If you’ve seen “Minority Report”, the movie, you must remember the interface Tom Cruise uses to access files. He pulls on gloves, then works the displays as if he touches a virtual surface in space. There are a number of projects doing gloves like this, such as the AcceleGlove by AnthroTronix.

It’s obvious, to me at least, that you can’t usefully move just any graphical interface to a virtual surface like in “Minority Report”. There are UI elements that work and others that don’t work. Obviously, you can’t use a mouse, there’s nowhere to let it rest, there’s just air. You can’t use a pen. The only thing you can use is your fingers. In other words, it’s a multi-touch interface, albeit virtually and in the middle of the air.

Could you imagine if you developed a useful virtual surface like this and you wanted to use the same user interface on a hard, real surface device. How would that look? Surprise, surprise, it would look exactly like the iPad. Not like Windows for Tablets, not like any other smartphone UI I’ve ever seen, but exactly like the iPhone and iPad UI.

I don’t think this is accidental. I think this is the fundamental reason that the iPhone and iPad have never had, and never will have, a pen or other pointing device. As long as they are entirely useable using only one or more fingers, the UI translates seamlessly to a virtual surface in the air.

There are signs one can do using a glove and a virtual surface that aren’t useable on a real surface with multi-touch. Example: making the “ok” sign using your thumb and index finger could work with a glove, but not with an iPad. On the other hand, it seems such signs are rarely used even in science fiction movies, and I think there’s a fundamental reason why not, simply because they are less suitable for an intuitive command interface. This leads to the rule that one should probably not introduce any visual signs in virtual surfaces that cannot be translated to gestures using a hardware device surface.

For medicine, all this is great news. This means that if you develop a medical records interface, or the interface to any other medical system, on an iPad, it will automatically be just right for a virtual interface, such as those we will need in operating theatres and bedside.

That makes the iPad user interface the lowest common denominator. If you develop for this UI, your medical app is future proof. MS Windows based medical apps, on the other hand, are living on borrowed time.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 update, pushed through the Windows Update service to all recent editions of Windows in February 2009, installs the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant firefox extension without asking your permission.
This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for websites to easily and quietly install software on your PC. Since this design flaw is one of the reasons you may’ve originally choosen to abandon IE in favor of a safer browser like Firefox, you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste.

Unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has taken steps to make the removal of this extension particularly difficult – open the Add-ons window in Firefox, and you’ll notice the Uninstall button next to their extension is grayed out! Their reasoning, according to Microsoft blogger Brad Abrams, is that the extension needed “support at the machine level in order to enable the feature for all users on the machine,” which, of course, is precisely the reason this add-on is bad news for all Firefox users.

And then follows a convoluted procedure to hack the crap out of the registry. Go there, read it, do it, if you run Windows, this service pack, and Firefox.

Tech Republic put it like this:

In a surprise move this year, Microsoft has decided to quietly install what amounts to a massive security vulnerability in Firefox without informing the user. Find out what Microsoft has to say about it, and how you can undo the damage.

Read the entire Tech Republic article.

PS: this isn’t exactly news (the annoyances.org article is dated February 27, 2009), but I only just noticed through a posting by Rob S on a private list.

When using the asterisk wildcard character in a searchPattern, such as “*.txt”, the matching behavior when the extension is exactly three characters long is different than when the extension is more or less than three characters long. A searchPattern with a file extension of exactly three characters returns files having an extension of three or more characters, where the first three characters match the file extension specified in the searchPattern. A searchPattern with a file extension of one, two, or more than three characters returns only files having extensions of exactly that length that match the file extension specified in the searchPattern. When using the question mark wildcard character, this method returns only files that match the specified file extension. For example, given two files, “file1.txt” and “file1.txtother”, in a directory, a search pattern of “file?.txt” returns just the first file, while a search pattern of “file*.txt” returns both files.

and:

Because this method checks against file names with both the 8.3 file name format and the long file name format, a search pattern similar to “*1*.txt” may return unexpected file names. For example, using a search pattern of “*1*.txt” returns “longfilename.txt” because the equivalent 8.3 file format is “LONGFI~1.TXT”.

The conclusion must be that this function is worse than useless and bound to cause excruciating bugs in your apps. Better use the GetFiles() method without any search pattern and then filter using a regex.

.NET development is single platform. Admittedly the largest platform, but a platform that is increasingly having to share the market with other platforms. And already, according to some, there’s more sales potential for small developers in the OSX market than in the Windows market, due to a number of factors like customers that are more willing to buy and to pay for software, less competition in each market segment, etc.

.NET development is also entirely dependent on Microsoft’s development tools and those are increasingly expensive. For reasonable development, you need an IDE, a good compiler, version control, bug handler, coverage analysis, profiling, and a few more. We used to have most of that in the regular Visual Studio, but recently MS has removed all the goodies and plugged them into the Team system only, which carries an obscene pricetag (in Sweden around USD 13,000 + VAT for the first year…). This means that a regular one-man development shop can barely afford the crippled Visual Studio Professional at USD 1,500 for the first year. Sadly, there aren’t even any decent and affordable third party products to complement the VS Pro so it becomes a “real” development suite. And with every version of Visual Studio this only gets worse. More and more features are added to the Team suite and removed from the Pro. This is not the way to breed a happy following.

