make page 13 - Dave's Blog

Angie and Kane Went Away

2007 Nov 19, 12:35Two weekends ago I went down to California for Angie and Kane's going away party. It was fun despite going to a country western club. It was a very large place with plenty of space for line dancing, a dentist chair turned into a make-margaritas-in-your-mouth chair, and of course a mechanical bull. Surprisingly, I did not fit in.

This past weekend Sarah and I went to the EMP and SciFi Museum. The last time I was there was for the Star Trek convention (I'm cool) and Sarah hadn't been before. We also ate in the attached diner which was acceptable.emp seattle nontechnical

Why I Feel Old

2007 Oct 12, 3:20And now to fit in better with the rest of the emo kids on LJ, in no particular order here are some reasons why I feel old:

• I've attended friends weddings sorted chronologically by when I met them: Lucas from high school, followed by Carissa from college, and then Palak from Microsoft.
• I rarely get carded for alcohol.
• Jon's moving to Germany soon -- this time permanently. He's already started the process of getting rid of possessions he's not taking with him like his car and TV. However, after doing so he couldn't maintain his smug "I don't even own a TV" attitude and ended up trading me my small CRT TV (as mentioned previously) for his DDR pads and games. A good trade for both since we were each looking to dump these items. So far I've only convinced Sarah to try DDR once with me. Somehow I've gotten much worse at something I wasn't that great at to begin with.
• I have business cards.
• I still have semi-monthly nightmares in which I'm taking a Linear Algebra course for which I haven't studied or done homework in years. This differs from the more frequent nightmares I had immediately after finishing that series of classes in which I was taking the final and it was all on the one topic I didn't study. In reality, the prof. had done his PhD work on this one topic and I, correctly betting it wouldn't appear on the final, didn't study it. Apparently this was a traumatic bet for me to make given the wake of destruction left on my dreams.
• I have to remind myself that 2005 was two years ago.

personal nontechnical

GPS

2007 Sep 18, 2:16Sarah got me the Garmin StreetPilot c580 for my birthday last month. I really like this because its a small device that makes my life easier without me having to learn anything new. Just the way tech. should be.

The device gets current weather, traffic, and movie times. The information is sent via FM and received via the FM receiver in the cigarette lighter power adapter of the GPS device. MSN sends out this info and I get a free one year subscription. In addition to taking traffic info into account when planning my route it will estimate the number of minutes I'm going to spend in traffic. Just knowing how long I might be in traffic somehow makes it more bareable.

The other day while driving for dinner I got a call. I got my phone out of my pocket and answered it. I heard Jon's saying 'Hello' under my passenger seat. After a moment of confusion I remembered that the GPS device also acts as a bluetooth hands free phone adapter and that it was under my seat.gps garmin personal traffic nontechnical

Video Woes

2007 Aug 15, 3:30I've been experimenting with adding video to my webpage. I tried to embed video in my livejournal blog posts previously however ran into some issues with that. When creating the LJ post I added an tag but when I submit that tags turned into an technical youtube video personal livejournal homepage

Which which - Batch File Hackiness

2007 Aug 9, 5:41To satisfy my hands which have already learned to type *nix commands I like to install Win32 versions of common GNU utilities. Unfortunately, the which command is a rather literal port and requires you to enter the entire name of the command for which you're looking. That is 'which which' won't find itself but 'which which.exe' will. This makes this almost useless for me so I thought to write my own as a batch file. I had learned about a few goodies available in cmd.exe that I thought would make this an easy task. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought.

for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in ( `"echo %PATH:;=& echo %"` ) do (
    for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%b in ( `"echo %PATHEXT:;=& echo %"` ) do (
        if exist "%%a"\%1%%b (
            for  %%c in ( "%%a"\%1%%b ) do (
                echo %%~fc
            )
        )
    )
)

The environment variables PATH and PATHEXT hold the list of paths to search through to find commands, and the extensions of files that should be run as commands respectively. The 'for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in (...) do (...)' runs the 'do' portion with %%a sequentially taking on the value of every line in the 'in' portion. That's nice, but PATH and PATHEXT don't have their elements on different lines and I don't know of a way to escape a newline character to appear in a batch file. In order to get the PATH and PATHEXT's elements onto different lines I used the %ENV:a=b% syntax which replaces occurrences of a with b in the value of ENV. I replaced the ';' delimiter with the text '& echo ' which means %PATHEXT:;=& echo% evaluates to something like "echo .COM& echo .EXE& echo .BAT& ...". I have to put the whole expression in double quotes in order to escape the '&' for appearing in the batch file. The usebackq and the backwards quotes means that the backquoted string should be replaced with the output of the execution of its content. So in that fashion I'm able to get each element of the env. variable onto new lines. The rest is pretty straight forward.

Also, it supports wildcards:

C:\Users\davris>which.cmd *hi*
C:\Windows\System32\GRAPHICS.COM
C:\Windows\System32\SearchIndexer.exe
D:\bin\which.exe
D:\bin\which.cmd

which cmd technical batch for

Two-for Script File

2007 Aug 6, 5:40I was messing with the XSLT to XSL Converter source which is a javascript file that can be run with cscript.exe. I've changed it to be like a very basic version of xsltproc that simply runs an XML file through an XSLT. I also wanted to run this from the command prompt without writing "cscript ..." everytime. I decided to make like perl programmers I've seen and make a JS file that works as a batch file and a JS file at the same time.

Here's a basic version of what I ended doing applied to a 'hello world' script named helloworld.cmd:

/* 2> NUL
@echo off
cscript /e:javascript /nologo "%~f0" %*
@goto :eof

    Hello World
        Says 'Hello world.' when you run it.
*/

var outText = 'Hello world.';
WScript.Echo(outText);

Running this on a command prompt gives the following:

C:\Users\davris>helloworld

C:\Users\davris>/*  2>NUL
Hello world.

However, after a little more experimentation I found this was slightly overkill for my purposes since if I rename the file to helloworld.js and just type its name like a command it is run by cscript:

C:\Users\davris>helloworld
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.7
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Hello world.

So this time I didn't need all that but if ever in the future I need to run a batch file then a JS file I can do it with one file...cmd js technical cscript batch xslt xsl javascript

Wp64 Issues

2007 Aug 6, 3:43Miladin told me about the Visual Studio compiler's promising option Wp64 that finds 64bit portability issues when compiling in 32bit. If, for instance, you cast from a (long*) to a (long) you get a W4 warning. However, the #defines are still set for 32bit builds. This means that other parts of the code can make assumptions based on the #defines that are valid on 32bit but generate 64bit errors or warnings.

For instance, in winuser.h the public published Windows header file there's the following:

...
#ifdef _WIN64
...
WINUSERAPI
LONG_PTR
WINAPI
SetWindowLongPtrA(
    __in HWND hWnd,
    __in int nIndex,
    __in LONG_PTR dwNewLong);
...
#else  /* _WIN64 */
...
#define SetWindowLongPtrA   SetWindowLongA
...
#endif /* _WIN64 */
...

In 64bit everything's normal but in 32bit SetWindowLongPtrA is #defined to SetWindowLongA which takes a LONG rather than a LONG_PTR. So take the following code snippet:

...
LONG_PTR inputValue = 0;
LONG_PTR error = SetWindowLongPtrA(hWnd, nIndex, inputValue);
...

This looks fine but generates warnings with the Wp64 flag.

In 64 bit, p is cast to (LONG_PTR) and that's great because we're actually calling SetWindowLongPtrA which takes a LONG_PTR. In 32 bit, p is cast to (LONG_PTR) which is then implicitly cast to (LONG) because we're actually calling SetWindowLongA. LONG and LONG_PTR are the same size in 32bit which is fine but if you turn on the Wp64 flag there's a W4 warning because of the implicit cast from a larger size to a smaller size if you were to compile for 64bit. So even though doing a 32bit or 64bit compile would have worked just fine, if you turn on the Wp64 flag for 32bit you'd get an error here.

It looks like I'm the most recent in a list of people to notice this issue. Well I investigated this so... I'm blogging about it too!wp64 technical 64bit compiler c++ visual-studio setwindowlongptra

Office with a View

2007 Jul 14, 3:12I've been at Microsoft three years as of last Thursday. It makes me feel old but on the bright side I've upgraded offices. I now have an office with a window. Its actually a coincidence that I got this office at the time of my Microsoft anniversary but I like to pretend. I've had a single office for only four or five months now so its a nice surprise that I'm moving into a single window office so soon.

Of course this move means I'll be leaving some things behind. For instance the hanging dry erase pen holder that I created out of office supplies I will leave attached to my old white board. My new office has fancy whiteboards with trays built-in (sooo fancy) so I know the person coming into my old office will make better use of my hanging dry erase pen holder then I would. I explained to him that the rubber bands need to be replaced every eight months or so and not to exceed the maximum weight restrictions.

