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Sunday, 31 May 2009

I have used this for ages and figured it would be a good tip to share.

I wanted a way to mute phone call ringtones and messages while I sleep but still needed to be woken up by the phone's alarm and calendar events the following morning.

Changing the "Ringing volume" to off also stops alarms and calendar alerts from sounding (which is quite misleading and after missing my alarm that morning quite frustrating).

After fiddling with the phone for a while I eventually came up with a workaround which I must admit was not obvious:

Simply create a new profile called "Alerts Only". set the "Ringing volume" to high and the message alert tone to "Off". Next create an empty call group (call it "Empty") and in the profile set "Alert For" for only that call group.

In effect you are saying you want to be notified when nobody rings you. It is a bizzare form of logic but does indeed work.

Now you will not be notified of messages, will not hear your ringtone as any callers will not match the empty group, yet all of your calendar alerts and alam clock alarms will continue to sound as normal.

Additionally you can just place your phone in "Offline" mode which will disconnect you from the mobile network but then you won't be able to pickup/recieve messages until you put the phone back online again. Given past text messages can sometimes take a while to come through putting the phone online after pulling the phone offline overnight shortly before leaving the house can be quite dangerous.
After reading up on "Emotional Intelligence" I just completed an online quiz in this area. Of course we all know quizzes shouldn't be taken too seriously (Facebook's "What kind of pirate are you?" style quizzes almost officially killed the genre) but I found some of the questions alone in this one quite thought provoking.

Firstly what is and why "emotional" intelligence?
"Researchers were puzzled by the fact that while IQ could predict to a significant degree academic performance and, to some degree, professional and personal success, there was something missing in the equation. Some of those with fabulous IQ scores were doing poorly in life; one could say that they were wasting their potential by thinking, behaving and communicating in a way that hindered their chances to succeed.

One of the major missing parts in the success equation is emotional intelligence..

....For various reasons and thanks to a wide range of abilities, people with high emotional intelligence tend to be more successful in life than those with lower EIQ even if their classical IQ is average."
Source: Queendom

A more concrete definition can be found on Amazon:
"He defines emotional intelligence in terms of self-awareness, altruism, personal motivation, empathy and the ability to love and be loved by friends, partners, and family members"
Source: Amazon.com Book Review

You can take the test here : http://www.queendom.com/tests/access_page/index.htm?idRegTest=1121

For those who are interested, the quiz had the following to say about me :
"Self-report Component
Subscale IQ score = 129
Subscale percentile = 97

According to your self-report answers, your emotional intelligence is good. People who score like you do feel that they have little trouble understanding and dealing with their own emotions and those of others. They generally are able to overcome difficulties in their lives and they are able to control their moods in all but the most trying of times. It’s easy for them to motivate themselves to overcome obstacles and reach their goals. In addition, they find social interactions to be quite easy and fulfilling, for several reasons. They are comfortable allowing themselves to get close with others, and feel comfortable being vulnerable enough to establish intimacy. They also report having an easy time offering support to others; this is likely due to an empathetic nature and a clear mind when it comes to offering good advice. "


If you have the time (and interest) it would be interesting if close friends took the test too and shared their result.

Even if you do believe psychology invents categories for things that are non existent, I think everyone accepts at least that IQ does not strictly lead to success. Perhaps there is a hidden metric after all?

Saturday, 23 May 2009

Developers might be used to using code like this:
Set objXMLHTTP = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")

What is this version? Is this preferable to specifying the version number? Is there a newer version? Would my applications benefit from using a newer version?

MSXML (now "Microsoft Core XML Services") is the Microsoft XML Parser.

ServerXMLHTTP (the "Server-Safe HTTP" method) was introduced with MSXML 3.0.

A quick search through regedit (the registry editor) for "ServerXMLHTTP" reveals the following ProgIDs are available:
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.3.0
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.4.0
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.5.0
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0

So what happens when you do not specify the version number and merely call Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP? Simple there is a "VersionIndependentProgID" value of "Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP" under the key for Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.3.0. Therefore your program defaults back to using MSXML 3.0. Microsoft have no plans to change this as they decided they did not want to support the same methods and features from one version to the next.

