8 Toolbars under IE7

Not long after my previous test with the Google Toolbar, I threw on the Yahoo Toolbar with no problem and began to wonder... how many others could I get to work? So decided to test this.

Thus far far... I am at 8.



For those morbidly curious who might want to try this themselves, the toolbars in question are:

• Google


• Yahoo


• MSN


• Skype


• AOL


• A9


• Dogpile


• Altavista

Of course, there are a couple of minor problems that I have run into:

Currently, the layout of all of the toolbars is a bit tricky for me, I imagine that if I were using my laptop right now instead of through two layers of VNC I might have an easier time.

Also, one toolbar I did add early on was the Anti-Phishing toolbar from Netcraft and it worked fine, unfortunately for some unknown reason when I try to show it now IE goes down hard. I’ll look into that a bit more later to see if I can’t find a fix or determine if it isn’t working well with a given toolbar and which one that is.

Google Toolbar under IE7

It is being reported by some hacks who will not be linked to from here that new IE7 beta breaks the Yahoo and Google toolbar.

Not having much time to test with, I threw IE7 on to my laptop at home through two different VNC sessions (that is the reason for the not so pretty looking screenshot) to see what it did to the Google toolbar. The result? Worked fine.



It looks like Andrew Orlowski should do some research and possibly even testing prior to leveling seemingly unfounded and false allegations.

A little later when I have some time I will throw Yahoo on the laptop and see how that works, however for now I think these results pretty much speak for themselves.

EDIT: 7/29/05 11:23AM CDT:
I just took this test a bit further and got 8 Toolbars under IE7 working.

Most Expensive Ice Cream Cone Ever

After seeing Charlie and the Chocolate factory last night, Chad decided that he was in the mood for some ice cream and we came to the choice between a short drive to the local Culvers, or a shorter drive to a place called Cold Stone Creamery that was just across from the theater.

Having never been to Cold Stone, we decided to go there. Upon getting inside, we were greeted by a line of more than 30 people which zig-zaged through a standard line barricade setup. While waiting I was taking a look around and was impressed by much of what I saw. The place was far cleaner than I had expected and had been well cared for since being built (6+ months ago at least).

It was during my attempt to decide what to get out of their 28 regular mixes that I realized: They make their own ice cream.

No, I don’t just mean that they put their ingredients in the machine, press go and come back an hour later... I mean they do all of that and mix in their own ingredients when you order.

Once you’ve reached the front of the line (which took us 20+ min), they use a couple of large spoons to scoop out the actual ice cream from the display area, and then knead it a shape more suitable for the adding of ingredients. Into mine, chocolate chips and a piece of cookie dough were added and well kneaded. Later, the preparer added some fudge and caramel to the mix before asking me what I would like it in.

One may be wondering “Wouldn’t the ice cream melt due to all of that?” Such was my thought too until I found that the name of the place actually meant something. The surface that the ice cream was being prepared on was a wide piece of very cold stone, so cold that metal scrapers were needed to remove the bits of ice cream that weren’t served to the customer.

Having 3 sizes of: ‘Like it’, ‘Love it’ and ‘Gotta have it’, I ended up going for the medium size and ended up paying $5.22 for my ‘Cookie Doughn't You Want Some’ mix in a waffle cone while Chad paid about a buck more for the larger size of something else (whose clever name escapes me and which he was not able to finish) in a waffle cone bowl.

Quite a good treat, albeit rather expensive.

Adding to the experience was the workers (6 of them behind the counter) breaking into song from time to time with brief ditties, one began:

Hi-ho! Hi-ho, we thank you for your dough…

Interestingly, all of those tunes I remember hearing (4 in all that were repeated) were all based on old Disney themes and I was forced to wonder what sort of deal they had with for these performances to be safe.

It was later on that I noticed that every time someone would come in, one of the workers would yell (and I do mean yell) “Welcome to Cold Stone”.

Overall, quite an enjoyable experience, except for the length of the line, the premium price paid for such a treat and the excess of calories that my body did not need that night.

