Matt Manela's Blog : Personal

How to teach your girlfriend Hexadecimal?

MattManela — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:49:00 GMT

It is an age old question: How do you teach your girlfriend hex?

I encountered this problem when I was a web developer in college for a late night student activities program aptly named Late Nite Binghamton. My co-worker and girlfriend Mallory was a graduate assistant for the program and had many ideas for how to make the website better and more engaging. While working with her she would often see me typing in the hexadecimal color codes in css such as:

color: #F24A7D

As I am inept with what color look good (I often say that I never learnt colors) I would often ask her for help with picking out colors and I decided that if she was able to give me these colors in their hex color codes it would make us more efficient :) I sat her down and described to her how they work but after talking for a bit I realized that although she understood everything that I said she wouldn’t gain a feel for what hex numbers related to what colors just from hearing me talk.

In order to help her gain this feel I created a simple game called The Mallory Color Guessing Game. The game is a webpage which shows you a large colored box and it is your job to guess what the hex color code is.

After you guess it tells you how close you were to the actual color:

This game was a hit! Mallory loved it and she would compete with me to see who could guess the color the best. Pretty quickly she gained a feel for what the hex digits meant and what color they represented. And that is how I taught my girlfriend hex!

NOTE: Mallory consistently gets over 80% at the Mallory Color Guessing Game.

Snippet Designer in April’s MSDN Magazine!

MattManela — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:33:47 GMT

I am excited to announce that the Snippet Designer is featured in the April issue of MSDN Magazine.

It is featured in the Toolbox column where they highlight useful tools and blogs. Here is a snippet of what it says:

Creating Code Snippets is a lot easier when using Snippet Designer (version 1.1), a free, open-source Add-In for Visual Studio 2008 for creating and editing Code Snippets directly within the IDE. Once you install it, creating a new Code Snippet is as easy as going to the File menu and creating a new Code Snippet File.

That is so cool! If you are interested go and download the Snippet Designer from the Codeplex website and give me more feedback.

Also, in the same article my friend Sara Ford had her blog featured. When I found out the Snippet Designer and Sara’s blog were in the magazine I quickly emailed to ask Sara if she knew about it. She already did and also had an extra copy of the magazine for me!

Snippet Designer 1.1 Released

MattManela — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:11:28 GMT

I just released Snippet Designer 1.1. This is not a major release but just some bug fixes and often requested changes to make the snippet designer more useful.

Some of the most notable changes are:

Languages Service are turned OFF by default now. Since I was unable to figure out a way to host the C# and VB language services in the snippet editor without causing fake errors in projects I decided to give the users an option to turn them on or off. If you are ok with the fake error you can turn this back on but since it really annoyed me I have it off. I plan in a future release to provide some basic color coding outside of the language service so you can at least have color coded code.
Many more aspects of the plug in are now configurable through the options menu under Snippet Designer. you can now set the location of the snippet index, set preferences for which snippet languages you would like to appear in the snippet explorer.
Several bug fixes to how the highlighting of replacements works and performance improvements with it also.

Hopefully these changes will make it much more useful so please download it and try it out here.

The future…

My plans for the future are still up in the air but some of the things I would like to add are:

More bug fixes and more feature enhancements suggested by many helpful users on the Snippet Designer Codeplex page.
Ability to color code snippets without using the language service. I have a few options here I have been looking at.
Create a website to host snippets and allow you to consume and publish from Visual Studio to this website.

I don’t know how much time I will have to commit to any of these but hopefully I will be able to get more work done on this.

Thanks!

When I am finally starting to get a handle on Monads...

MattManela — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 09:59:34 GMT

When I am finally starting to get a handle on Monads I discovered Arrows and I am thrown back into confusion. At least that is how it feels. In my exploration of Haskell I have spent a good deal of time trying to completely grasp and understand Monads. I have read much about it and feel pretty good about my understanding of them now. I am no expert but I at least am no longer afraid when I see or read about them.

But then I came across Arrows. Arrows (from what I understand) are a further abstraction on top of Monads which are themselves abstractions. What does this mean? I don't know.

I encountered arrows when I was looking into using the Haskell XML Toolkit. I was able to get a sample working (which I am planning to write about soon) using the toolkit and Arrows but it felt like shooting a pistol in the dark.

When I post the sample I created I will try my best to describe what I understand about it but I feel like this is going to be a slow road before I get a grasp on Arrows.

