shady's: July 2010

Thursday, July 22, 2010

FCIH Initiative Updates

Finally we are glad to announce the launch of

FCIH Initiative Program

On Next Sunday 25/7/2010 at FCI-Helwan

Join our great event; Join a group of carefully selected sessions highly needed in your practical life.

Event Schedule:

Day 1 [Sunday: 25-7-2010]: Let's get started
10:00	10:30	Orientation
10:30	12:30	Object Oriented Blocks
12:30	01:00	Break
01:00	02:30	Good Code
02:30	03:00	Break
03:00	04:00	English for Business
Day 2 [Monday: 26-7-2010]: Develop your path
10:00	11:30	Web Development A – Z
11:30	12:00	Break
12:00	02:00	Software Quality Engineering
02:00	02:30	Break
02:30	04:00	CV Writing and interviewing skills
Day 3 [Wednesday: 28-7-2010]: IT, World of Endless Choices
10:00	11:00	GIS: Geographic information system
11:00	12:00	CMS: Content Management System
12:00	12:30	Break
02:00	02:30	BI: Business Intelligence
02:30	03:30	RIA: Rich Internet Application
Day 4 [Thursday: 29-7-2010]: Into the business world
10:00	01:00	Agile Software Development
01:00	01:30	Break
01:30	3:00	Understanding Business Analysis
03:00	04:30	Global / Local IT Market
04:30	05:00	Closing

Don't miss the chance…..and don't forget our date "25/7/2010" at FCI-Helwan.

Waiting you there :)

Find more about the event here:
Mail: FCIH [dot] Initiative [at] fcih [dot] net
Website: http://www.helwan.edu.eg:90/fcih/details.asp?id=161
http://www.helwan.edu.eg:90/fcih/details.asp?id=162
FaceBook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=128813070490801

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Creating a simple Open Search Provider/Plug-in

Yesterday, I needed to check/search my delicious bookmarks more than once. I then realized that delicious have its a search plug-in as a part of a tool bar (along with other bookmarking tools, few search tools, though), which -I guess- loads all your bookmarks to browser & make them available for search.
As I’m not so much into too much plug-ins, specially if they load lots of data (in contradiction to Pointy-haired Boss) , not to mention that I won’t need bookmarks when I’m offline, anyway, I decided I should create my search provider.

Creating the Provider:

Here’s an example:

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
	<ShortName>My Delicious</ShortName>
	<Description>Search Shady’s Delicious Bookmarks</Description>
	<Tags>Delicious Bookmarks Search Favorites</Tags>
	<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">http://delicious.com/favicon.ico</Image>
	<Url type="text/html"
	template="http://delicious.com/search?p={searchTerms}&context=userposts\|m.shady\|&lc=1"/>
	</OpenSearchDescription>

view raw OpenSearchExample.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Away from the fact that I badly need a WYSIWYG code hi-lighter, let’s check that XML. First the ShortName which appears in your search box, something like this:

Description and Tags are obvious, & I think optional too.
Image is the small icon that appear beside when you select your provider (check the pic above again). You can either supply it as a URL to an image file (usually .ico or .png) or you can replace it with the base 64 string of the image (though I wasted quite sometime to make that work), like:

Finally, URL note that I’m using {SearchTerms} to pass the string typed in the search box. You can send other parameters to your search page. You might want add another URL for suggestions, here I’m only providing the search URL.

Using the Provider:

To add the provider to your browser (as far as I’m concerned it works fine for Firefox & IE) you have one of two options:
Adding it as a suggested search provider: This can be done by adding a single line in your page <Head> tag, note that the attribute title in the below tag refers to the name appearing in the list as [Add “title”], check the image below the tag.

Using JavaScript to add the provider: The other available option is to add the provider using scripting, here’s an eg of how you can do that:

Clicking a link like the one above will pop up a windows asking if you want to add the search provider.
References: http://www.opensearch.org

Friday, July 09, 2010

Changing regional settings for System accounts (including ASPNET) in Windows 7

One of the small issues I faced while switching my development machine to windows 7 was a bug/exception in an application I was working on in parsing date format.

After switching my regional settings to the “expected” format, I still got the same exception. After playing a little with the regional settings, I realized that I was switching only my account date format, not the whole machine's date format. To push those settings to other system accounts (like ASPNET, etc), I did the following steps:

After setting your your account regional settings, switch to “Administrative” tab: