Obscured Info

findstr, the grep built into Windows

Rich — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:22:45 +0000

Unix refugees take heart – there is a grep equivalent for Windows operating systems: findstr. Recursive searching and regex support. For basic usage, there’s no need to download 3rd party tools.

WCF Configuration Fun

Rich — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:05:07 +0000

WCF is generally making my job much easier these days. Where as I needed overloaded WebMethods to support my HTTP-only IVR clients, I can now expose a WebHttp endpoint and a SOAP endpoint on the same method. Excellent.

I still find myself occasionally struggling with configuration. First was realizing the 3.5 extensions weren’t registered on our production web servers. After the shock of our first load test results, it was calculating appropriate throttling settings. Now we have a need to provide the same service over HTTP, secured and unsecured. My search results are pointing to needing two endpoints? Does this mean I two different addresses that differ in more than the scheme?

Media File Fun with Python

Rich — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:42:54 +0000

I’m continuing my Python education by building little media organization scripts. This is all possible with the mutagen library.

This script extracts art from ID3-tagged files.

Citrix Receiver 11 on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10

Rich — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:37:47 +0000

I’ve done this twice now, so I’m documenting as much for myself as others.

1. Install 32-bit OpenMotif as per the last post on this thread.

mkdir motif
cd motif
wget http://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/o/openmotif/libmotif3_2.2.3-2_i386.deb
dpkg -x libmotif3_2.2.3-2_i386.deb .
sudo cp -r usr/lib/* /usr/lib32/

(For client V11)
sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libXm.so.3 /usr/lib32/libXm.so.4

2. Install the ia32-libs package.
3. Install the ICAClient version 11 from Citrix.

Optionally, I had to install the Entrust.net root cert in the ICAClient/keystore/cacerts directory. Run ldd on ICAClient/wfica to verify you have all the libraries.

Converting XPS to PDF on Ubuntu 9.10

Rich — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:58:24 +0000

On Ubuntu Okular can read XPS, but I didn’t want to install all of the KDE libs to run it. I’d rather convert to the more universal PDF format, anyway. Searching around I found reference to the GhostPDL project and its gxps program.

After a little work I was able to build this on Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit:

Unpack the source
Install the libxt-dev package for the X11 headers.
In the root of the source, run make xps

Voice User Interface

Rich — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:09:45 +0000

At this point in my career I’ve built Character User Interfaces (CUI) and Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). In October of 2007 I started a new position working on a team that develops Voice User Interfaces (VUI). Yes, the automated phone applications we all love to hate. The interaction patterns are very different from CUIs and GUIs. Imagine having to present the user a list of ten items, and have them select one of them without using a visual list. It’s a lot slower and painstaking process.

The technology stack is also quite different. The carrier-grade platforms seem to be predominantly proprietary and lack the niceties of the ecosystems that surround .NET, Java, Ruby, etc. The tool I use currently provides some Smalltalk for scripting. Cool, but unfortunately Smalltalk devs aren’t in great supply. The code is going to run on one platform only, probably forever.

This is where voicexml enters the picture. It’s been around for about a decade, but adoption has finally hit my enterprise. As someone experienced in web development, I’m a lot more comfortable with voicexml. It’s like html…for a phone. It has pages of code in individual text files. All my source code editing and management toolchain is still in play. It’s a standard supported by multiple vendors.

Where I have difficulty is the vendor tool support. Voice vendors like to sell nice clicky draggy tools that resemble Visio flow charts more than programs. Think BizTalk Orchestration Designer and its XLANG drawings. I understand the appeal. Really, I’m not one to code everything by hand. When the source code is obsfucated or rendered in such a way as to make code management a real pain, I have a real problem with a tool. Units of code spread across multiple files makes team development easier. Text source makes merging easier. Take away both of those and you’ve made parallel development a real pain in the ass. I don’t want to be the I’d Rather Use Notepad Guy, but I’m really leaning that way. Not that I’d really use Notepad with the smart XML editors than can be found.

This could be a vendor issue, I’d I love to hear from other VUI developers on this issue. Can voicexml development be managed like web development?

Closures

Rich — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:48:55 +0000

Once you use them, it’s hard to go back. The Java Jakarta Collections didn’t have true closures, but they were close enough and very useful. Here’s a C# example using anonymous delegates:

rules.ForEach(delegate(PriceRule rule) { ruleCatalog[rule.Item] = rule; });

For loops are bronze age.

Stumbling through ASP.net

Rich — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:13:09 +0000

One of the humbling (and slightly frustrating) parts of switching technology stacks is learning how to do something you knew by heart in the old tech. Case in point: figuring out which item you selected in a GridView in ASP.net. I had a pattern down cold for this in Java web development. I eventually found the DataKeys property of GridView, but the online help did not describe how to use multiple keys. Thanks to the internet, I found a very helpful answer (and it’s not intuitive) here.

C# and Yield

Rich — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:09:38 +0000

I just discovered yield. Wow. After using some of the new tools languages like Ruby provided (blocks, process control), it’s been hard to go back to Java. Nice to C# is up to more than just adding syntactic sugar (cough, Java5, cough).

Diving Into .NET

Rich — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 01:06:26 +0000

I’ve been coding Java for a good seven years now, ever since I walked away frustrated from writing business applications in lower level COM+, ATL, and C++. Tonight I dug into a .NET training book for the first time, as I plan on getting certified mainly as a goal for learning. It’s really hard to look at C# as a Java programmer and not see the overwhelming similarities. System.Console.Writeln isn’t fooling anyone. That said, I’m already seeing some niceties. Tonight’s example:

bool? flag = null;

The ‘?’ allows you to indicate the variable is nullable. Java is going to make you think about ints and Integers, even in the Java 5+ world.