slimCODE commUNITY

This morning, my Google alerts pointed me to this page, a Russian web site talking about a product called SLIMCODE. Google Translate tells me it's a box of capsules for a weight loss program. I'm fine with that. It's normal, on this planet, to have some name collisions, as long as the domains of business are different.

Where it hurts a little is the logo on that box:

"SLIM" is in a normal weight, "CODE" is in bold and uppercase. The only difference with my logo is "slim" in lowercase for mine. But the concept of "slim" versus "bold" is the same.

But don't worry. I may look mad, but I'm laughing about this. I'm sure the person who made that logo had no idea a software company existed with that name and similar logo, right? Right? Am I naïve?

At least I'm complaining about something more obvious than Apple vs GreeNYC!

I bought myself a nice gadget lately; an HTC P4000 mobile phone. While everybody is getting all excited (for good reasons, I admit) about the iPhone SDK, I decided to stick with Windows Mobile, a platform I was used to (both using and developing for).

My phone has both a touch screen and sliding keyboard, two features that were important for me. I'm eager to try Opera Mobile 9.5, probably the closest thing to Safari on the iPhone, even though my device isn't multi-touch.

I had to move to a monthly plan with a 3 year contract in order to get a rebate on the phone, but didn't go for the full rebate and data plan. Instead, I paid the phone a little more, but I have the smallest available plan, without a data plan. For the moment, that's enough for me, as I have Wifi access everywhere I need.

The one single thing that kept bugging me, though, is that every time I ran an application that tried a network connection while Wifi wasn't available, a data connection was established. Without a plan, it would cost me 15$ a meg! Though I was always quick enough to click the Cancel button on the connection notification, it scared me. So I walked through the registry and found this key:

HKLM\Comm\ConnMgr\Providers\{7c4b7a38-5ff7-4bc1-80f6-5da7870bb1aa}\Connections\CDMA1X\Enabled

As expected, it was "1" by default. I changed it to "0", rebooted, and voilà!!! No more data connection in my way. Wifi or nothing, just what I needed.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an application for Windows Mobile to work on. Can you guess what it is? slimKEYS Mobile anyone? If you already have suggestions, shoot!

My very good friend Pascal Bourque is one of the lucky 5 nominees for the MSDN Canada Code Awards 2008, for his key role in the creation of the Xceed DataGrid for WPF. I often compare Pascal's technical skills with Scott Guthrie, who I happen to admire a lot too.

The five nominations were made by Microsoft members upon submission, but one of those five developers will win the grand price, and this will be decided by popular votes. If you are an Xceed DataGrid for WPF fan, or any of the following products, I encourage you to go vote for Pascal, since he played a key role in designing and developing those products over the last 10 years at Xceed.

• Xceed Zip
• Xceed Backup
• Xceed Winsock
• Xceed FTP
• Xceed Zip for .NET
• Xceed Grid for .NET
• Xceed Docking Windows for .NET
• Xceed DataGrid for .NET

Congratulations Pascal! You deserve the spotlights!

I just did something really stupid. I don't know where my mind was. I have to say I'm loaded with work because I accepted two contracts, and I'm a part-time daddy at home since my son is only attending kindergarten 3 mornings a week. I even had to postpone some promises.

I was in my office and heard a "pshit" sound. It took me a fraction of a second to realize what it was, much faster than the actual mistake that led to this sound. Yesterday evening, I put non-rechargeable batteries in the charger! Thank God nothing bad happened in the night. I threw the batteries away, but I'll try to recover the charger. It doesn't look damaged, I only had to wipe the liquid.

Should I interpret this event as a signal?

...

Nah, too much work to do.

I'm beta testing Windows Live OneCare 2, and this morning, the automatic update failed, with a message redirecting me to this web page:

Hello? Who's telling me this? A web page!!! If you decide to move your help and documentation online, at least tell your technical writers about it!

A few weeks ago, for the release of slimKEYS version 1.1.0 (which quickly became v1.1.1), I decided to try submit-everywhere.com, to see if it could drive some more traffic. Before submitting, you must provide your existing download site credentials, or opt-out of their service for particular sites. I only had one account I wanted to handle myself, which was download.com.

Once their submission process was rolling, they contacted me about not having my FileForum.BetaNews.com credentials, since they saw the previous version was already visible and well documented. Well, I don't have those credentials. I never had. But FileForum has always displayed my latest version, diligently, accurately, without myself having to lift a finger. My initial release of 0.9.5 quickly showed up there, after I submitted my software to neowin.net.

Thursday, I rolled out a new build of slimKEYS v1.1.2, addressing a few bugs and limitations, but forgot to update the PAD file on my server. This morning, while looking at my referrer logs, I saw the usual FileForum entry for slimKEYS, and followed the link, and got a very pleasant surprise: version 1.1.2 was already displayed, with the correct list of changes. How do they do this? Are they monitoring specific web pages? Or the download section RSS feed?

Anyway, FileForum, I give you 5/5!

As for download.com... well... I'm still waiting for them to show version 1.1.1. The submission is so painful I never updated it since v1.0.3. Their estimated publish date says September 22nd! I decided not to wait, and pushed v1.1.2. This will delay my submission even more. In French, we say "tant pis pour eux". I can't find a correct English translation, but it's a polite way to say "screw them"!

