Chinh Do

The little known WBR tag is great for formatting HTML tables. Add it to specific places in your table cell values to give the browser the option to add a line break there. This is very useful when displaying tables with long strings that would otherwise cause horizontal scrolling.

Here’s a sample table, displaying some info. Since the values in the tables do not have spaces or tabs, the browser is forced to display the values on one line:

Here’s the same table, with <wbr/> tags inserted where periods are:

The use of instant messaging at the workplace is very prevalent these days. While instant messaging is very convenient for everyday communication, don’t treat it the same as email, face-to-face meetings, or phone calls. There are several significant differences between instant messaging and traditional forms of communications:

• Instant messaging is not necessarily one-one-one. At any given moment, one person may be engaged in several simultaneous instant messaging conversations.
• Even though your messages will be displayed on the recipient’s screen immediately, the recipient may not be able to read the messages and respond immediately.
• With most instant messaging applications, the recipient cannot read your messages until you press the Enter key to send it. This limitation inherently makes instant messaging significantly slower than voice conversations.
• Most people can speak faster than they can type.

Here are some guidelines on basic/everyday instant messaging etiquette that will help you and your co-workers make the most out of this communication medium.

Include Relevant Info/Questions in The First Message

Avoid typing greetings or non-essential messages separately first. Include the question or relevant information in your first message.

Not-so-good examples (avoid this)

Conversation 1

• Jane (10:54:50 AM): Hi
• Mike (10:55:01 AM): Hello
• Jane (10:55:06 AM): The test server will be restarted in 1 minute.
• Mike (10:56:11 AM): Thanks for the info

Conversation 2

• Jane (2:15:08 PM): Good afternoon
• Mike (2:15:13 PM): Good afternoon
• Jane (2:15:13 PM): Do you have a few minutes to talk on the phone re project A?
• Mike (2:15:18 PM): Sure, let me call you.

Conversation 3

• Jane (4:03:30 PM): You there?
• Mike (4:03:35 PM): Yes
• Jane (4:03:42 PM): Can we have a short team meeting in conf room A
• Mike (4:03:50 PM): Sure. Be there in 5.

Good examples

Conversation 1

• Jane (10:54:50 AM): Hi, the test server will be restarted in 1 minute.
• Mike (10:54:55 AM): Thanks for the info

Conversation 2

• Jane (2:15:08 PM): Good afternoon, do you have a few minutes to talk on the phone re project A?
• Mike (2:15:13 PM): Sure I will call you.

Conversation 3

• Jane (4:03:30 PM): Can we have a short team meeting in conf room A?
• Mike (4:03:35 PM): Sure, be right there.

Every time you send a message, the recipient is disrupted from whatever he/she is doing. The more you can delay this disruption the better, even if it’s only seconds. It’s also not necessary to ask the recipient if he/she is there. That’s what the online status (away/available) is for. You can just type your message or ask your question. One exception to this would be if your message contains sensitive information.

Send Complete Messages

Good:

• Jane (9:15:23 AM): Hi, all integration tests are failing in the integration environment for the admin user group. Can you take a look?”

No so good:

• Jane (9:15:23 AM): Hi, all integration tests are failing…
• Jane (9:15:27 AM): the integration environment…
• Jane (9:15:32 AM): for the admin user group…”
• Jane (9:15:38 AM): Can you take a look?

If you have to send several sentences in sequence, compose them in a separate editor first (notepad would do), then type them out quickly in succession. That way the recipient does not have to wait for you while you type your next message, make editing corrections, etc.

Do Not Expect Responses Immediately

Unless the recipient reports to you, do not expect a response immediately after you type a message. The recipient may be in the middle of five other instant message conversations, on the phone, or working on something else more important. If the recipient’s status is not set to “Away”, and you have not received a response after a few minutes, it’s ok to ping him/her again. Maybe they forgot about your message.

Update Your Status and Respect Others’ Status

If you need to step out, change your status to “Away”, or “In a Meeting”, or “Back in an Hour”, or whatever is appropriate for the situation. This tells everyone else that you are not available to respond to messages immediately and save them from having to wait for your responses.

Pick Up the Phone

If the instant messaging conversation starts to go into lots of details and may make take longer than a few minutes, consider picking up the phone and continue the conversation there.

Did you know that 7-Zip can open and extract ISO archives? I had to install OneNote today from the MSDN ISO and I didn’t have an virtual drive/ISO mounting tool installed on my work PC. So I tried to open the ISO in 7-Zip and it opened it just fine. All I then had to do was to extract the files to a temp folder and did the install from there.

In my opinion, the top three hardware items that help maximize programmer productivity are sufficient RAM, multiple monitors, and a fast multi-core CPU. For RAM, try to have at least 2GB for Visual Studio development, especially if you have additional applications such as Resharper, a local SQL Server instance, IIS, etc. Remember that on Windows XP or Vista 32-bit, the maximum usable RAM is limited to about 3.2 GB or so.

My current company-provided laptop, which I must perform most programming activities on, is a Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz. It is satisfactory for what I am doing. Given the choice however, I would go for a quad-core CPU desktop. Desktop usually has faster drives, better video cards, etc. And the additional cores allow for smooth multitasking and better performance when using virtual machines.

