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Windows 7 Accelerator Platform COM / C# Interop

For a new project I'm working on involving IE's installed Accelerators and OpenSearch search providers via the Windows 7 Accelerator Platform, I've created a C#/COM interop class for those APIs.

Download the osinterop.cs interop file here.

DVD Ripping and Viewing in Windows Media Center

I've just got a new media center PC connected directly to my television with lots of HD space and so I'm ripping a bunch of my DVDs to the PC so I don't have to fuss with the physical media. I'm ripping with DVD Rip, viewing the results in Windows 7's Windows Media Center after turning on the WMC DVD Library, and using a powershell script I wrote to copy over cover art and metadata.

My powershell script follows. To use it you must do the following:

1. Run Windows Media Center with the DVD in the drive and view the disc's metadata info.
2. Rip each DVD to its own subdirectory of a common directory.
3. The name of the subdirectory to which the DVD is ripped must have the same name as the DVD name in the metadata. An exception to this are characters that aren't allowed in Windows paths (e.g. <, >, ?, *, etc)
4. Run the script and pass the path to the common directory containing the DVD rips as the first parameter.

Running WMC and viewing the DVD's metadata forces WMC to copy the metadata off the Internet and cache it locally. After playing with Fiddler and reading this blog post on WMC metadata I made the following script that copies metadata and cover art from the WMC cache to the corresponding DVD rip directory.

Download copydvdinfo.ps1

TiMER

An excellent movie I'd never heard of. An entertaining and humorous sci-fi indie romance comedy. It stars Emma Caulfield (who I recognize as Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who obsesses over her timer, an implanted device that counts down to when she'll meet the love of her life. Thematically its similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which similarly adds a scifi device to society in order to examine the value of failed relationships on a persons life.

Cheap Multiplayer Tricks for New Super Mario Bros. Wii

The New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a great game. Its the fun of old school Mario with the addition of great graphics and the kind of multiplayer I've wanted for Mario since playing the original as a child: its got up to four player simultaneous cooperative multiplayer. I recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Mario in the past. Watch this amazing video of level 1-3 you can unlock in the game.

As noted elsewhere, multiple players attempting to navigate platforms, grab power ups, and throw turtle shells creates new challenges but along with that there's new ways to be incredibly cheap.

Jumping Higher

A second player means a head one can jump on to reach higher locations. Jump on your friend's head at the apex of their jump while holding down the jump button yourself for maximum jumping. In the game you can also grab other players and hold them over your head. This is useful for reaching the top of the flagpole at the end of levels. On that same line, if the player you grab has a flying cap you can now use them to fly in the same manner you would use a flying block which makes it easy to get two players to the top of the finish flagpole if only one of you has a flying cap.

Power-Ups

Normal power-up blocks now spawn enough power-ups for everyone. A mushroom is spawned for each small player and full power-ups for the rest, except in the case everyone is small: then one of the power-ups is a full power-up. If there's two players and you're both small, the full power-up always jumps out of the block to the right. Some hidden power-up blocks only give out one power-up and in that case its a mushroom or not based on the player who hits the block - so be sure that a big player hits that if you have one.

Death & Bubbles

When a player dies but at least one other player lives the dead player comes back in a limbo bubble from which they must be released before they may play again. Because of this, in a tough spot you can send one player in and leave a second behind. If the first dies you don't lose your place in the level and the first comes back in a bubble ready to try again. For instance, if you're trying to get the last star coin in 2-1 which sits just above the abyss, one player can just jump to their death for it and as long as another player lives you've collected the coin. However you need not sacrifice your life to do this: you can press down and 'a' to force yourself into a bubble saving yourself from death. This is true in general as long as you have enough time to see your death coming. This is also useful if one player runs ahead to the right. The screen will expand a bit but then it will just move to the right following the player in the lead. Players left behind walls or now forced into lava pits will die unless they use the bubble.

Misc.