I was looking for a free and simple application to convert icon files containing multiple resolutions, to multiple PNG files. I'm sure there must be such an application out there, but the few I checked were too complicated for my needs. I did what too many programmers do: I reinvented the wheel. Turns out it was very simple. I did a minimally featured console application, who's code looks like this:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Text;

namespace ConvertIcons
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main( string[] arguments )
    {
      try
      {
        if( arguments.Length == 0 )
          throw new ArgumentException( "No icon filename provided." );

        // Default values
        int minSize = 1;
        int maxSize = 256;
        int stepSize = 1;
        string filename = null;

        foreach( string argument in arguments )
        {
          if( argument.StartsWith( "-min", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase ) )
          {
            if( !int.TryParse( argument.Substring( 2 ), out minSize ) )
              throw new ArgumentException( "Invalid minimum size argument." );

            if( ( minSize < 1 ) || ( minSize > 512 ) )
              throw new ArgumentException( "The minimum size must be a value from 1 to 512." );
          }
          else if( argument.StartsWith( "-max", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase ) )
          {
            if( !int.TryParse( argument.Substring( 2 ), out maxSize ) )
              throw new ArgumentException( "Invalid maximum size argument." );

            if( ( maxSize < 1 ) || ( maxSize > 512 ) )
              throw new ArgumentException( "The maximum size must be a value from 1 to 512." );
          }
          else if( argument.StartsWith( "-step", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase ) )
          {
            if( !int.TryParse( argument.Substring( 2 ), out stepSize ) )
              throw new ArgumentException( "Invalid step size argument." );

            if( ( stepSize < 1 ) || ( stepSize > 512 ) )
              throw new ArgumentException( "The step size must be a value from 1 to the maximum size." );
          }
          else
          {
            if( filename != null )
              throw new ArgumentException( "Too many parameters." );

            filename = argument;
          }
        }

        if( minSize > maxSize )
          throw new ArgumentException( "The minimum size cannot be greater than the maximum size." );

        if( filename == null )
          throw new ArgumentException( "No icon filename provided." );

        Program.GenerateImages( minSize, maxSize, stepSize, filename );
      }
      catch( ArgumentException except )
      {
        Console.WriteLine( except.Message );
        Program.DisplayUsage();
      }
      catch( Exception except )
      {
        Console.WriteLine( except.Message );
      }
    }

    private static void DisplayUsage()
    {
      Console.WriteLine( "ConvertIcons [-min###] [-max###] [-step###] icon_filename" );
      Console.WriteLine( "  where -min indicates the minimum image size to generate (default = 1)" );
      Console.WriteLine( "        -max indicates the maximum image size to generate (default = 256)" );
      Console.WriteLine( "        -step indicates the step of each size to generate (default = 1)" );
      Console.WriteLine();
      Console.WriteLine( "This application extracts multiple icons from a single icon file, and generates multiple PNG files." );
      Console.WriteLine();
      Console.WriteLine( "For example, to extract the 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 icons from file 'foo.ico', use:" );
      Console.WriteLine( "ConvertIcons -min16 -max48 -step16 foo.ico" );
      Console.WriteLine();
      Console.WriteLine( "This will generate files foo16.png, foo32.png and foo48.png, if those resolutions are found." );
    }

    private static void GenerateImages( int minSize, int maxSize, int stepSize, string filename )
    {
      string baseFilename = System.IO.Path.Combine(
        System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName( filename ),
        System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension( filename ) );

      for( int size = minSize; size <= maxSize; size += stepSize )
      {
        try
        {
          Icon icon = new Icon( filename, new Size( size, size ) );

          if( ( icon.Width == size ) && ( icon.Height == size ) )
          {
            Bitmap bitmap = icon.ToBitmap();
            string newFilename = baseFilename + size.ToString() + ".png";

            bitmap.Save( newFilename );

            Console.WriteLine( "Generated {0}x{0} image named {1}", size, newFilename );
          }
        }
        catch( Exception except )
        {
          Console.WriteLine( "Error generating {0}x{0} image: {1}", size, except.Message );
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Should I build a binary?

I've been a FireFox user since version 0.8 or something. What drove me to FireFox was add-ins. The huge amount of tools I could add was calling me, and the tabbed interface was for me a great advance.

It wasn't speed. Back then, browsers were fast enough, maybe because web pages were lean enough. I don't know if it's really page sizes that is now killing me, but web surfing is painful, both in FireFox and Internet Explorer 7. I used both equally as my default browser on Vista since February, and they really feel sluggish. The worse part is opening a new instance. I don't keep my browser open. Why would I? Tabs are fun, but if you're done with all pages, why keep the browser open? It's only one more useless icon to go through when you switch between applications.

In the past 4 years, I've been trying Opera from time to time, without committing to setting it as my default browser. Every time, it felt much faster, much better for browsing. But the same problem kept killing its chances: where are my add-ons? So it usually got uninstalled after a few days. Thanks Opera for the great browser implementation, but no thanks.

Today, mark the date, September 25th 2007, I'm giving Opera a real chance. It will be my default browser for at least a month. At the end of October, I'll share with you my thoughts about it. I've added the del.icio.us buttons, which don't work like I would them to work, and the developer buttons, which gives me only a percent of what the FireFox Web Developer toolbar had. I'll search for better tools, but will live with those in the meantime. But this time, speed has become more important than tools.