place page 7 - Dave's Blog

Wikipedia Tools

2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use Everything2. No need to check references there.

There's the much hyped WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.

Also, via Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.

As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?wikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report

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

Moved

2007 Aug 6, 4:07I've moved from my previous apartment in Redmond into Sarah's condo in Kirkland. Over the past week I'd been coming home from work and packing and sorting all of my belongings. Everything had a few destination options:

• Sarah's condo
• Storage
• My office
• Recycle/Donate

I donated two carts of computer related junk (two CRTs, two desktops, six laptops, untold number of cables, piles of network and sound cards, etc) to RE-PC and six garbage bags of clothing that I either never wear or into which I have worn holes into friendly looking clothing donation bins. Of course I still need to find some place to get rid of my 15 inch CRT TV, VCR, DVD player, and X-Box. I finally emptied my bags of coins that had been collecting for about seven years (one of the bags was from my college orientation) through Coinstar and got ~$160. Some items seemed to fit very well at work like my satirical RIAA propaganda poster and my Darth Vader Nutcracker. This past weekend I had movers come and actually move my furniture. Most of its now in storage except for my living room which is moved into Sarah's second bedroom. Now all I have to do is unpack...move personal repc recycle nontechnical

Canadian Wedding

2007 Jul 15, 5:08This previous weekend Sarah and I went to Canada for my friends Palak and Meghal's wedding. Our five day stay took us on the route from Toronto, to Burlington (for the wedding), and then Niagra.

In Toronto we visited the CN Tower, the ROM, and the Bata Shoe Museum. We generally acted like tourists walking around taking photos of things, putting on sun block, and not saying 'eh'. But we could have been worse like the drunk American college students in front of us in line for the CN Tower asking the guide if the CN Tower is taller than the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. We stumbled upon the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibit which was really interesting. Sarah in particular recalls the cute stuffed animal monsters.

After Toronto we drove to Burlington where Palak and Meghal's wedding would take place. We got up early and made it on time to the wedding which was lovely. I hadn't attended an Indian wedding previously so it was a new experience for me. During the ceremony the child in front of me kept peeking over her parent's shoulder and staring at me. It lasted all day with a break after lunch during which we drove around and experienced small town Ontario. After the break cousins performed dances for Palak and Meghal and then we all danced the night away until the wee hours.

In Niagra we stayed in a hotel room with a falls view which was lovely. We went on the Maid of the Mist tour that takes tourists right up to the falls in a boat and drenches them. We also went on the Behind the Falls tour which was not as fun. In both we are given rain coats which are essentially glorified plstic trash bags. For dinner we ate in the hotel restaurant which had a lovely view of the falls. At night the falls are lit up in various colors with gigantic lights.niagra wedding personal toronto nontechnical

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

Office Remodel

2007 Jun 11, 4:20My manager has come back this week from a 10 week vacation and paternity leave. In response and similar to other office hacks some dedicated coworkers and I decided to do something to my manager's office.

While gone we knew my manager, Venkat, was getting into meditation. My coworker Vishu had the excellent idea of easing Venkat back into work by making his office better suited for meditation. To start with, we updated his nameplate with an Om.

Next we emptied his office of anything that could distract him from meditation and replaced it with a yoga mat. Of course I left a copy of the specification for the remodel in his office.microsoft personal office humor nontechnical

MoHo Living

2007 May 13, 12:16My parents and grandmother came to visit the weekend before this current weekend, starting Friday May 4th. They arrived via their new motor-home which is quite the machine. Of course its my parents motor-home so its very well decorated inside including drapes and mini-chandelier. I didn't have a memory card for my camera at the time but I'm sure my parents will put up photos on their new blog dedicated to their motor-home at some point in the future.

At any rate, they parked the motor-home in an RV park in Issaquah so that Friday night I drove over to them and we ate at the conveniently closely located Pogachas. The next day they came over and I showed them the various cool looking things my computer connected to my flat screen TV can do. This includes Vista Media Center showing my photos from recent trips and Google Earth mapping out our respective homes and my recent trips (and Paris). Additionally, we played Wii which, unsurprisingly based on anecdotal evidence from varied sources across the Internet, was a seeming hit. Mom broke records playing bowling with my dad and I, Dad did an excellent job fishing, and Grandma's slow but steady win's the race approach to cow racing worked very well.

The next day I drove them to Seattle and we walked around Pike's Place. My parents made dinner that night at my place which was very good and made my apartment actually smell like cooked food. Also, we exchanged Christmas gifts. For the past two years I've flown back to my parents' house for Christmas and ended up with gifts I couldn't take with me in both directions. Those I left at their house they drove up and I was able to give them the ones I left at my place. They started the drive back the next day. I really enjoyed seeing them here.motorhome family personal nontechnical

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.xml 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.resource technical xml msxml res xslt xsl

Trivia

2007 Apr 21, 11:38This previous Wednesday, I went to trivia at the Wilde Rover. Our team consisted of Sarah, myself, Jane, Eric, Rachel, and Ansen. Before the last round we were 16th (out of ~32) but after the final round we were 6th! The previous time Sarah played there the exact same thing happened. Of course you must be in the top five to win money (or last place who gets their money back). You could say, of those who didn't get any money we did the best! I didn't contribute too much except for spotting a street from Paris in the picture round and knowing which generation the Wii is of Nintendo home consoles. Mostly I focused on increasing our bill =)bar game personal trivia nontechnical

Bunny Weekend

2007 Apr 8, 3:46This weekend was fun. Sarah and I went out for Jane's Birthday. We ate at a little Italian restaurant where our group was almost too large for the place and afterwards went to the Viceroy lounge. The website apparently isn't very representative because although I looked at it before going out and I'd been to the place previously, I didn't realize it was the same location until we got there.

I got several games for my Wii through Sarah's connections including Wii Play and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. We played both of them and I thought Find Mii was especially fun.

Sarah's bunny is getting pretty big. Its been biting through wires now includig part way through the power cord to the cable box. You'd think after getting to the copper that it would learn to stop. At any rate, it didn't hide any eggs. I don't have any new photos but you can see the old bunny photos via my Vizicious tool.personal nontechnical seatle wii