Yahoo! mail fixed for Firefox 3 beta 2

Used to get an error on opening Yahoo mail beta in Firefox 3 beta 2 - and had to switch to the plain ‘ole yahoo mail. Here’s the bug report

Was pleasantly surprised today morning to see that Yahoo! mail beta now works properly in FF3b2. Thanks!

Pesky little bash quoting problem

Have to admit it - this happens every time I sit down to write a some shell script that manipulates paths on windows (where path names often end up with spaces). Soon I find my nifty little script running into problems when it doesn’t handle spaces properly and I find myself reading up on bash quoting rules once again…

Anyway, so this post is mostly for self reference and to put down some simple rules in the hope that writing it down will help committing it to memory.

The latest (mis)adventure was to make irfanview run under wine and a little script to allow irfanview to open a file provided on the command line. Irfanview being a windoze executable, its necessary to cd to the folder and then pass the file as argument to irfanview. Trivial isn’t it….until I found that the script fell over when it got a path liek /path/to/a folder with spaces/image.jpeg.

#! /bin/bash
DIRNAME=$(dirname “$1″)           # double quotes necessary - since $1 could have embedded spaces

FILENAME=$(basename “$1″)
echo $DIRNAME
echo $FILENAME
cd “$DIRNAME”                               # once more, double quotes necessart
irfanview $FILENAME

Golden Rule

When passing a path as argument, always enclose in double quotes.

Back in circulation

I’m on vacation in Bangalore, and guess what - fixing my home computer. Mostly things like lost drivers, screen resolution, cruft in the drives - its an old machine - a P4/512 Meg, but good enough for surfing the net.

Did a few fun things in the midst, and its been ages since I’ve added anything to this blog. Will summarize for now and put in longer posts with more details in cases someone’s interested.

1. Fixed my windows C drive which was running out of space - used trusty old windirstat for that.
2. Set up wifi at home with ADSL modem from BSNL - MT800. Again, wasn’t as straightforward as I’d thought.
3. Replaced old pcq linux 2006 with ubuntu gutsy - without losing stuff :D. Need to have /home in a separate partition, but otherwise this is a breeze.
4. Having fun with compiz-fusion. Its great - however, the documentation isnt easily locatable/consumable enough for first timers (me).
5. Set up DNS caching proxy on my linux box - has improved my net/web experience a 100 fold. Was a piece of cake too.
6. Set up Dynamic DNS and remote SSH access to my box - this has been the single most important utility/maintainance action.

More later.

Have been pulling my hair out trying to make co…

Have been pulling my hair out trying to make commandbar buttons go in VB Addins for Office 2000. There are a couple of gotchas here

1. Any references to buttons that you’ve added are not valid by the time you get to the disconnection method. There’s a MSDN KB article on this and the workaround is to use FindControl to get a new reference to the button.

2. The above technique works for Powerpoint and Excel. With ms word, the button is more stubborn. Turns out that it updates the normal template. So in a word addin, in addition to calling delete on the button, you should also save the normal template - see below..

btn.Delete
m_Application.NormalTemplate.Save

BSNL Broadband..

I finally got a broadband connection from BSNL last week. T’was heady stuff for the first few days - was getting 40 Kbytes/sec downloads - which translates to around 320 Kbps - more than the advertised 256Kbps.

And then it all had to come down eventually!!! For the past two days, the downloads are going at 3 Kbytes/sec… So today I called their help desk and as expected, got no real help other than getting a complaint registered. I was told that the problem will be fixed ’soon’ - with no details being provided on how soon is ’soon’

Anyway, thankfully the connections a bit better now - though still slow…getting 100 Kbps - which is way behind the advertised speed.

So its wait and watch down here.

Editing documents in sharepoint library in Office 2000

“Edit
In” functionality is only available for Office XP and Office 2003 on
the client, however I saw this workaround from a now unknown poster and


Joel Faigin

was kind enough to confirm that it works.

Â

“Office 2000 is not supported to edit documents within the Document Library under the “All Documents” view.

But here is a work around to get the same exact function from Office 2000 as you do in Office 2003.

This is for working with Windows 2000 and Office 2000.

1. Open your particular document library.

2. Make sure “All Documents” view is selected.

3. Check Out the file (do not open the file just check it out)

4. Click “Explorer View”

5. Open the document you checked out and then edit and save the document.

6. Now return to the “All Documents” view.

7. Check In the document, and make your selections as well as enter your comments.

8. Your changes should now be shown, as well as version history if enabled.”

from:

http://wss.collutions.com/Lists/FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=308

Coaxing IE to open office documents in Application windows

Found this great tip on preventing IE from opening office documents.

1. Launch Windows Explorer.
2. Select “Folder Options…“ from the Tools menu.
3. Select the “File Types“ tab.
4. Scroll down the list of “Registered file types“ until you find “DOC - Microsoft Word Document“ and select it.
5. Click on the “Advanced…“ button at the bottom of the dialog.
6. Uncheck the “Browse in same window“ checkbox.

from:

http://blogs.msdn.com/gusperez/archive/2004/04/28/122768.aspx

Obituary - My VS.NET 2003 debugger

VS.NET 2003 debugger died unexpectedly today. I get an access denied
error with a suggestion to add myself to Debugger Users group or be an
Administrator.

I’m already the administrator and also part of Debugger users group.

Googling a bit, found a collection of entries on M K Park’s blog

Feature Request: Environment variable expansion in CMAB

I’ve been using CMAB for sometime now and the only big crib that I have
against it is that it doesnt support environment variables for
specifying things like the path of the actual configuration file [One
of the projects that does is Log4Net]

I’ve looked at the code and supporting environment variable expansion shoudlnt be too difficult to do.

I’ll post a suggestion in and see what happens.

Enterprise Library

Probably I’ve been living in a cave…but looks like we’ve got a release of the enterprise library.

“Summary

The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a library
of application blocks designed to assist developers with common
enterprise development challenges. Application blocks are a type of
guidance, provided as source code that can be used “as is,” extended,
or modified by developers to use on enterprise development projects.
Enterprise Library features new and updated versions of application
blocks that were previously available as stand-alone application
blocks. All Enterprise Library application blocks have been updated
with a particular focus on consistency, extensibility, ease of use, and
integration.”

I’ve just got a copy of it. The cribs are

A. The download locations for the old Application Blocks is still in
place. They don’t link to the Enterprise library page either. (Though
GDN does have a note pointing users to the Enterprise library workspace)

B. I’ve yet to look at the Blocks in detail, but the changes are big and not very helpful.

a. Namespaces have changed.

b. There’s a new configuration tool

c. The documentation’s been updated but there’s precious little for people migrating from older versions.

d. [Configuration Application Block] <Crib>
Name value collections are not supported and so are XML Serializer. One
of the beauties of the original release was that you could integrate it
with the standard classes seamlessly. Probably, this one does too, but
I’ll need to look it up.