Plenty of RAM and multiple fast CPU cores will keep the waiting down to a minimum. Now you need to give yourself the ability to see all of those things that you have going on. Research has demonstrated that multiple monitors increase productivity. For most programmers, I would recommend two monitors. Adding that second monitor is a relatively inexpensive affair. Most laptops or desktop video cards has built-in support for a second monitor so all you have to do is getting that second LCD, which cost very little these days compared to three years ago. The third monitor and beyond is where things start to get complicated. You either have to install a second video card, or use a second PC/laptop in conjunction with a software application named MaxiVista. Unless you have spare monitors sitting around, I think the return on investment starts to diminish greatly beyond two monitors.

Another way to use that third or fourth monitor is to simply attach them to additional computers. Sure, you won’t be able to control all those monitors with the same mouse and keyboard but this setup is not without advantages:

• When the first computer is rebooting or not responding, you still have a fully functioning computer.
• The screens on the second computer are not using CPU/memory resources on the first computer.

My 5-Monitor Setup

I work from home most of the time and on my desk, there are five monitors, hooked up to three laptops. I know… it’s over the top but it’s not like I bought all of these laptops/monitors specifically for this setup. The second laptop is my personal laptop. The third one is another old personal laptop that would otherwise would be sitting around gathering dust. I might as well put them all to use. Here’s how the monitors are arranged:

The main laptop is hooked up to monitor #1, an ASUS 24″ running at 1920×1080 resolution and monitor #2, the main laptop’s built-in 15.4-inch LCD running at 1680×1050. I spend most of my time on these two monitors. The ASUS 24″ is great for programming/debugging and is where I normally park Visual Studio 2008 or Rational Software Architect. If you can get one with more vertical resolution (such as 1920×1200), that’s even better.

The extra width on the main monitor allows me to permanently open supporting panes like Solution Explorer that I otherwise would configure to “auto hide”. Note where I have my Start menu: on the right edge of the main monitor. This gives me more vertical space so I can see more code without scrolling. The additional benefits are that more opened windows can fit on the task bar, and that I don’t have to move the mouse as much to access the start menu.

The built-in laptop monitor (#2) is where I have miscellaneous supporting windows such as rolling logs, instant messaging client, email client, documents, etc.

For taking notes, I use Microsoft OneNote and since it’s not installed on my company PC, I use my own laptop for it. This laptop is monitor #3, sitting to the left of the main monitor. Monitors #4 and #5 are used once in a while to display server logs, various server telnet and remote desktop connections, and anything I don’t need to control often.

Update 2/25/2008 – Synergy

Rohan kindly pointed out to me a free keyboard/mouse sharing utility called Synergy. You should give this a try if you have multiple computers on your desk. Synergy lets you use a single keyboard/mouse to control multiple computers, running multiple operating systems. Additional features include clipboard sharing, screen saver, and single password login. The configuration is not the most intuitive but once you have everything set up correctly, it works like a charm.

I now can control all three laptops and 5 monitors with one mouse/keyboard combo! Very nice.

I googled and didn’t find anything useful so I thought I’d share this. If you have a VISA gift card and want to use it on Amazon.com in conjunction with a credit card (to pay for any amount over the gift card value), the trick is to use the VISA gift card to purchase an Amazon gift card of the same value for yourself (search for “gift card” on Amazon.com).

Once you have the Amazon gift card, you can then use it to pay for part of your order, with the remaining balance being charged to another credit card.

I am sure this trick works with most other online merchants too.

On my home network, I have a media file server running Vista 64-bit that serves out music and movies. Since everything is behind a router, I decided to make the shared media folders accessible to anyone on my home network. All you have to do is browse to the media server and start accessing content, without having to log in.

To enable anonymous browsing of a shared folder that is shared by a Vista PC (that is not on a domain), do the following:

• Enable the Guest Account:
• Run "lusrmgr.msc", select the Users folder.
• Right click on the Guest user and choose Properttes.
• Uncheck "Account is disabled".

  

• Enable "Public folder sharing" and disable "Password protected sharing":
• Choose Start, right click on Network, and choose Properties.
• Enable "Public folder sharing".
• Disable "Password protected sharing".

  

• For each shared folder:
• Grant Everyone Read permission to the Share.
• Grant Everyone Read and Execute (NTFS) permission on the shared folder itself.

  

Against popular wisdom, I decided to upgrade my bedroom home theater PC to Vista 64-bit a couple days ago (just have to make full use of all of my precious 4GB of RAM). Everything is working surprising well so far, with the exception of sound! Whenever I play any audio, my speakers now produce all kinds of pops and crackles along with the normal audio stream. Urgg.

After a couple of days of googling, tweeking various sound settings, uninstalling/reinstalling drivers, etc. without success, I almost gave up on the thing. Then I decided to try just one more thing, changing the default sample rate to “2 channel, 16 bit, 44100 Hz (CD Quality)” from the default “2 channel, 24 bit, 48000Hz” and just like magic, the pops and crackles are gone.

