Finished thesis

I actually finished my thesis in November 2009, but haven’t just put it up anywhere for others to read. Reading it now, over a year later with some more experience, there are a few things that I might do different, but on the whole, I’m still quite satisfied with the end result.

Please, if you’re interested, read it and if you have any comments, please share them here.

The PDF is downloadable from http://bit.ly/k9QxFW

Old post

I just found the place where you can change the password for the WordPress iPhone client, so here comes a post that was supposed to be published over a month ago.

Yes, I’m still here beneath all the snow. I can’t believe it’s christmas again already.

Perhaps I should use this blog as a diary. Nowadays it seems that I run around like headless chicken all the time and actually forget to stop and think for a while. Writing down the events of the day could be a good method to actually get some perspective on what actually happens, and perhaps also a way to see where the time flies.

Lately, a lot of my free time has been spent rereading the Wheel of Time books. I think I read the first one in Swedish about 15 years ago, so now when the opportunity came to read them as ebooks in English, I started from the beginning again. Just finished The Gathering Storm, the first one released after the death of Robert Jordan, the original author. There are two books remaining in the series, really looking forward to reading them.

WordPress for iPhone

Hello followers! Long time no write. I’ve been busy with life and stuff. I’ve been noticing that I actually have a lot to say, and that I really should write things down. Just feels like if I don’t write it down immediately it will stay unwritten.
Trying out the WordPress app for iPhone now to see if I can use it on the fly. Looks good so far, but how do I access the drafts on the server?

Disable hotkey for Microsoft Groove

Microsoft Office Groove has a nifty little hotkey. If you press shift twice, a dialog comes up to let you write a message. This is even more annoying than the accessibility sticky keys or filter keys dialog. And guess what, there is no way to disable the hotkey in the user interface! I haven’t found the place to do it at least.

I got so annoyed with this that I asked our internal IT support how to disable it. The answer was that you have to edit the registry.

I thought I’d make a short blog post with the instructions. And remember, all the normal disclaimers apply: It is dangerous to modify the registry if you don’t know what you’re doing! I am not responsible for any damage that may occur if you try to follow these instructions. With that out of the way, here’s the information you have been waiting for.

1. Make sure that Groove is shut down
2. Locate the  path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Groove
3. If this does not contain a sub key called InstaGroove, then create it
4. For the InstaGroove key, create a new DWORD Value called DisableHotkey
5. Set the value data to 1
6. Start Groove and verify that pressing shift twice does not pop up the message any more

Really simple, right?

Rantamaraton 2009

On Sunday 2009-09-20 it was time for my third half-marathon. It was the second Rantamaraton for me. About half of the route follows the sealine from Matinkylä to Otaniemi, the rest is cycling paths varied with forest paths.

I finally managed to reach my target of 2:20, I finished in 2:19:58 I had my pulse monitor all the way, but the last few kilometers I stopped worrying about my pulse and started to worry about my target time instead. The last 100 meters I had to run as fast as I could, but I made it Last year my time was 2:33:27, so compared to that, I made a huge improvement. Next target to reach is 2 hours…

20.09.2009 also marks the day of our marriage Even though the papers officially say 23.09.2009, we will always celebrate 20.09.2009 as our real wedding day. It was impossible (unless we wanted to travel to Lohja) to get a registrar on our chosen date. Instead we had a small ceremony the following Wednesday, just me, my wife, and our son at the register office.

Extending OrderBy

I found some really sexy code today. It was written by “mazzy maxim” as Community Content to MSDN.

What it does is to extend the OrderBy method for IEnumerables. You provide the name of the property you want to sort by, and the sort order. Without further ado, here’s the code:

public static IOrderedEnumerable<T> OrderBy<T>(this IEnumerable<T> items, string property, bool ascending)
{
    var MyObject = Expression.Parameter(typeof(T), "MyObject");
    var MyEnumeratedObject = Expression.Parameter(typeof(IEnumerable<T>), "MyEnumeratedObject");
    var MyProperty = Expression.Property(MyObject, property);
    var MyLambda = Expression.Lambda(MyProperty, MyObject);
    var MyMethod = Expression.Call(typeof(Enumerable), 
                                   ascending ? "OrderBy" : "OrderByDescending", 
                                   new[] { typeof(T), MyLambda.Body.Type }, 
                                   MyEnumeratedObject, 
                                   MyLambda);
    var MySortedLambda = Expression.Lambda<Func<IEnumerable<T>, IOrderedEnumerable<T>>>(MyMethod, MyEnumeratedObject).Compile();
    return MySortedLambda(items);
}

So what we have is a generic extension method for IEnumerables that creates a  lambda expression on the fly to sort the objects by the property with the given name.

Pretty cool or what?

eCross 2009

I participated in a cross-country run called eCross on September 6th. It is a 7 km race in quite varying terrain. Last year I finished it in 43:45. This year, I finished it in 39:42. I’m quite happy with the result

Last year they had a service station at about 4 km where they had water and sports drink, but not this year. If I would have known that, I would have brought a small water bottle, or drank a bit more before starting.

This was my first competition with a heart rate monitor. I found it quite useful for keeping up the pace, while not pushing myself too hard. I suppose that training using the pulse monitor could also make the training more efficient.

eCross 2009-09-06

Making your blog suck less

I watched one of Scott Hanselman‘s presentations from the Norwegian Developer Conference 2009 (NDC09) a couple of days ago. The title of the presentation was “Making your blog suck less”. He put forward quite a few interesting points. One in particular that I should take note of, is to not write blog posts that are too short. I feel I’m guilty of doing that. Anyhow, it’s worth checking out: http://media01.smartcom.no/microsite/asx.aspx?eventid=4465

Posting using my phone

I’m currently in the bus on my way home from work. Just thought I’d try to post using my phone (Nokia E51).

Update: apparently tags could not be set from the phone.

Tools for WPF development

Just a short note about a few tools that could be useful when developing WPF applications. Refer to the links for more information about the tools.

Snoop provides visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime.

Crack.NET is a runtime debugging and scripting tool. Also supports Windows Forms applications.

Mole is a Visual Studio visualizer allowing unlimited drilling into objects and sub-objects.

Check them out!

Update:

OJ points out in the comments that neither Snoop or Crack.NET will work with 64-bit processes due to the way the hooks are written. However, there is an x64 version of Snoop available on Dan’s IK Blog.