If you want to run the latest and greatest version of ServerXMLHTTP you are currently looking at using the following code:
Set objXMLHTTP = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0")

Of course if you are distributing this code to others you will want to include the old line commented out with a comment also stating where they can download MSXML 6.0 Service Pack 2 (with patch) (often referred to as "MSXML 6.2") or how they can (assuming you are not doing anything particularly weird) always use the older version.

MSXML 6.0 Service Pack 2 (with patch) is the latest (as of writing) but should this change there is a Microsoft page listing the "Microsoft XML Parser Versions" (though the page is not 100% accurate, it fails to list all of the new version numbers after the recent MS08-069 bulletin).

The page above will also helpfully list which versions come with which products. This is useful because if you know your target users all run certain Microsoft products (perhaps your program even has a dependency of them being there like SQL Server or Office) you can safely assume the relevant version of XML is installed with it.

So lastly, why should you use the newer versions? There are many strong cases for this, firstly in MSXML 4 the code was changed to use the standard WinHTTP library that many applications have come to use and rely on, this is far better supported (and more likely optimised) than having all your HTTP code running in some crummy XML DLL and waiting for people to try all sorts of weird combinations. To quote Microsoft "This release provides the slimmer, faster, and more conformant XML processing components". Microsoft argue some of the new versions have "Substantial Improvements". Additionally various bugs have been fixed in the XML libraries itself as well as important security holes.

Speaking of security the latest version on the list of versions is "6.0 Post SP2 (MS08-069)" this is because on 11 November 2008 MS released a patch fixing some very serious security holes. This affected MSXML 3 right through to version 6. You should download each of the patches for each version from MS08-069 until your version numbers match the following:
msxml6.dll (version 6) - SP2, 6.20.1099.0
msxml5.dll (version 5 for Office) - Office 2007 Fix, 5.20.1087.0
msxml4.dll (version 4) - SP2, 4.20.9870.0
msxml3.dll (version 3) - SP9 Fix, 8.100.1048.0

The latest patches and updates for XML 2 and below appear to be in the Windows operating system service packs.

With all this in mind do you want to continue running code that calls the older versions? I certainly do not.

Sources:
What's New in MSXML - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms753751(VS.85).aspx
I have most of my music on a NAS at home but very little IT infrastructure here. After playing with Shoutcast I knew how to stream music from home but unfortunately, controlling it was another issue. Using Remote Desktop to change the music became tiresome very quickly.

Ages ago I went on the search for a little remote interface to control the music playing loudly on my computer by using my WiFi phone or another computer in the house. I came across AjaxAMP. AjaxAMP was a bit clunky if I had a particularly large playlist loaded up and not the best thing to use on the Nokia N82's small screen.

Trying to use AjaxAMP remotely on my laptop with all my music added into one super playlist and set to shuffle also turned out to be disasterous. Firefox's memory usage and resource requirements shot up rapidly. I was also particularly dissatisfied with the constant polling it was making to the server to check the track's current status.

So I noticed AjaxAMP behind the scenes just called on a few service commands yoururl.com/stop, yoururl.com/play etc and decided to make my own page with a small box of text on the page that would let me call those commands directly.

The idea of "SmallBox" was born. Due to Firefox's strict restrictions (i.e. matthew1471.co.uk is not allowed to make AJAX requests to matthew1471.co.uk:5151) this ended up having to be an ASP script running on the remote side.

I also decided instead of getting it to reload every 10 seconds or so, to work out how many seconds remain of the current playing track and refresh the page then. Therefore if you have a 2 minute track the page refreshes in 2 minutes. Previously AjaxAMP was asking for data every 3 seconds or so, every 2 minutes is a lot less noise.

My page also does not rely heavily on Javascript (though the refresh code does) so web-browsers with limited capability or even text-based browsers such as lynx will have little problem rendering it.

Here is a current screenshot:
SmallBOX Screenshot

Of course given it calls AjaxAMP you will need AjaxAMP installed to use SmallBox.

Download NowDownload Now

Sunday, 10 May 2009

I would be interested in hearing what bloggers think of twitter. I have had a request to provide more functionality linking BlogX to twitter. Does anyone have any comments? Either comment on this entry or message me in private by clicking the mail icon.