05/26/2011 06:37 PM -
i've been playing with my new wacom bamboo pen & touch tablet input device. it seems to play well with onenote; though i've been running into my fair share of hurdles along the way. here's one of them.
if you get an error when entering ink equations into the onenote 2010 equation editor:
please enter a different correction
or
please write well formed math expressions.
onenote doesn't like rendering one-sided equations. you've just entered an equal sign, arrow, or something similar. a math equation expects something on the other side. so just keep writing.
this bothers me. if onenote isn't going to solve the equation, it should let me enter non-standard notations. in fact, it should also let me enter custom notations such as bra/ket vectors ( , and ), vertical bars to represent "given" and a triplet of dots in a pyramid shape to represent "therefore". i think some mathematicians would likely agree.
Post.aspx?Title=OneNote%3a+Please+Enter+a+Different+Correction
05/26/2011 02:17 AM -
a q&a site i frequent recently posted a question: "would you switch your os for a day?". a simple question with a complex answer, just like in most forms of science. here is my ridiculously detailed response.
ubuntu:
i switched to ubuntu for two days, actually; but only because it took two days to get it to work. even with help from forums and what they laughingly refer to as the community. while it's nice to be able to edit your settings/configs manually via text files and command lines, the user should never be forced to do so. even if that user has seven monitors on four video adapters which are a mix of ati and nvidia. personally, i blame the hardware vendors; but merely blaming them does not make the problem go away. ubuntu worked pretty well in a virtual machine; albiet completely useless. why waste my time working in a vm when i have a physical machine right there?
mac:
in order to switch to macos, i would be legally obligated to purchase an entire apple computer. if i wanted the best user experience (running 10.6 or whatever's out now), i'd need pretty good hardware. that means shelling out some decent money. apple's return policy is two weeks, and buying it used basically means all sales are final. i doubt i could get the full picture of the mac experience in that two week time. therefore i would inevitably end up wasting money if i decided i didn't like it.
if i could just buy a copy of osx and stick it on my beastly rig, knowing all my hardware and drivers would work, i'd try it in a heartbeat. if only i could legally install it on my completely compatible hardware.
in general:
i'm fully willing to accept the software isn't compatible across oses and i'd have to find alternatives for most of it. indeed, for some of it i'd need to have a separate windows machine, or wine, bootcamp, or parallels. for others, i'd have to give up my beloved name brand software and settle for opensomething which has two people working on it, except they stopped three years ago and six people forked it into other projects that also went nowhere. it gets whacky. any windows software i've paid for over the years now goes completely to waste, along with some of the hardware.
once it's running, i'd have to deal with the details. i have terabytes of media files and documents. which formats work on the newly chosen os? which ones will have to be converted? what media formats does this new os even support? can i convert from avi/divx, mts and mkv to opennoodle or oogf (fictional examples of the weird, unknown, nameless codecs and formats i expect.)? what software can do these conversions? will i have to convert to an intermediary format and then to the ultimate final format? won't that be lossy? where shall i back up the originals? which hardware will work? does logitech support this camera on a mac? does this new os offer a secure remote desktop client that can connect to my windows server machine? do i need to research cryptography just to keep my password secure? how does this new os handle having 50 windows all at the same time, across seven 1080p screens? can it recognize 16gb ram? how will i ever play my directx games? am i stuck with the far inferior opengl? can i connect to the four different vpn protocols i need for work?
these are questions i never asked when i bought the devices, because they were never an issue. on my windows pc, when i plug something in -- anything -- it just works.
i may be biased.
Post.aspx?Title=On+the+Merits+of+Switching+Operating+Systems
05/25/2011 07:42 PM -
posted this up on my youtube a while back and forgot to embed it here. if you play empire avenue, you'll want to see this.
download here.
Post.aspx?Title=Project+Stockmaster+Alpha+3
05/25/2011 07:18 PM -
so i got a new api to connect to from an application i'm working on. they give me the wsdl file, i add it, it configures its own remote ip, and i start coding. i got some errors along the way i figured i'd share with the internet since google didn't lead me directly to an answer on some of them.
invalidoperationexception
method [...] cannot be reflected
the xml element 'myresponse' from namespace 'http://example.com/v1.0/services/myservice' references a method and a type. change the method's message name using webmethodattribute or change the type's root element using the xmlrootattribute.
first instinct was a bad wsdl. figured vendor would refuse to fix or would fix very slowly. set visual studio solution explorer to show all files. went into the web reference > reference.map > reference.cs file. manually changed the input and output names from myservice to myservice1. fixed.
system.net.webexception: unable to connect to the remote server --->
Post.aspx?Title=A+Series+of+Unfortunate+Errors
05/11/2011 08:32 PM -
Post.aspx?Title=This+is+why+I+hate+IVRs
05/11/2011 08:11 PM -
in this video i lead the viewer through preparing red bell peppers in ginger miso sauce.
