Man, what an absolutely beautiful song. I’d been hunting for its chords for the last couple days, but couldn’t find anything online, so last night I just buckled down and figured them out myself.

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Train the peepers on this little gem, courtesy of Outlook 2007:

Check out the Send/Receive option. Initially this caught my eye because it’s the one option that isn’t checked, and I am very aware that yes, I actually do have a send/receive button. My first thought was, “Huh, OK, so a checkmark bug?” Nope, notice immediately below it, the exact same send/receive item, CHECKED, and disabled. But the home run is that if you check the one you can check, you end up with 2 identical send/receive buttons on your toolbar. You can hide every other button, but you can have either 1 or 2 Send/Receives. Wacky! Maybe this is the fault of some add-in? If so, fair enough, but otherwise, come on!

I was crestfallen to see the same crap UI when I fired up Outlook 2007 for the first time. I’ve been using Word’s new ribbon bar (the official name of its “super toolbar”), and I like it, and couldn’t wait to see what they’d done to Outlook, the app that needed the most ribbon bar love. Not much. The ribbon bar is on other windows, but the overhaul of Outlook’s main view that I was hoping for still stands as long overdue.

Also on this same subject, I don’t like how new apps hide the pull down menus completely until you press Alt+F. Windows Media Player did this, but the annoyance was lost in the noise, in that app. But since, I’ve seen it in Live Messenger, and a couple other applications. Why make the menu bar secret? Everyone, and I mean literally “everyone,” as in, most of the people on this PLANET, are now familiar with the concept of a menu at the top of your (app,screen) that you use to access features.

Supposing you buy the argument that we need to replace menu bars because they’re a crap UI construct (and maybe they are, I don’t agree but I see the validity of that argument - hunting for options through them is difficult), there’s still the issue of why, then, the menu bar is there at all. If the menu bar sucks, take it out entirely, and don’t regress - let me do everything I could do with it via some other UI. But it’s incorrect to hide the bar when it contains functionality you can’t get anywhere else.

Maybe you want to phase it out? Fine, but then in that case - it should be a preference: “Use New UI” vs. “Use Classic UI” or something. And again, there should be feature parity between both options.

The “secret” menu bar just teaches people to press Alt+F if they’re stuck.

There’s a show on the Science Channel called How It’s Made. I just started watching it, and I gotta say, this is pure unfiltered entertainment. The show says what it is. It’s high concept. You watch how things are made. Today I watched how chocolate bunnies, bottle caps, and pills are made. Previous episodes have taught me about chains, matches, canoe paddles, globes (easily my favorite), pasta, and boomerangs. It is high def machine porn, and it rocks. Schedule it, you won’t regret it. The Cuttlefish Entertainment Advisory (CEA) gives it several tentacles way, way up.

Yeah, I went there. My blog, my embarrassingly lame jokes.

*** READ THE COMMENTS! I have been enlightened. ***

Maybe it’s just me, but it took me forever to figure out how to set the background color of a control to the “window” color the user has set up in the control panel. 99% of the time this is white but since I’m one of those guys who runs with dark window colors, I was determined not to make that assumption and do things the right way.

Ways you can’t do it:

• System.Windows.Forms.SystemInformation: You can get a wealth of information from here, including whether or not the user has chosen to always show pull-down menu access key underlines, or only when ALT is held… but no color information. Close, but no cigar.
• Color.System.: all the other colors live here. I was hoping for a “System…” subsection under here or at least names like “ActiveBorder” intermingled with “hard coded” names (Lemon Chiffon!), but couldn’t find any.
• Control.DefaultBackColor: So close! This appears to return the 3D face color, but regardless isn’t what I was looking for. I want a big list of all the system colors, not just a one-off.

The Way:

System colors, in C#, are called “known colors.” Once you know this it’s easy to find:

System.Drawing.Color.FromKnownColor(KnownColor.Window);

And, as you’d expect, the KnownColor enumeration contains all of the other user-definable colors (active window border, whatever).

