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ErrorZilla err ErrorSoft

2007 Aug 21, 4:04Seeing ErrorZilla I realized I could easily do a similar thing to the IE7 404 page using the same technique I used for the XML view and the feed view.

So that's what I did: I made a new 404 page for IE7. There's not much new here technically if you've read the previous blog entries to which I linked. My 404 page change adds links to the Internet Archive, the Coral Cache, and Whois Tool.PermalinkCommentsarchive personal res cache resource ie7 technical browser whois 404 error extension

Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities

2007 Aug 9, 1:33Win32 versions of many common Unix commands.PermalinkCommentsunix linux tool tools download windows sourceforge shell software free

CSSVista: Live CSS editing with Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously

2007 Jun 20, 1:05A tool that lets you edit HTML & CSS in realtime with views rendered in IE and Firefox side by side.PermalinkCommentsbrowser ie ie7 firefox mozilla css debug html free software download tool tools web

Install Debugging Tools for Windows 32-bit Version

2007 May 20, 5:14Debugging tools for Windows executables.PermalinkCommentsmsdn microsoft c++ c debug debugger development download free programming software tool tools windbg windows cdb

XPointer Framework - IE7 XML Source View Upgrade Part 3

2007 May 17, 5:16Previously I created some resource tools and then I used them to overwrite msxml3's XML source view. In this update I've added support for the XPointer Framework.

This time around I've started to add support for the XPointer Framework to my XML source view and I've added installation instructions. The framework consists of a series of pointer segments each of which has a scheme name followed by data in parenthesis. For example 'scheme1(data1)scheme2(data2)scheme3(data3)'. A pointer segment resolves to a portion of the XML document based on the data and the scheme name. The whole pointer resolves to the first segment that successfully resolves. That is, from the example, if scheme1 resolves to nothing and scheme2 resolves to something then that's used and scheme3 is ignored. In addition to the framework I've added support for the xmlns scheme which binds namespace prefixes to a namespace URI and the element scheme which is a simple way to resolve to particular elements in an XML. I also have limited support for the xpointer scheme the content of which is resolved as an XPath with some extra functions (which I don't support -- hence the limited). I've also thrown in schemes for the two SelectionLanguage values supported by msxml3.

Next time I might try to support the xpointer functions that aren't in xpath using msxml script. But I think I'm losing steam on this project... we'll see.PermalinkCommentsresource technical xml xpointer res xpath xslt

Reverse Latin Script

2007 May 11, 3:48Type in some latin script and you'll get back a string of Unicode characters that looks like its rotated 180 degrees. More info on exciting Unicode codepoints.PermalinkCommentsunicode javascript tool tools web language

New XSLT - IE7 XML Source View Upgrade Part 2

2007 May 11, 8:55Last time, I had written some resource tools to allow me to view and modify Windows module resources in my ultimate and noble quest to implement the XML content-type fragment in IE7. Using the resource tools I found that MSXML3.DLL isn't signed and that I can replace the XSLT embedded resource with my own, which is great news and means I could continue in my endevour. In the following I discuss how I came up with this replacement for IE7's XML source view.

At first I thought I could just modify the existing XSLT but it turns out that it isn't exactly an XSLT, rather its an IE5 XSL. I tried using the XSL to XSLT converter linked to on MSDN, however the resulting document still requires manual modification. But I didn't want to muck about in their weird language and I figured I could write my own XSLT faster than I could figure out how theirs worked.

I began work on the new XSLT and found it relatively easy to produce. First I got indenting working with all the XML nodes represented appropriately and different CSS classes attached to them to make it easy to do syntax highlighting. Next I added in some javascript to allow for closing and opening of elements. At this point my XSLT had the same features as the original XSL.

Next was the XML mimetype fragment which uses XPointer, a framework around various different schemes for naming parts of an XML document. I focused on the XPointer scheme which is an extended version of XPath. So I named my first task as getting XPaths working. Thankfully javascript running in the HTML document produced by running my XSLT on an XML document has access to the original XML document object via the document.XMLDocument property. From this this I can execute XPaths, however there's no builtin way to map from the XML nodes selected by the XPath to the HTML elements that I produced to represent them. So I created a recursive javascript function and XSLT named-template that both produce the same unique strings based on an XML node's position in the document. For instance 'a3-e2-e' is the name produced for the 3rd attribute of the second element of the root element of the XML document. When producing the HTML for an XML node, I add an 'id' attribute to the HTML with the unique string of the XML node. Then in javascript when I execute an XPath I can discover the unique string of each node in the selected set and map each of them to their corresponding positions in the HTML.

With the hard part out of the way I changed the onload to get the fragment of the URI of the current document, interpret it as an XPath and highlight and navigate to the selected nodes. I also added an interactive floating bar from which you can enter your own XPaths and do the same. On a related note, I found that when accessing XML files via the file URI scheme the fragment is stripped off and not available to the javascript.

The next steps are of course to actually implement XPointer framework parsing as well as the limited number of schemes that the XPointer framework specifies.PermalinkCommentsxml xpointer msxml res xpath xslt resource ie7 technical browser ie xsl

Resource Tools - IE7 XML Source View Upgrade Part 1

2007 May 9, 4:15I read about text/xml URI fragment resolution a few months ago. I was interested to find another kind of fragment reference other than the text/html URI fragment but of course I didn't find an implementation in IE, Firefox, or Opera. I decided to see how much work would be required to implement this in IE.

