Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:
There's no easy way to use local applications on a PC as the result of an accelerator or a search provider in IE8 but there is a hack-y/obvious way, that I'll describe here. Both accelerators and search providers in IE8 fill in URL templates and navigate to the resulting URL when an accelerator or search provider is executed by the user. These URLs are limited in scheme to http and https but those pages may do anything any other webpage may do. If your local application has an ActiveX control you could use that, or (as I will provide examples for) if the local application has registered for an application protocol you can redirect to that URL. In any case, unfortunately this means that you must put a webpage on the Internet in order to get an accelerator or search provider to use a local application.
For examples of the app protocol case, I've created a callto accelerator that uses whatever application is registered for the callto scheme on your system, and a Windows Search search provider that opens Explorer's search with your search query. The callto accelerator navigates to my redirection page with 'callto:' followed by the selected text in the fragment and the redirection page redirects to that callto URL. In the Windows Search search provider case the same thing happens except the fragment contains 'search-ms:query=' followed by the selected text, which starts Windows Search on your system with the selected text as the query. I've looked into app protocols previously.
Inspired by one of Penn's (of Penn & Teller) articles in which he mentions he has his computer tell him what he wrote in his journal that day the previous year, I've wanted to implement a similar thing with my blog. Now that, as I mentioned previously, I've updated my blog such that its much easier to implement search and such, I've added date range filtering to my site's search. So now I can easily see what on Delicious and my blog I was doing last year.
I've also otherwise updated search on this site. You can now quote terms to match an entire string, stick 'tag:' in front of a term to only match that term against tags as opposed to the title and body of the entry as well, and you can stick '-' in front of a term to indicate that it must not be found in the entry.
I've redone my blog's layout to remind myself how terrible CSS is -- err I mean to play
with the more advanced features of CSS 2.1 which are all now available in IE8. As part of the new layout I've included my Delicious links by default but at a smaller size and I've replaced the
navigation list options with Technical, Personal and Everything as I've heard from folks that that would actually be useful. Besides the layout I've also updated the back-end, switching from my
handmade PHP+XSLT+RSS/Atom monster to a slightly less horrible PHP+DB solution. As a result everything should be much much faster including search which, incidentally, is so much easier to
implement outside of XSLT.
On Friday Sarah and I went to the
Mariners vs Rangers game at Safeco Field with Eric and Jane. The Mariners lost but then before the game the announcement made outside the stadium guaranteed the best service and a good time, not a
winning game -- and they were right about the good time.
The night before, we saw The Hangover which was very funny and included Zach Galifianakis who was great. Incidentally, take a look at some of Zach's Between Two Ferns.
Last weekend Sarah and I mounted the TV to the wall which was exciting and we saw a mouse in the house!
I've hooked up the printer/scanner to the Media Center PC since I leave that on all the time anyway so we can have a networked printer. I wanted to hook up the scanner in a somewhat similar fashion but I didn't want to install HP's software (other than the drivers of course). So I've written my own script for scanning in PowerShell that does the following:
Here's the actual code from my scan.ps1 file:
param([Switch] $ShowProgress, [switch] $OpenCompletedResult)
$filePathTemplate = "C:\users\public\pictures\scanned\scan {0} {1}.{2}";
$time = get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d";
[void]([reflection.assembly]::loadfile( "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll"))
$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject WIA.DeviceManager
$device = $deviceManager.DeviceInfos.Item(1).Connect();
foreach ($item in $device.Items) {
$fileIdx = 0;
while (test-path ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"*")) {
[void](++$fileIdx);
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Scanning..." }
$image = $item.Transfer();
$fileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,$image.FileExtension);
$image.SaveFile($fileName);
clear-variable image
if ($ShowProgress) { "Running OCR..." }
$modiDocument = new-object -comobject modi.document;
$modiDocument.Create($fileName);
$modiDocument.OCR();
if ($modiDocument.Images.Count -gt 0) {
$ocrText = $modiDocument.Images.Item(0).Layout.Text.ToString().Trim();
$modiDocument.Close();
clear-variable modiDocument
if (!($ocrText.Equals(""))) {
$fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $fileName
if (!($fileName.EndsWith(".jpg") -or $fileName.EndsWith(".jpeg"))) {
if ($ShowProgress) { "Converting to JPEG..." }
$newFileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"jpg");
$fileAsImage.Save($newFileName, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg);
$fileAsImage.Dispose();
del $fileName;
$fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $newFileName
$fileName = $newFileName
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Saving OCR Text..." }
$property = $fileAsImage.PropertyItems[0];
$property.Id = 40092;
$property.Type = 1;
$property.Value = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($ocrText);
$property.Len = $property.Value.Count;
$fileAsImage.SetPropertyItem($property);
$fileAsImage.Save(($fileName + ".new"));
$fileAsImage.Dispose();
del $fileName;
ren ($fileName + ".new") $fileName
}
}
else {
$modiDocument.Close();
clear-variable modiDocument
}
if ($ShowProgress) { "Done." }
if ($OpenCompletedResult) {
. $fileName;
}
else {
$result = dir $fileName;
$result | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name OCRText -value $ocrText
$result
}
}I ran into a few issues:
I'm excited by HTML5's video tag as are plenty of other people. Once that comes about and once media fragments are adopted, linking to or embedding a portion of a video will be as easy as using the correct fragment on your URL thanks to the Media Fragments WG who has been hard at work since the last time I looked at fragments.
