Free Wireless at Peet's

Finally! Wireless at Peet's Coffee & Tea and it's FREE!!!

Peet's Coffee & Tea

Looks like they one-upped their main competitor again. Now awesome coffee and free wireless!

Now if we could just get them to also offer non-baked-goods for food.. hmmm...

twitterfeed

OK... as usual, I'm a little slow finding out and signing up for the latest social productivity tools, and this time I recently discovered twitterfeed from seeing it being used by some folks who I'm following on Twitter:

twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter - post RSS to twitter automatically

...it's very handy and simple to use.

WPF Window Events - Loaded or Initialized?

So I was trying to determine which event to use for handling window initialization in WPF, since there seems to be a couple of options that are a little different from Windows Forms: Initialized and Loaded.

Thankfully MSDN came to the rescue and clarified things a bit in the documentation for the Initialized event:

[Initialized] will be raised whenever the EndInit or OnVisualParentChanged methods are called. Calls to either method could have come from application code, or through the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) processor behavior when a XAML page is processed.

Whether you choose to handle Loaded or Initialized depends on your requirements. If you do not need to read element properties, intend to reset properties, and do not need any layout information, Initialized might be the better event to act upon. If you need all properties of the element to be available, and you will be setting properties that are likely to reset the layout, Loaded might be the better event to act upon. Be careful of reentrancy if your handler resets any properties that are interpreted by the layout system to mean that a new layout pass is required. (You might need to check the FrameworkPropertyMetadata values on the property if you are unsure of which properties can require a new layout pass if they are changed.)

Disabling Windows Desktop Search Explorer Integration

If anyone hates the steaming turd that is Windows Desktop Search's Explorer Integration as much as I do (i.e. the search utility that can't find anything), please read Scott Hanselman's blog article outlining the very simple fix to disable this piece of total crap software:

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - How to disable Windows Desktop Search explorer integration after installing Office 2007

I feel much better now.

Hope this helps!

Visual Studio Tip: "You Are Here"

This is a tip that I got from a colleague several years ago when I was developing in VB 6, but I've kept doing it in Visual Studio and C# and it still works great...


At the beginning of the day I like to know exactly where I left off, so one way of accomplishing that is to just insert "you are here..." in the body of your code where you left off. This accomplishes two things:

1. it prevents compilation since "you are here..." is not valid code
   
2. the IntelliSense picks up the self-inflicted bug in the code and insterts red squigglies to show you the exact location where you left off...

Here's an example:



Hope this helps!

Rumor: 3G iPhone to sell for US$199 | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com

If this rumor doesn't end up being even remotely close to reality I'm going to be totally bummed...

Rumor: 3G iPhone to sell for US$199 | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com

we'll see, but if it's at that price point, I'm buying TWO!

Livescribe Smartpen

This just popped up on the radar on the IxDA List:

Livescribe - Pulse Smartpen

It looks pretty awesome, and almost magical if it lives up to its marketing description...

echominder: a home run from Intuit (and it's free!)

Being an ex-Intuit employee, I always like to keep tabs on stuff that they've been researching.

One of the coolest services that has come out of their research group is Echominder:

echominder

Here's a[n edited] description from the echominder site of how the service works:

scenario

you've got a flight tomorrow and just remembered you need to pick up your dry cleaning and set your out of office message. you're driving to work and can't stop to write it down, but echominder is in your speed dial:

• as you're driving home, call echominder and instruct it to have your cell phone ring at 4:30pm with a reminder to pick-up the dry cleaning.
• leave another message to call you at 8:00am tomorrow morning to remind you to turn on your out of office message on your computer before you shut down and leave for the airport.
• your phone rings right on time and you get the important things done.

I had actually been using a similar system before signing up for echominder: I'd call my voice mail at work to remind me to do certain things, but I would have to actually be in the office and then log into my voice mail to get the message.

Now that I've used echominder a few times, I've found it to be invaluable since it takes out the variables that caused my older methodology to break down:

1. Location: I don't have to be in the office, because echominder calls me wherever I am.
2. Timing: echominder calls me at the time I specify; I don't have to get a message and then remember to act on it at a particular time, or enter it into Outlook to remind me.
   

Great service. I just hope it doesn't get Zipingoed.

DomQuery for Windows Forms in .NET

Seems like it would be useful to be able to say, "Give me all the controls on this Windows Form that are check boxes," or add other critera and have the system return a collection of those objects that one could act upon.

Anyone know if such functionality exists?

Once again the last person on earth to hear about a cool application

How did Apple's Quartz Composer never come up on my radar? I had to find out about it from this post on CreateDigitalMusic.com:

Lily: Browser Beatboxes and the Rebirth of Max-Like Patching

...and that was posted in August of last year.

Anyway, here's the official Apple intro page for it, and QC looks very interesting.

Working with Quartz Composer

Additionally, it comes free with Apple's development tools on Mac OS X, so that makes it even better!

Here's a quote from CDM that I particularly liked:

First, Apple quietly acquired the developer of a little-known live visual/VJ app called Pixelshox, transformed it into a new app called Quartz Composer, made it part of the Mac OS X developer tools, and made it central to their UI efforts. One day, a tiny VJ app with a cult following, the next, central to Cupertino’s OS strategy? Interesting.