cat page 8 - Dave's Blog

I've made GeolocMock. If your PC has no geolocation devices, IE9 uses a webservice to determine your location. GeolocMock uses FiddlerCore to intercept the response from the webservice and allows the user to replace the location in the response with another. This was a fun weekend project in order to play with FiddlerCore, the W3C Geoloc APIs in IE9, hosting the IE9 WebOC in a .NET app, and the Bing Maps APIs.

Max Tannone does awesome remix albums:

• Jaydiohead - Radiohead & Jay-Z mashup. Listen:
  Jaydiohead - 06 - Dirt Off Your Android by Max Tannone


• Selene - Richard Rich & beats over the Moon soundtrack. Listen:
  Selene - 01 - You Are Here by Max Tannone


• Double Check Your Head - Beastie Boys albums mixed together. Listen:
  Beastie Boys - 02 - Pass The Gratitude by Max Tannone
  

Also, the movie Moon is really good on a variety of points. Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey! Its available on Netflix Watch Instantly so you have no excuse!

I just found out that I like the group Ratatat. I'd first heard them way back when the Zune was first released as the backing for Los Corazones on the zune-arts.net website.




But I didn't know who they were until today when I watched this Filmography 2010 video (via Kottke)



Until about 1:16 in, the music is Ratatat's Nostrand. On the first viewing it drove me crazy because I could only vaguely recall hearing something like that music before. I tracked it down via the zune-arts thing above and eventually found my way to the Nostrand video. Funny, all the recent comments on that one are from people who also just watched the Filmography video.

I've made two simple command line tools related to the console window and Win7 jump lists. The source is available for both but neither is much more than the sort of samples you'd find on MSDN =).

• SetAppUserModelId
• SetJumpList

SetAppUserModelId lets you change the Application User Model ID for the current console window. The AppUserModelId is the value Win7 uses to group together icons on the task bar and is what the task bar's jump lists are associated with. The tool lets you change that as well as the icon and name that appear in the task bar for the window, and the command to launch if the user attempts to re-launch the application from its task bar icon.

SetJumpList lets you set the jump list associated with a particular AppUserModelId. You pass the AppUserModelId as the only parameter and then in its standard input you give it lines specifying items that should appear in the jump list and what to execute when those items are picked.

I put these together to make my build environment easier to deal with at work. I have to deal with multiple enlistments in many different branches and so I wrote a simple script around these two tools to group my build windows by branch name in the task bar, and to add the history of commands I've used to launch the build environment console windows to the jump list of each.

I previously described my desire to hook my Outlook calendar up to my Google calendar. I just found out that I can do this and the reverse as both support publishing calendars to the Internet. The following are how I set this up under Outlook 2010 and Google Calendar:

In Outlook, I go to the calendar view, right click on my calendar and select "Share Publish to Office.com". At this point I can change the permissions to allow anonymous Internet access, and under Detail change between 'Full details' (full calendar), 'Limited details' (subject lines & availability only), 'Availability only'. Availability only is almost just what I want -- I'd also like to include location but availability only is good enough. After hitting OK here I get a 'Do you want to send an invitation...' dialog box. I hit 'Yes' and I can copy the webcals:// URL out of the email window that opens up. Next, to add it to my Google calendar, I open http://www.google.com/calendar/, and under 'Other calendars', I select 'Add Add by URL', paste in that webcals:// URL but change the 'webcals' at the start to 'https'.

In Google Calendar, I can click on my calendar name under 'My calendars', select 'Calendar settings', and on the new page, look under 'Calendar Address', click the ICAL icon, and copy the URL in the new dialog. Now back in Outlook I go to the Calendar view, right click on 'My Calendars', and select 'Add Calendar From Internet...'. In the new dialog that pops up I paste in the URL from Google Calendar.

In this fashion I can share public calendar data between my personal and work calendars.

I just finished watching both seasons of this very funny and engaging TV series Id previously never heard of and I highly recommend it. Adam Scott stars as an actor who has given up on his dream of acting and joins a catering company working along side actors trying to make it in LA. There are many ties to Veronica Mars: the shows creator is Rob Thomas (the creator of Veronica Mars), the show features Ken Marino and Ryan Hansen, and has guest stars of Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, and Enrico Colantoni, among others. It has many of the same talented people from Veronica Mars but Party Down is more like a smarter and funnier The Office given the relationship between Adam Scott and Lizzy Caplan and their subtle mockery of their wackier workmates and inept boss.