TextPad and Clip Libraries

TextPad has a feature called Clip Libraries, which basically is a library of code snippets. Each snippet is identified by a short name and the full code (of the actual snippet). Once the short name is double-clicked, the expanded code snippet is placed at the location of the cursor.

Out of the box TextPad provide a handful of these libraries, such as SMS Texting, HTML Characters, and Control Characters to name but a few.

Doctypes

As I previously wrote, I end up writing most of my code in a plain text editor (rather than a WYSIWYG editor). The other side of the story is that you need to remember all of the available elements of the language, which really isn't terribly difficult for HTML, but when it comes to doctype's I always seem to draw a blank!

When I was to start a new HTML document, and in need of a doctype, I would end up going to a site in one of my bookmarks, viewing source, and copying the doctype. Works most of the time if I got the site correct for which doctype I wanted to use! So, rather than relying upon guess work I ended up writing a Clip Library for HTML doctype's.

Clip Libraries Location

The process is fairly straightforward, and it really only involved a few minutes of tinkering with one of the existing libraries and searching for the doctype's.

Once you download the HTML Doctype Clip Library below simply save the file into the user folder for your clip libraries. You can find this by going to Configure | Preferences menu, then click through to Folders | Clip Library and note the folder path. On my Windows 7 system it's located in C:\Users\serdar\App Data\Roaming\Helios\Textpad\5.0\ and place the file in there. You may have to show hidden files in Windows Explorer to see the App Data folder.

Do not save the file where the default Clip Libraries are, which would be in the Program Files\TextPad\Sample folder, as the next time you restart your machine you'll see that you're custom libraries would have disappeared!

Download the HTML Doctype Clip Library

To remind myself of writing more throughout the year I signed up to Project 52, I won't rehash the purpose of the program but do expect a blog post at least every week of this year.

So it's time to dust off the cobwebs and give this weblog a bit of a tune up!

First up, two quick changes, one being to the about page to reflect some new items and remove what is now inaccurate. Yes, a new profile picture is on the cards as well!

Secondly, the homepage now lists the last 5 published items in contrast to the last item that use to be published. This should liven things up a little as I plan on writing a little more than I did last year.

However, for the last several weeks, maybe even months, the apple.com homepage has been featuring the new iMac with a desktop photo of a scene from the new Star Trek movie. Every time I see this, I want to go out and watch the movie. Of course, on a Mac as well.

Yesterday I finally succumbed to the marketing and hired the blu-ray version from my local Blockbuster. I have to say I did have my doubts about whether or not I'll actually watch it till the end, however, I ended up finding it to be quite engaging and thought the performance of "Sylar" as Spock was what really made the movie.

I haven't read any reviews so not sure on what the general consensus or what the "trekkies" thought of the movie but it's definitely one that I'll look forward to owning.

Armed with only the basics of Cloud architecture the main takeaway for me, as a developer, was that basically the tools and other material that I use in my day-to-day job will have to suffice, as there is basically a lack of Cloud-aware tools available. The nature of the beast also makes building such tools non-trivial. However, I'm sure that as it becomes more and more mainstream we'll start to see some more tools becoming available.

Photos of the event can be found here on my Flickr stream.

I set out to solve this using Yahoo Pipes, which was something that I wanted to play around with for a while. A few hours later and voila, Flickr - Get feed of all user Public Groups, a Yahoo Pipe that goes off to Flickr traversing your public groups, grabbing the feed URL and creating a single combined mega-feed. All that it requires to generate your specific group feed is your Flickr username!

Note that if you subscribe to a large amount of groups this is going to be a pretty hefty RSS feed so please be mindful of that.

Here's a screenshot of the elements involved in putting this together, click through to a larger version for a better view.

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

The second problem relates to stitches, both in the middle of my chest but especially on my right side. I googled, as one would, and found out that there's the lucky ones who don't really ever get stitches, and then there's the rest of us. It was good to know that I wasn't alone! I came across a site that lists 25 body hacks (very geeky, I know), including this gem:

During or after a run, some people will occasionally get a "side stitch." This pain in the side is generally a product of exhaling as the right foot hits the ground, thus putting downward pressure on the liver and causing it to pull on the diaphragm. To avoid side stitches, exhale as your left foot hits the ground during runs.