The best game EVER

MattManela — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:53:31 GMT

Note: This post may be subject to gross use of hyperbole.

By far the best game in the history of man is:

Fuel Pipe on Skype

Skype has a bunch of built in games which you can play with the person to whom you are talking. These games are good since they make it seem as if you and the person you are talking to are sitting next to each other playing a collaborative game. This is why Fuel Pipe is such a good game. It is not too hard but requires both people to communicate to get their sides in synch. And in addition to this fun there is the amazing music! Whenever you complete a level in the game it plays this victory song that will brighten up anyone's day and make you want to dance.

If you are a Skype user I recommend trying Fuel Pipe out.

I was on DotNetRocks!!!

MattManela — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:32:56 GMT

A couple week ago I had an interview with the DotNetRocks folks. In this interview I discussed the MSDN Code Gallery and I also discuss ed my time as an intern at Microsoft.

It was really fun recording this and my interviewers Carl and Richard were very enjoyable to talk to.

I hope you like it. You can get to the interview by clicking HERE!!!!.

My attempt at a web comic

MattManela — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:35:17 GMT

Last year my girlfriend Mallory Emerson drew my attention to a web comic called Dinosaur Comics. It is really funny and inspired me to try to make my own. So while I was in class one day (not the most interesting Information Retrieval lecture) I drew my version of a Dinosaur Comic on my tablet pc. I find it very funny probably because I made it but here for your approval or hatred is Matt's Dinosaur comic:

Windows Media Player Problem AND Solution

MattManela — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:33:07 GMT

I am the proud owner of a iriver clix portable media player. I have had it for about a year now and I have had no complaints. It works beautifully. When I first got it I had some concerns about using Windows Media Player. The clix is made to work best with it but I had some bad experiences in the past versions of WMP. However, I decided to give it a go and I was pleasantly surprised. The killer feature I found with WMP11 is the synching. You can synch your device with media based on any criteria you want. One example is that I set it up that whenever I plugged my device in WMP would synch all songs which are in the genre of rock and I have listened to 5 or more times but I haven't heard in 2 months.

That is pretty cool.

I was happy with this until about a week ago when IT STOPPED SYNCHING. I didn't know if it was a iriver problem or a WMP11 problem. I reset the firmware on my clix and it didn't help. I reinstalled WMP11 and it didn't help. Then after searching online a bit I found a solution.

Somehow my WMP library got corrupt. The music was fine but the index the media player keeps of the music got corrupt. WMP would still play music and videos but it wouldn't let me manage my library, add files to the library or synch.

I thought that reinstalling WMP would fix the library but it doesn't. I really do think repair library probably should be an option in the installer or in the program but since it is not I had to look to the intertubes for the answer. The solution was simple though, just delete the contents of the WMP library folder.

Instructions to do so can be found

here

and

here

Depending on whether you are running XP or Vista the instructions are slightly different so read carefully.

Things I have learnt about Seattle...

MattManela — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:20:10 GMT

At the beginning of August I moved out to Seattle from New York and since then I have learned some things about this city:

People in Seattle dislike Starbucks but are inexorably drawn to constantly go there. Everyone complains how Starbucks sold out and how there is better coffee at other local Seattle coffee shops but they all still go to Starbucks religiously.
Traffic in Seattle is worse than all of New York city EXCEPT for Manhattan. Traffic here is pretty bad (520? 405?) and beats in my opinion the four other boroughs of New York in severity but nothing compares to the parking lot that is Manhattan.
Homeless in Seattle get up very early and stay out very late. Anyone who travels in Seattle will notice the flocks of homeless people. I feel bad for them but I must appreciate the long hours they work. I have seen the same person at 6:30am and at 9pm in one day.
The Seattle bus drivers are the nicest people in the world. Maybe I am biased coming from New York where most of the bus drivers would ignore you if you did talk to them but the bus drivers in Seattle are extremely nice. They will help you with anything and seem genuinely concerned that get to where you are going. I had a bus driver ask everyone if they were sure that they didn't want to get off at a certain stop. That shocked me. A bus driving making sure no one forget to see if this was there stop.

That is all for now. I will add more as I learn them.

First Post!

MattManela — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 05:32:30 GMT

Welcome to my first blog post as a Microsoft employee. I work for a team who is truly focused on building a better community around Microsoft developer technologies and tools. I hope I can use this blog to spread information, tips and maybe a few funny things (don't count on it).

I have failed at other blogs I started. I would post once or twice then give up. Lets see if I can do better this time.