Follow the Heard Blog

Check out the new site!

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:54:00 +0000

Just to let you know, I have bitten the bullet and setup a dedicated site to host the software I am developing at http://www.followtheheard.co.nz/. This blog will continue as the source of unrelated meanderings. I know the content has been a bit light as of the last epoch or so - expect this to change :)

Princeton Flunks the iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:52:00 +0000

Apparently the new Apple iPad has some issues around respecting DHCP lease settings – so Princeton has taken steps to block iPad’s accessing their Wifi network.

The short version is that if your iPad screen is locked, it doesn't request to continue using the assigned IP, and just keeps using it after being unlocked. Princeton is a little different though, as their lease time is measured in hours, rather than days.

More information available here.

Mailview POP3 Screensaver

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:04:00 +0000

This software is now also available at http://www.followtheheard.co.nz/mailview/

Mailview is a screensaver for your Windows based PC that monitors your POP3 email account and displays your inbox email count on screen.

Features

- Show your email count when the screensaver is active

- Choose to show the sender and subject line of emails

- Multi-screen supported

Requirements

- Windows XP or higher
- Microsoft .NET 2.0

Screenshot

[Main Screensaver View]

[Configuration]

Purchase

Purchasing Mailview is conducted via the Share*It! Payment processing service. Basically you pay, and they send you a personalised download link.

Purchase Mailview v1.1 Screensaver for only USD$10!

[Product Code 300380123]

Release History

1st June 2009 – Version 1.0 Created for personal use

19th April 2010 – Version 1.1 Released

* Multi-Monitor Support Added

NAVER Clock iPhone Application - English Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:01:00 +0000

There is a nice little application for the iPhone and iPod Touch called NAVER Clock.

Unfortunately for me the settings screen is all written in Korean.

However, thanks to the help of friend (Hi Euna!), I can give you the english translation. So, without further ado, here's my modified screenshot:

GUI Prototyping with Pencil Add-on for Firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:28:00 +0000

If you've ever used Microsoft Visio to mock up a GUI prototype, then you really need to check out the Pencil Project - it's a free add-on for Mozilla Firefox 3.

Using XULRunner, you can also run it independently of Firefox. This is well worth you taking a look. The layout and positioning of elements seems very slick - you won't be micro-managing the layout like you would in Visio.

[via Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Tools List]

Newsgator gives up consumer online RSS feeds

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:16:00 +0000

Users of FeedDemon on Windows and NetNewsWire on the Mac using Newsgator synchronisation have a month (until the end of August) to update your software and migrate your OPML feed list to Google Reader. Alternatively you could find some other means to manage your feeds. For help on transferring your feed list to Google Reader, check out the instructions here.

Personally, I use the client tools across all three of the supported platforms, Windows, Mac OSX and iPhone. I'm hoping that the transition to Google Reader will "just work".

Read more at Newsgator Daily and Google Reader blog.

Web service shape for Microsoft Visio

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:53:00 +0000

If you are busily diagramming your latest enterprise application in Visio, and you want something to represent your web service, there is a shape that you can use. Popularised by Microsoft a number of years ago, it has proved particularly difficult to get a hold of for Visio.

However, if you want it you can grab it as part of the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Visio Stencil pack. There are a few other handy shapes in that stencil as well.

Iconic Easter Eggs

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:02:00 +0000

Check out the Apple Blog for easter eggs hidden in Apple icons. Is there anything equivalent in Windows icons?

A personal favourite is the pointed message to Windows users, with a dreaded BSOD...

Q: When is an alarm not an alarm?

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:46:00 +0000

A: When you’re running an iPod Touch v2.2.1!

I had a situation the other day, when I had an alarm scheduled for a specific time, and prior to it firing, I received an updated Meeting Invitation courtesy of my Exchange link over Wi-Fi.

Because the Touch was displaying a popup on the screen, the alarm notification couldn’t appear and play the sound until after I had dismissed the popup – 30 odd minutes after the alarm was to fire!

Something to be aware of if you want to use your iPod Touch as an alarm clock to get you up in the morning…

Get a list of all checked out files from TFS

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:42:00 +0000

There are times in every TFS installation where you need to make sure that all your files are checked in. This could be when you are migrating servers, or even if you are leaving the company and want to clean up everything before you go. If you ever have a need to find all checked out files across all your Team Foundation Server workspaces, you should run the following command line program (assuming you have Team Explorer 2005 installed):

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" status /server:<SERVERNAME> /workspace:*

The same command should also work for Team Explorer 2008:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" status /server:<SERVERNAME> /workspace:*

Setting an Icon with the Autorun.inf File

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:15:00 +0000

Following my earlier post about setting a custom label for removal drives, I have taken this a step further and added custom icons.

