Open Clip Art Library

Open Clip Art Library

"This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used.

All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain according to the statement by the Creative Commons. ..."

There are a couple pretty cool things about this collection...

• It’s all public domain
  
• They are using SVG as the standard format (i.e. kiss resizing issues goodbye)
  
• The collection is available as a complete download package.
  The current package, 0.18, is 131MB (zipped, 286MB unziped) and contains both the original svg file, png previews and text file metadata (for a total of 23,698 files).
  
• There’s currently over 6,900 pieces of clip art

Ton-o-Clip Art indeed...

(via Larkware News - The Daily Grind 926)

Technorati Tags: Clipart, Clip art, Openclipart.org

TextBox with Cue/Prompt

The Moth - TextBox with cue banner support for Windows Mobile

"When talking about TextBox with cue banner I thought I had done a good job at the end of the post of hinting that someone should write a pure managed version; a version that is not restricted to Windows Vista, but rather would work on WindowsCE/WindowsMobile devices (via the .NET Compact Framework of course).

Since nobody stepped up, I thought I’d tackle it myself :-). I have to say that what I thought would be a 10 minute job ended up taking 6 times as long and right about now I give up as what I have is good enough and a nice starter for someone else to take and polish, iron out any issues etc.

..."

I thought Daniel’s code to provide cues/prompts to a textbox was pretty cool.

Though he started it was for WinCE/Mobile, I wanted the same feature for my WinXP WinForm apps. In looking at the code, I didn’t see any reason it wouldn’t work...

So this morning, after a little bit of work (mostly due to converting it to VB.Net, the programming language I dream in...) I had a working TextBox control with cue support on WinXP (no reason it shouldn’t work on other Windows platforms either). After a little additional work to add designer SmartTag support and property attributes, I have myself a cool little textbox.

That will add a nice bit usability to my apps.

The next step is to convert it to an Extender so the same functionality can be used across a number of different controls. That I’ll leave for another day...

Now to see if I can get permission to post the code somewhere [long deep "I hate IP issues and contracts" sigh]...

DotLucene 1.9 Final Released

DotLucene News Blog - Lucene.Net 1.9 final

"George Aroush announced final Lucene.Net 1.9 release....

Read the full release notes in his message to lucene-net-user@incubator.apache.org mailing list. The zip download link is updated on the downloads page.

Read also what are the new features of Lucene.Net 1.9. "
While there are tons of fixes and new features in this release, I think just the fact there IS a new release, that this project has really risen from the dead, is the coolest news of all...

Related Past Post XRef:
"DotLucene / Lucene.Net has moved to ASF"
Desktop Search Application: Part 1 [Search Office Doc’s With DotLucene]
Indexing Database Content with dotLucene
DotLucene: Full-Text Search for Your Intranet or Website using 37 Lines of Code
Lucene.Net 1.4.0 Beta build-001
Open Lucene.NET - The Open Source Search Engine
SourceForge.net: Lucene.Net core moved from SF
SourceForge.net: Project Info - Lucene.Net search engine

Technorati Tags: Lucene.Net, DotLucene

Another Shot Fired in the Virtualization Battle, Virtual PC 2004 is Now Free

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004

"Virtual PC Is Now Free!

Whether Microsoft virtualization technology is an important component of your existing infrastructure or you’re just a Virtual PC enthusiast, you can now download Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 absolutely free. Microsoft is also offering the free download of Virtual PC 2007, with support for Windows Vista in 2007.

Download SP1
To get Virtual PC 2004 SP1, download it via the Microsoft Download Center. "

Looks like another shot has been fired in the ongoing virtualization batten between Microsoft, VMWare and Xen.

BTW, don’t let the download name confuse you (as it did me for a second). This download is "Virtual PC 2004 WITH SP1" and not JUST SP1 for Virtual PC 2004 (big difference). The download is the full and complete Virtual PC 2004, with its SP1 slip-streamed in.

(via The Road to Know Where - Microsoft’s Virtual PC Is Now Free!)

Related Past Post XRef:
Virtual Server 2005 R2 - Enterprise Edition - Now Free

Upgrading an Existing Application to use the New Infragistics Application Styling Feature

Infragistics - HOWTO:Upgrading an existing application to use Application Styling

"This article will show how to take an existing NetAdvantage powered Windows Forms application and upgrade it to the 2006 Volume 2 version of NetAdvantage and how to enable support for Application Styling.

Additional Information

New in NetAdvantage 2006 Volume 2 is the support for Application Styling. This is a powerful new framework that allows for a great new way of applying visual themes to all user interface elements through the use of Infragistics Style Libraries. You can think of these as “Skins” for your application. In this article I will walk you through the steps that are needed in order for you to take an existing NetAdvantage equipped Windows Forms application and upgrade it to 2006 Volume 2 and enable Application Styling.
..."

Being an Infragistics NetAdvantage owner (customer, licensee, what ever) I’ve been watching the recent low volume hum relating to their new Application Styling with interest.