Meanwhile, OSX comes with XCode, which is almost as good as Visual Studio Pro, and is free. Objective-C is also a much more modern language with more depth than any .NET language, even though it is actually older. But, sadly, it’s not cross platform either and I don’t see how you can get the Windows fanboys of the Scandiavian healthcare scene to even consider another platform. Same probably goes for most other industries.

I’m no fan of Java, but on the other hand I’ve never worked much with it so that opinion doesn’t count. Eclipse, the IDE often used for Java development, is cross platform, very capable, and open for other languages such as Python, Flex, and many more. Yes, I know, in theory so is Visual Studio, but how many real languages do you have there? You’ve got one: Basic, masquerading as C#, J#, and, um, Basic.

Using Eclipse on any platform, you’ve got a real good chance of covering the line of tools you need, profilers, coverage, version control, without much pain and without breaking the bank. And you can write crossplatform integrated larger systems.

So, I guess it’s time to bite the bullet. I really like XCode and OSX, I really know C# and .NET, but I really only believe in Java, Flex, Python, Perl, C++ under Eclipse for enterprise development in vertical markets. And in XCode under OSX for regular shrinkwrapped desktop apps.

Not even Silverlight is very attractive and that is largely due to the marketing and pricing of the tools for it. A small developer organisation can’t afford it. Flex and AIR looks like serious contenders, though.

x2c stands for “XML to Code”, and it’s an interpreter for a little language I made with built-in commands to handle XML documents and write to plain text output files.

It started life as a tool to create VB and C# source code for data access layer classes, based on XML descriptions of an Oracle database. Another possibility is generating language tables from Excel spreadsheets, and I’ll tell you how:

Imagine an Excel spreadsheet with one sentence per row. In each column, the same sentence is written in another language, like Swedish, English, French, etc. Save the spreadsheet as an XML document. Now you can write a pretty short x2c script that reads these languages, column by column, and then produces a C++ header file with the right strings declared as constants. Great for products you want to recompile for a number of human languages.

Especially for this last use, I recently adapted the text output file command in x2c to allow output to ASCII, unicode (default), or any codepage you have installed on the Windows system you’re running this thing on. In the above script example, you see codepage 1251 used for Russian. In this case this was necessary since the C++ compiler used (Borland) couldn’t use unicode header files. This script runs under US or Swedish XP and Vista, as long as codepage 1251 is also installed on the system, and then produces the right MBCS file for Borland C++, resulting in binaries that will look real to russians running russian versions of Windows. Note that above is the complete script that is needed to convert the excel spreadsheet to four different C++ header files and it can easily be run from a build script.

The source is C++ in a VS 2008 solution. Have a go at it.

After upgrading my SQL server to 2005 SP2, I went to download the update for the Books On Line using the recommended link from the SP2 installer. Downloaded the msi to my desktop, double-clicked it and ran it. Then, after a while, got this message: “A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file:….”

Network error dialog

“Network error”? Which “network”? The one between the screen and the desktop? Searched the web, found nothing. Started thinking deep. Read that message again and again and started noticing something weird about the filename. The file in the error message is called SqlServer2K5_BOL_Sep2007[1].msi, while the file on disk is called SqlServer2K5_BOL_Sep2005.msi, no “[1]” in there. So I renamed the file accordingly:

And lo and behold, the installer ran fine now! At a certain point while cleaning up temp files, it sits there spinning like forever, but that’s ok, normal MS behaviour, so don’t panic, it gets its knickers untwisted in due time:

The point of seemingly eternal wait

Any solution also needs to pander to intellisense, making it easy to use and kinda idiot safe (I’m talking about myself a couple of hours after defining any constant, which usually leads to me behaving like the idiot user I had a hard time envisioning just hours earlier).

I think I found a good system for doing this, and as an example, I’ll invent a function that takes a string parameter, but it has to be just the right kind of string. To do that, I first declare the constant strings in a separate module this way:

Then I write my function, the fictional “Rechandler” that takes a parameter of the ConstRecTypeValue kind. And then I write a function that calls it. Now, while writing the caller, I want intellisense to do its thing, and it does:

As you can see, it obediently pops up a tooltip to tell me only a ConstRecTypeValue is accepted here. As soon as I start to type that, it recognizes the ConstRecType static class name and it intellisensively lets me choose which constant member I want:

…which I complete the usual way:

The callee (Rechandler) then easily recovers the string that is hiding inside the passed value (in this case “DELETED”) and continues its merry ways.

Naturally, you can use chars, doubles or entire collections of values instead of the string value in this example and still achieve the same effect.

You can also take it one step further along the path to universality, by using a generic base class for the value type:

If you have this guy in reach in your project somewhere, you can now simplify the definition of the value class like so:

…while everything else stays just the same.

I love it.

Now, Windows repair didn’t find the drive. Fixmbr didn’t fix the MBR. Fixboot didn’t fix the boot. Knoppix couldn’t mount the drive. Nothing worked.

So I pulled the drive from the laptop, hooked it up to my old, crappy, Dell Optimus, Octopus, or whatever it’s called, since it had SATA. Got the FindPart utility package, and man does that thing work right! The instructions aren’t exactly clear, but you can figure it out with a little patience. That stuff rocks! Highly, highly recommended.