Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

Something that irritates me with far too frequent regularity is copying and pasting of text in Windows. The reason is that I tend to copyfrom sources that use formatted text, such as web pages, word documents and emails. Programs by default keep the formatting when pasting. It is very rarely the case that I want to keep that formatting though.

MS Office applications have special paste options, but accessing the “paste without formatting” option tends to take far too many mouse clicks. Also Wordpress can be expanded via a plugin to provide a paste as plain text option. To get it to work in Firefox though, one must hack an obscure config file. To get around it, I’ve resorted to leaving Notepad++ open simply so I can paste into there first. This removes the formatting and I can then cut and paste to the true destination. It’s still a faff, but much less so that the previous options.

I have recently discovered a simple, free, application that effortlessly solves the problem. Pure Text sits unobtrusively in system tray and provides a new paste from clipboard option to all applications. By default the keyboard shortcut is Windows-P. Hit that key combination and it pastes the clipboard contents as plain text. Simple.

My only gripe is that it clutters the system tray, rather than being configured from the control panel. It’s a really minor irritation though compared with its usefulness.

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and had a bit of a shock when I visited the admin area of my blog. The old drop-down menus supplied by the Lighter Menus plugin had gone, but the new funky menu down the left hand side didn’t appear. So I had no way of navigating around the admin area.

Luckily the solution was straight forward. I simply visited the URL wp-admin/plugins.php and disabled the lighter menus plugin and the 2.7 menus sprung into life.

I’m really glad therefore that WordPress uses nice simple URLs to navigate around the admin area, rather than fancy cookie-based navigation that some systems use. Anyway, if you use WordPress and are considering upgrading to 2.7, make sure you turn off the lighter menus plugin (assuming you have it installed) before upgrading and you’ll save yourself a bit of hassle.

Demonstrating that the devotion of Apple fan boys to all things Apple, one japanese fanboy has achieved the ultimate in devotion: Apple branded apples.

Apple branded apples

The orchard owner apparently stuck various Apple stickers on his fruit whilst they were still green and unripe. The sun then rippened the fruit, save for the covered bits. When harvested, and the stickers were removed, he had himself a box of fruit bearing the Apple (and iPod) logos:

Box of Apple-branded apples

I guess this proves there really is no limit to the madness of the Apple fanboy…

Since the launch of AIR, Adobe have had a product marketplace for applications written using AIR. In amongst the dozens of twitter clients that clog up its pages, one can occasionally find a real gem of a product. One such application is Balsamiq Mockups.

If like me, you hate creating mock-ups with pen and paper, then normally you are limited to two choices:

1. Use some sort of overly-complex CAD or structured drawing package like Visio
2. Use a paint program like MS Paint or Paint Shop Pro.

Both solutions are far from ideal, and it will often take far longer to create (and modify) the resultant mock-up than it would take to draw it with pen and paper.

Balsamiq Mockups addresses this issue really nicely. I offers an interface that is is simple to use, is geared specifically toward drawing mock-ups, and - as an added bonus - the skins applied to the components makes then look like they were drawn with pen and paper. It only costs $79 a license too.

As an experiment, I downloaded the trial version, ran it and attempted to create a mock-up myself. It is of a AIR-based Google chart generator that I started working on months ago (but haven’t got anywhere with due to other commitments, so don’t hold your breath for it if you think it would be useful).

The total time taken, including installation, learning to navigate around the tool, drawing the mock-up and taking a screen grab of it took about 20 minutes. With a bit of experience, I could easily have created this in just a couple of minutes, far faster than using pen and paper. Yet the resultant drawing is fully editable, unlike a pen and paper version. It really is an easy tool to use and I’ve become an instant fan of it

Vista’s compatibility modes are great in many ways. I use them to run old games, and to work around a problem in Eclipse for example. However, they contain a sneaky little “gotcha” that recently caught me out.

I have recently been involved in work with Vista’s implementation of symbolic links. For reasons best known to Microsoft, they chose to use a feature available in XP - reparse points - to implement symbolic links in Vista, yet didn’t release the reparse point drivers for symbolic links as an update to XP. This means that XP can recognise a symbolic link, but can’t do anything with it. As a result, I ended up with different Java Native Interface (JNI) DLLs for basic Windows file functionality and Symbolic link-specific functionality, and only wanted the latter loaded on a Vista (or Server 2008) machine.

Java provides a means of determining the operating system by calling System.getProperty("os.name"). On a Vista machine, it returns “Windows Vista”, and on an XP machine it returns “Windows XP”. Except that for me, it didn’t. I tried various versions of the JDK and JRE, wrote a test program etc and all to no avail, for my Vista box kept reporting it was Windows XP. At a complete loss, I turned to Stackoverflow and asked there. Someone very quickly pointed out what I was doing wrong: I was running Eclipse in XP compatibility mode, which meant any Java program or test suite launched via Eclipse also ran in XP compatibility mode! I ran Eclipse without it and all my Java code dutifully reported it was running on Vista.

