Gordon’s Place

Another one of those execuses for not working – geotagging my flickr pictures –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gordonrobertson/map?map_type=sat

I can’t mention any specifics ‘cause I haven’t checked with the clients whether they would mind or not, but there’s just been an advert on the TV for a web app which I developed the HTML front end for. It was a while ago and the system has moved on a fair bit since, so I can’t claim much credit for it, but it was cool to see an ad for a system I had some small part in. The best bit was that the ad break in question was at half-time during a world-cup match, so the ads on either side featured Pele and Roberto Carlos.

My favourite thing about the new PSDN site – it’s got an RSS feed of all the new documents posted in the library.

Since I knocked up that search plugin for IE, I’ve been thinking a bit about search / the internet in general. Well, actually I’ve been thinking about wikipedia specifically. These days I’m using wikipedia all the time. It’s become my default search engine. If I’m looking for information, then most of the time, wikipedia will have it for me with just one quick search. It’s way better than trying to find information using google, and it’s the only search engine I ever use on my phone. Just in the last few hours, I’ve used it as a sports site – to get a list of the strikers playing in the world cup for the office sweep, a travel guide – to read about North Berwick where we’re spending the weekend – and as a movie guide – to answer a question about Lost.

I know there are problems with the accuracy of information, and I’m sure that as usage continues to increase, spam will become much more of a problem than it is now, but I’m starting to think that it won’t be another search engine which will steal the google crown…. wikipedia is the internet.

I’ve downloaded the lastest, open beta of IE 7 to mess around with and it seems that the IE team have learned a thing or two from Firefox’s success. In particular, they’ve developed a remarkably familiar looking search box at the top of the screen, next to the address box. I use that box a lot in Firefox, so much so that I’ve hacked up some simple plug-ins to extend the choice of engines, including plugins for searching the PEG.

Well, it turns out that the IE7 version is extensible too, although naturally they use a different “standard” format the the Firefox “standard” format. So I’ve knocked up a bunch of similar plugins for the IE 7 search box. Click on the following links to install whichever plugin(s) takes your fancy.

Install search plugin for the main PEG archive

Install search plugin for the PEG API archive

Install search plugin for the PEG DBA archive

Install search plugin for the PEG Webspeed archive

Supposed to be working on some of my home projectes today, so needless to say I’m busy doing anything I can to avoid working. This is pretty neat, though. Throw one of your photos at The Rasterbator, tell it how big you want your poster and you get back a PDF which is guaranteed to finish off your black ink cartridge.

It turns out that you can subscribe to iCal feeds in Outlook. All you need is Remote Calendar from SoureForge ( and probably this and this from Microsoft ) and you’ll be able to setup a subscription from Outlook. If you have the calendar download into your main Outlook calendar, then it will also end up getting synched onto your PDA / phone.

Two hours of messing about and installing software, just so I could subscribe to the World Cup TV Schedule

There are three novels sitting on my desk, all newly arrived from Amazon. I couldn’t work out which one to start on first ( kid in the sweet shop syndrome ), so I read the first sentence of each. Which do you fancy? The first one hooked me.

Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers froma sitting position, and then rising to his feet.

Clare: It’s hard being left behind.

Shadow had done three years in prison.

Been messing about with the new google calendar, just to see what the fuss was about. The one thing that grabbed me almost immediately as one of those simple, but brilliant design ideas was the “Next 4 Days” view. Most calendar apps I’ve used have the option of single, working week, full week and month views and I’m always flicking back and forth between the five day and seven day views to get some detail on what I’m supposed to remember. Particularly on Thursdays and Fridays. This simple tweak does away with all of that view switching at a stroke. Great design.

And the downside – modal dialog boxes. Still! Even worse, they’ve tried hard to make it modal.

I’ve been meaning wrap this up and post it for a while, so here goes. It’s a very simple window which will let you capture a signature using the MS Tablet PC SDK. This code should run on any tablet PC, but you can also run it on a plain XP machine as long as you download and install the Tablet PC SDK first. In the later case you should be able to use your mouse / graphics tablet to “sign” in the box.

The actual ink itself is quite compact and could easily be stored in a database, you probably wouldn’t even need to use BLOBs / CLOBs. The InkPicture control itelf can have a background image loaded, so as well as the classic signature capture application, it’d be really useful for any kind of annotation / handwritten form.

Anyway, here’s the code ( in a zip file ). Hope someone finds it useful. If you’re interested in running Progress on a Tablet, you should check out the SDK. This code is just a very simple example, there’s a lot more to the SDK.