gingerbbm

Metamorphosis

The first books for my course have been delivered.

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Add items to a Word document using C#

I thought I had found the promised land. Then I tried adding more than one item to a blank Word document using C# and I realised it had been a mirage all along. I simply wanted to create a blank document, add a line of text, followed by another, followed by my table. I was flummoxed by the Word.Range object – and I’ll go into detail in a bit – but here’s the solution: More »

Add a table using Word Interop and ConvertToTable

The .NET Framework allows us to do many things with relative ease but the main cost is often the time taken in finding a decent example to learn from. I experienced pain when I wanted to create a Word document programmatically and add a simple table to it. But I got there in the end, and this is how I did it. More »

IE6 Compatibility VPC IETest Password Is P2ssw0rd

I just downloaded and installed the very useful IE6 Compatibility Virtual PC [IE6-on-XP-SP3.exe] from Microsoft. Within minutes of starting the machine and getting distracted, the screensaver kicked in, locking the machine until I entered the relevant password for the IETest user. The password is P2ssw0rd. More »

Hotel Room Message Retrieval Fail

We’re all familiar with software applications and web sites that require us to enter a password: type in an obscure string of masked characters to proceed to the promised land. More »

For Sale: Kawasaki ZX-9R Ninja

Alas, the Ninja has to go. I’m asking for £1100 but I’m open to offers. More »

URL Editor

On a few occasions recently I’ve had to deal with long URLs, or more accurately, URLs with long querystrings. Each time it was a chore: strings that are a few hundred characters in length are unwieldy, hard to read and tricky to edit. So I decided to make my life easier and build a tool. More »

Path and Filename to Clipboard

Many moons ago I wrote a little helper application for Windows that would allow you to right-click a file in Explorer and get its full path, including filename, into the clipboard. Owing to underwhelming demand I have resurrected it. More »

HTML images using long GET strings

The Problem

You’ve got a piece of code that creates an image in your web page by passing a bunch of parameters in a GET string to some server-side process:

$('tile').src = 'http://img.com/generate.php?a=1&b=2&c=3';

But what do you do when the URL goes beyond the limit? Practically, for cross-browser solutions, the limit is around 2000 characters (thanks to IE), and I recently had to find a workaround when generating images via a WMS. More »

Meltdown Festival 2009

This year’s Meltdown Festival on the South Bank is looking better and better. I already have tickets to three shows, but more great artists keep being added. More »