I finally got my Google Wave invite.  I have 7 invites left.  If you can tell me what a good use for Wave is I’ll send you one.  Right now I just kinda don’t get it…

Cheers,

Tim

Just saw the most interesting story on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” Mo Rocca did a piece about how in some parts of Europe all traffic signs are being removed. For example, at a typical four way stop intersection the signs are removed and the intersection is replaced with a traffic circle without signage of any kind. According to the story, accidents not only fell, but were eliminated entirely. This effect was attributed to drivers increased communication and their inability to use the signage as a sort of offload of there own responsibility to think, not simply trust the signs. i.e. there’s a stop sign there, so that driver must be going to stop, I won’t even look…

How interesting this is. I wonder if there are implications here for user interface. I’m gonna have to think about this one.

So I needed to set up an app to print when the user presses control+p. Seems fairly straight forward right, after all there are all kinds of multiple key press codes like this in the world ctrl + P is print, ctrl + F8 could be something else, etc. etc… I was shocked when I went looking on the net for a good way to implement this in C# .NET and found no good examples, so I made my own keydown event handler, so here it is.

private List<string>  pressedKeys = new List<string>();
private void ShellForm_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
{
pressedKeys.Add(e.KeyValue.ToString());
bool x = pressedKeys.Contains(“80″); //P key

bool y = pressedKeys.Contains(“17″); //CTRL Key

if (x & y & pressedKeys.IndexOf(“80″)>pressedKeys.IndexOf(“17″)) // so it has to have P and CTRL and CTRL has to be before P
{
MessageBox.Show(“you pressed CNTRL+P good job stupid…”);
_btnPrint_Click(null, e);
pressedKeys.Clear();
}
int count = pressedKeys.Count;
if (count>2)
{
pressedKeys.Clear();
}

}

the message window was just for my benefit… gotta remember to take it out. Let me know if you see, or know of, a better way to do this.  The one thing i see missing is some sort of timer to limit the time between key presses. As it is now a user could press “Ctrl” and then wait any amount of time and press “P” and it would print.

Cheers,
Tim

This is my first post from my new android phone. Very very cool and will hopefully lead to more posting!

I found an awesome site for click-once help and super sweet screen-casts (my favorite way to learn)

http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/

Robin is really clear and easily understood. So if you have questions about concurrent clickonce installs, or certificate expiration issues, or other .NET click once troubles, check her out. Don’t check her out, check out her site… Or whatever…

If you’re like me and you just got assigned a project that has at it’s heart the evil and pungent windows smart client factory, and you’re having just a bit of trouble figuring out “huh, i just need a text box and a button… why are there 33 solution files and 15 service references…” try this link, it kinda helps to get the idea… it is funny that a “hello world” application ends up having like 7 projects and 40 some files inside the single solution… oh well. Here ya go, it helped me.

http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Getting%20Started%20with%20the%20Smart%20Client%20Software%20Factory&referringTitle=Smart%20Client%20Software%20Factory

Cheers,
Tim

I needed to setup a development environment for my advanced Java course, and had just a hell of a time getting it set up, so I thought I’d write a small tutorial. Maybe you won’t need to spend as much time on this as I did. Anyway here goes…

• First step is to download the preconfigured TomCat server from the good people at coreservlets.com http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/tomcat6.0-files/tomcat-6.0.16-preconfigured.zip unzip it to c:\
  
• Next you need to right click on “Computer” then select “Properties” then select “Advanced System Settings” you’ll be promted by UAC to give you’re permission.  Next click on “Environmental Variables”.  This will get us to where we need to be.
• In the “Environmental Variables” window under “system variables” click “new”.  Create a new variable named  “JAVA_HOME” and set the value to where ever you keep your java jdk for me it is

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11

• hit “ok” but don’t leave the “Environmental Variables” area we’re not done yet.

• Next find the variable “PATH” click on it and then click “Edit”  go to the end of the text that’s there and paste in “;your java directory\bin; %PATH%” .  For me it was:

;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11\bin;%PATH%

• don’t forget to add the  ;   before the new text . Hit OK

• Next find the variable “CLASSPATH” click on it and then click “edit”.  Go to the end of any text that’s already there and add this text:

;.;C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\lib\servlet-api.jar;C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\lib\jsp-api.jar;C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\lib\el-api.jar;C:\Servlets+JSP;..;..\..

• Hit “OK” all the way out of all the windows.  Now go to your “apache-tomcat-6.0.16″  file at C:\  open the apache-tomcat-6.0.16conf\server.xml file in a text editor and change the connect port on line 72 from 80 to 8080.
• Then add a username and password to the tomcat-users.xml file in the “C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\conf” directory.  It should look like this:

<?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’utf-8′?>
<tomcat-users>
<role rolename=”manager”/>
<user username=”put your username here” password=”put your password here” roles=”manager”/>
</tomcat-users>

• Save and close the file.

• To start and stop TomCat go to the “bin” directory within your tomcat file and create shortcuts for the “startup” and “shutdown” batch files.

That’s it.  Click on your startup shortcut to start TomCat, and the Shutdown shortcut to, you guessed it, shutdown TomCat.  You’ll be able to access Tomcat at “http://localhost:8080″

Cheers,

Tim