To add an icon, copy the icon you like to the flash drive and then specify in the autorun.inf file:

[autorun]
icon=<local path to icon>

I have a number of flash drives laying around, so I made some variations of the icons in different colours. This way I can identify the drive I want by the colour of the icon. I have created five versions: red, blue, brown, cyan and green.

Download

Download Flash Drive Icons

The original icon came from Frédéric Bellaiche at Quantum Bits and is licensed under the GNU GPL. This version therefore is also GPL’ed.

Rescue Your iPod Library When iTunes Swallows Your Tunes

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:43:00 +0000

Apart from having a cool icon, the software Music Rescue from KennettNet is one of those applications that you don’t realise you need until it’s too late. Basically it supports recreating your iTunes library when it gets toasted.

To do this, it is capable of actually recovering all the music on your device and placing them back into your iTunes Library. This can be useful if when your computer dies on you.

I’ve tried this software out, and it does what it says it does. It’s also a very easy program to pick up and use without having to wade through pages of instructions.

Refreshing email folders on the iPhone/Touch

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:04:00 +0000

If you have an email profile on your iPhone or iPod Touch talking to Exchange, your email folders might not synchronise correctly after you make changes. New folders seem to come through fine, but deleted or moved folders don’t seem to automatically refresh.

You’d think that deleting the email profile and recreating it (as a last resort) would sort out the issue, but it doesn’t.

In order to get your revised folder structure in the Mail Profile, follow these steps:

From the main screen, go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts/ Calendars
Select the account you want updated
Turn off Mail synchronisation
Go back to the main screen and run the Mail application, going into the mail account (there shouldn’t be anything here at this point)
Go back to the main screen, go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts/ Calendars
Select the account you want updated
Turn on Mail synchronisation
Go back to the Mail application and refresh – the updated folders should then be there

I hope this helps someone, as I had to search the web and experiment to get this working. Based on the evidence, it suggests that deleting a profile doesn’t actually remove the cached information from the device, so if you recreate the profile it stills picks up the information retained on the iPod Touch.

Wanted: Developers, Developers, Developers!

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:11:00 +0000

M-Com is hiring again! If you are a talented developer wanting to work on enterprise class mobile banking and payment systems see the opportunity here. If you or anyone you know are interested in applying, then please let us know via the email address on the linked page.

Windows Desktop Background #2

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:46:00 +0000

This shot is of the exterior of the Cadrona Hotel.

* Size 1680x1050

The Art & Science of CSS from SitePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:07:00 +0000

The folks at SitePoint.com are giving away their book “The Art & Science of CSS” free for the next couple of weeks.

This book is ideal for anyone who wants to gain the practical skills involved in using CSS to make attractive web sites, especially if you’re not the type who likes to learn by memorizing a formal specification and then trying to work out which browsers implemented it completely (does anyone enjoy reading specifications?). The only knowledge you’ll need to have is some familiarity with HTML. This book will give designers the skills they need to implement their ideas, and provides developers with creative inspiration through practical examples.

To get the eBook (about a 23Mb download), you’ll either need to follow their Twitter or give them an email address. At 227 pages, this is no lightweight promotional gimmick, at first glance the book has some good content.

New Zealand Election - Decision 08

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:23:00 +0000

If you are wondering exactly which party to vote for this year, you should go along to Glassbooth. This is a site that by getting you to vote on the relative importance of issues and answering some policy type questions, can advise you on which electoral party best meets your personal preference.

In an election year in which parties have been relatively vague publicly about their policies, this is a good way to discover what they are actually standing for. You might just be surprised by the result that comes back to you!

Initially created for the US elections this week, it was recently expanded to include details of the New Zealand election (which is why the majority of the non-core functionality is still US-centric).

Windows Desktop Background #1

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:07:00 +0000

This shot was taken of the exterior of the Christchurch Art Gallery.

* Size 2592x1944

"WMS Idle" Not Responding When Shutting Down Windows XP

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:48:00 +0000

Well, after suffering through this error for many months, I finally decided to research the solution.

