MustEat.org

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007: Global Hotkey Win+q

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:22:38 -0000

Only one program on a desktop can bind any particular global hotkey at a time. If two programs overlap, the first one to get up and running and make the API request gets the notification of the key press.

Considering this scenario, the easy possible for overlap, you would think most applications that have a global hotkey would allow what key they bind to, to be configurable.

I have been using a program called Slickrun as a convenient way to navigate into my computer, launch url’s and access arbitrary programs. By default it binds to Win+q to bring itself to the foreground ready for input. Since I’ve been using this for the past 5 or so years, so I’ve grown quite accustomed to the key combo.

Enter Microsoft Office Communicator 2007.

One of the global hotkeys it registers is also Win+Q. Except Communicator has no configuration options to say which hot key you wish to bind globally. I’ve done a cursory search through the registry but so far nothing. So I’m at an impasse. Do I disable auto start for communicator or do I attempt to learn a new key combination for slickrun?

Of course I will send feedback to Microsoft about this.

A Message to Microsoft and Nintendo

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:43:55 -0000

Microsoft

I have enjoyed my Xbox. Great network play in college with Halo, excellent games like Kotor, Fable, Jade Empire, and Psychonauts (which yes, I bought when it came out), and the final stage of being the primary DVD player. I would love to buy an Xbox 360, for wireless controllers, media center functions, and great games. Except I won’t because of your horrid failure rates. It has been almost 3 years since the console hit the market, and STILL buying one of those console is playing russian roulette, and I LIKE roulette. Looks like I’m going to be waiting for the next generation of your console, (with a 2 year wait time after release to watch for issues, like I did with the original xbox).

Nintendo

My former roommate had a Wii shortly after it’s release. A bit misguided about multi-player and the true power of having a networked device under the TV, still a excellent platform and I would love to own one. Except I can’t find one. I refuse to pay more then MSRP, camp out for it, or buy it in a bundle. I can’t order one from Amazon, I can’t walk into Target or BestBuy to pick one up. What is wrong? It’s been 2 years!

Summary

I’m a male 18-25, with the income of an established software engineer. I have the money to spend, I have the desire to spend, but I can’t. What sort of business model is this?

Note To Self: 2008/6/13

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:30:07 -0000

Look into
- TaskTop and further work with Mylyn
- Cactus + JUnit
- Quartz Java Scheduling
  - How could JMS be improved with concepts from Quartz

Random Picture 1

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:21:35 -0000

Places I need to get too: Portland OR

Mon, 26 May 2008 14:21:31 -0000

Got some place that I should visit, drop it on Twitter aimed @MEY

HP Network Devices Support

Mon, 19 May 2008 16:55:05 -0000

Noticing that my desktop was eating up 50% of it’s CPU while doing nothing more intensive then playing a mp3, I popped open Task Manager to see what was up. A single svchost process was eating 48-50% of the cpu constantly. Since Windows built in process manager is a load of crap, I went and grabbed Process Explorer from the now bought out Sysinternals.

Good olde PID 1772 was the culprit, being the service for HP Network Devices Support. I have a HP Photosmart C6280 All-in-one in my office, which is a very capable network printer, but it currently isn’t connected to the network due to some needing to purchase a better wireless link for it’s area of the house. So there is no HP devices running on the network, nor does this svchost process have any TCP/IP ports open. So what the hell is it doing eating my CPU?

I’m going to leave this service disabled, and rely on the fact that, I’ve configured the printer to a static ip.

Once again, HP produces some amazingly crappy desktop software…

Note: You should kill off the service from the normal services menu, as attempting to kill it from Process Explorer, it simply re-spawned.

Job Search Fun: Programmers make great sales people...

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:17:52 -0000

Got this in my e-mail this morning. My resume is titled Wireless Developer, and references job experience working on platforms like BREW, J2ME and Verifone Verix. How that translates into a great Sales person I’ll never know…

Dear Scott,
My name is _ ___ and I am a District Manager with Farmers Insurance Group in the Northwest Territory. After reading your resume online, you may be a great fit as a Sales & Marketing Professional with our company. Within my District the top selling Professional earns in excess of $400,000 a year, and the average income for a full time agent is around $150,000 a year.

If you would like more information about this opportunity, I would encourage you to CLICK HERE and send us an updated version of your resume.
I hope to speak with you soon

Java ME: maxMemory()

Mon, 12 May 2008 11:32:03 -0000

Java ME doesn’t have a Runtime.maxMemory() function. Runtime.totalMemory() returns the current memory space of the JVM, but under Symbian devices this can grow dynamically during operation. As such we can’t accurately determine if a particular device will be able to accept and process a large data set from the network in advance.

You can attempt to fill the space by allocating space, but this can cause problems for other applications running in the background on my advanced devices like Symbian.

Widows XP SP3: STOP: c000021a

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:13:18 -0000

Well I upgraded my desktop to SP3 today, and things do not appear to have gone off without a hitch.

Doing a normal or safe-mode boot results in a stop code of c000021a. After digging around, and being relatively certain that the system doesn’t have some sort of virus infection, I found KB 156669. This does not appear to be the same issues as the endless reboots after SP3 (The endless rebooting is a symptom of the crash, not an indicator).

Booting the system into last know good configuration got me a workable system again, and I’m going to enable more logging and hopefully isolate what is going on, or if this is some sort of edge case on the SP3 install, and things will be running smoothly from here on… I will do a follow up post if I find something useful.

ASUS motherboard, Intel 4 CPU, Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT