Mickey Gunderloy has announced the Larkware 2005 Developer Tool Programming Contest... now I've said before that Very Very few people enter these things, so the potential return on investment is HUGE!.

I urge you -- YOU -- to enter Mike Gunderloy's Programming contest.

If you need an idea, here's one of mine:

Implement the 'Automatic Screenshot journal.'

Here's some possible names for it: Snapsalot, Pixalot, Snapaday, timeSnapper, Pixatime.. and so on

I think it would take between 1 hour and three days to implement that thing fully.

Build a NICE installer for it.

Focus on simplicity. Less features. Fun to use. Stick to the core. Don't let it mess with the clipboard.

Split me your prizes, remember me in your speech, but first: get coding. Our prizes await. comments

My strange friend Gaksloope, who lives in an alternative-reality cubicle, fourteen minutes into the future, sent me an IM message today that i thought i'd share.

(first, recall that alternative universes only ever seem to inter-communicate via instant messaging services. And Google talk is weapon-of-choice for most trans-temporal-cross-reality chatters. But we digress.)

Here is what Gaksloope has to say:

** gaks may not reply because his/her status has changed to 'no available ripple in trans-reality fibril or offline' **

Ah... there you have it. Maybe i'll share again, next time i hear from Gaksloope. Best of luck.

Before i forget -- you need to see the improved Gradient Maker application i fixed last week.

It's got a color picker now, thanks to Eric Meyer (the css guru)

Hence, it's more fun. Fun-of-use, is important, apparently.

I kind of hoped it would get a coupla-hundred del.icio.us recommendations, but it hasn't yet.

An approximation of the GDI+ .net code it uses is stored in a previous entry.

On the topic of GDI+ .net restful webservices for rendering images, check out Shital Shah's technique for rendering equations online. (Be warned about his page transitions... they are frightening ;-) )

Here's a usability goof in windows xp. And I'm not making this up.

I walk up to the computer and here's what's on the screen:

Let me repeat that, in text, for those with screen readers:

One program! One! Yet they recommend a little less of that crazy multi-taskng.

Brisbane Band Delpino are playing their last ever show this Friday (12th Aug) at the Troubadour.

If you've never seen or heard this special Brisbane act, seize your last chance.

Other Brisbane news...

I ran the Bridge to Brisbane, (euphemistically known as a 'fun run') on the weekend. I haven't found out my "place" yet, but I'm guessing somewhere in the top twenty (...thousand that is). You can watch me (competitor 29062) crossing the finish line, very exhausted -- if you're a freaky stalker type, that is.

Also, I've used tada to compose (and share) my ToDo list for the world's 3rd simplest code generator. That tool might be coming soon.

(In which I demonstrate a GDI+, asp.net, color gradient webservice which lets you create blend images in firefox, not just IE)

Three strange and interesting technical things have converged on me recently....

First, I read about a Sparklines webservice that lets you inject funky little sparklines into your html, like this: or like this: , just by specifying an image source url such as:

(where those comma separated values are the datapoints in the sparkline!)

Second, I've taken an inordinate fondness to the gradient transformation features of IE, which let you create smooth color gradients. (If you've got IE you can see some at work in the World's 2nd Simplest Code Generator (or if you've got Opera/Firefox you can see evidence of the filters in these screen shots.)

And third, I've downloaded firefox, which doesn't render gradient transformations, because those mozilla kids are fairly fussy about standards compliance and things like that.

So I find myself wishing for a browser-independent way of generating color gradients, and thanks to the sparklines article, and sunday's hangover (cheers jeb), I had an idea.

With a little bit of .Net GDI+ magic, I've managed to generate pixel-thin 'blend' images for use as backgrounds.

So what does it do?

If you call out to my 'web-service' in an IMG tag, like this:

You'll get a result like this:

Basically, a one pixel-wide blend image. Here, i'll stretch it out wide to make it easier to see:

By changing the query string around, you can have any start and end color you want, you can go horizontal or vertical. Plus a few other options.

Tastes better with CSS

Like most things in life, this tastes better with CSS. Use the service (or the test page) to create an image for you, then save it to your server. Set it as the background-color (sic.) using CSS. For 'V' (vertical) images, specify a repeat direction of Y. For 'H' (horizontal) images, specify a repeat direction of X.

To Test the Service...

Use this rather natty little test page to test the service. I have, for once in my damn life, tested it on two different browers. So, with luck, it might work.

Here are some samples of the webservice in use:

Parameters...

Error Handling

If parameters are wrongly setup, or if something else goes wrong, you get an image like this one:

The Code

Related articles

• XML.com: A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines
• Cross-browser BlendTrans Filter JavaScript, Fade in-out
• CAPTCHA Image - ASP.NET (from Brainjar {Mike Hall?} at CodeProject)
• Common mistakes in REST webservices

Button Makers

• glassy button maker
• Button Maker by LucaZappa.com
• adam kalsey's button maker
• The Opera Custom Buttons & Command Creator

Help Mort solve this common computing conundrum...

It's early on a Monday morning and our hero, Mort Visibasicus, is about to do some typing when he should, instead, be programming.

He's already written this rather boring and repetitive chunk of code, which populates controls based on local variables:

  txtFirstName.Text = _FirstName
  txtLastName.Text = _LastName
  cboTitle.SelectedValue = _Title
  txtAddressLine1.Text = _AddressLine1
  txtAddressLine2.Text = _AddressLine2
  txtAddressLine3.Text = _AddressLine3
  (and so on for twenty controls...)

Now, Mort needs to write the complementary code.

Mort needs to write code that will read from the controls to populate local variables.

He needs code like this:

  _FirstName = txtFirstName.Text
  _LastName = txtLastName.Text
  _Title = cboTitle.SelectedValue 
  _AddressLine1 = txtAddressLine1.Text
  _AddressLine2 = txtAddressLine2.Text
  _AddressLine3 = txtAddressLine3.Text
  (and so on... twenty times)

Mort refuses to do all that typing. He considers using cut and paste... maybe block selecting.... perhaps a regular expression, or Excel... but no... still too laborious, too methodical.

Screw this, Mort shakes his fist at the sky. I don't enact algorithms. I write them.

Mort considers the pattern he is after... it is just the same thing, but switched around, back to front... he thinks.

His eyes glaze over. He has one of those all-too-rare Mort Epiphanies.

He cranks up his friend -- the world's 2nd simplest code generator.

He sets the column delimiter to the equals sign "="

He turns on the option to 'trim each field'.

He pastes the existing code into the 'Input box'

And he types in this pattern:

  $2 = $1

Mort smashes the [calculate] button.... and Voila!

The desired code is created as if by digital magic.

Now while the geek in the next cubicle is still slaving over her hand-crafted, carefully typed code, Mort has finished his tasks for the day and can devote the remainder of his time chuckling away at the Daily Wtf.

Mort has discovered the essence of 'Micro Code-Generation'.

Laziness is its own reward.

Can you think of cleverer ways to use the world's 2nd simplest code generator?

(Note for C# programmers: set ";" as the row delimiter, and use the pattern: "$2 = $1;")

Okay, I've been meaning to run an "MSPaint.exe" master class for a while now.

Here's the first lesson.... This could save you a lot of paper, and a lot of sticky tape.

MSPaint, (or "Ms Paint" as she prefers to be known) doesn't have much, but she does have a "Page Setup" dialog.

The clever thing about this is that it contains the option:

Hence, when printing, there is no need for your screenshot to span over two portrait pages. (And screenshots, of course, are what Ms Paint is best at.)

This is bad news for companies that sell sticky tape.

Did you realise that Mozilla firefox is just a 4.6 meg download? That's like... less than the runtime for Notepad! (nearly)

Thanks to a shove from Mike Leung, I finally installed Firefox... not as default browser... (for that we have Crazy Browser! [which runs on top of ie]) -- but it's there on the quicklaunch... just waiting for me to see how broken all my markup is...

C#... FireFox... What's next? Linux??