Call it skinning or CSS like functionality, I dig the idea of applying design/runtime styling to a WinForm app. Being the UI "look and feel" lamer that I am I can use all the help I can get in providing great looking apps...

MS Windows on the ISS?

I can’t confirm this, but it made me laugh (and sigh) when I read it (it sounds so likely that I’m giving the benefit of the doubt and believing it true)...

Portals & Integration blog - Custom resolutions with RDP

"... While typing this blogpost I am listening / viewing NASA TV and just overheard one of the astronauts saying:

ISS:
’uhhh...Houston, We just rebooted the file server and see a popup:

Service Control Manager : At least one service or driver failed during system startup. Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details”

Houston: “That’s a known problem. It has occurred several times before“ :-D

Guess they use Windows up there as well :-)"

"Regular Expression File Renaming Utility"

INauseous() - Regular Expression File Renaming Utility

"There have been numerous times that I’ve needed the ability to rename a set of files based upon a pattern, something regular expressions could easily take care of if the old DOS rename command, or something built into the Windows OS could do. However, there’s nothing in Windows base set of command utilities that can provide this. I haven’t delved into Windows PowerShell (fka Monad) enough to see if this capability exists already. But, I had a bunch of pictures that I wanted renamed in my library and just needed a utility to do it.

So, I built this utility to help me rename files, by directory, based upon Regular Expression patterns.
..."

This looks like a pretty cool utility (with C# source) that might just come in handy...

FreeImage 3.9 Released

FreeImage - FreeImage 3.9.0 released

"Release 3.9.0 brings two new plugins for SGI and raw FAX G3 formats, better support for HDR images in the rescale function, a new thumbnail generation function, as well as several internal code enhancements. The library has been updated with the new libtiff (3.8.2) and libpng (1.2.12) libraries. FreeImage is also distributed with improved wrappers (VB6/VBA, C++ and Delphi). Lastly, many bugs reported by our users have been fixed (check the changes log for details) and the PDF documentation has been updated."

The "improved wrappers (VB6/VBA, C++ and Delphi)." is what caught my eye...

Related Past Post XRef:
FreeImage VB.NET Code Sample
The FREEIMAGE Project (12/2003)
The FREEIMAGE Project (10/2003)

Wow, I got quoted on BetaNews...

For me, it’s very weird to see my name or blog being quoted somewhere else. I blog because I want a record of "cool things" I find on the Net. The fact that sometimes others also think the same stuff is cool, is just icing on the cake...

I was reading the BetaNews article, "Microsoft’s Private Folder App Criticized". Having posted about it, I was interested to see what others are saying. Then I see my name and a quote of my Private Folder post.

Sooo weird (and kind of cool).

Of course I’m being slammed a little in the comments, but that’s par for the course for having a public blog I guess... (If Blog = public and skin.thick < > true then head.explode() end if    ;)

Sometimes you just have to love the Marines...

Murray Gordon - Good answer to a dumb question

"Katie Couric, while interviewing a Marine sniper, asked:

"What do you feel when you shoot a terrorist?"

The Marine shrugged and replied: "Recoil." "

LOL... Enough said.

Manually Update TFS Warehouse Utility (with C# Source)

Eric Lee - A Humble Blog - Updating the TFS Warehouse

"...The Team Foundation Server Data Warehouse updates itself every couple of hours by default....

However, there are times when you want to update the warehouse on demand. Maybe you’re giving a demonstration, or maybe you’re debugging an adapter you’ve written or maybe you just need the most up to date method.
...
To make this a little easier, I thought I would write a small utility to kick off the run and monitor its status for me. This little utility is shown below:



Once you select the right TFS, press the Update button and the utility should take care of kicking off a run and polling until the warehouse is idle again. I posted the source here ..."

There have been times where this could have come in handy... Plus it’s a cool example of using the TFS API to get the registered servers and calling the TFSWarehouse to get the status and to kick off an update.

Technorati Tags: TFS, Team Foundation Server

sharpBITS.NET - C# 2.0 BITS Wrapper

The Code Project - sharpBITS.NET - wrapper for BITS API

"SharpBITS is a library to wrap the BITS SDK for use with managed code on .NET platform. It was intended and first implemented for a project designed to transfer large files over a slow and instable WAN link. While there are some other options like use of FTP, BITS had some real advantages made it the favorite selection.

As it uses the HTTP/HTTPS protocol to transfer files it’s immune to firewall restrictions. Also it keeps a session (in default setting) for up to 14 days, which gives a reliable file transfer option in this case! The project where SharpBITS was developed on consists of a small command line application, and the separate BITS wrapper library. Even if there are some custom implementations for BITS wrapper available already, also for .NET managed code (see "Wrapping Bits" on MSDN), they are based on older versions of BITS and don’t support some features like authentication, so the decision was to have a new C# based wrapper library.

..."

This looks like a cool BITS wrapper that I might be able to use one day...

Technorati Tags: BITS