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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!

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)

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

Forte Agent 2.0

Forte finally released Agent 2.0, a complete rewrite of the IMHO best newsreader for the windows plattform. I’ve just downloaded (and registered – there’s a quite reasonable upgrade fee of $15) the new version and I’m going to have a look at it…

Omniweb 5

Last monday, OmniGroup has released the public BETA version of OmniWeb 5. The most interesting thing I’ve seen in it (I’m currently writing this entry using OmniWeb) is this text in the EULA:

IMPORTANT – Read this License Agreement carefully before clicking on the “Agree” button. By clicking on the “Agree” button, you agree to be bound by the terms of the License Agreement.
—

The document that follows this paragraph is a license agreement. Why do we need such a thing? Well, to be perfectly honest, our lawyers have told us that we need to protect ourselves. We at The Omni Group pride ourselves on our low-key style, but the global nature of the software business means that one lawsuit from one user in a far-flung jurisdiction could put us out of business. It also means that, without this agreement, we might not have protection from people who misuse our software. We do not want to bet our entire company on such possibilities, however unlikely, because we like doing what we do and want to continue to be able to do it. And, so, we require you to read and agree to this license. We think you will find it quite reasonable. Obviously, if you disagree, click “Disagree.” But, don’t just stop there. Let us know. Send some e-mail to <info@omnigroup.com> telling us what you find unacceptable about our license agreement. We can’t promise to change anything, but we will do our best to get back to you.

Nice. It’s their style, so it does not really surprise me, but it’s nice anyway.

What I like is this tab-drawer. I’ve just seen that even the bookmark-window is displayed as a tab. Very nice. Very integrated.

In the stauts bar there are some Icons. I don’t really understand what they are doing and there’s no tooltip, but I’m sure, this will be fixed in a later release.

Very good-looking. I’m going to surf around a bit and will possibly post something more later on.

Just before hitting “submit”, I’ve seen this small plus-sign above the scroll bar on any <textarea>-element. This thing is just great. When you click on it, an extra window will open providing you with a nice large texteditor and the possibility to import any text file. Nice! Very Nice.

I think, I’m going to find a whole lot of nice little things as I continue trying the thing out.

Programmers Font

When writing code here and then, you usually use a monospaced font for better alignment of the characters. The default in Windows is Courier New which is quite readable, but its characters are a bit wide.

My favourite so far has been Lucida Console which comes with Windows XP and maybe Microsoft Office. The fonts characters are a bit less wide than those in Courier New. This is my default-font in Putty as it’s very readable (for a monospaced font) and doesn’t use as much space as Courier does.

Somewhere on the web, I came across ProFont which is a modified version of Monaco, the mac users have as default monospaced font. ProFont is optimized to be used by programmers, can be set to a very small size (lots of code visible without scrolling) and is very very readable.

On the page you’ll find a bitmap and a truetype version. The latter looks quite badly on Windows XP with ClearType and the former doesn’t work in Java-Applications. Unfortunatly jEdit is indeed written in Java, so I have to use the TT variant.

Then again, Delphi and Putty are not written in Java, so I want to use the bitmap version.

Unfortunatly, it’s not possible to install both fonts at the same time as the are both named the same, so the TT version always wins.

My solution: I’ve opened the bitmap-font with a hex editor and changed all ocurrences of ProFontWindows to something else which finally allowed me to install both fonts at the same time.

Get the hacked version here. Note that I’ve only hacked the fontname. All its copyright belong to the author of the page above.

dvdupgrades.ch

When I was looking for a new AV-receiver, I soon found out that my whishes cannot be pleased in common consumer-shops like Media Markt. I found my device by googling.

Where to get it? Although, I am one of those guys that like to go into a store and just take the stuff with me, this was not possible this time as said receiver is quite uncommon (newly on the market and quite expensive [but sounds very nice]), so buying online was my only way to get it.

Browsing around a bit finally lead to dvdupgrades.ch which has the most complicated user interface I’ve ever seen on a website (and runs only on IE as the JavaScript for the menues at the top is somewhat strange), but looked quite ok anyway.

They promised delivery somewhere around February, 10th, but the stuff was here already yesterday. They’ve worked fast and professional. Very nice.

If you live near switzerland and need exotic AV-stuffm especially modified consoles or DVD-players (region code, macrovision, … – they even wrote a new firmware for Pioneer Players from scratch), give them a shot!

Delphi, WinXP and Password Edits

I’m still into making Delphi apps look more “native” when run under Windows XP. Now that I got the IE-Control working, I was looking into the password-edit case.

The Problem: When using the standard way for creating password edits (Drop a TEdit on the Form and set the PasswordChar property to ° ), this may look and work on in Win 9x, NT and 2000, but under XP, some features are missing:

In XP, password-edits cannot be read from other applications by sending the WM_GETTEXT message. Delphi’s TEdit can.
In XP, the edits have a nice bullet instead of a * to mark the entered characters
When CapsLock is active, a balloon-hint appears warning the user that maybe she is not doing what she expects
How to fix this?

Simple: Create a descendant of TEdit, override CreateParams and set the controls style to ES_PASSWORD. Provided you are supplying a valid Manifest for XP, you now have a fully fledged and nice working password-edit:
```
procedure TPasswordEdit.CreateParams(var Params: TCreateParams);
begin
  inherited;
  Params.Style := Params.Style or ES_PASSWORD;
end;
```
Oh. One thing is still missing: The dots look wrong. This is because Delphi does not use Windows’ standart font per default but overrides this with “MS Sans Serif” where “Tahoma” is the standard under XP. So Delphi-Apps generally look kind of foreign – even more so, when ClearType is enabled (MS Sans Serif is a bitmap font and cannot be antialiased).

This can be fixed by setting each forms DesktopFont property to true. Note that it’s a protected property, so it must me called from withing the form.

Now the bullets look right and the font’s in your application are proper anti-aliased (provided ParentFont is set to true in every component on the form).