Have a bite…

0860095.jpg

… if you still can ;-)

I found this in the online shop of one of our customers which distributes dental equipment. The device is called “Lippenexpander” and I have no idea what practical use a dentist may have for it but it’s no pleasant picture at all.

Too bad!

Crash

The red train you see in this picture is the new model of trains, Forchbahn, a small train leading from Zürich zu Forch and Esslingen, recently bought. This is the very same train that sohuld have been used for public transport next monday. The first new model for 12 years.

Now it seems that I have to wait for some more time before trying it out ;-)

Responding to search-strings

I’ve just looked at the logs of this webserver and – under the search strings used to find this page, found this: <blockquote>delphi cannot debug anymore</blockquote>It happens that tough I have not written about this particular topic, I certainly have some hints to this fellow searcher (although, they possibly come to late now):

  • Have you compiled your project with debug information? (Project/Options/Compiler).
  • Have you rebuilt your project after changing above settings?
  • Do your files by any chance have Unix-Lineendings? If so, the debugger won’t work
  • Have you restarted your PC? Sometimes this works too.

I’m quite sure there are more things that could make the debugger unusable, but unfortunatly I can’t currently think of any more of them. Maybe becuase just the ones listed above are common enough that I remeber them? Delphi is very nice, but sometimes it can be so unstable

Personal Toolbar

My own bookmarks-management is somewhat non-existant. Those few pages I’ve actually bookmarked are the ones with long URLs (longer than lwn.net for example – a page which definitely is one worthy of being in my bookmarks-file). There are so few bookmarks, that I use only the “Personal Toolbar”-Feature of Mozilla Firefox – the Bookmarks-Menu is completely empty.

As I wanted to do some coding and tweaking around with MovableType, I’ve deceided to create this little tool which renders my original bookmarks.html from my mozilla profile to something more useful.

I initally tried to just apply a CSS-style to the original file, but that was not possible because a) it has much too less named identifiers or structure to style it properly, b) I would have had to do some coding anyway bacause I wanted to display the bookmark-image and c) the original file is nowhere near XHTML-compliant – so that’s another reason which would have forced me to do some coding anyway.

I hope you like the thing and forgive me those two “evil” links – there is virtually no way to get to subtitled animees the legal way, so I have to refer to “other” channels. Much the same with english video games: You simply can’t get them here in Switzerland, so I usually buy the german version and download the english one (Broken Sword 3 was the last one).

Printing

I’ve just finished a first version of a printing-stylesheet. Now when you print one of the pages here, you will get a more suitable layout without navigation and background-colors.

The more I’m working with stylesheets, the more I begin to like that. There is virtually nothing you can’t do, it’s quite browser-interoperable, it’s easy to do. It’s just nice.

Now the only thing left to do is to convice Richard also to use CSS whenever possible so that our company’s webpages get the same clean code.

Very nice!

Going on

Now that I’ve created the new design for the front page, the next step was to get working at the archive. As I disliked the Popup-Window, MT created for comments, I had a look into the detail view of an entry, aka. the individual archives.

It’s not yet linked from the new index-page, but here’s an entry using the new template. You may see that I’ve chosen some more useful filenames for the individual entries, that the sidebar is now also visible in the sub-pages and that the comments still look like they did in the old MT-layout – richard has not provided me with a good looking comments-template yet.

By the way: This would be an entry with trackback-pings. Looks quite nice to me.

If you by any chance visit gnegg.ch, tell my what you think!

That’s it… for now

With the monthly archives now working, I finally enabled the new layout per default. There are still some tweaks to do, but those will require me to learn even more CSS which is the next thing I’ll do. And there is the search results template still coming in the old design. Will fix that too.

But for now: Enjoy!

Many thanks go to Richard for providing me with the template.

CSS – I’m getting into it

With my recent motivation in posting here, the desire grew to actually create a layout for gnegg.ch. I’ve asked richard whether he would be so kind to create one which he actually did. Many thanks Richard.

Now my knowledge in HTML is quite limited. The last time I actually did something in HTML besides tweaking some templates here and there to enter some dynamical content in, was about three years ago – way before CSS was something browsers did actually understand.

So – to make things interesting for me, I deceided that I will use no tables, no old-fashioned HTML-hacks, but straight CSS and DIV’s for “converting” Richards Photoshop-File to something your browser understands.

At first, it was quite difficult, but I made quite some progress as the time continued. The code looks quite nice too.

But have a look for yourself.

Currently I’m working at adopting the layout to the rest of this MT-based pages which at first will involve quite some reading the documentation. Until I’m ready, the alternative index-page above is the only thing you’re going to see about the new layout, but it’s already MT-integrated, you if you want, you can bookmark it insted of the old index-page.

I will post some newbie-notes for CSS-beginners later on.

T610/Z600, Outlook, MobileAgent and Bluetooth

If you own either a T610 or Z600 mobile phone, you may know of floAt’s Mobile Agent a not-so-stable but even more powerful tool for accessing the phone from your PC. Sending SMSes, Managing contacts, even getting a popup windows when somebody calls you – everything is possbible.

Everything but synchronizing with outlook. There’s just some kind of CVS export for your contacts, but this is very uncomfortable to handle. The bluetooth sync-profile the Widcomm software provides would do the trick, but I’ve many more contacts in outlook than there’s space on the phone. So I need a way to specify which contacts to synchronize.

The software that comes from ericsson, XTNDConnect PC, has support for filters (I’ve created a category T610 and I’m syncing only contacts whithin this category), so would be doing the job.

Unfortunatly, this Ericsson PhoneMonitor-thing which XTNDConnect relies on is slightly incompatible to MobileAgent – either the phone is not detected or MobileAgent loses its connection (which locks my workstation because I’m using the proximity detection). I’ve never succeded in finding a way to reproducibly use both programs concurrently.

Not ’till now.

(BT-Driver is Widcomm 1.4.x but it should work with 1.3 too)

  1. Open the Advanced Bluetooth configuration.
  2. Client Applications Tab.
  3. Add COM Port
  4. OK to everything
  5. Double click the BT-Icon in the Tray
  6. “View devices in range”
  7. Double click your phone
  8. Right-click “Serial Port 2” and create a shortcut.
  9. go up two levels.
  10. right click the created shortcut, properties.
  11. Select the newly created port
  12. OK everything
  13. In the control panel open the Ericsson Phone Monitor
  14. In COM Ports, select the newly created port, chose “Reserve” and “Enable”
  15. OK

Before synchronizing, double click the newly created shortcut in your “bluetooth places”. The phone will not immediatly be detected, but as soon as you start XTNDConnect and hit “synchronize”, it will be.

What you did with this steps is creating two virtual com-ports for the phone that can be concurrently used. That way you can use XTNDConnect to synchronize with outlook and MobileAgent for the rest. Very nice.