Going to be a good week

Ever have one of those days where you realize that it is going to be a great week... or at least, it better damn well be one? This week I expect will be one of them... or if it's not, I will be quite disappointed.

Between it not being my week to drive for the carpool, having a birthday, auto insurance rates going down(due to birthday), the first annual Brendan Grant Appreciation Day, and also of Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica returning for their new seasons, as well payday #2 of a three paycheck month.

All I need now is to win the Powerball and find my dream house affordably priced and it will be a perfect week me thinks.

What happened to the .netcpu? It was sold

I just heard back from A Dot on what happened to the ,netcpu (dotnetcpu) product. Turns out, it has been sold to Microsoft.

Dont get me wrong, I am in some ways rather happy to hear that... but at the same time, kind of let down too because it seems that it will take a lot more to get some of these in house to look at.

Now comes the fun part... hunting down a contact at Microsoft for this.

What happened to the .netcpu?

Remember the .netcpu? If not, here is a quick rundown: It was/is a small processing board that contained a mini CLR (Common Language Runtime) that would enable developers to write programs for it using Visual Studio.NET and C# (or any .NET language really) that could be used in embedded systems. Back in December WindowsForDevices.com and others wrote about it, as well as there being a great deal of interest within the general blogsphere. Brilliant idea... except... where are they?

While preparing for a recent 'What is .NET?' presentation I gave here at work a few weeks ago, I went to their website and was greeted with a friendly "You are not authorized to view this page" message. This same message has greeted me every time I've tried to visit it over the last month.

The website of the company making it, A Dot Corportation is accessible, but not the actual products webpage.

After my presentation, a number of people expressed interest in learning more about this part given the number of embedded products we make, so one hopes they come back soon. In the mean time I've got an e-mail into A Dot asking if/when the page will be back up, because when it is, I will need to try to get an eval board or two in for us to play with... err, experiment I mean.

Flat XML Serialization

Serialization in .NET rocks! It makes some of ones tasks of constructing an XML file out of values from a class and vice versa so simple.

Recently at work we had a need to send an XML string across the wire without all of the extra hard returns and formatting, however I did not have much luck other doing a quick and dirty Replace() on the string (which was enough for the time being). Later, seeing someone on microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp asking about how to do this... I decided it was time to find a way... unfortunately, Google failed me, running searches such as: 'XmlSerializer format c# flat', 'XML Serializer format', 'Serialize format c#', 'XmlSerializer format c# flat' and many others... all without luck. (Note: those search terms are only here to help Google pick up on this page in case

In order to serialize something normally, you need to create a stream (to resource it will be serialized to (string, file, etc)) that is indirectly used by the serializer. This stream is often wrapped in a stream writer of some sort, often a TextWriter or StringWriter in my case.

If you create a new XmlTextWriter that uses the previously created TextWriter or StringWriter, you can better control the output, nambly by setting the Formatting property of the XmlTextWriter to None.

The following code is an example of how I traditionally serialize a class to a string (albeit stripped down a bit):

StringBuilder serializedOutputStringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer( typeof( ClassTypeToBeSerialized ) );
StringWriter w = new StringWriter( serializedOutputStringBuilder ) );
s.Serialize( w, value);
w.Close();

We modify the creation of the StringWriter be created as an parameter for the creation of the XmlTextWriter ala:

StringBuilder serializedOutputStringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer( typeof( ClassTypeToBeSerialized ) );
XmlTextWriter w = new XmlTextWriter( new StringWriter( serializedOutputStringBuilder ) );
w.Formatting = Formatting.None;
s.Serialize( w, value);
w.Close();

It's that simple, sure wish I had figured out how to do this a couple of weeks ago instead of having such high quality logic as:

serializedOutput = serializedOutputStringBuilder.ToString().Replace("\r\n","");

Yes, I know that this is a minor discovery and countless others have used it in past, I only offer this write up in the hopes that any others trying to find this method can do so more easily.