After I let my brother and his family use the computer, an unfortunate incident occurred that involved the cosmetic destruction of the B key on the keyboard. The key worked, but the tabs that held the platform that the keycap sits on broke off, so the B key stuck out higher than the rest of the keys on the keyboard. Unsightly, yes, but still functional.

Alas, my brother had to have a functional and flat keyboard, so I began the process of looking to find a replacement keyboard for a computer that was 5+ years old. The Sony part number for this keyboard is 147915321, and it must be the same keyboard on all VGN-FS series Vaio notebooks.

The first thing that I found was that I was more than likely going to have to buy a used keyboard and hope that it worked just fine. So I ordered one from the E-Tech eStore. The keyboard arrived well packaged, and after I installed it, I tested every single key on the keyboard and found that all of the keys worked except for the V key.

At this point, I should have requested an RMA for a refund, but I mistakenly requested a replacement. After sending the first keyboard back and getting the second keyboard, the situation got worse, as on the 2nd keyboard, quite a few more keys were not working. And of course, at this point my return request for a refund was rejected, as E-Tech is claiming that their keyboards are all tested, and that I check my equipment for failure.

So, as a response, I created this little rant video showing that my equipment is fine:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_c1hBj2MG0

As I said in the video, I cannot see how they could have tested the keyboard fully, since my hardware seems to work fine with my old keyboard with the B key tabs broken. I am guessing that their replacement keyboards are all pulls from computers that are dropped off at the computer recycling, and for the particular keyboards that I received, the reason the computer was at the recycling center was that the keys stopped working.

By the way, congrats to the Ohio Bobcats.  Big win last night.

On the form you want to print from, pull up the Toolbox and add a PrintDocument, a PrintDialog, and a Button, set the Document property of the PrintDialog to point to the PrintDocument you just created, and in the button’s Click event, insert the following code:

    Private Sub butPrint_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles butPrint.Click
 
        If PrintDialog1.ShowDialog() = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK Then
            PrintDocument1.DefaultPageSettings.Landscape = True
            PrintDocument1.Print()
        End If
 
    End Sub
 
    Private Sub PrintDocument1_PrintPage(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Drawing.Printing.PrintPageEventArgs) Handles PrintDocument1.PrintPage
 
        PrintTestPage(e.Graphics, PrintDocument1)
 
    End Sub

The Print method call in the button click event then fires the PrintDocument PrintPage event. Notice that I have set the default page settings to landscape. Don’t forget to wire the PrintDialog Document property to your PrintDocument, otherwise if you change the printer to print to in the print dialog, the document will still go to the default printer.

The PrintTestPage method is just something simple that I put together to make sure that the coordinates and justifications are all working fine. Here is that code:

    Sub PrintTestPage(ByVal g As System.Drawing.Graphics, ByVal doc As PrintDocument)
 
        Dim x, y As Integer
 
        For x = 0 To 100 Step 10
            For y = 0 To 100 Step 10
                PrintAtLocationWithColor(g, doc, x.ToString + ", " + y.ToString, x, y, _
                                         If(x = 0, "L", If(x = 100, "R", "C")), If(y = 0, "T", If(y = 100, "B", "C")), _
                                         "Arial", 8, True, Brushes.Red)
            Next
        Next
 
        PrintRectangle(g, doc, 0, 0, 100, 100)
        PrintRectangle(g, doc, 10, 10, 80, 80)
        PrintRectangle(g, doc, 20, 20, 60, 60)
        PrintRectangle(g, doc, 30, 30, 40, 40)
        PrintRectangle(g, doc, 40, 40, 20, 20)
 
    End Sub

The two methods called here, PrintAtLocationWithColor and PrintRectangle, are shown here:

    Sub PrintAtLocationWithColor(ByVal pg As Graphics, ByVal pd As PrintDocument, ByVal s As String, _
                                ByVal xPosition As Single, ByVal yPosition As Single, _
                                ByVal justification As String, ByVal verticalJustification As String, _
                                ByVal fontFace As String, ByVal fontSize As Single, _
                                ByVal fontBold As Boolean, ByVal theColor As Brush)
 
        Dim w, h As Single
        Dim x, y As Single
        Dim f As Font
        Dim sty As FontStyle
 
        sty = FontStyle.Regular
        If fontBold Then sty = sty + FontStyle.Bold
        If fontSize < 1 Then fontSize = 8.0
        f = New Font(fontFace, fontSize, sty)
 
        If pd.DefaultPageSettings.Landscape Then
            x = xPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Height)
            y = yPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Width)
        Else
            x = xPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Width)
            y = yPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Height)
        End If
 
        w = pg.MeasureString(s, f).Width
        h = pg.MeasureString(s, f).Height
 
        If Left(UCase(justification), 1) = "C" Then
            x = x - w / 2
        End If
        If Left(UCase(justification), 1) = "R" Then
            x = x - w
        End If
 
        If Left(UCase(verticalJustification), 1) = "C" Then
            y = y - h / 2
        End If
        If Left(UCase(verticalJustification), 1) = "B" Then
            y = y - h
        End If
 
        pg.DrawString(s, f, theColor, x, y)
 
    End Sub
 
    Sub PrintRectangle(ByVal pg As Graphics, ByVal pd As PrintDocument, ByVal xPosition As Single, ByVal yPosition As Single, _
                                ByVal width As Single, ByVal height As Single)
 
        Dim w, h As Single
        Dim x, y As Single
 
        If pd.DefaultPageSettings.Landscape Then
            x = xPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Height)
            y = yPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Width)
            w = width / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Height)
            h = height / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Width)
        Else
            x = xPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Width)
            y = yPosition / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Height)
            w = width / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Width)
            h = height / 100 * (pd.DefaultPageSettings.PrintableArea.Height)
        End If
 
        pg.DrawRectangle(Pens.Black, x, y, w, h)
 
    End Sub

All of the positioning and size parameters of these methods are percentages across and down the page, which I find much easier to deal with than absolute or printer specific positioning. This makes it dead simple to scale the reports to any page size I want to use.