However, until that work is embraced by browsers, embedding portions of videos will continue to require work specific to the site from which you are embedding the video. On the YouTube blog they wrote about how to "link to the best parts in your videos", using a fragment syntax like '#t=1m15s' to start playback of the associated video at 1 minute and 15 seconds. Of course if you want to embed part of a Hulu video it will be different. Although I haven't found an authoritative source describing the URL syntax to use, you can follow Hulu's video guide on linking to part of a video and note how the URL changes as you adjust the slider on the time-line. It looks like their syntax for linking to a Hulu page is to add '?c=[start time in seconds](:[end time in seconds])' with the colon and end time optional in order to link to a portion of a video. And the syntax for embedding appears to be "http://www.hulu.com/embed/.../[start time in seconds](/[end time in seconds])" again with the end time optional.
For more sites, check out the Media Fragments WG's list of existing applications' proprietary fragmenting schemes.
The weekend before the previous, Sarah and I moved our belongings into the
new house and spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, and now we're officially living there (interested Facebook friends can find my
new address or just ask me). The Saturday of the previous weekend Sarah's family came over for a half house warming and half Sarah's birthday celebration which was fun and served to force us to do
more unpacking and forced me to take trips to Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc. On Sunday, Sarah and I went out to her favorite restaurant and she opened her gifts that I had to hide to keep
her from opening before her birthday. Happy Birthday Sarah!
While at Home Depot I had trouble finding what I was actually looking for, but I did find everything I needed to terminate the Cat5e cables that are wired in the house. Each room has a wall plate with two RJ45 sockets, both sockets wired to Cat5e cable. One of the cables per plate was already hooked up to a standard phone service punchdown board and the other cables per plate were all hanging unterminated next to the punchdown board. So now I've terminated them all with RJ45 connectors and hooked them up to my hub, wireless router, cable modem, etc. I had the same sort of fun setting all that up as I did playing with model train sets as a child. Hopefully no therapy will be required to figure out why that is.
I like the idea of QR codes, encoding URLs and placing them
on real world objects, but the QR codes themselves are kind of ugly. To make them less obvious I thought I could spray QR codes on to an object with an infrared reflective paint and shine infrared
light on the QR codes, since most cameras, for instance the camera in my G1 phone, pick up infrared that our eyes do not.
In my search for infrared paint I've found a seller of IR ink (via programming forum) and an Infrared Paint Recipe (via IR FAQ).
In looking for this paint I've found that it comes up a lot in relation to the military for things like paint markers that are visible at night with proper equipment, and paint that absorbs IR light to make vehicles less obvious to night vision goggles. Even though the first reflects infrared light and the second absorbs it websites end up refering to both as infrared paint which made it difficult to search.
Additionally I found links to some other geeky infrared projects:
Checking out at a grocery store to which I rarely go, the cashier asks me if I want an
Albertson's card. I respond sure and she hands me the form on which I give up my personal information. I ask if I need to fill this out now, and she says yeah and it will only take two minutes,
which surprised me because at QFC they just hand me a new card and send me on my way. I fill in my phone number as the first ten digits of pi so I don't have to worry about getting phone calls but
its something I can remember next time I'm there and don't bring the card.
I turn to leave and the cashier asks me is that a '759' or '159' in my phone number. I stop for a second because I only know the digits as a sequence from the start and pause long enough reciting it in my head that its clear its not my phone number. And she calls me out on it: "Is that your real phone number?" I sigh, "No, does it have to be? Are you going to call me?" "Yeah," she says, "I'll call you." (ha ha) "Well I'll try entering this number," she says doubting the computer will accept the fake phone number. "On the number's already registered," she says, "So you already had a card." "No," says the manager who had walked up during for this exchange, "It means someone else used that same number." So the moral of the story is, try your fake phone number before trying to use it to get a new card.
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