6strikes

Avoiding the dreaded red X

2009-09-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

Just a simple little thing, but I only thought of it recently. Sometimes, for various reasons, a dynamically loaded image occasionally fails. I used to live with the little red 'x' that would occur in these cases, but eventually realised that there's a more elegant solution -- use the onerror handler to replace that with a tasteful default image. Here's how I do it.


<html>
  <head>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        function pagePreviewError() {
            try {
                var elem = document.getElementById('page_preview');
                elem.src = "res/img/rhs_preview/default.png";
            }
            catch (e) { }
        }
    </script>
  </head>

 <body>       
    <div id="pagePreview" class="img-shadow">
      <img class="content" id="page_preview" onerror="pagePreviewError()" src="res/img/rhs_preview/null.png" /> <!-- generate an error, get the default image -->                   
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Hacking away

2009-08-25T00:14:00.000-07:00

Gimp

Javascript

Aptana

Test

Update todo list

Rinse, repeat.

Making progress.

Windows 7 Touch

2009-08-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

Having gotten the Dell Studio touch past the birthing pains of Windows 7, it really is a sweet platform. The hardware supports multitouch input, but the Vista operating system that it was shipped with barely supported it.

However, W7 supports multitouch WM_TOUCH messages natively.

The Windows 7 Touch Pack is supposed to be installed by OEM only, and only on hardware that is approved by Microsoft. (This makes sense, since if they installed the Touch Pack on hardware that was single touch, it would come across quite lame). I acquired a grey-market version of Windows 7 Touch that was floating around on the 'Net, and it works fantastically. The 3D Multitouch Virtual Earth supports single hand rotate, pan, zoom, etc. It's quite cool. Mind you, I do remember using a similar interface in 1995 on a SGI :)

There's also a surprisingly satisfying photo collage making tool via Microsoft Surface, and an interactive fish pond. The very thing, indeed.

I'm looking forward to making a really first class user interface with this stuff.

Unwinding the highly strung

2009-08-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

As a person who finds it straightforward to veer towards being highly strung, I'm a fan of things that make life less frustrating.

And also things that help me to be organised without having to be organised, if you know what I mean.

Many years ago I used to use unix and Linux and X Window and had a groovy hot rod window manager, but then I moved to MS Windows. It just ain't as good (although it's improving).

So I made a windows utility that helps to get things done.

It uses mouse buttons 4&5 (e.g. the grey extra left and right buttons on the side of an intellimouse, and other mouses also have their own types of 4 & 5 buttons).

When running, the utility affords:

stress free window move (position cursor over window then drag with button 4)
stress free window resizing (position cursor over window then drag with button 5)

F1 key will open a file with notepad dated YYMMDD.txt in C:\
F2 opens yesterday's day file.
F3 opens tomorrow's day file.

(NB I usually use the vim editor but changed to notepad.exe for this post. Email me for the auto hotkey source code if you want to hack on it.)

I've been using this for about 18 months and have found it useful. I write up all kinds of notes and tasks and thoughts into each day's file, and then simply grep through ??????.txt to look stuff up.

Windows 7 on Dell Studio 1909 Touch

2009-08-11T21:32:00.000-07:00

I made a promise that I'd start a blog after installing Windows 7. Time to contribute more back to my community.

I'm working on a touchscreen version of a document imaging user interface that I've been developing for a while. We ordered a Dell Studio with a touchscreen, a quad core CPU, 750GB disk and 4GB of ram; it arrived and the system is pretty good in all respects except one -- it came pre-installed with Vista.

Little needs to be said about Vista -- I'm sure Microsoft are appropriately chagrined and embarrassed, deep down where it matters -- and they have done an awesome job with Windows 7, so I was rarin' to go to install it. Especially since it purports to have native multitouch support.

However, the Dell, bless its titanium foot, wouldn't install Windows 7. It would get to the "Completing Installation" step, and then would freeze. No mouse response, no keyboard response (ctrl-alt-del not working), and no animating dots. Googled for similar cases, found several, and most successful resolutions of the problem were effected by restoring BIOS default settings or by physically removing hardware such as RAM, video cards, or card readers and the like.

Try doing that on a all in one computer like the Dell. I couldn't even find any screws to open the case.

So I fiddled with the BIOS settings, disabling what I could. Even tried disabling the USB controller entirely, but then the damn thing wouldn't even get past POST. I did a clean installation after each BIOS change, but every time it would freeze at the same place.

I tried installing about 6-7 times. I even tried installing Vista and then performing an upgrade inplace -- ultimately, the same result.

But now, my friend, for the useful bit -- I got it working and here's how:

Downloaded GA11N-A101.zip from ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/rmsd/ and installed it using Vista.

Then did a clean full install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64bit .

And it's sweet.

Hooray!