I don’t understand the logic behind calling these colors “known colors.” If anything, Lemon Chiffon is a Known Color (well, OK maybe not to all of us, but to interior decorators at least), and the current window color is Unknown, or at least “user-defined.” But even more perplexing is why C# deviates from calling them “system colors.” In Win32 you’d call GetSysColor() (and truth be told, I almost just pinvoked that). KnownColors is a wart that detracts from the beautiful organization of C# in other places (for example, Process or System.IO.Ports).

If I were running the C# show, I would have put the system colors in with the rest of the system information.

So I’m working on this XNA game and have recently become annoyed with the amount of absolute garbage that appears in the output window. Check this out:

The top line is where I start the build, and the bottom line is the first error from the complation. But everything in between is completely useless. Specifically it looks like an echo of the command line for the C# compiler (csc) - the bulk of which is just all the CS files to compile.

That’s annoying, but what’s worse is that when you hit F4 to go to your first error the IDE takes you to this line instead. This morning, after working in c# for almost 3 years, for some reason, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

As it turns out the “magic option” is here:

By default the “MSBuild Project Build Output Verbosity” setting is “Minimal,” which for me isn’t nearly minimal enough. Set it to Quiet and behold:

I am kind of terrified to see what the “Diagnostic” setting would do to my poor output window.

What the hell is that? It is a Chumby. I won’t tell you what it does, because that’s for you to decide, after looking at the site.

What I will say is that this thing is RAD. Seriously. I got one a few days ago, and it is up there at Tivo levels of awesomeness. Playing with this thing is like seeing the future.

In fact, it has inspired something big. In a closed door top-secret meeting last night, the Cuttlefish Industries board of directors unanimously approved the creation of a spin-off company: the Cuttlefish Technology Procurement Advisory Group (CTPAG), dedicated to testing products from across the globe and showcasing to the consumer only the most righteously awesome.

The Chumby has received a coveted One Star rating from the Cuttlefish Technology Procurement Advisory Group. Since this is the first product to receive such an honor, all subsequent products will be awarded stars (or, more likely, fractions of a star) based on their awesomeness relative to the Chumby.

I got to thinking today about how in the late 90s I wrote a lot of stuff online. Back when Y2K was still selling bomb shelters, I had a pretty regular stream of writing going - most notably at gamedev.net, but in the 7 or 8 years since, it’s kind of fallen by the wayside. But, I decided today that letting that happen was a sad thing, and have thus resolved myself towards more active participation in this here “Internet Thing.”

I will christen this re-emergence by giving a shout out to some of my favorite OTHER blogs (in no particular order):

• Pharyngula - science goodness with a dash of cephalopod
• Coding Horror - obligatory reading for programmers
• Joel on Software - again, obligatory
• And finally, the gawkers: LifeHacker,Giz, Consumerist, and Kotaku.

Save this IP! More episodes of C# on Two Beers, more chords, more articles, and more awesomeness in general all coming soon.

So… yeah. When people say it gets REALLY hot here during the summer… they aren’t lying. As Carly puts it: “it feels like a new, horrible planet out here.”

Holy crap I can’t believe I just blogged about the weather! I’m THAT GUY!!

Real content coming soon. Promise!

Whee! I’m on the other side of the nation! I used to live in Los Feliz…. now I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Ain’t that a swift kick to the head. It’s all good though. The burg seems righteously cool in so many secret ways. And it rains here, too! I had to lock up my inner rainophile for 5 years but now it is busting out of its cage and bounding, all snarls, into the city, like that scene in Ghostbusters where the “doggie” comes to life and takes off down the avenue. No umbrella needed.

On my new subway commute the other morning, I watched from the other side as a bunch of people went for some empty seats. A lady across from them said, “hey, I wouldn’t sit there if I were you, a man just PEED there.” Yeah. So there ya go. Make of that what you will.