Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 08/27/2006

Friday, September 01, 2006

Free Icon's via the Neat Icons Core Set

"Free toolbar icon set. The set consists of the icons that are primarily used by software developers. When creating these icons, the most attention was devoted to a neat design and Microsoft standards compatibility, as well as the metaphor that enables the user to feel comfortable when using the software.

Software developers' needs weren't ignored. Each icon is presented in several states, sizes and formats, which makes it possible to use it in the development of Win32/Win64/NET applications and also in web applications for the Internet and intranet

..."

Because I can always use more free icons...

There are the 30 above icons, broken into normal, hot and disabled states and in 9 different formats & sizes (GIF, BMP, PNG in 16x16, 24x24 & 32x32). For a total of 810 icons...

(via WindowsForms.net - Neat Icons Core Set)

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Los Angeles Disaster Response Wiki (LADRWiki)

LADRWiki (http://www.losangelesdisasterresponse.com) - Welcome message

"Greetings! I am the news director at KNBC, Channel 4 in Los Angeles. The purpose of this wiki is to solicit ideas for better serving the public in the aftermath of our next disaster, natural or otherwise..."

Our big quake is coming. Of that, there is no doubt.

The important thing is to prepare NOW. It's not hard, and not doing it will not keep the quake away... Make it a family project. Or a "Christmas Gift Theme." Or a end of month item. Or a "just cause I want to buy cool disaster stuff" day... Or a church project... Or anything, just as long as you get starting preparing.

Call me weird (believe me, I've been called worse), but that was my gift theme last x-mas... Disaster Preparedness. I bought many of the critical things that you just don't normally buy or think about. Red Cross Thee Day backpacks for all the cars. Boxes of 5 year fresh water and survival food. Portable sanitary systems (including privacy tents), emergency sleeping bags, shade canopy, lots of first aid stuff, extra pet supplies, etc, etc, etc.

You guys know it. You know that we'll be on our own for 3-7+ days after the big quake. You KNOW THIS. So prepare now... (If you do it now, you won't have to worry about it anymore... believe me it's a huge weight off your shoulders).

Sorry, the public service announcement is over (for now)... ;)

(via Metroblogging Los Angeles - KNBC Southland disaster wiki)

"Drop and Forget Dialog Buttons"

The Code Project - Drop and Forget Dialog Buttons

"If you are anything like me, you've been spoiled by Intellisense and want everything to go as quickly as possible when coding. So, when I make dialog boxes (as I am sure you do too), why should I have to set 4-5 things every time I want an OK or Cancel button on a form?

Whenever I drop a button on a form, I inevitably forget one of the following 4 steps (except #3, that one's kind of obvious).

Set the Name to something resembling "OK" or "Cancel" so that it's not just called "button1".
Set the DialogResult to DialogResult.OK or DialogResult.Cancel.
Set the Text to "OK" or "Cancel".
Set the Form's AcceptButton/CancelButton to your new OK/Cancel button (or pressing Enter/ESC won't press OK/Cancel).

I can't tell you how many times I have hit OK or Cancel and then wondered why it didn't do anything. Or the right thing. Or only half of the right thing--the half in the OK button's event handler but not the half in the form's if (dialog.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK) block. It seems like when it comes to OK and Cancel buttons, they should "just work".

Out of completeness, I have added "Yes" and "No" buttons as well, which allows us to do Yes/No and Yes/No/Cancel scenarios as well. I'll leave the useless Abort/Retry/Ignore scenario as a reader exercise.

..."

I dig these kinds of simple time/brain cell saving/I hate re-inventing the wheel projects...

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Vista 5536 (Pre-RC1) Voice Recognition Rocks

The voice recognition in Vista just simply rocks. I'm having the best geek time playing with it, since I installed this Vista build yesterday.

Some background first. I have Vista on an old Thinkpad (T30) which gives me a Vista rating of 1.0, so it's pretty close to bottom of the Vista performance barrel. But it DOES work...

Today I started playing with the Voice Recognition and am very impressed. I'm having the best time playing with all of its features. (My wife is having a good time laughing at me... "But honey look at how cool this is... and if I say this... Wow, check THIS out... Hey, where are you going? You haven't seen it do THIS yet... " LOL )

For example, I just started playing with the Mousegrid feature.

When you say "mousegrid" a 9 square numbered grid is drawn on your screen (think Sudoku grid). You then say the number of the square you are interested in. You now get another 9 square in the area... i.e. you are zooming into the area you are interested in. Once you have it narrowed down you can say "click" or "double click" or "mark" (to select an item so you can then verbally drag it somewhere), etc. (Think Blade Runner and the "picture zooming" scene...)

Meaning that even if an app doesn't directly support voice, or have shortcuts, easily determinable text, etc, you can still use voice recognition to control it. For example, using the mousegrid, you can actually draw an image in MSPaint.

The bitmap below was done completely hands free, from launching the app, to selecting tools and colors, drawing the lines & circles, sizing the text box, entering the text, to the file save and close. Done entirely using Vista's voice recognition. Yeah, it's nothing special to look at, and with a mouse it would have taken 1/100% of the time, but that's not the point. The point is that this was done with voice alone (which is cool in my book)!

Okay, okay... I know I'm getting a little (little?) too excited about this. But it really is "officially cool."

Cool in that my lower end notebook does an okay job handling the recognition. Cool in that I've not even really trained my machine yet (I got about half way through the tutorial/training and just HAD to play with it "in the wild"). Cool that while voice recognition has been around for years now, this technology may be finally be close to truly usable.

Sure it's not perfect and some of its mistakes are pretty funny...

Still I have to say this implementation is pretty darn impressive. Good job guys.

Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Beta) Available for Download

Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Beta)

"Brief Description

Create great video games, more easily for Windows-based PC systems using this first beta of Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express.

Overview

XNA Game Studio Express enables individuals and small teams to more easily create video games using new, optimized cross-platform gaming libraries for Windows and Xbox 360. This beta release targets the development of games for Windows. The final version of XNA Game Studio Express will be available this holiday season and will enable development of games which target Windows and upon purchase of a XNA Creators Club subscription, the Xbox 360 as well. "

I SO want to code my own app's for the 360.

I'm not sure how I feel about paying the $99 bucks annually to actually use the app on the 360, but very capability of cheaply coding my own 360 app/game is officially cool...

This the final push I need to begin coding in C#? We'll see..

(via XNA Diaries - Finally...)

RSS Output via .Net XML Serialization

Scott Van Vliet - RSS in .NET Made Easy with XML Serialization

"...

So I was looking for a real quick way to publish an RSS feed from a Web application I created for a friend and found some great articles and components (RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0.) However, I didn’t find anything that used XML Serialization (specifically) to work with the RSS 2.0 Specification (maybe my Google skills are truly weak today.) I use XmlSerializer religiously, and thought it would be quite trivial to build a set of classes to quickly create and publish an RSS feed. Thus, as any geek would do, I did just that.

...

To create an RSS document, it’s no more difficult than creating and populating a PONO (Plain Ole .NET Object.)

...

To generate the XML for this feed, simply call the ToString() method:

rss.ToString();

..."

That's a pretty cool implementation. A simple strongly typed method to create RSS output (with C# source included) via XML serialization.

I like the PONO approach... ;)

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Marge's Asshole Management Metric

Bob Sutton - Marge's Asshole Management Metric

"...Bill described how Marge uses a four-point system (ranging from 0 to 3) to rate the degree to which a person is acting like an asshole.

Bill told and showed us how, in the middle of a meeting, Marge would sometimes point at someone, and hold up three fingers to communicate that (at least for the moment) he or she was being too nasty and needed to calm down, and how –- because Marge was so well-respected and they all understood the system -- such signals had an instant and powerful effects.

...

In her own words, this is Marge’s scale:

0 = You are a very nice person, and very passive. No one can say a word against you, and would never think to call you an asshole.

1 = You are a normal person who can occasionally assert yourself on an issue you are passionate about, but you handle yourself in a non-confrontational way in nearly all occasions.

2 = You can consistently assert yourself in a non-confrontational way and are occasionally an asshole, but you feel horrible about it afterwards, and you may or may not apologize (but you probably will have to confess your remorse to someone).

3 = You can consistently be an asshole and you either do not recognize this or you simply enjoy it.

..."

LOL. This made me snort-laugh (which I hate). I think I'm going to adopt this metric. It's one metric that seems to make sense... ;)

I believe my work persona is about a 1.9 to 2.3 ... :|
(Those who work with me... um... shut up?.. lol )

This might work with my family too. A safe, non-confrontational way for my wife or son to communicate with me when I'm being a little too "direct" (aka in Command Mode, being Grumpy Greg, etc).

The rest of the post is interesting, make sure you check it out...

(via dzone - Marge's Asshole Management Metric)

Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows is Out

Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

"...This is the Updated for 2006 Version of my Original Tools List and 2005 List, and subsumes all my other lists. ..."

There are few tool lists as good as Scott's. If you're a Windows developer or power user you've got to check his list out.

More than enough things to keep me busy for a day or two ;)

Monday, August 28, 2006

Folder Marker - Folder Icon Explorer Extension - Two Click Folder Icon Changing

FolderMarker

"How many folders do you have on your computer? Scores of them? Hundreds? Thousands? Are all of them are alike: yellow folder, yellow folder, yellow folder, yellow folder... It's so easy to be confused with such a routine!

Folder Marker is your small assistant, an ardent fighter for your convenience and comfort in any kind of computer work. Use Folder Marker to mark your folders. One mouse-click and it becomes clear at once, which documents have a high priority, and which of them have normal or low priority. Which operations are finished completely, which are half-done and which haven't started yet.

...

And what's more - Folder Marker is FREE!"

I like using custom Explorer folder icons to highlight specific types of folders (folder's with checkmarks are source code trees, etc).

But I've been doing it manually, editing the desktop.ini. Yeah, I know, lame-o ;)

Then today I saw FolderMarker... Not only does it look easy to use, but it's free too.

Downloaded and installed. Let the folder icon'ing commence!

(via Brenton House - Folder Marker )

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Free Continuous Integration tool for Team Foundation Server

Notion Solutions Announces Continuous Integration Tool

"IRVING, TX — August 25, 2006 — Notion Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System and Microsoft Team Foundation Server training and consulting, has made available for free their Team Foundation Server Continuous Integration Solution at TeamSystemRocks.com. “TeamCI”, which is the name of their product, is meant to help teams easily automate their software builds by providing an interface where users can configure the behavior of their “Team Builds”.

Because “Team Build”, Team Foundation Server’s Build Server, does not include any out-of-the-box mechanism to automatically start a build when a user checks files into the Source Control System, users have to manually start those builds on a regular basis. TeamCI makes this cumbersome task as easy as it can be, with a user interface that helps users quickly configure which builds execute and enables them to execute builds based on the path in the Source Control repository to which files are being checked in. What that means is that it is “smart” enough to sequentially launch one or more Team Builds based on the location of the file(s) being checked-in.

..."

Sounds pretty cool...

When I get back into TFS mode, I'm going to have to check this out.

Download: http://teamsystemrocks.com/files/12/tools/entry1018.aspx
Forum: http://teamsystemrocks.com/forums/70/ShowForum.aspx

(via Team System Rocks - Notion Solutions announces a free TFS)