Daily Archives: January 28, 2004

Ink Blogging with WebCamNotes – oh *that’s* how he does it

Blink

I was just chatting with Peter Rysavy (TabulaPC and SPOTman) who wanted to know why I had an “out to lunch“ hung on my i.m. status (I was bored with “busy“) and then he was trying to convince me that I just had to have a SPOT watch. I think I replied with something like “see spot run, see julie run from spot”. Just in a silly mood, nothing personal Scott! heehee

So then we got to talking about ink logging again and he had me look at Loren Heiny’s totally groovy WebCamNotes application – well the output from the app. I had looked before and thought “cool” but that was just a quick look. This time, I did a closer look ala “view source” and damn, he’s doing image mapping to make hyperlinks. Totally AWESOME solution. I didn’t think of it. It still doesn’t bring both things together that I dream of – recognized ink (i.e. legible) combined with inky ink and then links too. So if you did a view source on one of the BLInk! posts you will just see html that is text then a gif then some more text. Boring, but legible. I like the image mapping. Neat neat neat. Good thinking Loren!!!

Also he just posted some thoughts about what we are all trying to solve while working on our various blog in ink projects. It’s really quite similar to the thoughts I had while I was trying to think what would make a userful ink blogging tool and then going through the pros and cons of each idea I came up with. But heck, I still never thought of that image mapping!

Whidbey BCL the Easy Way #3: One line File Reading

dotNET

Here is another item that I am putting in my BCL talk. It’s not earth shattering but it’s sure to bring a round of applause! 🙂

I have a presentation I have done a few times on Streaming in .NET Tips and Tricks. Trying to explain the ins and outs of streamreaders and streamwriters, that they are not containers – just transporters, that you use Read to write and Write to read (think about it…). All VERY confusing to non-plumbers. If you are using streaming to open a file up and see it’s contents or create file, you have a lot of concepts to understand and a lot of lines of code. And then don’t forget to close the file stream or is it close the file or …oh god. I better go look at my slides again.

Which is why, even if it is one of the more seemingly pedestrian changes in .NET, File.ReadAll and File.WriteAll are very welcome new methods in the Base Classes.

With this one short line of code:

Dim str as string=File.ReadAll(“c:\mynicefile.txt”)

(and you can do this in C# too and in this.net and that.net cause it’s in the BCL…)

I now have a string filled with the contents of my text file. I don’t even have to instantiate an object. I don’t have to close any resources.

No research, no acrobatics.

One very good point that Kit George makes about this is that it’s intuitive. Certainly you have started by typing “File.” and looked up and down the intellisense list for something that would do this. Well, now it’s there. Thanks guys and gals!

DevDays Speakers Action Items

dotNET

It is amazing the amount of coordination that is going to happen to get the various speakers in 32 different cities all on the same page.

If you are anything like me you get a gazillion emails a day and set some aside to read later. Better not do that with the one you got from the DevDays coordinator. There are some serious action items that need to be attended to pretty quickly. Just thought I’d mention it here in case your email is buried already. It was only yesterday afternoon, but it feels like it was days and days ago already!

 

Norton Anti-Virus users – Intelligent Updater for up to the minute definitions

Tools

Update: Even after doing the intelligent updater, my NAV continued to say that I was only running the 1/18 definitions. I finally checked my activity log and saw that indeed, since I ran the Updater, NAV has been catching “W32.Novarg.A@mm“ which is one of the names of this virus.

I could not figure out why my latest virus definitions kept saying 1/18 even after I manually ran live update. Here’s why!!

LiveUpdate
LiveUpdate is the easiest way to obtain virus definitions. These virus definitions have undergone full quality assurance testing by Symantec Security Response and are posted to the LiveUpdate servers once each week (usually Wednesdays) unless there is a major virus outbreak. This is the easiest option for most home and small business users, and it provides a very high level of protection along with ease of use.

Intelligent Updater
Intelligent Updater virus definitions have undergone full quality assurance testing by Symantec Security Response. They are posted on U.S. business days (Monday through Friday). They must be downloaded from the Symantec Security Response download virus definitions page and installed manually.

Laughable Spam

Just Rambling

This is just too much, but it made me laugh…

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