Cum Grano Salis : General

New ImageResizer build (801) - Added quick-resize from the menu

Shahar — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Small addition to the shell extension for resizing the images:

You can now quickly resize images w/o going through the UI and choosing options.

Note that you will need to set your defaults the first time you do this. Also note that any option that automatically overwrites images will not be set-able as a default.

Vista Time Saver: Copy full file name to clipboard from Explorer.

Shahar — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Thought I'd drop a line, since this is a feature I have been looking for FOREVER and never got around to writing it myself.

In Vista, if you Shift-Right Click a file name in explorer, it will give you an option called "Copy As Path". Selecting that, will place the full name of the file (including complimentary double-quotes) in the clipboard.

No more two-step copying for me!

Abusing my poor pregnant wife. Pictures Inside!

Shahar — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:58:00 GMT

My wife is at the last stages of her pregnancy - and she's HUGE.

We decided to have a bit of fun before the little creature that's inside her tries to claw it's way out. This is what we came up with:

For my homies who root for Hapoel Tel Aviv:

This is me reenacting how I made my wife so huge (no birds or bees here!!)

Just finished giving the Excel Services DevCon demo.

Shahar — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:57:00 GMT

Just finished doing the DevCon demo together with Danny Khen. People seemed to really like what we showed them. In the next couple of days I will start adding a lot of the stuff we showed there to the blog with step-by-step instructions on what things actually do.

What's the bloody point? American Express Gift Card...

Shahar — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:52:00 GMT

So I'm standing in a safeway, at the register. There's an American Express $100 gift card. You pay $105 for it ($5 fee), and get a $100 gift card that can be used anywhere..

Maybe it's a culture gap thing. I have only been in the US for 4 years.. But wouldnt it be better to just give someone $105?

What's the bloody point?

Another DRM legistlation. Wonder where it will stop.

Shahar — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:11:00 GMT

As reported in Slashdot (and other places):

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/19/088241&from=rss

Basically, making legistlation to close the loophole that will currently allows analog copying of digital copyrighted matirial (I am oversimplifying, but you get the idea) - the D2A2D thing.

The reason for this post though, is the 5 minutes of amusment I got from one of the techologies used to fight the Analog copying - it's called Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL). They should have just called it in its real name: Encoded Video Invisible Light (EVIL).

Oh, how I hate the concept of DRM.

I never knew how protected I was from spam.. Until somebody changed the winisp filters...

Shahar — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:49:00 GMT

In the past 24 hours I have been getting spam emails at a rate of one per minute on my non-ms email (if you just woke up, that's about 720 emails in 12 hours). Outlook junk filter was able to filter about 30% of them but the rest landed in my inbox.

In a reply to a support request I sent to my email ISP, I was told that "someone touched the exchange junk-mail filter settings". Joy!

I never knew just how many emails were blocked by that. Insane.

Copy (Ctrl-C) works in Message Boxes

Shahar — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 02:37:00 GMT

This feature has been working since windows 2k or early versions of XP, and still many people do not know about it.

If you have a Message Box showing, and you want to copy its contents, you can just Ctrl-C when the window is focused - you will hear a beep and the contents of the Message Box (including buttons and caption) will be loaded into your clipboard.

Very useful when having to copy a long error message somewhere or when a message box used for debugging displays too much information.

Note though, that apps that use non-standard message boxes will probably not have that feature enabled.

Example:

---------------------------
MSN Messenger
---------------------------
You are now signing out from MSN Messenger. All conversation windows will be closed.
---------------------------
OK Cancel
---------------------------

Mailbox too big? MSN Desktop search to the rescue.

Shahar — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 11:04:00 GMT

In our internal exchange system, MS has various limits on email size, depending on what server you happen to reside on (true beta servers tend to not have any limit. More stable servers tend to have an upper limit in the vicinity of 500mb). If you are as disorganized as me, one of the things you need to do every now and again, is to clean your mail box. This used to work, for me, like this:

1. Delete everything from my "Deleted Folder" that is more than 3 weeks old.

2. Delete all the folders that are just junk (Check-in mails, Office Build Problems and the like for me).

This gets rid of a good chunk of stuff, however, there's still a bunch of things that needs to be done, such as looking for large items in the Sent Items, Inbox and various other folders. This is usually done by using the Folder Size feature of Outlook.

Not anymore! Now, with desktop search, you can just look for all the space-hoggers in your mailbox by searching for mail items that are larger than X. To do that, simply instruct MSN Desktop Search to look for all items that are > 1,000,000 - it's that simple. You will get a list of all the items that fit that criteria and then you can decide if you want to delete them or not. To do this, the search string you need to use is:

size: > 1000000

(Of course you can use any other size that fits your profile)

Edit: bakshi commented that with Office 12, Outlook will have real search/indexing capabilities embedded in it - and so one would be able to use the same "trick", but w/o having to install MSN Desktop.

Why does this spelling mistake bother me so much?

Shahar — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 19:59:00 GMT

Not being a native English speaker, makes me less critical about other peoples spelling. However, there's one spelling mistake that just makes me cringe whenever I see it. Now, because I spend at least some of my internet time in forums, that means I see that word quite a bit.

The word is Your. What's that I hear you say? “Your” is not a misspelled word? Oh, but it is when it’s used instead of You’re. And the problem is that it seems like this mistake is starting to take roots – starting to pop all over the place. I just got this in my email:

I just hope our dictionaries will be smart enough to point this mistake out at some point.

I usually don’t like ranting about such inconsequential things, but I guess I have my pet peeves just like each of you have you’res.

A new blog comes to life!

Shahar — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 04:41:00 GMT

I know this is very exciting to the multitudes that are reading this. You probably cannot contain you excitment. Well, try. It's quite unbecoming.

Introductions are in order I guess. My name is Shahar, I work for Microsoft, on the finally-not-top-secret Excel Server product. We can't really write anything about that yet since for now the only official place to go is the Excel Server Blog. Once we open it up for individual people on the team, I will probably be talking about that a bit too.

This is the part where I should be giving my Geek History, though I dont think anyone really cares, so I will skip that (aren't you thankful?)

My posts will consist mainly of programming tips, programming-related-tips, tid bits about Excel Server and the occasional humm-drumm comment about life at large.

In the past 3 years or so I have started using .NET heavily - both on Excel Server and in my home grown projects. As sad as it is to admit, C# and the CLR have replaced C++ as the love-of-my-(computing)-life. Talk about feeling like a wuss. But more about that in future posts. Because of that, most of my programming posts are probably going to be about .NET related issues.