Connecting Visual Studio to IE6 in a Virtual Machine

So, you’re developing web applications using Visual Studio and you’re a good boy or girl and are making sure you’re code is cross-browser compatible (as well as standards compliant of course, right, riiight?). We’ll it gets tricky right. You want to check Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera (for the 5 people that use it ;P), IE8, IE7, IE6, etc…and then all of that on PC/MAC (you could even check on linux, but come on really, who has that kind of time.) Well, you start installing browsers, and all goes well until you hit IE6.

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Looking for a place to live

Well the hunt continues for an apartment here in lovely Sydney. Could you believe (if you are not from here) that it has been a month of looking? We have inspected a score of apartments at prices ranging from $450 to $550 a week (yes, for those of you in TN who may be reading this, that is dollars and per week!!) and found only 1 place worth living in and someone else got it. Even once you have found a place, inspected it, applied for it (the process is almost more grueling than looking for work!), you are competing against others that want it. At the upper end of the range the competition is not so fierce, whereas at the lower end you can be viewing an apartment with 40 other people! Well we’re on the line for a couple places and with luck we will have a home by early to mid march.

Cheers,
Andre

Facebook Select All Bookmarklet

For some reason Facebook seems to think that its users love clicking and so refuses to give us a Select All button (is that part of the monetization scheme? are they going to charge for it?) Anyway I can’t stand it, so I found a little bookmarklet that will invite all your friends.


The one I found worked well but it selected everyone, even those who were already members, so I altered it so it would only select friends who needed the invite. Follow the steps below to create the bookmarklet that makes this work. The instructions are for Firefox, but should be similar for other browsers.


How to create a Firefox Bookmarklet The best way to do it would be to add this as a browser bookmarklet. So in FireFox:

  1. Right click next to your other bookmarklets and select New Bookmark.
  2. In the Name field type: FaceBook Select All (or whatever you want)
  3. In the Location field copy and paste the code you see below in the code box exactly as it is. You can leave the KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION field blank. They aren’t necessary.

    javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object' && elms[fid].className != 'disabled'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}
  4. Hit Add.

You can also just drag this link to your bookmark toolbar: FB Select All

Now wherever you are adding friends to an event or group using the Facebook friend selector you can click the bookmarklet and it will select everyone who is not already a member.


Enjoy.

Merry and Happy Christmas to all!

Hi all,
New Years resolution is to blog a lot more. Shouldn’t be hard as I haven’t been on here much in the last few months. I will begin by trying to catch up on the travels and adventures that AH cubed have been sharing. But for now let me just say Happy Christmas to the Aussies and an early Merry Christmas to the Yanks and Brasileiros.

Cheers,
Andre

When it rains it pours

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I made up a patch in Pure Data that allows me to control the elements…mwaahhaahaha! Well, it allows me to create the sounds of the elements actually. Angela and I led a master class at Sydney Dance studios today. Angela led and I accompanied. I created music with a mixture of beats running from Ableton Live and played Bass and Tenor Bass (this is my Samick Bass with tenor strings…basically guitar strings long enough and thick enough to put on a bass). I love the sound of my tenor bass. It’s like a guitar with tons of fundamental! It’s a bit hard to play, but worth it. With this setup I created a mix of algorithmic glitch and techno and rock and even a bit of afrobeat.

There was one section of the class however that featured an improv based on the four elements (earth, air, fire and water). So for that part I layered some ambient musical sounds with sounds of…earth, air, fire and water.

So here is a bit of playing around with this patch to create a rainstorm (no music here). There are no samples used, it is all generated in real time and manipulated by me. The sounds are all created by the filtering and other mangling of white noise generators.

This patch borrows heavily from Andy Farnell’s tutorials on those sounds. Here is the patch.