Stuff I'm working on at the moment

Posts by edlong

Starting with Lotus Notes

May10
2010 3 Comments Written by edlong

So you’ve somehow managed to get lumped with the abomination that is Lotus Notes. It is a hideous user experience but I have a few tips that may make life easier and make it work somewhat.

Tips:

  • Ctrl+M creates a new memo (i.e. mail).
  • Finding people in your address book is slow, instead type their first name and the first initial of their second and press comma ‘,’. This will either autofill the username or bring up a dialog of users to select the correct user.
  • To attach a document, click into the body of the email and go to File->Attach (obviously). There is no attach button that I can aware of.
  • F5 does NOT refresh your mail. In fact it logs you out of Lotus Notes and you must go in again. I can’t find an easy way to change keyboard shortcuts so you’re stuck with these sucky ones.
  • You do not get any alarms for meetings by default. Whenever I get a meeting I accept the meeting first. Then I go into my calendar on the left hand side and find the meeting. Double click into the meeting and click on the ‘Edit Document’ button on the top left. Next click the ‘Notify Me’ checkbox and a dialog will appear. I generally send an email as well as receiving the alarm, so click on the ‘Send mail notification with subject’ checkbox and enter your own name. REMEMBER to click ‘Save and Close’ when done otherwise your changes will be lost. To permanently enable a message box to be displayed for meeting then click on the tools icon on the left hand side of the client and then on Email preferences. In the dialog that appears click on calendar and Todo tab and then on the Alarms tab. Click on whichever type of meeting, reminder etc. that you want a reminder for an hit Ok. You should now receive a message box reminding you of meetings in advance, hurrah!
  • This is a bit of a personal preference but I know a lot of people use it, spell checking on sending of mails. In the left hand column click on the Tool’s icon and then on Email Preferences. Click on the ‘Automatically check mail messages for misspellings before sending’. The option is about half way down the dialog.

Functionality

  1. Go to View->Document Preview and click Show Preview. This turns on the mail preview, I think this is a must for any mail application, to be able to view a mail without having to double click into it every time.
  2. As a consequence of having a preview, I have seem many people with three or four thousand mails unread as clicking on a mail and viewing it in the preview doesn’t mark an email as read by default. This irritates me but thankfully there is a way of getting around this. Go to File->User Preferences and in the ‘Additional Options’ pane click on the first option, ‘Mark documents read when opened in preview pane’.
  3. Any url in Lotus Notes will open up in the in-client browser by default. This is terrible and may sites don’t work at all in it. You can change the default browser that is used by: Go to File->Preferences->Location Preferences. Click on the internet browser tab and click on the drop down shaped button to the right of the ‘Notes’ browser name. You should now be able to select the browser you want, I set mine to Firefox by default. If your browser isn’t present you can add it by clicking the weird looking torch button and navigating to its location.

Thats all I can think of for the moment. This application drives me insane but hopefully these tips may help someone.

Posted in Windows - Tagged

Uninitialised template compiler warning

May06
2010 Leave a Comment Written by edlong

I encountered a rather unintuitive compiler warning yesterday that I’d thought I’d share. See the simple templated class below:

template
class ATemplateClass
{
public:
	ATemplateClass()
	{
	}

	virtual ~ATemplateClass()
	{
	}

	void Add()
	{
		++size;
	}

        void Reset()
	{
		size = 0;
	}

private:
	int size;
};

(for some reason my code output tags are doing strange things to liek putting in a and messing up the template tag, grrr!

Obviously this isn’t what my class is doing but is illustrative of the problem. When attempting to use this class on the stack like so:

MeanAverage myTemplate = MeanAverage();

I got the compiler warning:

warning: ‘myTemplate ‘ is used uninitialized in this function

After some head scratching (it is clearly being initialised!) one of my colleagues suggested the reason why I was getting the warning. The ‘size’ member of ATemplateClass wasn’t being initialised in the constructor which seems to have the knock on effect of causing the entire template to appear to not be initialised to the compiler! It may be a particularly strict but it fixes the warning nonetheless, hurrah!

Posted in C/C++

No files were found to look in, Visual Studio 2005

Mar29
2010 1 Comment Written by edlong

I got this the other day when I was attempting to search for some text. Nothing had visibly changed that I could see and for some reason the search was always returning ‘No files were found to look in’ regardless of the search options I entered (i.e. types to search, looking in entire solution, project etc).

I cannot explain this but focus on Visual Studio and press Ctrl + Scroll Lock fixes it. Yes it is mad and doesn’t make sense.

Credit goes to: here

Posted in C/C++ - Tagged

Clear iPhone simulator cache (out-dated files being loaded)

Mar15
2010 Leave a Comment Written by edlong

Quick post that might help someone.

I had an XML file that I had changed in Dashcode and for some reason the older XML content was being read into my app. I ‘re-touched’ it in XCode and even though the right XML showed up within the project the wrong XML was being loaded up in the simulator.

A little perplexed by this I checked what file was being loaded by stepping through code and saw that the XML was being loaded up from a path that looked something like “/Users//Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/User/Applications/xxx”. This location obviously contained the old version of the XML file and not the new one I had in XCode. To solve this problem I cleaned the project and performed a full re-build and low-and-behold the correct XML was loaded. I suspect cleaning the project deletes the app and all associated data from the simulator cache.

Posted in iPhone, Objective C

Create a class from a string

Mar15
2010 Leave a Comment Written by edlong

I found myself in the position that I had a string that came in from XML and wanted to create an appropriate class from this string. After some searching I found the neat little function NSClassFromString. So given a string I could allocate a class by doing

id newClass = [[NSClassFromString(string) alloc] init];

I also needed to go back the other way, get the name of the class as a string. Again there is a similar function definition

NSString* name = NSStringFromClass([self class]);

This above shows how to get the class from self using [self class].