Additionally, the office art masterpiece I created I will also leave behind. When Bill Gates was featured on the cover of Diversity Inc. for his amazing philanthropic acts many of us got copies in our mailboxes. I collected mine and some from the recycling bins and put up five of the covers on the wall. Eventually others added to it which was my intent, but I only started this when I eventually checked my mailbox a week or so after the magazine arrived so there weren't as many covers left with which to work. At any rate I ended up with eleven on the wall. I'll leave the interpretation of the artwork up to the viewer.microsoft personal office nontechnical

Backup Notes

2007 Jul 13, 8:30I bought an external backup drive a few weekends ago. I've previously setup a Subversion repository so I decided to move everything into the repository and then back it up. So in went the contents of all of my %USERPROFILE% and ~ directories with a bit of sorting and pruning. Not too much though given its much easier to dump in everything and search for what I want then to take the time to examine and grade each file. What follows are the notes I took while setting this up. It takes me a bit of time to look up the help on each command so I figure I'll write it all down here for the benefit of myself and potentially others...

Setting Up the Backup Drive For Linux
I first changed the filesystem on the drive to ext3. I plugged it into my USB2.0 port and ran fdisk:

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Useful commands I used to do this follow mostly in order:

m

help

p

print current partitions

d

delete current partition

n

create new partition (I used the defaults)

w

write changes and exit

Then I formatted for ext3.

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

I made it easy to mount:

sudo vim /etc/fstab
# added line to end:
/dev/sda1 /media/backup ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0

I setup the directory structure on the disk

mount /media/backup
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users/dave
sudo chown dave:dave /media/backup/users/dave

After all that its easy to make a copy of the Subversion repository:

mount /media/backup
cp -Rv /home/dave/svn /media/backup/users/dave/
umount /media/backup

Next on the agenda is to add a cron job to do this regularly.

Subversion Command Reference
On a machine that has local access to the Subversion repository you can check out a specific subdirectory as follows using the file scheme:

svn co file:///home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html

Note also that although one of my directories is named 'dave@deletethis.net' Subversion requires the '@' to be percent-encoded.
Other useful subversion commands:

svn help

help

svn list file:///home/dave/svn/

list all files in root dir of svn depot

svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/

list all files in svn depot

svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/ | grep \/$

list all directories

svn status

List status of all files in the working copy directory as in - modified, not in repository, etc

svn update

Brings the working copy up to date wrt the repository

svn commit

Commit changes from the working copy to the repository

svn add / move / delete

Perform the specified action -- occurs immediately

Setting up Windows Client for Auto Auth into SVN
When using an SVN client on Windows via svn+ssh its useful to have the Windows automatically generate connections to the SVN server. I use putty on my Windows machines so I read the directions on using public keys with putty.

putty.exe dave@deletethis.net
cd .ssh
vim authorized_keys # leave the putty window open for now
puttygen.exe
Click the 'generate' button
Move the mouse around until finished
Copy text in 'Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file:' to putty window & save & close putty window
Enter Key passphrase & Comment in puttygen
Save the private key somewhere private
pageant.exe
'Add Key' the private key just saved.

Checking out using Tortoise SVN
On one of my Windows machines I've already installed Tortoise SVN. Checking out from my SVN repository was really easy. I just right clicked in Explorer in a directory and selected "SVN Checkout...". Then in the following dialog I entered the svn URI:

svn+ssh://dave@deletethis.net/home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html/

Note again that the '@' that is part of the directory name is percent-encoded as '%40' while the '@' in the userinfo is not.

Windows Command Line Check Out
On my media center I didn't want to install Tortoise SVN so rather I used the command line tool. I setup pageant like before the only difficulty was getting the SVN command line tool to use putty. With the default configuration you can use the SVN_SSH environment variable to point at a compliant SSH command line tool. The trick is that its interpreted as a backslash escaped string. So I set mine thusly:

set SVN_SSH=C:\\users\\dave\\bin\\putty\\plink.exe

The escaping solved the vague error I received about not being able to create the tunnel.backup technical personal windows svn linux subversion

Second Life Translator

2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his Second Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this blog post I became aware of the llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests. I decided that I too could do something cool with this.

Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.

Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non US-ASCII character input worked.

In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation. Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest

Unspun IE List

2007 Jun 21, 2:38Unspun is a social list creation website from Amazon. For instance, you could create a list named 'Most Desired Features for Next Version of Internet Explorer' and users of Unspun fill in and rank the answers. There's a mix of serious answers that are excellent suggestions, fan-boy answers that are lame, uninformed answers that are already implemented, and hilarious answers that are awesome. The following is the very short unsorted list of the awesome suggestions.

Innovative Anti-Phreaking Technology

Given the work done in IE7 on anti-phishing, subsequent work on anti-phreaking just makes sense.

AXELROD 2.8 Acceleration with XML Bindings

I'm not sure what AXELROD 2.8 is but accelerating it sounds good. Also I enjoy binding things to XML so...

Larger Buttons for My Mighty Fingers

For maximum humor this should be read by Richard Horvitz as Zim of Invader Zim. This one makes me laugh every time I read it.

amazon personal ie humor nontechnical