My Hope for the Future of Laptops

Way back when Natural Keyboards were all of the rage and gelled wrist rests were new, I was looking at the advancements in human interface input devices and started thinking about what my dream interface would be.
At the time there was this cool keyboard I saw advertised in the gaming magazines which had removable templates which would give you a themed lit keyboard. I was fascinated with it, what if instead of templates you could stick one of those really thin screens in there? Wouldn't that be cool? And what if it had some sort of touch interface to it? What if you could have programmed keys that you could reprogram and move around anyway you want? What if you could even raise the surface of the keyboard screen so you could touch type with it? Wouldn't that be cool?
The Idea I ended up with would have packaged it all up into a two monitor laptop with one defined as a screen and the other a keyboard. Then there would be a stylus for interfacing with the screen. You could type on the keyboard screen then pop up a different keyboard scheme for gaming, even have two sets of arrow keys for letting two gamers play at once.
I seem to remember making a little tiny mockup of the idea though I drew the keyboard using pencil and it had a track ball drawn on it as they were all the rage back then.
Later I started wondering why the screen should even be opaque? what if the screen was transparent and you could selectively make parts opaque or transparent/translucent at varying degrees. Then, what if you could even selectively make the screen reflective so a window could act a a mirror? Wouldn't that be cool?
Over time it has been fascinating to watch and see the advancements that have occurred to bring it closer to reality.
Screens have been getting thinner and thinner, more efficient and usable. LCDs now come in color and You can now look at from multiple angles. The advancements in OLED screens and color electronic ink display displays makes me drool at the possibilities if they could just be combined.
The advancements in touch to the point that it is now built into major operating systems around and with support for multi-touch it makes the dream even more interesting.
The only thing missing today is implementing a way to raise the surface of a transparent material so that it could be used to provide tactile clues and feedback for touch typers. [Update: This Brail E-book Looks Cool!]
I was excited when I found out OLPC was thinking along the keyboard screen for the XO-2. Microsoft working on the Courier tablet is excitedly similar as well.
Awhile back I read about a Sony VAIO laptop which has a transparent screen.
Now if the displays could also be 3D…

Where is that SQL Management Studio?

Have you have Installed SQL Server Express Edition only to discover that SQL Management Studio did not get installed with it? Or when you try to install it you can’t find it in the options?

Well, for some reason, if an application such as Visual Web Developer Express, which installs a minimum install of SQL Express, is installed first those settings are used for all subsequent installs of SQL Express on the OS and since SQL Management Studio was not an option for the first install it won’t be permitted for any of the latter.

The solution is to install SQL Server Express Edition first, before any other software is installed.

Should you find yourself in this predicament you may need to wipe the machine and reinstall everything again. Fun.

Poor Mouse

Grr. It looks looks like my mouse is starting to wear out, the left click is beginning to not respond. This mouse has served me well for about three years and though it has visible signs of wear it will be sad should it die.

So it might be about time to look into buying a new one.  The Microsoft Bluetooth notebook mouse 5000 looks interesting. But I should do some shopping around to see what I can find. And wait to see if I can get a job soon…

Deseret Translator Prototype

With Windows 7 being released, which along with the latest in Apples OSs, can display Deseret characters I thought I would have a little fun with it and see if I could make a Latin alphabet English to Deseret alphabet English translator. I made it as far as being able to replace all of the consonants preserving capitalization and a handful of token combinations before I realized the huge problem would be in trying to figure out how to translate the vowels. If it weren't for all of the exceptions to rules in Latin alphabet English it might be a bit of a simple task.

I had thought it might be a fun and simple project to put up, but it looks like it will take some extra thought and work before it is ready. At least it sort of works.

Intentional Software

Woah! This is a fascinating video! (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/dd727740.aspx) A few years ago I wished that .net code could be saved in some intermediary language which could be swapped between syntaxes on the fly. This looks like my dream come true! Woo hoo!

Microsoft Security Essentials

Woo! Hoo! It's available!

I have been waiting for this for some time. At last Microsoft has released a free antivirus! You can go and pick it up now at:  http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

I've heard good things from the Beta; like it is supposed to be really light weight and it is supposed to be easy to use and unobtrusive. I'm uninstalling AVG right now and I'm installing Microsoft Security Essentials. Let's see how it goes!

RoboCopy

So you have a huge number of files that you want to copy from one place and put them somewhere else. Perhaps you have updated some of the files and want to make sure the changes are copied but you don't remember which files were changed.

The easiest way to do this would be to drag and drop the folders to merge them but if you have done this before you probably know that this is likely to take long enough that you wonder if there might be a better way.

Fortunately for those using Windows Server 2008, Vista or Windows 7 there is. Robocopy to the rescue! For Windows XP and Server 2003 you can get it via a download from Microsoft.

For this purpose robocopy has some advantages over it's predecessors copy and xcopy and it's alternate bitsadmin in that it copies folders, it has the ability to check to see if a file needs to be copied before copying and it is relatively easy to use.

In my example I will take clipart stored on c:\ and copy it to z:\ I want to log the results and I don't want to copy the thumbnail database so here is my command line.

Set Source=c:\Images\Clipart
Set Dest=z:\Images\Clipart
Set LogFile=ClipartCopyLog.txt
Set SkipFile=Thumbs.db

robocopy "%Source%" "%Dest%" /E /LOG:%LogFile% /TEE /V /FP /XF %SkipFile%



The /E switch tells robocopy to copy empty folders. /LOG is the switch which tells where to write a log to. /TEE logs the results both the the log and displays in the console window. /V presents verbose output which is good for debugging but not needed to run. /FP is also for logging instructing to use full path names. /XF is what allows Thumbs .db to be skipped in the file copy. For more information type robocopy /? in an open command window.

The biggest advantage by far is that if the file already exists and is up to date then it won't try to copy the file which speeds things up quite a bit when merging folders.

Office Web

Whoot! From the tiny Thumbnail you might not be able to tell exactly what the screen shot is of, but it's something I'm excided about.

I opened up my SkyDrive today and found I had been accepted to the Office Web Apps Technical Preview.  Which means I get to be one of the first to be able to view Word Docs, view and edit Excel spreadsheets all in side of SkyDrive  in the browser.

The one thing which has really surprised me so far, is that it could actually handle opening my almost a ream of paper document!! I'm impressed. It is limited though, I tried a few of my crazier spread sheets which wouldn't open online. It isn't designed to replace Office in any right anyway but is a nice offering so far.

Filtering the Path

This is a little project I have been trying to figure out ever since I read a line in the help for the "For" command:

%~$PATH:I   - searches the directories listed in the PATH
               environment variable and expands %I to the
               fully qualified name of the first one found.
               If the environment variable name is not
               defined or the file is not found by the
               search, then this modifier expands to the
               empty string

Running multiple scripts that continually add to the path list can muck up the path list. I hoped I could design a function that searches to find out if a path exists in the path list and if it does it wont add the new one.

@Echo Off

PATH=C:\WINNT\system32\;C:\WINNT\;C:\Program Files\Test1\

    Call :AddToPath "C:\Program Files\Test1\"
    Call :AddToPath "C:\Program Files\Test2\LICENSE.txt"
    Call :AddToPath "C:\Program Files\Test3\"
    Call :AddToPath "C:\Program Files\Test4"

    Echo %Path%

GoTo :EOF

:AddToPath
    If Not ""=="%~x1" Call :SetToPath "%~dp1"
    If "%~1"=="%~dp1" Call :SetToPath "%~1"
    If "%~nx1"=="%~n1" If Not ""=="%~nx1" Call :SetToPath "%~1\"
GoTo :EOF

:SetToPath
    Set t=%path%
    @Rem Deleting the path if it exists
    Call Set t=%%t:%~1=%%
    If "%path%"=="%t%" Path %Path%;%~1
GoTo :EOF



This is as far I have been able to get the script. For the most part it works except if the new path is already part of the path of another path in the path list. There may be better ways to implement this.

One thing to note is that it is best that the path being added has already been created. Sometimes splitting out the different parts doesn't work if it doesn't exist.