Posted in Objective C

Selectors with multiple arguments

Mar15
2010 Leave a Comment Written by edlong

I’ve needed to figure out if a certain function exists for a class before instantiating a new class. However the init function takes two parameters and all code samples I’ve seen use selectors with just a single parameter. Below is the code that checks if a selector with two parameters is present.

if([NSClassFromString(classType) instancesRespondToSelector: @selector(initWithTwoParameters: withSecondParameter:)])
{
}
Posted in Objective C

Posting code in wordpress blogs

Mar15
2010 Leave a Comment Written by edlong

Hi,
I’ve regularly needed to post code in blogs and there are many plugins out there that do this job. However as I upgrade WordPress they regularly break which is highly annoying. At the moment I’m using SyntaxHighlighter. It works with the latest WordPress 2.9.2 and seems fairly easy to use.

Syntax Highlighter

The usage is quite straight-forward

 …Your Code Here

The list of valid code-aliases are shown here (the middle column):

Brushes

Posted in Wordpress - Tagged

Setting up a basic OpenGL project on Mac OS Leopard and XCode

Oct11
2009 2 Comments Written by edlong

I’ve recently setup a basic OpenGL project in XCode to have a black window.

In XCode select File->New Project. Select an Empty Project and name it whatever you want, screenie below:




newproject




Within XCode select Project->New Target again. Select Cocoa on the left then Application and name it whatever you’d like.




targetapp




You will now see a window with a whole bunch of settings. In the General tab press the + button in Linked Libraries. Add OpenGL.Framework and Glut.framework from the list of frameworks in the dialog that appears.




generalwindow




Next select Build in the tabs along the top and clear the bottom field GCC_PREFIX_HEADER so that its blank.




targetsettings




In the Groups and Files explorer right click on the top level project and select Add->New File. Choose C and C++ and select C file. Again choose whatever name you wish.




candc_





Paste the following code into the C file:

#include stdlib.h
#include GLUT/glut.h

void myCustomDisplay(void)
{
    glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);

    glutSwapBuffers();
}

void myCustomReshape(int width, int height)
{
    glViewport(0, 0, width, height);
}

void doSomethingWhenIdle(void)
{
    glutPostRedisplay();
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    glutInit(&argc, argv);

    glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGBA | GLUT_DOUBLE | GLUT_DEPTH);
    glutInitWindowSize(800, 600);

    glutCreateWindow("My First Window");

    glutDisplayFunc(myCustomDisplay);
    glutReshapeFunc(myCustomReshape);
    glutIdleFunc(doSomethingWhenIdle);

    glutMainLoop();
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Next Build the application using ‘Build and Go’ and you’ll be presented with a 800×600 empty window with the title ‘My First Window’, easy! I won’t go into the explanation of the different functions, there are plenty of sites out there for that!

Posted in C/C++

Display correct text colour on a background colour

Sep10
2009 Leave a Comment Written by edlong

Hi,

I haven’t posted for a bit, back to some handy C++. I’ve been working with a lot of text being displayed on a background which can be various colours. Not knowing the background colour is in advance is problematic as if you specify the text colour to be always white and the background colour changes to white then the text is unreadable. Likewise for black and there are a range of colours in between that suffer with the same problem, light grey or dark purple for example.

I needed a way of determining correct text colour based on a given background colour. After doing a little bit of digging I came across this article on CodeProject which almost gives the solution I was looking for. However I want to just display white or black text depending on the background colour. So here is the code I used to do so, it works remarkably well. I’ve pseudo coded it up a bit to remove various bits and pieces that may not be important but you can just replace bits of it with proper objects. Also ignore the magic numbers, they’re there just to show the numbers that worked for me. This algorithm can potentially be used in any language, I’m using C++ here as it is what I’m currently using.

COLOUR GetTextColourFromBackground(COLOUR BackgroundColour)
{
	uint32 uDarkLightColourThreshold(105);
	float fRedThresholdValue(0.299);
	float fGreenThresholdValue(0.587);
	float fBlueThresholdValue(0.114);

	uint8 bgDelta = static_cast((BackgroundColour.GetRed() * fRedThresholdValue) + (BackgroundColour.GetGreen() * fGreenThresholdValue) +
		(BackgroundColour.GetBlue() * fBlueThresholdValue));

	COLOUR TextColour(GetColour(White));
	if((255 - bgDelta) < uDarkLightColourThreshold)
	{
		TextColour = GetColour(Black);
	}

	return TextColour;
}

So on a white background the text colour returned will be black and on a black background the text colour will be white. Also on a light grey background the colour returned will be black and so on.
The formula used above originally comes from the W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/AERT#color-contrast.

Posted in C/C++

Disable intellisense in Visual Studio 8 & 2010 – updated!

Jul10
2009 5 Comments Written by edlong

Hi,

The studio I work in use Visual Assist which is a far better version of Intellisense in my opinion. However Intellisense is on by default on Visual Studio and does a far bit of processing in the background, especially when there are significant project changes. So I’ve needed to disable intellisense for this project, to do so is trivial really.

Close your active solution in Visual Studio.
Navigate to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\vcpackages (you may need to find the right directory on your machine depending on where Program FIles are…)
Remove or rename(a better option in case you need it again)

Feacp.dll

Intellisense will now be disabled.

UPDATE: I’ve noticed that intellisense still churns away for projects that had generated intellisense data previously, i.e. before Feacp.dll was deleted. When you delete Feacp.dll you should also delete the .ncb files associated with the projects you’re working on. They will still be regenerated (for other debug information) but I’ve not seen any intellisense activilty since I’ve done this.

Posted in Uncategorized
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