So I should probably take the jackhammer back to the tool rental place, I guess I won’t be needing it to eat my Kit Kat bar.

Finally, I found out that I could force the device to do a database rebuild by doing the following steps, which should work on any Sansa e200 series MP3 player with the version 1 firmware:  (WARNING:  Please do not do this if you are worried about making your device inoperable.  There is always a risk that this will happen when you start futzing with the system files.)

• Go into the Settings screen and scroll to USB mode, and set it to MSC
• Connect the device to the computer
• Once the device mounts as a drive on your computer, browse to the device, look for the System folder, and the Data folder in that folder
• Delete the file called PP5000.DAT
• Disconnect the device

Once you disconnect, the device will restart, and it should refresh the database. If you prefer MTP mode, make sure to go back into the settings to change it back.

However, in .NET, they introduced a handy-dandy .ToString() method that, on the surface, seems to do much the same thing as the Format function. I have been able to use them pretty much interchangeably with the desired results coming out every time.

I started to wonder which way was faster. Since I am a big proponent of empirical knowledge instead of just trying to get the theoretical story behind the two ways to do this, I rolled together this quick VB.NET console application:

Imports System.Text
 
Module Module1
 
    Sub Main()
 
        Dim i As Integer
        Dim r As Random = New Random()
        Dim t As Double
 
        System.Console.WriteLine("10,000,000 Formats")
        Dim sb1 As New stringbuilder
        t = Timer
        For i = 1 To 10000000
            sb1.Append(Format(r.NextDouble * 100.0, "###0.00 "))
        Next
        System.Console.WriteLine("Seconds elapsed: " + (Timer - t).ToString("#######0.00"))
        System.Console.WriteLine("Length of string builder: " + sb1.Length.ToString())
        System.Console.WriteLine()
 
        System.Console.WriteLine("10,000,000 ToStrings")
        Dim sb2 As New StringBuilder
        t = Timer
        For i = 1 To 10000000
            sb2.Append((r.NextDouble * 100.0).ToString("###0.00 "))
        Next
        System.Console.WriteLine("Seconds elapsed: " + (Timer - t).ToString("#######0.00"))
        System.Console.WriteLine("Length of string builder: " + sb2.Length.ToString())
        System.Console.WriteLine()
 
        System.Console.WriteLine("Press any key to end the program ")
        System.Console.ReadKey()
 
    End Sub
 
End Module

And here are the results:

As you can see, the ToString method is about 15% faster when doing 10 million calls with random numbers.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Pancake Day.

Silicon Valley’s Island of Misfit Tech

I can’t believe that, with all of the trips that I have made to the Bay Area, that I never heard of this place or stumbled upon it by accident. I so want to go there now to look for a copy of Microsoft Bob. Or maybe I should try to sell my copy of Microsoft Dogs.

I was trying to work through the Minesweeper problem on the UVa Online Judge site, and my submissions kept failing with a “Runtime error”, with no explanation given as to the source of the problem. Of course, everything was working swimmingly when I was trying to run through the code as a command line application in Xcode on my Mac. Some investigation into this led me to pad my arrays and strings so that there was no chance of an array index going into areas they were not supposed to, but it was still failing.

I finally discovered the problem was that I had used an int variable in my code, but a %i instead of a %d in the scanf format string. As soon as I switched that over, the “Runtime error” went away. And I was able to move on to the “What do you mean ‘Wrong answer’???” part of my evening.

Oh, and Happy Data Privacy Day everyone.

As it turns out, I found a posting by Jay Barlow that mentions converting the time different to a date time, and then using a custom format string to do the work so that I wouldn’t have to.  Here is my new VB.NET code, where rec is a class that includes the start and end date and duration is a string that holds the information to be displayed:

If rec.endDate IsNot Nothing Then
    Dim ts As TimeSpan = CDate(rec.endDate).Subtract(rec.startDate)
    Dim dt As DateTime = DateTime.MinValue.Add(ts)
    duration = "Event duration: " + dt.ToString("H:mm")
End If

Oh, and one more thing. Am I the only one in the world that thinks that iPad is the worst product name in history? Sure, it is so close to iPod so as to create brand recognition and draw comparisons, but I would just wonder what kind of names were shot down, and if any of them did not begin with the letter i.

By the way, Happy (Belated) Australia Day.

So I decided to try and use the application while walking one of my dogs. The navigation around the application is pretty simple, and the track recording seemed to work very well. After I got back from the walk, I was able to see the path that I walked along with a bunch of statistics about it.

The program has upload options to send to Google Docs and Google Maps, so I tried them both at first. This first upload did complete to my Google Docs, but I did have a bit of trouble when it tried to upload the track to Google Maps. The first few times I tried it, I got some miscellaneous errors, such as an authentication error and other nondescript messages. Finally it did go through, and the track then was showing up on the My Maps page of Google Maps.

Even though this app is in the early stages of development, I think it rates quite well. I would give it a 4 star rating, if only because I had some trouble getting the Google Maps upload working.

If you can find it in your heart to help out a fellow nerd, please help out Shawn Powers, he is having a tough go of it. Here are the details:

Urgent: Help Shawn Powers & Family

Oh, and I hope everyone out there had a good Martin Luther King Day.