32 Bit on 64 Bit Program Files

When 32 bit programs install on a 64 bit Windows they are dumps %ProgramFiles% into %ProgramFiles(x86)% and the default command line in 64 bit Windows is the one that is 64 bit which directs %ProgramFiles% to %ProgramFiles%. So if you want to access a 32 bit program you have to use %ProgramFiles(x86)%. This can really complicate matters if you need to access the same program on both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows. So what can you do? Try this:

@Echo Off

Set Programs=%ProgramFiles%

If "%PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%" == "x86" Set Programs=%ProgramFiles%
If "%PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%" == "AMD64" Set Programs=%ProgramFiles(x86)%
If "%PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%" == "IA64" Set Programs=%ProgramFiles(x86)%

CD /d %Programs%



This method is extensible so that you can add any additional operating system processor types as they become available and it allows you to select the correct path for each one.

One little fun note is in the dummy CD call I'm using /d which changes the current drive as well as changing the directory for the drive. Fun!

Popups

Dear Netflix, University of Phoenix, and others who blatantly continue to use the blight of popup advertizing,

I wanted to let you know that I will personally continue to abstain from use of your services so long as you continue to use popup advertizing.

Thank you.

~____

Rebooting a Remote Machine

It is quite common for me at work to be remoting into a computer working on it and realize I need to reboot it for one reason or another only the machine I'm remoting into is a client OS (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7) that has the reboot icon removed from the start menu in the remote desktop window.

If the machine is under my desk I can just switch over to it to reboot or hard reboot with the button on the front but sometimes the machine is in another room in another building in another city in another state or another country. Then I have no access to the physical machine.

On occasion if I'm using a Lab machine they will have some interface that I can use to reboot but not always. So what do you do?

It's actually quite simple, open up an elevated command window and run the following command:

Shutdown /r /t 0

The flag to restart is /r, then the flag /t plus a number sets the time delay before the command restarts the machine, a value of "0" reboots immediately.

For more information on this command run "Shutdown /?" from a command prompt.

The Geeky Workplace

One of the cool things about working at Microsoft is just how geeky people are. You can be in a meeting and there might be one or two people who follow sports (strangely it is possible they would be mostly women) and one of them would say something like how about that game last night and most of the people in the room would look at them confused thinking of World of Warcraft or some other sort of video game rather than a ball game.

Oh so much fun.

Get a File's Date and Time

Have you ever come across the need to log the date and time a file was created only to discover dir doesn't do it?

I did. I spent a couple of days frustratingly trying to find a way to capture the information with little luck. Finally I found documentation in the call command that explained that "%~t1"  expands %1 to date/time of file. This gave me enough information that I could come up with the following script:

@Echo Off

    Call :FileTimeDateSize "MyDate" "MyTime" "MySize" "%WinDir%\notepad.exe"
    @Echo:%MyDate%
    @Echo:%MyTime%
    @Echo:%MySize%

GoTo :EOF

:FileTimeDateSize
    Call :AsignDateTimeSize "%~1" "%~2" "%~3" %~t4 "%~z4"
GoTo :EOF

:AssignDateTimeSize
    Set %~1=%~4 & Set %~2=%~5 %~6 & Set %~3=%~7 bytes
GoTo :EOF



I was able to extract the date and time using "%~t3" but I wanted the date separated from the time so I wrote the second function to split out the date and the time by feeding "%~t3 to the function :AsignDateTime without quotes so that it will be split out into three tokens which are assigned independently to the desired variables to be used later.

If you run the script you can see that it is working because the date Notepad was built appears on one line and then the time on the next. I have also expanded this so that it reports the file size as well.

Now all I have to do to log the date and time so I can parse it later is @Echo:%MyDate%,%MyTime%,%MySize%>>LogFile.log

Return to Microsoft?

Woo! Hoo! I received the much anticipated Return to Microsoft email this morning, so I'm spending some time working on updating my Resume. Now how do I summarize the vast amount of random stuff I did in my last contract to only a few short sound bites?

