cat page 16 - Dave's Blog

Subway Ad Cat

sequelguy posted a photo:

Marienplatz and the Deutsches Museum

On Monday in Germany we went to Marienplatz and wandered around the Christmas Market, some of the stores, had drinks in a little pub, visited the Toy Museum, and checked out an impressive looking church. We accidentally drew in some other tourists as we stood gaping at the Glockenspiel tower waiting for the little show to begin at the wrong hour. That night Megan and Oliver came by our hotel and took us out to a traditional Bavarian restaurant and brewery that had been brewing beer there for hundreds of years. It was fun although we may have kept Megan and Oliver out too late on a weeknight.

The next day we went to the Deutsches Museum the largest science and technology museum in the world. And indeed it is very large, six floors on a large grounds. I needed to better pace myself: I spent too much energy being interested in the engineering sections with steam engines, mining, aerospace etc. I was completely worn out by the time we got to physics, chemistry, etc. etc. and we didn't even look in the natural sciences section. Anyway, its very large. That night we ate with Jon at an Italian restaurant. During the meal two period dressed children came in and began singing then tried to shake down their captive audience in the restaurant asking for money. The man at the table next to us asked one of the children what charity the money was going towards, the child said they kept the money, and the man said never mind then and sent the child away.

Back From Germany

Sarah and I are back from Munich, Germany as of Thursday and I've just about recovered. The trip there via Air France we watched many movies and it was much better than the trip back in which the entertainment system failed and I had a cold. When we arrived, Jon met us at the airport, helped us with the subway system, we played Guitar Hero, ate at a Bavarian pub, and then later at an Australian bar.

The following day we met up with Jon and three of his friends, one of whom was visiting from England and we all took a train to Neuschwanstein Castle. Apparently its the 'Disney' castle in that Disney's castle's are based upon it. The castle is filled with images and statues of swans in homage to the Swan Knight. We ate in the town at a cafe with traditional Bavarian food before taking the train back and getting all you can eat fajitas for dinner.

Off to Germany

Sarah and I are off to Munich tomorrow. I was about to lose a lot of vacation time if I didn't use it so its good timing and it will be nice to get away from work for a bit. I've made a map of some of the places I'd like to visit. Prost!

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;
         }
    }
}

G1 Android Phone

I finally replaced my old regular cell-phone which was literally being held together by a rubber band with a fancy new G1, my first Internet accessible phone.

I had to call the T-Mobile support line to get data added to my plan and the person helping me was disconcertingly friendly. She asked about my weekend plans and so I felt compelled to ask her the same. Her plans involved replacing her video card so she could get back to World of Warcraft and do I enjoy computer gaming? I couldn't tell if she was genuine or if she was signing me up for magazines.

I was with Sarah in her new car, trying out the phone's GPS functionality via Google Maps while she drove. I switched to Street View and happened to find my car. It was a weird feeling, kind of like those Google conspiracy videos.

The phone runs Google's open source OS and I really enjoy the application API. Its all in Java and URIs and mime-types are sort of basics. Rather than invoking the builtin item picker control directly you invoke an 'intent' specifying the URI of your list of items, a mime-type describing the type of items in the list, and an action 'PICK' and whatever is registered as the picker on the system pops up and lets the user pick from that list. The same goes if you want to 'EDIT' an image, or 'VIEW' an mp3.

I wanted to replace the Google search box gadget that appears on the home screen with my own search box widget that uses OpenSearch descriptors but apparently in the current API you can't make home screen gadgets without changing parts of the OS. My other desired application is something to replace this GPS photo tracker device by recording my location to a file and an additional program on my computer to apply those locations to photos.

XSLT Meddler Script

I've made an XSLT Meddler script in my continued XSLT adventures. Meddler is a simple and easy web server that runs whatever JScript.NET code you give it. I wrote a script that takes an indicated XSLT on the server, downloads an indicated XML from the Internet and returns the result of running that XML through the XSLT. This is useful when you want to work with something like the Zune software or IE7's feed platform which only reads feeds over the HTTP protocol. I'll give more interesting and specific examples of how this could be useful in the future.

I Voted

This past Tuesday I voted in my first presidential election. Of course I was eligible twice before so don't tell my social studies teacher. I read about folks who stood in line for twelve hours waiting to vote but I personally had no issues. I found the voting location around 10am and it seemed appropriately busy: There were people voting but no lines. I came in and looked confused until an elderly lady gave me a paper to bubble in. The voting booth was more like a fold out voting table at a very awkward height and in the end my back ached. It feels better to vote in person and have a back ache after. Its more like I've accomplished something.

Halloween and Gas Park Weekend

The weekend before last Sarah and I went down to Gas Works Park in Seattle. Gas Works Park is a former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant now turned into a park with the machinery kept intact and found right on the shore of Lake Union. There's a large hill right next to the plant with an embedded art installation from which you get an excellent view of the park and the lake. Anyway a very cool place. Afer, we ate at Julia's of Wallingford where I stereotypically had the Santa Cruz omelet. Good food, nice place, nice neighborhood.

This past weekend was Halloween weekend. On Halloween at Microsoft parents bring their kids around the office buildings and collect candy from those who have candy in their office. See Matt's photo of one such hallway at Microsoft. The next day Sarah and I went to two birthday parties the second of which required costume. I went as House (from the television show House) by putting on a suit jacket and carrying a cane. Sarah wore scrubs to lend cred. to my lazy costume. Oh yeah and on Sunday Sarah bought a new car.

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.