Archive for June, 2008

Mouse Scroll Wheel in Ubuntu in VMware

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

I'm running VMware Workstation 6.5 under Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu 8.04 installed. I found a tip on how to enable the mouse scroll wheel, but I found that it switched my mouse over to Ubuntu control. That is to say, my mouse acceleration changed, and I ...

CoCreateInstance Fails With “Class Not Registered”

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Recently, I had a problem unique to my test machine. Attempting to call CoCreateInstance on a COM class provided by one of our DLLs resulted in HRESULT 0x80040154, which corresponds to "Class not registered". This was a mystery since regsvr32 appeared to properly register our DLL, and all the obvious ...

Stripping Vertical Whitespace Using tr

Monday, June 16th, 2008

The Translate command, tr, is available on all Unix-y systems, including Cygwin. tr -d will delete the specified characters from a stream. Several handy escape sequences are provided for stripping newlines, carriage returns, and form-feeds: \f - form feed \n - new line \r - return Since tr is deleting characters, ...

Snake

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

This story was a very interesting read.

B.O.B. Yak Plus versus Ibex versus Panniers

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Trailers versus Panniers Based upon my online research, the trailer versus pannier debate will rage on forever. Panniers have the advantage of not requiring you to worry about a trailer. Trailers have the advantage of reducing your frontal area (and therefore wind drag), and in theory don't require wheels ...

SetThreadLocale and SetThreadUILanguage for Localization on Windows XP and Vista

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Simple Localization In classic Windows programming, the quickest way to handle localized resources is to put all languages into the same resource file, then use SetThreadLocale to tell Windows that it should return resources tagged with the specified language identifier. Subsequently, any attempt to load a resource by that thread ...

Autohide Ubuntu Menu in MythTV

Friday, June 6th, 2008

When running MythTV under Ubuntu, the top menu (panel) may appear over MythTV's output. The panel can be set to auto-hide, but even when hidden, several pixels will be displayed to remind you of its presence. Luckily, the number of pixels shown can be customized. Run gconf-editor. Select apps | ...

Hauppauge HVR-1800 with MythTV

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

The Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1800 is a PCI-Express card which has two tuners: one for ATSC/QAM digital video, and one for NTSC analog video. According to the MythTV wiki, only the digital video tuner is currently supported. Hauppauge's Windows driver, which contains the proper firmware, plus a shell script to ...

Underlining Characters in a ToolTip

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

My product, a toolbar for Outlook Express, uses tooltips to display keyboard shortcuts. For some localization work, I needed to display an underlined character within a tooltip. The only hint I could find was a reference to .Net tooltips. Apparently, in both .Net and Win32 tooltips, a single ampersand will be ...

Tartine Bakery in San Francisco

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

B, T, and I stopped at Tartine Bakery after "Beer Croquet" (which, due to a lack of a croquet set, became merely "Beer" in Dolores Park). I had the bread pudding and a mocha, and both were excellent. The bread pudding had a healthy dose of very tasty ...