• If all players hit the ground at the same time from a ground pound it acts like hitting a pow block, killing the enemies on the screen.
• If you hold a player who has a projectile power over your head they can still use their power.
• Bubbles can be popped by hitting them with your fire or ice projectiles as well as thrown shells or blocks.
• All players get the extra lives from anyone collecting 100 coins or finishing a level with more than 7 enemies on the screen.

PowerShell Scanning Script

I've hooked up the printer/scanner to the Media Center PC since I leave that on all the time anyway so we can have a networked printer. I wanted to hook up the scanner in a somewhat similar fashion but I didn't want to install HP's software (other than the drivers of course). So I've written my own script for scanning in PowerShell that does the following:

1. Scans using the Windows Image Acquisition APIs via COM
2. Runs OCR on the image using Microsoft Office Document Imaging via COM (which may already be on your PC if you have Office installed)
3. Converts the image to JPEG using .NET Image APIs
4. Stores the OCR text into the EXIF comment field using .NET Image APIs (which means Windows Search can index the image by the text in the image)
5. Moves the image to the public share

Here's the actual code from my scan.ps1 file:

param([Switch] $ShowProgress, [switch] $OpenCompletedResult)

$filePathTemplate = "C:\users\public\pictures\scanned\scan {0} {1}.{2}";
$time = get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d";

[void]([reflection.assembly]::loadfile( "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll"))

$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject WIA.DeviceManager
$device = $deviceManager.DeviceInfos.Item(1).Connect();

foreach ($item in $device.Items) {
        $fileIdx = 0;
        while (test-path ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"*")) {
                [void](++$fileIdx);
        }

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Scanning..." }

        $image = $item.Transfer();
        $fileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,$image.FileExtension);
        $image.SaveFile($fileName);
        clear-variable image

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Running OCR..." }

        $modiDocument = new-object -comobject modi.document;
        $modiDocument.Create($fileName);
        $modiDocument.OCR();
        if ($modiDocument.Images.Count -gt 0) {
                $ocrText = $modiDocument.Images.Item(0).Layout.Text.ToString().Trim();
                $modiDocument.Close();
                clear-variable modiDocument

                if (!($ocrText.Equals(""))) {
                        $fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $fileName
                        if (!($fileName.EndsWith(".jpg") -or $fileName.EndsWith(".jpeg"))) {
                                if ($ShowProgress) { "Converting to JPEG..." }

                                $newFileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"jpg");
                                $fileAsImage.Save($newFileName, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg);
                                $fileAsImage.Dispose();
                                del $fileName;

                                $fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $newFileName 
                                $fileName = $newFileName
                        }

                        if ($ShowProgress) { "Saving OCR Text..." }

                        $property = $fileAsImage.PropertyItems[0];
                        $property.Id = 40092;
                        $property.Type = 1;
                        $property.Value = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($ocrText);
                        $property.Len = $property.Value.Count;
                        $fileAsImage.SetPropertyItem($property);
                        $fileAsImage.Save(($fileName + ".new"));
                        $fileAsImage.Dispose();
                        del $fileName;
                        ren ($fileName + ".new") $fileName
                }
        }
        else {
                $modiDocument.Close();
                clear-variable modiDocument
        }

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Done." }

        if ($OpenCompletedResult) {
                . $fileName;
        }
        else {
                $result = dir $fileName;
                $result | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name OCRText -value $ocrText
                $result
        }
}

I ran into a few issues:

• MODI doesn't seem to be in the Office 2010 Technical Preview I installed first. Installing Office 2007 fixed that.
• The MODI.Document class, at least via PowerShell, can't be instantiated in a 64bit environment. To run the script on my 64bit OS I had to start powershell from the 32bit cmd.exe (C:\windows\syswow64\cmd.exe).
• I was planning to hook up my script to the scanner's 'Scan' button, but HP didn't get the button working for their Vista driver. Their workaround is "don't do that!".
• You must call Image.Dispose() to get .NET to release its reference to the corresponding image file.
• In trying to figure out how to store the text in the files comment, I ran into a dead-end trying to find the corresponding setter for GetDetailsOf which folks like James O'Neil use in PowerShell for interesting ends.

