The Blog of Matthew Baxter-Reynolds

Need to present a drop-down list of countries for a registration form? Here’s a CSV file of countries for you to enjoy. http://www.floresense.com/resc_center/?art=1360.

I have to travel to Bury St Edmund’s tomorrow. It’s snowing in Bedfordshire, and I figured if I searched for “Bury St Edmund’s” if it was snowing there someone would be saying as such.

Quick search for Twitter pointed me to @dianadupree, and she pointed me (and everyone else) at http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk/. It’s a app that searches Twitter for #uksnow tags and renders them on a Google Maps map.

Makes you wonder how we coped in the 70s… or even the late 90s. Scary…

Back in the day of primarily using Windows XP, I used to use the Microsoft Power Tools utility for mounting ISOs. This doesn’t work in Windows 7 – my recommendation is now the freeware Virtual CloneDrive. Enjoy!

I’m pleased to be able to introduce our latest service offering – Twitter Ad Box.

The problem that Twitter Ad Box solves is this – if you’re into social networking to boost credibility and promote yourself as having something interesting to say about a given problem domain you have to refer people to interesting things on the Web to read. (As I do – through this blog, @mbrit and LinkedIn.)

However, when someone clicks off of your Twitter (or whatever) profile you’ve lost them – they’re no longer thinking about or reading about you, they’re (hopefully) into whatever content you’ve promoted. Twitter Ad Box allows you to create URLs that contain an ad for your own services that sits alongside the content you’re looking at.

Here’s an example link created with Twitter Ad Box: http://tr.im/xI9V

This is a service that I have built based on my own needs as someone who uses social networking tools for business – namely that if I refer someone to some content, I want my message to continue through to that visitor with that click-through. What we are looking for is people to come onboard as early adopters of the service, tell us what they think and see if we can get some momentum going. I personally think it’s a great service, but any comments are always appreciated.

Here’s more blurb about how it works, with pictures!

Back when I started this blog I thought I would use WordPress as it seemed appropriate. Setting it up on Fasthosts server was pretty easy. However now we have moved over to a new server facility (RackSRV), I found myself having to set it up from scratch and migrate it.

This was not a straightforward process, mainly because I don’t spend all day in a world of MySQL and PHP.

The killer issue for me was that last time I setup PHP on a server, I downloaded the appropriate installation package and configured IIS to use the ISAPI filter – namely the php5isapi.dll DLL. However this time, no matter what copy of PHP 5.3 I installed there was no ISAPI filer. It transpires that the PHP guys decided to deprecate the ISAPI filter relying instead on FastCGI implementation of IIS to drive the regular PHP CGI executable.

For the record, virtually every article I found about installing PHP on IIS specifically instructed the user not to use the installer. Personally, I found the installer worked fine. (Especially seeing as you can get the installer to configure the MySQL extension for you, saving you that step.)

This article – http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2007/11/16/iis-6-0-fastcgi.aspx takes you through it.

The one I have been using for a while on http://www.twitter.com/topazfiler is TweetLater. This is neat because it lets you setup multiple accounts.

Apparently a few people also rate Twollo, which i shall also try!

Funny, but by “desktop” I mean, “a piece of wood on which I have my monitors”…

For the past six weeks, I have been running an environment whereby I have XP on my main machine for development an Office applications, and use Ubuntu on a separate machine for doing everything else. As we’ve been working hard over the past year to make things we use less Microsoft-specific and less tied to our local network (e.g. SugarCRM for CRM, hosted SourceGear Vault, etc) this is working incredibly well.

Key to this is the open source Synergy application, which cunningly allows you to have a single keyboard and mouse across separate physical computers. So I have my Unubtu machine on the left with one screen, my development machine with two screens in the middle and right – all I have to do to activate my Ubunty machine is move the mouse to the left monitor and it’s ready to go.

Synergy is a little flaky however – sometimes it captures all mouse and keyboard input and refused to give it up. The only way to get around this appears to be to point a LogMeIn client session at the XP machine and kill the Synergy process. (An RDP connection won’t do it.)

I must admit to being hugely impressed with Ubuntu – if I didn’t develop everything on the Microsoft stack and be so used to using Office, I would ditch Microsoft on the desktop.

(We have our test lab running a bunch of Windows XP images on VirtualBox on Ubuntu. This works remarkably well too.)

Here’s a weird one… we were adding user properties to a message using the IUserProperties interface, but whenever we did this the property would render when the message was printed. This included whenever the message was sent to a recipient within the same Exchange organisation.

Last time I had to ask Microsoft PSS to help was 1992, and in that case they were nice enough to send me a handcrafted sample application on a 3.5″ floppy. This time however they got back to me in a day with this little code snippet:

void MarkPropNoPrint(Outlook.MailItem message, string propertyName)
{
// Late Binding in .NET
// http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;302902
Type userPropertyType;
long dispidMember = 107;
long ulPropPrintable = 0×4;
string dispMemberName = String.Format(”[DispID={0}]“, dispidMember);
object[] dispParams;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.UserProperty userProperty = message.UserProperties[propertyName];

if (null == userProperty) return;
userPropertyType = userProperty.GetType();

// Call IDispatch::Invoke to get the current flags
object flags = userPropertyType.InvokeMember(dispMemberName, System.Reflection.BindingFlags.GetProperty, null, userProperty, null);
long lFlags = long.Parse(flags.ToString());

// Remove the hidden property Printable flag
lFlags &= ~ulPropPrintable;

// Place the new flags property into an argument array
dispParams = new object[] {lFlags};

// Call IDispatch::Invoke to set the current flags
userPropertyType.InvokeMember(dispMemberName,
System.Reflection.BindingFlags.SetProperty, null, userProperty, dispParams);
}

Srsly… there is no way I would have worked that out for myself…

Neat little tool: Voo2Do.

I love the term Googasm – meant to describe tech pundits falling over themselves to be unbelieveably impressed with anything that comes out of Mountain View.

In fact, with a lot of new things we are doing lately we are using a lot of Google applications, such as Google Mail, AdWords, AdSense and Google Checkout. One thing we haven’t used is Google Docs.

Now, I have heard Google Docs described time and time again as an Office killer, but I have never actually used it. In recent weeks a couple of times I have considered moving our SharePoint-based document store onto Google Docs and have chosen not to because it a) supports only a tiny number of file types and b) only supports teeny-tiny files. (Interestingly though I have gone through this process twice – the first time I forgot how limited it was but when the idea crossed my mind again I was like “Google must be looking to help me here”, only to be reminded of how limited it was.)

Anyway, in writing content for a new Web site I decided to give up trying to use our unbelievable slow VPN and thought I would use a small computer I have at home for browsing on. Upon discovering it did not have Office on it, I thought I would use Google Docs thinking, “Google did it, everyone is saying it’s awesome, it must be a competitor to Word.”

It’s a joke.

It is basically, as far as I can tell, the Gmail editor that doesn’t send e-mail. In 1995 Microsoft introduced red-squiggle background spell-checking. 14 years ago. Assume it was in pilot and beta for two years, that’s 16 years PCs have been able to underline spelling mistakes. Does Google Docs? No.

Does it give me fine control over layout? Does it basically let me write a proper document that I would give to a client? No.

It is, frankly, barely better than Notepad. In fact, I wish I had used Notepad and then I wouldn’t have to waste five minutes writing a blog post to rant about how crap it was.

And now I find myself feeling a bit sorry for Microsoft because they are getting the sh*t kicked out of them in the market with everyone fawning over everyone and everything, but at the end of the day, if I just want to write a nice looking document quickly, or build a cashflow forecast easily, or develop a little application… it has to be Microsoft all the way.