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.
Nice surprise logging into Gmail just now: Themes! I tried out a few and have to say they are nice to look at. I almost forgot I have actual emails to read. I’m going to try out a cheery theme to offset the grim news from Wall Street.
There’s even a Terminal theme for die UNIX shell diehards. It’s actually kind of cool… if only for a few minutes.
Ever since Windows 2000, menu keyboard shortcut characters are not underlined by default. According to Microsoft, the underlined letters are hidden until you press the Alt key. Let’s try that… First, use the mouse to click on the Help menu in Visual Studio:
Now, press Alt to show the underlined letters right? Poof, the menu is gone. Ok, that’s an easy one. I’m sure everyone have figured out that Alt key must be pressed before you access the menu. But can anyone tell me this? How do I show underlined letters for right-click/context menus with the Alt key? Well, the short answer is you can’t! If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. I’ve tried Alt+right-click, Alt then right click, right click then Alt, etc. Nothing works.
The only thing I’ve found to work is the Application key (this is the key with the image of a mouse pointer on a menu, between Alt and Ctrl). Interestingly, the Application key will always show underlined letters regardless of the “hide underlined letters” settings. The keyboard combination Shift-F10 also brings up the context menu, however that keyboard shortcut does not show underlined letters.
You can forget about all of this nonsense and have Windows always show the underlined letters by changing a setting (instructions below are for Windows XP):
Open the Display Control Panel.
Click on the Appearance tab, then Effects…
Uncheck “Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key”.
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:
Scroll to/find desired element in the XML editor.
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.
Tools And Techniques to Identify Concurrency Issues. By Rahul V. Patil and Boby George, MSDN Magazine. Lots of good information on concurrency issues, how to analyze/detect problems, and pointers to tools.
Did you know about AppDomain::UnhandledException Event? I didn’t, until my Windows Service started to die without even leaving a nice goodbye… stacktrace. Well there was this mysterious looking entry in the Events Log. MSDN.
Add color to your Console apps with ConsoleColor. MSDN.
Nick Beradi showed you how to Turn Google App Engine into your own Personal Content Delivery Network (CDN). App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.