The points here may be obvious to many, but they never really occurred to me. If you run a program in compatibility mode, any program it launches in turn, will also run in compatibility mode. And part of the compatibility mode features involves lying to the program about the operating system it’s running on.

With a demo of forthcoming features and the release of a pre-beta build of Windows 7 to folk lucky enough to attend this year’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC), the internet is awash with reviews. One point of interest is that the internal Windows version number for Windows 7 is still version 6.1 (yes, you did read that right, they really have called v6.1 of Windows, Windows 7. You can read a great article on just how insane the Windows 7 name choice is here).

The version number aside, Windows 7 looks good, and the reviews seem positive. Aspects of Vista that improved upon XP (such as Areo) appear to have been enhanced further. In addition, many of the things that Microsoft got wrong with Vista (such as the truly crap UAC) have been reworked and should be a whole lot better with Windows 7.

Here are some reviews worth reading (IMO of course; feel free to disagree )

Hands-On with a Windows 7 Notebook

Neowin: Introducing Windows 7

ActiveWin: Windows 7 pre-beta review

Gizmodo: Windows 7 Walkthrough, Boot Video and Impressions

At Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) yesterday, Anders Hejlsberg unveiled plans for C# version 4.

One of the key changes is the introduction of a new type called “dynamic”. By declaring a variable of type dynamic, the compiler makes no attempt to resolve any of its members at compile time, instead performing late-binding checks at run time. This feature enables C# to use the DLR, and to use DLR-based Python and Ruby libraries.

Another key change, is the inclusion of named and optional parameters. Default values can now be specified for a method’s parameters, and parameters can be specified in any order in a call by using the parameter := value convention to name the parameters. This, combined with dynamic types, suddenly makes COM invocation a lot simpler. For example, the current mess of “ref missing” parameters will just go away.

There are various other additions, such as covariance and contravariance for generics (which I do not yet fully understand). You can read more details of the changes by downloading the document “New features in C# 4.0”

If you are eager to try out an early CTP of VS2010, with .NET 4  and C# 4, you can download the 7.5Gb virtual PC image from here.

Prior to the start of ReMix this year, Microsoft made a big thing of how attendees would get a year’s Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription free (normal price £670). So just how difficult do you think Microsoft can make giving away that freebie? This difficult:

• Just before the event, they announce that we won’t actually get anything at the event, instead we’ll have to fill out a form and it’ll be posted to us.
• Day 1 of the event and I ask about the form. “That’ll be available tomorrow sir”. Lucky I’m attending both days then…
• Day 2 of the event: AM. On arrival, I’m presented with a flimsy piece of paper that I have to fill out with my details. I head upstairs, grab a coffee, find a seat and fill out the form. I then head back down to hand it in. “Oh no sir; the forms cannot be handed in until this afternoon”.
• Day 2 of the event PM. Head back down after lunch and hand in my now somewhat scrumpled form. How long will it take to send the subscription through? “Up to 28 days sir”. Well clearly Microsoft are just covering themselves. A data entry clerk will be able to process the forms in a few days and I should have the software within a week…
• One week later: nothing.
• Two weeks later: nothing.
• One month later: Wednesday : I get an email with instructions on how to access my subscription online. So I guess I don’t get any DVDs then. I dutifully visit the website, enter the details and get told the details are invalid. I try a few more times. Still invalid.
• I wait until after lunch, and it still doesn’t work. So I track down a customer help number, phone up and explain the problem. The polite lady on the other end - Annette Schulz - taps away on her system, sounds a little puzzled, but assures me it ought to be sorted that afternoon and that she’ll email me when it is.
• The next day I hear nothing.
• Friday: I receive an email from Annette apologising as apparently my subscription hasn’t been put on the system still and so it won’t be fixed until the next week.
• Monday: nothing. I take a look on the ReMix “back network”. Other folk have complained that their subscriptions haven’t arrived yet or that they too have experienced the same glitch as me. So a week of our year’s subscription has expired and we haven’t been able to use it yet. Perhaps tomorrow…

The classic phrase “cannot organise a piss up in a brewery” comes to mind here. Given the millions of licences and subscriptions Microsoft process, just how difficult can this be? Those Adobe Flash and Flex tools sure do look tempting at this point!

UPDATE: Well it took a further week, but Microsoft did finally manage to fix my subscription (along with those  of many others that attended ReMix, who also had the same problem). Of course that wasn’t the end of the saga. The download links on the Expression site do not work with Firefox. They also do not work with IE tab on Firefox. They also do not work with IE, until you have installed a download application. Oh dear. Oh well, I guess that if one is to mess something up, one might as well make a thorough job of it…