I switched over to Graffiti on Saturday and also took on creating my own theme for the site. I did this with Community Server and it was quite difficult. I spent over a week with it and I came up with a terrible theme. But I entered it into the theme contest at Telligent and won a free CS license. There were less than 10 entries which probably shows how difficult it is to come up with a theme for CS.

I was a bit worried I would have the same problem with Graffiti. It started out badly...I searched for documentation and found the same thing as with CS: what little documentation for Graffiti is out there is really awful. In fact, when you go to the Graffiti site, much of the documentation you have to search for. But when you are new to a topic, you don't know what to search for. Also, the little bit of documentation out there only explains how to do something, not necessarily why you want to do it.

Anyway, I plugged away and by late Sunday night, I have something that I actually really like. I am not a fan of the bright and colorful sites out there but I also hate seeing the more boring plain text sites. So I wanted something a bit in the middle. I feel that there is enough interesting style to this layout without being too gaudy.

I still have some tweaking to do but the majority of it is there. Tomorrow is a holiday here in the Netherlands, but I will really try hard to get outside into the gorgeous weather...perhaps out for a nice drive... Oh well, time for bed now.

UPDATE: oops, no ability to post comments, back to one of the default themes

UPDATE 2: OK, now I have enabled comments in GTech.

I have this love/hate relationship with this blog. I love having posted to it, but I hate posting to it. Having a poorly performing and poorly laid out site only added to the hate side of that relationship. So I switched the site just now from Community Server to Graffiti. Been playing around with Graffiti themes today and hope to have something interesting here soon.

I just finished my class in Dubai and a student asked about SMTP integration. My throat was shot and I was barely able to think straight, so I didn't have an answer for him. But after I had a chance to recover, I tried it out and came up with this little screencast on the problem. Its very easy as you can see here. By the way, this video is now hosted on YouTube, Google Video, and Revver. Revver is by far the best of these because I can actually see what I am doing.

Twitter is a great tool for me and I like being able to post, but sometimes I wish it were more convenient to do so. Sure there are plenty of apps and widgets, but I wanted something that would let me post from a command line. Not an interactive app, just type and go. I didn't see anything for it, so I ventured off on my own.

First, I saw that Twitteroo had a .NET library for Twitter. So I built my client with that. After a while I realized that Twitteroo does a lot more than I need, so with the aid of Reflector, I found just the lines that I needed, and copied and pasted into my own code.

Now I can type contwit "This is a status update" and "This is a status update" will show up on my Twitter account. So how did it know who I am? Well, if you just type contwit with no parameters, it asks you for a username and password. These are stored in an encrypted string in a configuration file in the same directory as the executable.

Now, that's pretty cool and all, but it still didn't make it much easier to use. Enter Dash. Dash is the App Launcher I use. I just type <WIN>-<-> and a little window pops up. I can then type what I want to launch and it launches it. I don't even have to type the whole command because it autocompletes. Visit the site. It works really well.

So with Dash, I end up typing <WIN>-<->tw<TAB>this is my status update<ENTER> and I am done. But my app is a console app and I hate having the console window pop up. Sure, I could write the app as a windowless Windows app, but I am lazy. So to cure this I use HStart from NTWind. This is a great tool that launches any command line app from a hidden window. The options are a bit confusing so here is my Dash command line:

Path: hstart
Arguments: /NOCONSOLE ""C:\Program Files\contwit\Contwit.exe" "*ALL*""

Note the double quotes, those are important.

If you want the app I wrote, here it is: CONTWIT. Enjoy.

Although it wasn't supposed to be hooked up until next week, I tried my internet connection today...woohoo...it worked!!! Its lower than the advertised speed, but I am still getting 10 Mb/s....awesome.

At work, I have a subscription to Books24x7 which is an online library of technical and business books. Its like that other service from OReilly, but my work uses this instead. When I am browsing through books on the site, its kind of annoying having all the buttons that normally show in Firefox or IE. Then I found out about Prism from Mozilla. Its not brain-dead easy to set up, but its also not too difficult. Just install Prism, then create a configuration file, zip it up, rename the file, and run it.

So let me go through this in a bit more detail. First I installed the application. Just follow the prompts. Now create a configuration file called webapp.ini. The contents should be something like:

[Parameters]
id=Books@technovangelist.com.PRISM
uri=http://skillport.books24x7.com/bookshelf.asp
status=yes
location=no
sidebar=no
navigation=yes

Now zip up the file to something with a webapp extension. Since mine is for Books24x7, I called it books24.webapp. Now double-click on it and it opens a window that goes straight to the site, no extra buttons. Thats great, but the size of the window was wrong. So I added one file to the zip file and called it webapp.js. The contents of the file are here:

function resize()
  {
    window.resizeTo(850,1000);
  };
window.onresize=resize;
resize();

This is just some simple javascript that resizes the window. Now I have exactly what I wanted. When reading a book online, this helps make it as easy as possible to read without getting distracted.