If you do any web scraping (also known as web data mining, extracting, harvesting), you are probably familiar with the main steps: navigate to page, retrieve HTML, parse HTML, extract desired elements, repeat. I’ve found the SgmlReader library to be very useful for this purpose. SmglReader turns your HTML into XML. Once you have the XML, it’s fairly easy to use built-in classes such as XmlDocument, XmlTextReader, XPathNavigator to parse and extract the data you want.

Now to the labor intensive part: before your program can make sense of the XML, you have to manually analyze the HTML/XML first. Your program won’t know jack about how to extract that stock price until you tell it exactly where the stock price is, typically in the form of an XPath expression. My process of getting that XPath expression goes something like this:

1. Scroll to/find desired element in the XML editor.
2. Does element have unique attributes that can be used?
• a – If yes, code XPATH statement with filter on attribute value. Example: //Table[@id="searchResultTable"].
• b – If no, code an absolute XPATH expression. Example: /html/body/div[4]/pre[2]/font[7]/table[2]/tr[5]/td[2]/table[1]/tr[2]/td[5]/span.

Step 2b is where it gets very labor intensive and boring, especially for a big web page with many levels of nesting. Visual Studio 2005 XML Editor/Resharper have a couple of features that I find useful for this:

- Visual Studio’s Format Document (Edit/Advanced/Format Document) command formats the XML with nice indentation and makes it a lot easier to look at.

- With Resharper, you can press Ctrl-[ to go to the start of the current element, or if you are already at the start, go to the parent element.

Even with the above tools, it's still a painful and error-prone exercise. Luckily for us, Firebug has the perfect feature for this: Copy XPath. To use it, open your HTML/XML document, open the Firebug pane (Tools/Firebug/Open Firebug), navigate to the desired element, right click on it and choose "Copy XPath".

You should now have this XPath expression in the clipboard, ready to be pasted into your web scrapper application: "/html/body/div[2]/table/tr/td[2]/table”.

A feature that I would love to have is the ability to generate an alternate XPath expression using “id” predicates, such as this: “//Table[@id="searchResultTable"]“. With web pages that are not under your control, you want to minimize the chance that changes on the pages impact your code. Absolute XPath expressions are vulnerable to any kind of changes on the page that change the order and/or nesting of elements. On the other hand, XPath expressions using an “id” predicate are less likely to be impacted by layout changes because in HTML, element IDs are supposed to be unique. No matter where your element is on the page, if it has the same ID, you should still be able to get to it by looking up the ID. Hmm… this sounds like a good idea for a Visual Studio Add-in.

Programming

• Borland Turbo Pascal was my favorite language in my early days of hobby programming. I feel a little sad to hear that Borland recently sold their CodeGear division to Embarcadero.
• Day-to-day with Subversion is a good and detailed write-up on procedures most developers need to perform daily. By Bil Simser.

.NET/C#

• The evil sou file – fighting and winning with Visual Studio. By Brian Noyes.
• Joshua Flanagan had an interesting idea on a Readable Regular Expressions framework.
• Derik Whittaker posted a tip on how to share config files between projects.
• Jon Galloway: //TODONT: Use a Windows Service just to run a scheduled process.
• You can throw away your own TitleCase method now. Because there’s one in the framework. Via ASP.NET FAQ.
• Operator~ and BinarySearch. By Shahar Y.
• Steven Harman detailed a hack to get Visual Studio to use more than 2GB of RAM.
• Frank-Leonardo Quednau: Lazy instantiation one-liner of instance fields with the coalesce operator.

Software and Tools

• Google Maps Street View is in Richmond.

  Goo

  It looks like the Street View images were taken around September 2007 because according to IMDB, the movie Game Plan was playing in the US starting 9/23/2007:

  

• Google Maps adds user-created photos, videos, maps. Via CNET.

  Goog

Something Different

• Top 50 soccer goals (video).

Just in case anyone else needs to do this out there…

I recently got myself a nice ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC. It doesn’t come with a DVD-Drive and although I have an external DVD drive, I just can’t seem to find its power adapter. Argg!

In order to do this, you must have the following:

• Windows XP installed on the PC you want to install Vista to.

Procedure

1. Log in into Windows XP on the PC you want to install Vista to.
2. Use Partition Magic or another partitioning tool and create a second partition for Vista. Make it a Primary Partition (don’t know if this is required but this is what I did). Format the second partition with NTFS. Your Windows XP installation will be left alone and you will be able to dual boot to it.
3. Create a folder (let’s called it "c:\VistaInstall") and copy all files from the Vista DVD / ISO there (either extract the files from an ISO image using a Virtual CD/DVD emulator like Daemon Tools, or copy the files from another PC with a DVD drive over the network).
4. Run Setup.exe from c:\VistaInstall.
5. Choose Custom Install and follow the prompts to select the second partition you created.
6. Follow the rest of the on-screen instructions.

As part of the installation, Vista Setup will copy the installation files to the new partition. After it reboots, it’ll have all the files there to continue.

After you are done with the install, you can delete the temporary folder c:\VistaInstall that you created.