Well that explains it fairly well the why bit and how to avoid it. I have also found that not taking in as much water in the hour leading up to training and also doing a stretch to the left also helps quite a bit. I put this to the test a couple of weeks ago for an 8km fun run and am happy to say that it did work for me! It was the first time I ran that distance without stopping and had a personal best time of 41 minutes 45 seconds!

"Redkite supports children, young people and their families through cancer by providing emotional support, financial assistance and education services. Redkite's work is as vital as assisting families with utility and food bills, providing education grants to help children and young people stay connected with school and catch up with missed study, providing petrol vouchers to get a child to treatment and funding social workers and music therapists in hospitals."

Technorati Tags: geeks, thevault, webdirections, webtrivianight

Of course, heaven forbid I enter the stationary store, namely Dymocks Stationary. Oh no. I can't just glance inside, I mean I need a spare ink refill for some of my pens, right? Yeah, of course I do!

So a while ago I came across these "bookmarker" pens, basically they're flat enough to be able to use them as a bookmark in your notebook, hence the name. They're cheap and plastic, but come in a whole assortment of colours (ink wise they're all black). Initially I came across these on a weblog, but never bookmarked (excuse the pun) the site. So I spent sometime trying to track down where these are sold and finally found them at bookmarkpen.com. These pens also go by the alias of Grippa Slip pens.

Well, now that I found a supplier in the US, it was time to track one down here Australia.

Unfortunately after all my googling and yahooing I came up trumps, so I asked the US supplier if they where willing to ship to Australia. Now whilst they accepted, the "target audience" of these pens are for marketing purposes whereby you get your company name stamped etc. That also means you typically buy this at a much larger quantity. After several emails back and forth online payment was organised for a set of ten, and in about two weeks my pens had arrived. So this "fix" should keep me going for a short while.

Technorati Tags: bookmarker, dymocks, grippaslip, officeworks, stationary

Gears make use of an SQLite database, weighing in at only 343Kb, so it's relatively small. There's a few API's that make up Gears, namely LocalServer, Database (to run queries etc.), and a WorkerPool (threading meet JavaScript, JavaScript meet threading). JSON is ubiquitous.

Next up was a PhD guy from Leeds University, who shows us Mapplets (Map-applets) that allow third party content to be hooked into google maps. This is available at http://maps.google.com/preview. One cool mapplet was the Distance Measurement tool, which allows one to drag a pin from one location to another which then calculates the distance between the two points.

There's a new domain out there as well, gmodules.com, which calls some of the Map API stuff by iframing maps.google.com. The way it seems to work is that you code against the gmodules.com which packs up your api calls and serialises them across to maps.google.com - via GET. Last I checked there was a 1024 character limit for GET requests, so it'll be interesting how the API circumvents this.

Bo Majewski, PhD from Queensland University of Technology took us through some cool Map API calls - a gravity defying bouncing pin, GDownloadURL to, well, download data and access it locally, and Marker Manager that can be used to keep your map more lighweight by adding and removing markers automatically depending upon the view. There was no mention of the new street view that's available for Maps, but there is now AdSense for GMaps as well.

Zhen Wang displayed how simple it is to create Google Gadgets, which are interestingly portable to Vista Sidebar, and also BEA WebLogic. Need to find out if they conform to WSRP, that would be nice.

Lars Rasmussen, Mr. Google Maps, broke up his presentation to three parts. First up was Google's adoption of Open Source, most devs are using a version of Ubuntu modded for Google (aptly nicknamed Goobuntu). Millions of dollars spent fed back into the open source community in various ways. Need to have a look at Breakpad which is an open source crash reporting system. Finally, it was time for the Google Web Toolkit (GWT, which he pronounced "GWIT"). Google Base is one app that is built on GWT. I wonder if there's anyone working on a .NET port?

Afte lunch Prakash Barathan had a talk about GData, Googles data api for all things google. GData is a superset of the Atom Publishing Protocol, adding extensions for a data model, query, concurrency, and authentication. Gumiyo.com was showcased as an application that makes heavy use of GData via Google Base.

And for the finale Michael Ashbridge took as thorough KML, the xml geo-data specification that is used by Google Maps and Google Earth (oh, and I guess Lunar as well!).

Technorati Tags: gdd07, google, googledeveloperday, googlegears, googlemaps