This is a note for me so that I don't have to search too hard next time. When I build VMs I usually like to be completely disconnected and never connect to the internet. But then things like IE7 force me to connect at least once so that it can go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=74005 at least one time. I hate that. To solve the problem add two DWORD values to the registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main: RunOnceHasShown and RunOnceComplete. The values should be set to 1. Ahhhh

UPDATE: After switching to Graffiti, I don't have this anymore. Will come up with something else soon.

Earlier today I saw Nikhil Kothari had implemented a cool slide show on his site. It was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately I spent the last 8 hours trying to figure out how to implement it. Some of that time was wasted on a stupid error...grrr....a few more hours on getting it to work on CS. Anyway, check out the galleries and let me know what you think. I will write up a post on how I implemented it in the next couple of days. I also have to solve the wierd 4001 error thats coming up...oh and post some photos...

About a week ago I listed a bunch of things I wanted to do over my vacation. One of them was to write up my thoughts about some great tools out there that I just can't live without. But I realised that I need to write those up pretty soon because while I couldn't live without them while working, I can live without them all just fine while sitting on my ass and doing nothing.

So just after telling you about a service I couldn't use because my phone is so awful, I thought I would tell you about a service anyone can use even if they have a terrible phone. And as my title said, I would have died a few times without it. The service is SpinVox Memo and its free!!! Well...not quite free...but it costs whatever the phone call costs. For those of us on an unlimited plan or who never see their phone bills, its pretty close to free.

Now you may be wondering how a free phone service saves me from death...repeatedly. Let me describe the scenario. Every day that I am not traveling, I drive down from my home to our offices in Vianen. For those of you not familiar with the Netherlands, that's a 50 km (30 miles) drive that takes anywhere from 35 to 120 minutes depending on traffic. If I commuted the other way, make that a 60-180 minute drive, but thankfully I am not insane. On that drive I keep myself busy by listening to the latest NYTimes from Audible, or watch the other stupid people crash. It's mayhem out here. But every now and then a thought goes through my head that I need to address later that day. If I don't, bad things could happen. Before SpinVox, I would simply forget about them until that bad thing happened, then run around at the last minute to get it done. Now I simply press a single speed dial button on my phone, say what I want to remember, and hang up. By the time I arrive at work (but usually within a couple of minutes) I have received an email from SpinVox with the text of what I said. It feels like magic.

Well, not quite like magic. It would be great if it worked like that all the time but its often a little bit off. The message I get is usually an approximation of what I said, so I have to act on them right away otherwise I will have no idea what I was thinking. There better not be any other voices or the text is really bad. So usually, I pause the Times, and speak on my phone using my bluetooth headset (an NX6000). I speak slowly and clearly. If I do all of that, it gets 80-90% of what I actually said. And I make sure I don't say much because the longer I talk, the less it actually gets.

Despite all those faults, it does a really good job overall. By the time I get to work, I have 4 or 5 SpinVox emails waiting for me and I convert them to tasks in Outlook first thing. I wish it would do a bit more though. I think they have other services, but their website is a bit confusing so I am sticking with just Memo for now. Jott seems to have a more complete service and their site does a great job of explaining what they do, but its only available in the US (OK, Canada too, but they're the 51st state). SpinVox wins out because they don't have such a lame limitation.

Every day that I drive down to work I use SpinVox and I am positive that it has saved my life more than a few times already. Give it a try and let me know what you think...

I have a craptacular phone. It really sucks. What is it??? Its a Blackberry!!! I hate it. Sure I can fancy it up with some themes, but its still the same crap phone it was before. To be specific, its a 8700g and the carrier is KPN in the Netherlands. But then I have had a lot of crappy phones. There was one exception...the Audiovox 5600. That was the best phone I ever used. It always worked, apart from that time I crushed it in the car door. But it never hung, which is something the Blackberry likes to do...often. Ugghhh....

So there is a reason I am going off on this phone again. Today I stumbled on a cool service called Qipit. If you had a normal, less crappy phone with a camera, you could take a picture of a whiteboard or a document, and Qipit sends you a PDF version of it. No idea if its just a PDF wrapper around the image or if its a searchable PDF, but it apparently cleans up the image first. If it does OCR it and make it searchable, it would be interesting if it supports other languages beyond English.

Anyway, they also go a step further. They also allow you to specify an email address or fax number in the message you send to Qipit and it will then get sent on to the intended recipient. That is way cool!!! Now of course its not managed by your company so there is no way for them to figure out how many faxes have been sent from their employees, but for personal use, its fantastic.

PS. I found out about this from the TravelGearBlog.