Wow, it looks like I have come back to where I started. My first real job (second if you count the camera shop on Key Biscayne I worked in during High School, third if you count my Islander News paper route) was in Tech Support for PC Docs in Tallahassee, Florida. Soon after I left the company to move to New York City, they got bought out by Hummingbird. Then Hummingbird got bought  by Open Text. Since then I have spent time working for small companies and big ones (Microsoft) and now Captaris. Then today Open Text announced that they are acquiring Captaris. So I am back where I began...bizarre!

I was just catching up on reading some feeds and noticed both Owen Allen and Harry Pierson talking about the death of Robert Satterwhite. I am completely shocked about this. I think I had last seen Robert a couple of years ago, but I talked to him on the phone several times since, after I had moved to Amsterdam and left Microsoft. Harry mentioned that he had worked with Robert on the NAT team. I was the Technology Specialist at the time for State and Local Government at Microsoft, and I would often work with both of them down in Olympia, or at various other city government offices around the state. While I have known other people who have died, this is the first person I would classify as a friend who has died (outside of family). Will take a bit to process....

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...