Programming

The DevX Source Code Library is a great resource for developers.

Anybody out there know how to generate a UPS tracking number / shipment via XML?

It really drives me nuts that you can’t delete Notepad.exe in Windows 2000. Oh, you can, but only if you really muck around with your files. Here is a tutorial on getting rid of the pesky application. Note that you must delete the notepad.ex_ file from your I386 directory before you try to delete the copies in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DLLCACHE, C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32, and C:\WINNT. If you don’t, it will just keep raising itself from the dead. I love the fact that when you finally manage to rid yourself of the world’s least-feature-packed text-editor, the Windows 2000 Operating System makes a dire warning that a file integral to system stability has been replaced with a different version. And then, when you tell it that you did it on purpose and you’re not just a bozo screwing around in your system files, it warns you that you’re being a bad, bad little hacker. Great Caesar’s Ghost! It’s not like I’m trying to get into the Pentagon, y’know? I just like EditPad better.

Note that mucking around with your registry is most likely not going to help much. I’ve tried several times to change registry settings to simply avoid notepad instead of deleting the file. Doesn’t work. As long as the file exists in the above locations (in Win2000, at least) it will ignore and / or undo whatever changes you make to the registry. Crazy, huh? If you do want to try to change your notepad registry settings, look for the strings “C:\WINNT\notepad.exe %1″ and “%SystemRoot%\System32\NOTEPAD.EXE %1″.

Well I already made a bunch of changes to AutoText. Thank you so much, Leia, for beta-testing!

Now there are four text boxes. AutoText will post the text in the selected text box to the open app. That way you can save several juicy bits of text for auto-posting.

Please note that if you’re using WinAMP and you have the Playlist editor open, for some reason AutoText will try to always send text to that, which will be confusing. I can’t seem to fix this. My only suggestion is to not use the Playlist editor if you’re trying to use AutoText.

I’m always writing little programs to make my life easier. One of the handiest I’ve created is called AutoText. This small (only 32K!) app sits in your system tray and, when you double-click it, sends a text string to whichever application has the focus. There’s no documentation or help; it’s pretty simple. Right-click the icon in your system tray to edit the text. When you want to insert that text into another program, just double-click the icon. I use this mostly for blogging. That way I don’t have to type

target=”_blank” title=”" onmouseover=”window.status=”; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘; return true;”

every time I want a link in an entry. There’s no setup or uninstall utility. If you don’t like it, just delete the executable (exe). You can save it anywhere on your hard drive. (There’s a chance that you may need to get the Visual Basic run time to get it to work. Most people already have this on their system, so I haven’t included it. If you get an error, let me know.)
Please let me know if you like it or if you have any comments.

Download it!

I found this excellent essay about writing computer code at evhead. The author makes several very good points about reading and writing in a programming language. I feel a little bit better about my own programming after reading it. When I dusted off PoolPlayer (my football pool manager app) last month I was tempted to just start from scratch and re-write the whole damn thing. I know so much more know about database structure and design and about data access methods than I did when I originally started writing it two or three years ago. I’m glad that I decided to keep my core code and fix it rather than begin again. When the Gators lost to Auburn I lost all desire to continue. It sucks. It really does. I want to work on the app and fix it and make it work and finally finish it. But I have no motivation now. Oh well. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it.

Help! If anyone can help me out with this I will severely owe you one. I have this SQL query that I need to return just one more field, and I can’t figure out how to do it. (The query is in the extended text for this entry; click on the icon or the comments link to get there!) Currently the query needs the parameter [TeamID] to run, and it returns the Sum of the Wins and Losses for the [TeamID]. (The Sum of the Wins is the Sum of the AwayWins and the Sum of the HomeWins. And the Sum of the Losses is the same except for Losses instead of Wins …) What I want to be able to do is to have it return the [TeamID] as well, so that I can build another query on top of this one. Anyone? Anyone? Please eMail me if you have any thoughts …
[click to continue...]

This is a test to see what will happen to the category icon if I add an entry without selecting a category …

Ah. What happened was this: The <MTCategory> tag was not there, so when it tried to load the .gif associated with that category (the uncategory) it looked for a file name simply .gif. Of course there was no file with that name, so it showed the dead image placeholder. Here’s how I fixed that: I added an ‘x’ to the template before the <MTCategory> tag so now it looks for x<MTCategory>.gif. I added an icon named x.gif to the images directory. (Actually, I just copied the icon for the web development category for now. I’ll get an uncategory icon later.) If there’s no category associated with the entry, it loads x.gif. Woot! Who, may I ask, is your daddy?

There are quite a few office pool manager applications on the net. I looked at all of them at one point and none of them were really what I needed. Now - haha! - I don’t have an office, but I’m still working on the program. One of the major things I need to do is include the abilities to use confidence points, over/unders, and tie-breakers. But I’m almost done. I think the interface is really slick and is much better than all the other apps out there.
Game-editing Screen
Player Picks Selection Screen

I’m almost ready for a beta release of PoolPlayer. I need to get a better name for it, I know. Right now I’m working on letting the user (or the app) delete a week from the database regardless of whether there are any games associated with that week. It’s not as easy as it sounds. But I should be done soon. Woot!

PoolPlayer is the current name of the app I’m writing to manage office football pools. The program is very versatile and can be used to manage any kind of pool: NFL, NCAA, NBA, MLB, whatever. This post is mainly just so I can check that the categories are working correctly.

I have to keep searching for them, so to make it easier on myself:
the MovableType default templates are here.

This is going to be a blog for information related to my many projects. Mostly I will probably write about programs I am writing and web development work I am doing, and I imagine this will mainly be a personal blog. I doubt many people will be interested in learning about listview columnheaders or SQL parsing problems.

Take a look at some screen shots from my soon-to-be-released pool manager.

Yeah. So. Gotta little bug here. Can anyone tell me how to force Outlook to send a message formatted as plain text instead of in the user’s default format in VB? The only information I can find is about the OlEditorType, but that is apparently read-only unless I force the mail object to have HTMLBody true. It’s not an emergency, or even important. It’s just really annoying me.

Dim myOLApp As outlook.Application, myItem As outlook.MailItem
Set myOLApp = CreateObject(”Outlook.Application”)
Set myItem = myOLApp.CreateItem(olMailItem)