Batch Script Rename Files with Spaces

In the previous article I introduced how to use batch to search and replace text in strings but what can you do with it?

Let's say you have a whole bunch of files that you want to work with but you are using some old program that frustratingly refuses to allow you to open files that have spaces in their names. Luckily this is a rare case now days but I recently came across such circumstances.

You could rename them by hand, but if you have lots of files it could get old fast. Believe me, renaming thousands of files by hand is a pain in the wrists.

The first possibility is that you could delete the spaces such as in the following:

DeleteSpaces.bat

@Echo Off
SetLocal EnableExtensions

@Echo Renaming all files in the folder to remove spaces.
For /f "delims=" %%a In ('dir /a-d /s /b *.*') Do Call :DeleteSpaces "%%~a"

GoTo :EOF

:DeleteSpaces
    Set t=%~n1
    Call Set t=%%t: =%%
    Ren "%~1" "%~dp1%t%%~x1"
GoTo :EOF



But deleting spaces may not be what you want to do, after all you are deleting valuable information that spaces bring. What about replacing the spaces with underscores_ instead?:

UnderscoreSpaces.bat

@Echo Off
SetLocal EnableExtensions

Echo Renaming all files in the folder Replacing spaces with Underscores.
For /f "delims=" %%a In ('dir /a-d /s /b *.*') Do Call :UnderscoreSpaces "%%~a"

GoTo :EOF

:UnderscoreSpaces
    Set t=%~n1
    Call Set t=%%t: =_%%
    Ren "%~1" "%~dp1%t%%~x1"
GoTo :EOF



What these both do is retrieve a list of tiles then use modifications of the find and replace function and replaces spaces either with nothing or an underscore then rename the files accordingly.

One thing I made certain to do is limit the renaming only to the filename and not the rest of the string. This is done by setting "t=%~n1" the n flag pulls only the filename. When the rename is done it is all put back together using "%~dp1%t%%~x1" the flags d and p are drive and path then %t% is the filename and it completes it using the flag x for extension.

note that SetLocal keeps the variables set in either script contained within the scripts so that they don't spill out into other scripts.

Disney + Marvel

I wonder what this will do for the Amalgam universe?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/disney-to-acquire-marvel-entertainment-2009-08-31-9050

Precision

I used to argue with my dad on the matter of precision. My dad is and engineer in education and personality as was his dad and his dad's dad and so on, so I inherited the mentality critical thinking and interest in mechanics, processes and technology of an that such a personality brings (Which sadly doesn't help with personal relationships:).

At one point I had decided I wanted to design my own game engine. I had decided I wanted to use the most precise decimal system I could find in 'cough' VB for storing the locations of points. In the process of designing the basics of the engine I tried to find pi to the most decimals that would fit in the desired unit. I had learned the 22/7 trick from my Drafting instructor but was completely unsatisfied with the accuracy of only 2 decimal points.

My dad asked why I thought I needed any precision beyond two decimal points; in the mechanical engineering world two or three decimals are usually considered accurate enough for almost any consumer products, as anything more precise makes little difference, and just the expansion and contraction of materials alone exceeds the difference such precision would bring. 

But I was using a computer and despite what the 1950s and the movie industry hope to tell you, computers are inherently inaccurate at least when it comes to trying to calculate decimal and floating point numbers.

If you use floats for storing points in a world you can move around in, you would find that the precision of the locations of points in the center of the world is quite high, but the farther away you move from the center the less precision you have because the whole number portion of the value is getting filled with the larger numbers sacrificing the precision and storage space of the decimal portion. So at the edge of a large map you could end up with unexpected gaps in your world.

Well, okay if you were to only use integers the gaps could be reduced, but when you want to try to copy the nature of your surroundings you might find you want more precision. The thought might come up to use fixed point, sure it could work but you would have to be very careful with your rounding and your geometry.  You also end up with geometry that can look a little blocky depending on the resolution of your values.

But I never got far enough along to be able to see any degradation. So now days, I've stopped caring. Well almost, when I go back and play with old geometry code I am still tempted to write everything as doubles rather than singles, but now I've learned to think processor capacity and the effects on speed too.