Tab Expansion in PowerShell

PowerShell gives us a real CLI for Windows based around .Net stuff. I don't like the creation of a new shell language but I suppose it makes sense given that they want something C# like but not C# exactly since that's much to verbose and strict for a CLI. One of the functions you can override is the TabExpansion function which is used when you tab complete commands. I really like this and so I've added on to the standard implementation to support replacing a variable name with its value, tab completion of available commands, previous command history, and drive names (there not restricted to just one letter in PS).

Learning the new language was a bit of a chore but MSDN helped. A couple of things to note, a statement that has a return value that you don't do anything with is implicitly the return value for the current function. That's why there's no explicit return's in my TabExpansion function. Also, if you're TabExpansion function fails or returns nothing then the builtin TabExpansion function runs which does just filenames. This is why you can see that the standard TabExpansion function doesn't handle normal filenames: it does extra stuff (like method and property completion on variables that represent .Net objects) but if there's no fancy extra stuff to be done it lets the builtin one take a crack.

Here's my TabExpansion function. Probably has bugs, so watch out!

function EscapePath([string] $path, [string] $original)
{
    if ($path.Contains(' ') -and !$original.Contains(' '))
    {
        '"'   $path   '"';
    }
    else
    {
        $path;
    }
}

function PathRelativeTo($pathDest, $pathCurrent)
{
    if ($pathDest.PSParentPath.ToString().EndsWith($pathCurrent.Path))
    {
        '.\'   $pathDest.name;
    }
    else
    {
        $pathDest.FullName;
    }
}

#  This is the default function to use for tab expansion. It handles simple
# member expansion on variables, variable name expansion and parameter completion
# on commands. It doesn't understand strings so strings containing ; | ( or { may
# cause expansion to fail.

function TabExpansion($line, $lastWord)
{
    switch -regex ($lastWord)
    {
         # Handle property and method expansion...
         '(^.*)(\$(\w|\.) )\.(\w*)$' {
             $method = [Management.Automation.PSMemberTypes] `
                 'Method,CodeMethod,ScriptMethod,ParameterizedProperty'
             $base = $matches[1]
             $expression = $matches[2]
             Invoke-Expression ('$val='   $expression)
             $pat = $matches[4]   '*'
             Get-Member -inputobject $val $pat | sort membertype,name |
                 where { $_.name -notmatch '^[gs]et_'} |
                 foreach {
                     if ($_.MemberType -band $method)
                     {
                         # Return a method...
                         $base   $expression   '.'   $_.name   '('
                     }
                     else {
                         # Return a property...
                         $base   $expression   '.'   $_.name
                     }
                 }
             break;
          }

         # Handle variable name expansion...
         '(^.*\$)([\w\:]*)$' {
             $prefix = $matches[1]
             $varName = $matches[2]
             foreach ($v in Get-Childitem ('variable:'   $varName   '*'))
             {
                 if ($v.name -eq $varName)
                 {
                     $v.value
                 }
                 else
                 {
                    $prefix   $v.name
                 }
             }
             break;
         }

         # Do completion on parameters...
         '^-([\w0-9]*)' {
             $pat = $matches[1]   '*'

             # extract the command name from the string
             # first split the string into statements and pipeline elements
             # This doesn't handle strings however.
             $cmdlet = [regex]::Split($line, '[|;]')[-1]

             #  Extract the trailing unclosed block e.g. ls | foreach { cp
             if ($cmdlet -match '\{([^\{\}]*)$')
             {
                 $cmdlet = $matches[1]
             }

             # Extract the longest unclosed parenthetical expression...
             if ($cmdlet -match '\(([^()]*)$')
             {
                 $cmdlet = $matches[1]
             }

             # take the first space separated token of the remaining string
             # as the command to look up. Trim any leading or trailing spaces
             # so you don't get leading empty elements.
             $cmdlet = $cmdlet.Trim().Split()[0]