Post.aspx?Title=Miso+Peppers+(Red+Bell+Peppers+in+Ginger+Miso+Sauce)
05/07/2011 02:12 AM -
as you recall, i'm working on a project i call project codename: stockmaster, specifically because i suck at naming things. it's a stock tracker for empire avenue.
today, in working on the alpha 2 release, i found the documentation somewhat lacking in the api specs for the eav shares/buy call. so after a good deal of fiddling with it, i finally came up with the code that works.
it does not use uploaddata as i expected it to. rather, it uses uploadvalues, which i hadn't even been aware of. note you must post the credentials twice: once in the url as usual to authenticate (lest ye get a 401 unauthorized of a 403 forbidden); and again in the post collection so the api itself can verify you. that's once for the webserver and once for the webservice. yeah, i know i know; but that's what it took to get it to work.
so this is for all you googlers with similar errors uploading data to a server via post because someone decided to expose their api via json instead of the far-superior soap... and if you happen to be coding against the empire avenue api, then this is your lucky day.
namevaluecollection nvc = new namevaluecollection();
nvc.add("ticker", ticker);
nvc.add("shares", shares.tostring());
nvc.add("last_trade", last_trade.tostring());
byte[] bytes = new webclient().uploadvalues(string.format(buyurl, new object[] { apikey, username, password, ticker, shares, last_trade }), "post", nvc);
return system.text.encoding.ascii.getstring(bytes);
how do you know it worked? here's an erroneous (103 invalid shares) response:
{"meta":{"error":"103","uri":"\/shares\/buy","limit":150,"limit_type":"user","requests":44,"reset":2131,"recorded":"2011-05-07 07:35:06"}}
here's a valid (success) message. i changed the ticker to mine so as not to involve the person who was unwittingly being tested on.
{"meta":{"requested_user":"tsilb","total_rows":1,"uri":"\/shares\/buy","limit":150,"limit_type":"user","requests":6,"reset":3596,"recorded":"2011-05-07 08:10:47"},"data":[{"success":true,"shares_owned":1,"commission":"5.00","total_charged":7.97672,"bank_balance":"392.77031"}]}
it's been a while since i had an excuse to post code to the blog. feels good.
Post.aspx?Title=401+Unauthorized+and+103+Invalid+Shares+Numbers+during+HTTP+POST+via+WebClient
05/04/2011 12:14 AM -
> > > download project stockmaster here < < <
today i'm releasing an initial alpha build of project codename: stockmaster. the name has not been finalized; thus the codename.
stockmaster is a multiple-monitor compatible stock tracker for your empire avenue accounts. it's designed to solve a very specific problem: empire avenue provides no direct way to monitor your stocks in realtime, in large numbers, or with automatic refreshes throughout the day. stockmaster solves all these problems.
if you've ever seen a day trader's computer setup, they generally have a bunch of monitors with charts, graphs, information, and news regarding the stocks and commodities they're dealing in or considering dealing in. stockmaster provides that functionality in empire avenue's environment, so you can have a daytrader's setup without actually having to trade real-world commodities and stocks.
project stockmaster is currently a very basic interface designed to provide basic graphs and stock information. if there is sufficient interest, which i won't know unless you tell me, i will add a great deal of functionality and performance improvements. if not, then i'll probably just make the improvements i want for myself and stop bothering you people with it. ideally, you will prefer it to the empire avenue website.
watch the video above for more information and a brief walkthrough.
Post.aspx?Title=Project+Stockmaster+Alpha+Release+(Empire+Avenue+Stock+Tracker)
05/03/2011 12:56 AM -
project surrogate intermix is a go. i call it cowhut, because it's hard to find good, short, cheap domain names. two out of three ain't bad.
i suck at making project codenames.
youtube has a sucky user interface. sure, it's pretty, but it works very poorly when you want to search in specific ways. for example, have you ever tried to filter your search results or a user's videos by upload date? youtube doesn't really have a way to do that, because youtube -- a google subsidiary -- sucks at search. enter cowhut.
to be clear, cowhut is just a different way to search youtube. at least for the moment, it is not a full-featured interface. maybe in a later dev cycle, if people show interest. cowhut is the "ugly but functional" to youtube's "pretty but broken".
right now it just does a basic search by query, category, or user. i intend to continue adding features as i go. at the moment i'm working on orderby (relevance, published date, views, rating) and plan to add more search filters shortly.
you do not need to log in to use it.
cowhut
Post.aspx?Title=CowHut+Wide+Beta+Launch