Software History

Following on from my ZoomIT post and thinking again about presentation tools,  I started thinking about the ways in which magnification tools generally work an how you might want to use it in a presentation scenario.

I’ve been using DropBox for some time now and I use it in some ways that I think are quite innovative and will be the subject of future blog posts.  However in the last few days I’ve been having a few problems with Windows Explorer taking forever (well over a minute or two at times) to respond and it responds very sluggishly.  I’ve managed to track the problem down to DropBox misbehaving.

In preparing a post today I’ve been through a bit of a winding process whereby I came across an issue I’d never encountered before with a VBScript.  At first I thought I’d made some sort of mistake, but it appears I’d come across a limitation of a VBScript function I use all the time - MsgBox.

I briefly had a problem with the web server that’s running my personal wiki yesterday.  Try as I might it just wouldn’t start-up.  I hadn’t had a problem before and after three or four attempts at clicking the start option I took a step back and surveyed my machine - a useful option in many circumstances.

I’m been a huge fan of DokuWiki for many years now.  Since I worked in a huge corporate development environment where structured documentation was hard to set-up I managed to pull a great number of resources together using DokuWiki and make it available to my whole team.  The culture was such that I was pretty much the only person keeping it up to date … but that’s a different story.

I tried adding my Twitter RSS feed to FeedBurner a little earlier.  Even though FeedValidator identified the feed as valid FeedBurner wouldn’t.  Googling this suggested that either Twitter isn’t producing nice RSS feeds (which FeedValidator’s validation seems to contradict) or FeedBurner has blocked it.

I’ve spent a little while today looking at putting something together for Evernote.  Hopefully I’ll have it finished pretty soon and I’ll probably share it with you when it’s done, but whilst I’ve been experimenting, I’ve also been looking at ENScript a command line utility that allows you to interact with an Evernote database.

Since Google Notebook went out of development earlier this year I’ve made the migration over to Evernote. It has many cool features one of the coolest being the ability to upload images and have Evernote run OCR to index the content of the image.  The mobile phone Evernote applications allow a phone’s camera to be used to take a snapshot image and to upload it to Evernote over a 3G connection.  Unfortunately the Windows desktop application has no functionality for capturing images in the same way through a web camera and with the proliferation of netbooks I feel that this is a feature that is sadly missing - well for me anyway.   So after a bit of research I embarked on a quick weekend VB.Net project to put together a little application that could do this - and so I created “SnapIT”.

I run XBMC on a Mac Mini plugged into my TV.  Sometimes XBMC gets a bit caught up and freezes or gets locked into some sort of loop.  I have it running in full screen which makes it rather hard to quite when the application with focus is non-responsive.  So to get past this, press F8 to bring up Spaces and navigate to another space.  From here right click on XBMC in the dock to reveal and select Force Quit.

I was challenged to work out a little problem someone was having with Excel today.  The expectation was that I could write some VBA to resolve it, but once I found out what the task was I quickly managed to put together a purely Excel function based solution.

I’ve been using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 (Express Edition) recently to create some utilities.  As part of this I needed to have an application start-up but only display as an icon in the system tray.  After attaching a notify icon control to my main form I set the form’s load method to set the display in task bar and visible properties of the form to be false.

I recently bought an iPod touch and for several days struggled whenever trying to type in acronyms like “BBC” as the iPod’s on screen keyboard didn’t seem to have a way to lock capitals on.  I finally came across the solution when looking through some of the settings.

The default browser on the iPhone and iPod is Safari which is a built in application.  As it currently stands inbuilt applications on Apple’s hand held device operating system doesn’t give much to developers who would like to be able to add extra functionality (at least not without jail breaking).  The option to send page content to Evernote from Safari is something I had hoped would be easily available, but found myself having to manually copy content from Safari to Evernote.