In IE and Firefox when you open an XML file that doesn't have an XML stylesheet the XML source is rendered with syntax highlighting. In IE I also noticed that the gold bar appears when you open an XML file off of your local machine. To me this suggested that the XML source was being rendered as HTML which I assumed was produced by running an XSLT on the source XML file. If so, I figured I could modify the XSLT to implement text/xml URI fragments. I ran FileMon to see if iexplore.exe loaded an XSLT file when opening an XML file. Only the XML file and MSXML3.DLL were opened and no XSLTs were loaded as files. My next hope for modifying the XSLT was if it existed as a resource in MSXML3.DLL. I did a findstr on the DLL for SCRIPT and found an XSLT so I decided to check for resources in MSXML3.DLL. Unfortunately my previous resource viewer didn't work correctly so I decided to write my own.

I created resource tools to view and modify resources in Windows modules. The viewer outputs HTML with links to the individual resources of a module using the res URI scheme that's built into IE. The modifier is a simple command line tool that replaces or adds one resource at a time to a module.

Using these tools I found that the XSLT was stored as a resource in MSXML3.DLL. I'll talk more about the existing XSLT and the one I replaced it with next time.PermalinkCommentsresource technical xml msxml res xslt xsl

Commenting Wishlist

2007 May 1, 4:33In the past I've come up with ideas for software and find that the very idea is implemented soon after. So this time rather than getting down about it I'm going to make it work for me. I'll state what I want to use and hope that its magically implemented. In order to uniformly support comments on my website I want a web service with the following features: I'm going implement this now so no one go off and do it before me so that I can use it without having to do anything...PermalinkCommentstechnical homepage

PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client

2007 Apr 9, 5:15The SSH client I like to use.PermalinkCommentsclient ssh tool tools free encryption privacy putty security sftp setupnewcomputer

Delicious shortcut tag

2007 Apr 8, 3:05Shortcut Tag?
I just saw this on another user's delicious links: a link to ESV search that's tagged with, among other things, "shortcut:esv". When viewed on del.icio.us there's a text box that lets you search using that link. I hadn't seen this before, but it seems pretty cool and I'm surprised I hadn't seen it previously. A delicious post with such a tag ends up looking like the following: I tried searching for information on this and I've found other delicious users doing the same thing, but nothing about the tag itself. If you know any information especially official information from del.icio.us itself please post links in reply to this post. So without further preface here's what I've learned about the del.icio.us shortcut tag.

How-to
To get a search box in your del.icio.us links make a post that satisfies the following requirements:
  1. One of the tags must begin with the text 'shortcut:'. You can have more text following that in the tag if you like but it must at least start with 'shortcut:'.
  2. The 'url' you post must be a shortcut url rather than an actual URL. It must contain a '%s' with a lowercase 's'. When you enter text into the textbox on the del.icio.us page the text will replace the '%s' after being percent-encoded. For example 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s' is the shortcut url for Google and if you type 'foo bar' into the textbox the URI you will navigate to would be 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foo%20bar'.


Complaints
This is neat but I do have a few complaints:
  1. The text from the textbox is percent-encoded before replacing the '%s'. Most sites use application/x-www-form-urlencoded which encodes spaces as '+' rather than '%20'.
  2. The shortcut url format seems to be taken from Mozilla's Firefox Custom Keywords. Its a shame it wasn't based on something more adaptable like the OpenSearch URL template syntax.
  3. A '%s' in the url means technically what you're submitting to del.icio.us isn't a URI as defined by the standard.
  4. Allowing text after 'shortcut:' means you can't look at all of a user's shortcut using this tag.


The next step is to create a tool to sync my IE7 search providers with my shortcuts saved to delicious...PermalinkCommentstechnical howto tagging tool tag delicious

Junkbusters Declare Headlines

2007 Mar 30, 3:26Information on reducing phone, email, and physical spam (junk mail & telemarketers). Also has lots of info on other privacy related matters. The sites ugly but I find its easy to navigate and find the info I want.PermalinkCommentsprivacy security tools junk mail spam

Pennypacker - The Penny Arcade Firefox extension

2007 Mar 26, 10:20A website where you can search through Penny Arcade comics using terms set by the community.PermalinkCommentstag tagging social penny-arcade folksonomy tools search

XFN 1.1 Creator

2007 Mar 21, 1:41A tool that will create HTML to describe your relationship to another individual.PermalinkCommentsgenerator microformats tools xhtml xfn

CSSFly - Edit websites on the fly!

2007 Mar 20, 6:06View and temporarily edit the source of websites. Your changes to the source will be reflected immediately.PermalinkCommentscss webdesign tools design development javascript website

tortoisesvn.tigris.org

2007 Mar 19, 12:08Tortoise is a Subversion client for Windows that integrates with your Explorer shell.PermalinkCommentssubversion svn version client software tools free extension windows

Synergy

2007 Mar 19, 10:52This tool allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to control all your computers.PermalinkCommentskvm tools windows linux mac download free desktop

vLite - Windows Vista configuration tool

2007 Mar 12, 5:21vLite lets you create custom installs of Vista on a DVD. It lets you remove system components and drivers.PermalinkCommentsvista windows tools howto iso boot dvd free install

Emily Chang - eHub

2007 Feb 20, 10:47Emily Chang's list of new and interesting web services.PermalinkCommentsemily-chang ehub web2.0 blog ajax tools web webdesign webservices research social sharing search folksonomy development design tagging monthly

ishida >> utilities: Unicode character pickers

2007 Feb 14, 3:12Another of Richard's tools that allows you to compose strings by visually picking characters from particular alphabets.PermalinkCommentsunicode tools picker encoding javascript language tool codepage i18n
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