archive page 8 - Dave's Blog

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.archive personal res cache resource ie7 technical browser whois 404 error extension

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

Chicken Roundup

2007 Jul 11, 3:52I realized that I have short list of chicken related things I find humorous and they're all available for the linking to via youtube.

Chicken: The Powerpoint Presentation. This is a power point presentation of a research paper written in the language chicken. (video)

Bluth Family Chicken Dances. From the show Arrested Development many Bluth family members had their own chicken dance. (video)

Peter Fights the Giant Chicken. A man sized chicken fights Peter from Family Guy for multiple minutes in several episodes mimicking famous action sequences. I must admire the writers dedication to the gag. (video1, video2)

roundup video personal chicken humor nontechnical

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

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

My New IE Blog Entry

2006 Dec 6, 6:18I got another blog entry on the IE Blog! I wrote about file URIs in IE. Lots of fun right? Woo for file URIs! I added the post to del.icio.us and saw that it had already been added 6 times previous. This compared to my previous IE Blog post which was added to del.icio.us a total of 1 time(s) by y.t. I guess people are more interested in blog posts that have 'URI' in the title than they are about blog posts whose title references Dijkstra. Coming soon (or later) to the IE Blog: a post on international mailto URIs. Hooray!blog ie7 file uri delicious