This evening I had the pleasure of attending a special Microsoft event hosted just a few minutes away from my office.  A team of Microsoft employees are currently traveling across Europe on the Microsoft Get on the Bus tour.  York doesn’t really strike people as being the heart of UK ICT, but Andrew Bettany of the University of York managed to arrange for the tour to swing by the National Science Learning Centre and it was a fantastic opportunity.

I really like Evernote and the more I use it the more I like it.  For anyone who hasn’t used it, Evernote is a free piece of software that allows you to capture notes in a variety of formats and synchronise the electronic notebooks it creates with other machines via ‘the cloud’.  It has lots of other features, but one thing it doesn’t do is templates.

I recently got a Starbucks card.  As well as getting a free shot in my latte when I pay by card I can get free WiFi access with my mug of coffee.  However all was not straight forward for me because of one mis-communication when I got my card which caused a bit of a problem.

Recently one of my colleagues was having issues in registering a piece of Adobe CS4 software on one of our user’s PCs. The product code was numeric and it was being refused each time he entered it. It even got to the point where he had another colleague check he was entering it correctly. After some frustration and a bit of research he discovered a surprising fact….

I’ve had an iPod touch for a few months now and I’m a little frustrated by one of the keyboard elements.  The keyboard has a backspace key but has no delete key  i.e. you can delete characters to the left of the cursor, but not to the right.

We have a number of E-series Dell laptops in my organisation and whilst we don’t configure it many have Dell’s Latitude On installed.  This is a small Linux install that gives quick read only access to things such as recent mail, calendar and even a web browser.

If you’ve used Google Earth on the iPhone or iPod Touch have you ever visited one of the poles?  If you do be sure to check out the compass in the top right corner of the screen.  If for example you zoom in on a point roughly 90°N & 135°W you will see the compass rotate and spin freely.

I regularly make use of Evernote from my iPod touch (effectively an iPhone without the inbuilt communications) and I frequently look to add information from a web page in Safari to Evernote.  As I’ve written about before, the standard Evernote bookmarklet can be added to the iPod/iPhone Safari app and this will then provide an option to set a title for the note as well as providing an option to add tags.  I find this useful but invariably it is quite slow.

Evernote is a great application for jotting down a quick note about something new, but occasionally I find that I want to jot a note that’s very similar to an existing note.  I predominantly use the Windows 3.1 version and whilst it looks as though copy and paste is enabled for notes it isn’t.  So how do you do it?

Several months ago I got a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop to replace my overworked Dell Latitude D410.  Along with the laptop I got a new advanced E-dock which included two monitor outputs, so I recycled an old smaller monitor that had been relegated to the stores to have a dual monitor set-up.

This coming year I’ve decided to take a different approach with one of my core applications, Evernote. It’s based around reducing the number opf notebooks I’m using whilst increasing the number of tags. This is the opposite to what many Evernote users are doing, so I thought it might be useful to explain what my reasoning is behind this.

One of my best technology purchases in 2009 was my Huawei E5830 MiFi.  The best way I have to describe it is like a smart phone without the phone bit.  It connects to a cellular data network and shares the connection over a self-generated WiFi network with up to five other devices such as a laptop or iPod touch.

Currently Evernote does not currently support outline structuring for notebooks.  This means that you can’t group notebooks into collections (e.g. folders) or have sections/sub-notebooks.  Recently I posted about why in many cases it is often better to use tags rather than notebooks as this allows you to better mark-up notes for searches and the like.  However there is a desire to sometimes have information hierarchically organised and this is where an outline structure for notebooks in Evernote would be useful.  Until the Evernote developers catch up on this popular request across all of the software platforms tags can provide you with a workaround.

It’s been about a year since I started blogging here and whilst it was primarily supposed to be a site for quick useful tech-related posts several have grown into far larger posts.  Whilst some posts have remained somewhat quiet on the number of reads others have generated far more interest than I could have expected.

I’ve been doing a little bit more work with some spreadsheets recently and I came across a situation where I needed to work with a date and carry out a comparison to a string of text.  My first attempt fell short as it wouldn’t get the value I wanted, but Excel’s TEXT() function came to my rescue.