final) level in Gadsden, Alabama. There were two age groups and most states participated, so close to ninety semi-finalists were there to try to make...
My most recent Coding 4 Fun article has been up for a few weeks now, but I haven't gotten around to mentioning it yet! I wrote a neat little utility that uses the Windows Desktop Search index to provide auto-complete functionality for file names. As you start to type, it shows files across your local hard drives (and possibly network). The standard filesystem-based autocomplete (built-in to the TextBox) works based on matching the full paths, from left-to-right. This one is based on solely on filename, so will find files that even contain the string in the middle of the word. It's fairly...
Microsoft has released a great new tool for working with digital photos. Photo Info adds shell extensions to improve the tooltip hover for photos, and adds a context menu item to work with photos individually or in groups. You can manipulate all common EXIF and IPTC tags, and it even has very flexible date manipulation features built-in. Why date manipulation? I had a camera a few years ago that would lose the time on every battery replace! Of course I didn't always reset it, so I had many shots taken January 1, 2000. More recently, my wife went to Guatemala...
As I was debugging an in-progress sample application, I was having trouble with an unhandled exception. The application would bomb on an Invoke statement, when clearly there was no problem at that point: Image 1: An unexpected exception (click to see full-size) I had previously created a delegate pointing to a given method, and a delegate for the callback method. From a delegate instance, you can call BeginInvoke to cause the method to be queued on a background thread. When the operation completes, your callback method is invoked. It's a beautiful way to dispatch low-priority programming tasks without...
Maybe you've written VBA macros for Office, or used COM interop to leverage Microsoft Office clients (Word, Excel, etc.). When I worked at MCI (WorldCom, Verizon, whatever it is now!), we had a system to watch a database for rows to be inserted in a given table, then generate form letters with Microsoft Word based on that data. When I first saw the application (obviously, I didn't write it!), I was amazed that such a thing could even be done. It was like a world of opportunity opened having access to Microsoft Office features as part of your code. ...
I logged onto Google Calendar tonight to see this: Notice the interesting replacement for the Google Calendar logo! It isn't actually a link to the mentioned site so the hack failed for that reason, but very interesting nonetheless! I've never actually seen a live Google hack before, so I guess I'm lucky!