             # now get the info object for it...
             $cmdlet = @(Get-Command -type 'cmdlet,alias' $cmdlet)[0]

             # loop resolving aliases...
             while ($cmdlet.CommandType -eq 'alias') {
                 $cmdlet = @(Get-Command -type 'cmdlet,alias' $cmdlet.Definition)[0]
             }

             # expand the parameter sets and emit the matching elements
             foreach ($n in $cmdlet.ParameterSets | Select-Object -expand parameters)
             {
                 $n = $n.name
                 if ($n -like $pat) { '-'   $n }
             }
             break;
         }

         default {
             $varNameStar = $lastWord   '*';

             foreach ($n in @(Get-Childitem $varNameStar))
             {
                 $name = PathRelativeTo ($n) ($PWD);

                 if ($n.PSIsContainer)
                 {
                     EscapePath ($name   '\') ($lastWord);
                 }
                 else
                 {
                     EscapePath ($name) ($lastWord);
                 }
             }

             if (!$varNameStar.Contains('\'))
             {
                foreach ($n in @(Get-Command $varNameStar))
                {
                    if ($n.CommandType.ToString().Equals('Application'))
                    {
                       foreach ($ext in @((cat Env:PathExt).Split(';')))
                       {
                          if ($n.Path.ToString().ToLower().EndsWith(($ext).ToString().ToLower()))
                          {
                              EscapePath($n.Path) ($lastWord);
                          }
                       }
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        EscapePath($n.Name) ($lastWord);
                    }
                }

                foreach ($n in @(Get-psdrive $varNameStar))
                {
                    EscapePath($n.name   ":") ($lastWord);
                }
             }

             foreach ($n in @(Get-History))
             {
                 if ($n.CommandLine.StartsWith($line) -and $n.CommandLine -ne $line)
                 {
                     $lastWord   $n.CommandLine.Substring($line.Length);
                 }
             }

             # Add the original string to the end of the expansion list.
             $lastWord;

             break;
         }
    }
}

Investigation of a Few Application Protocols (Updated)

Windows allows for application protocols in which, through the registry, you specify a URL scheme and a command line to have that URL passed to your application. Its an easy way to hook a webbrowser up to your application. Anyone can read the doc above and then walk through the registry and pick out the application protocols but just from that info you can't tell what the application expects these URLs to look like. I did a bit of research on some of the application protocols I've seen which is listed below. Good places to look for information on URI schemes: Wikipedia URI scheme, and ESW Wiki UriSchemes.

QuickBase Formula Pretty Printer and Syntax Highlighter

Sarah asked me if I knew of a syntax highlighter for the QuickBase formula language which she uses at work. I couldn't find one but thought it might be fun to make a QuickBase Formula syntax highlighter based on the QuickBase help's description of the formula syntax. Thankfully the language is relatively simple since my skills with ANTLR, the parser generator, are rusty now and I've only used it previously for personal projects (like Javaish, the ridiculous Java based shell idea I had).

With the help of some great ANTLR examples and an ANTLR cheat sheet I was able to come up with the grammar that parses the QuickBase Formula syntax and prints out the same formula marked up with HTML SPAN tags and various CSS classes. ANTLR produces the parser in Java which I wrapped up in an applet, put in a jar, and embedded in an HTML page. The script in that page runs user input through the applet's parser and sticks the output at the bottom of the page with appropriate CSS rules to highlight and print the formula in a pretty fashion.

What I learned:

• I didn't realize that Java applets are easy to use via script in an HTML page. In the JavaScript I can simply refer to publicly exposed methods on the applet and run JavaScript strings through them. It makes for a great combination: do the heavy coding in Java and do the UI in HTML. I may end up doing this again in the future.
• I love ANTLRWorks, the ANTLR IDE, that didn't exist the last time I used ANTLR. It tells you about issues with your grammar as you create it, lets you easily debug the grammar running it forwards and backwards, display parse trees, and other useful things.

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