In my case, it was because the computer had Nero 7 Essentials installed. To solve the problem, I followed the following steps:

Click Start | All Programs | Nero 7 Essentials | Tools | Nero Scout
In the left hand column, click Indexing | Folders
Click the Clear All button
Uncheck the Enable Nero Scout item
Click OK

And that was it.

Setting audible alert in Outlook 2003 when new email arrives

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:14:00 +0000

To set a sound to play when an email arrives in Outlook, use the following:

Tools Menu, then Options.

On the Preferences tab, click the E-mail Options… button:

Click Advanced E-mail Options and make sure the Play a sound item is ticked:

Click OK, OK, OK.

If you still don't get a sound played when an email arrives, then you need to check the Windows Sounds configuration.

To do this on Windows XP, click the Start Menu and then select Control Panel. Find the option called Sounds and Audio Devices. Double-click to open the applet.

Find the Sounds tab, and scroll through the Program events list until you find the item New Mail Notification.

If the New Mail Notification doesn't have the speaker icon next to it (as shown), then you'll need to click Browse and choose a file. The file that you probably want is C:\WINDOWS\Media\Windows XP Notify.wav

Click OK, then OK again and either send yourself an email or wait for someone else to send one. This does assume of course that your computer is able to play sounds.

Changing the Bitmap Banner in Visual Studio 2005 Setup Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:00:00 +0000

If you have created a setup project in Visual Studio 2005, and you want to change the banner that appears on every setup screen - you'll soon find that it's not easy to do. Firstly, you need to override the BannerBitmap setting on every screen, and secondly by default it likes to have the picture you want to use to be installed on the target computer.

However, it doesn't have to be that way. Thanks to a MSDN Forum post by René van Bemmelen, the answer is really simple.

First, create you banner image as a bmp or jpg and save it somewhere. The size of the image should be 500px by 70px.

Secondly, if you typically setup your projects localised to "English (United States)", then go to the directory:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Tools\Deployment\VsdDialogs\1033

And make a backup copy of the file VsdUserInterface.wim. If you localise to one of the other languages then you'll need to work out what directory you should be working in.

Thirdly, open the file VsdUserInterface.wim in your favourite MSI editor. This could be either Orca (from the Windows Installer SDK), or you could download InstEd from http://www.instedit.com/.

Select the Binary table and double-click the data entry for the DefBannerBitmap entry. If you click on the ... button to the right, you can then select the banner image that you created earlier.

Lastly, select the left arrow button to load the image into the wim file. Don't forget to save the updated file!

This change means that all MSI's that you then build from Visual Studio will have this banner as the default.

iPhone in New Zealand thanks to Vodafone?

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:02:00 +0000

Pricing plans for the new Apple iPhone 3G, to be available in New Zealand from July 11th was released today.

The short version of the story, is that people are less than impressed with the options. See Stuff and Geekzone for more information.

I think that in some ways, given the hype that was building behind the iPhone on the Geekzone forums for example, that some disappointment was inevitable.

If however, you simply can't wait and will be queuing at midnight outside the Vodafone stores in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, this might make sure you don't miss out!

Firefox 3 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:37:00 +0000

So now that the dust has settled, and the Firefox Download Day is over, it looks like the software was downloaded over 8 million times. As expected, they had some server trouble, and I was unable to use the update process from within the release candidate.

However, direct downloads eventually did work, and the install went smoothly. As I mentioned in a previous post, the improved performance leaves IE7 in the dust.

There are rumours circulating that this is the year of the Browser War Rematch, with FF3, Opera 9.5 and soon IE8 available. Do you think this release cycle will change the market penetration for each browser?

Improve Windows Vista Here

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:22:00 +0000

Long Zheng has set up a Windows UX Taskforce website where people can submit and vote on improvements to the Windows user interface. There are components in Windows Vista that look a little long in the tooth, some have even managed to survive since Windows 3.1!

Using a Digg like model to encourage user participation, this site shows some promise. Even if Microsoft never actually change anything, the site provides an interesting insight into UI design issues.

What The Font?!

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Heard) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:13:00 +0000

If you have a printed document with text that you like the look of, and you want to find out what font file you need to reproduce the look, this site is for you.

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Basically you need a picture of the font, so you'll either need to scan the document or crop a picture depending on your facilities.

The recommended file format is a grayscale TIFF at 300DPI. I've checked a couple of fonts through this site and it's given me excellent results.

Aside from it's practical use, it also offers a great UI when identifying the individual letters that you have scanned. It identifies the 'dot' and the stroke of an i as individual letters, but all you have to do is drag one over the other and the system will merge them together.