Batch Script Search and Replace

A while back I thought I would try to share some of my favorite batch script snippets from my Google notebook but the shared notebook was quickly flagged as potentially dangerous and I didn't feel like contesting the flag so I pulled the snippets back into my private notebook.

I still want to share a few of my most useful snippets, so here is my favorite which I have heavily adapted it to fit many needs

Replace.bat

@Echo Off

Set /p Source=Text you would like to search:
Set /p Search=Text you would like to find:
Set /p Replace=Text to replace "%Search%" with:
Set Dest=

Call :Replacer "%Source%" "%Search%" "%Replace%" "Dest"

@Echo.%Dest%

GoTo :EOF

:Replacer
    Set t=%~1
    Call Set t=%%t:%~2=%~3%%
    Set %~4=%t%
GoTo :EOF

So what's going on here?

Well, first you provide a string to search, what you are looking for, then what you want to replace it with.  The script then calls a function which replaces all instances of the search term with the desired replace term. Simple right?

The interesting part comes in the line which does the search and replace.

variable t is a temporary variable which gets set as the source string then it is replaced with the new string in a call set statement in this strange part "Call Set t=%%t:%~2=%~3%%" which could be written as "Call Set Destination=%%t:%Search%=%Replace%%%".

What it expands to is fascinating as it double expands. Say you want to replace "is" with "was" in the string "This is your search string". You would end up with "Call Set t=%%This is your search string:is=was%%" which needs to be expanded one more time as it is now an environment variable replacer which the call statement executes to replace the instance of "is" with "was" so you end up with "This was your search string".

The final confusing piece of code sets the result to an arbitrary variable name which you feed the function in this case "Dest", this allows you to reuse the code with any destination variable you would like.

This has been a fascinating  howbeit confusing piece of batch script that I have found to be very useful in so many situations.

Now for a few notes about batch code hygiene in which this sample employs.

1. Never wrap strings used in set statements with quotes "". doing so will make string cleanup difficult. Set will set a variable to the entire line after the equals = sign.
2. In batch, all variables are global, so work with them accordingly. You may end up with confusing results if you don't understand this.
3. Create empty variables for readability. If you have a set of variables where one will be set later but you can set it blank near the top then fill it later, this is only for readability.
4. When you pass a string to a function, even if you are passing a variable, quote "" it. You never know when you will be passing a string with spaces or some other weird characters, so in order to make sure it is all kept together quote it.
5. When you retrieve a variable from a function use the tilde ~ eg. %~1. the tilde removes the surrounding quotes from a string passed through a function.
6. When echoing a variable use "@Echo.". This prevents displaying the echo state such as "Echo off" if the variable ends up being empty. The @ prevents echoing the command if Eco is on.

Photo Tags

There are two graphics applications I use on occasion which automatically scan through photos and identify faces. They are Google's Picasa and Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery. They both have their own unique uses and they are both getting better, but every time I move to a different computer or install a new operating system I find myself doing the same thing all over again.

On my little network hard drive I have tens of thousands of photos must of which are of people. Right now I can remember who many of them are, some I have forgotten their names already, but I want to make sure I keep track of who the people are. I've started a few times tagging people and adding comments to pictures, but then I go on to another computer only to discover the information was stored on the first machine only.

Windows Live Photo Gallery has built in tagging of people which is nice, the auto identification could be improved however. The manual tagging is almost as good as FaceBook. Actually it would be nice to be able to sync to FaceBook and other accounts to help identify who someone is, as it is now the only option is a Windows Live account.

Picasa doesn't seem to be able to locate people using just the installed application, but it can when the photo is put online and the identification online is actually pretty good, but I don't want to put all of my pictures online, I don't have enough space available for that on my account for that and I'm not wiling to shell out to get more right now.

What I wish would happen is they would write the tags directly into the photo's metadata so that it travels with the photo. And it would be nice if they used a method that would be interoperable between applications so that you could identify someone in one application and it could be associated as the same person in another application. Okay, that might be a near impossible idea but it would sure be nice.