Hacking IE9's font smoothing

If you have been following my blog for a bit, you know I am quite set on my web browser's content readability.  Well, it happened again with Internet Explorer 9 and this time, my font of choice was there but it was rendered with ClearType even though I turned it off with the ClearType Text Tuner:

See?  It's clearly off, but noooo, someone's feeling waaaay too important to follow the operating system's settings.

Anyway, after a Wednesday afternoon of mad hacking (followed by a Saturday afternoon of fixing and cleaning), the result is the DWrite.dll wrapper, which is available for free download.

I just hope this doesn't turn into a game of walls and ladders.

Console2 and Altap Salamander: together at last!

Introduction

Not unlike Nuts and gum, I wanted Altap Salamander to play nice with Console2 by having the former launch the latter whenever I hit the / key above the numeric keypad. Console2 is awesome: it supports using Courier New as a font, has much more natural text selection, features copy & paste keyboard shortcuts, etc.

The problem

I used to connect the two together by launching Salamander with a batch file that would override the COMSPEC environment variable to point to Console2, which mostly worked, until a process launched by Salamander itself would try to use a shell. It turns out Console2 is NOT a shell and thus I would often get really weird behaviour out of those programs.

The solution, part 1

It turns out an Automation plug-in now exists for Salamander. Using it, I wrote the following quick script, adapted from the Launch Elevated Command Prompt.vbs sample script:

Set ShellApp = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
ShellApp.ShellExecute "E:\Program Files (x86)\Altap Salamander 2.54\Console2\Console.exe", "-d """ & Salamander.SourcePanel.Path & """", ""

The Plugins Manager allows me to bind keyboard shortcuts to individual scripts, so I selected Alt+- since just about everything else was taken and you can't use a shortcut key that Salamander itself already uses. A few dialog dismisses later and Alt+- indeed opens up Console2 to the current panel's path. Not bad, but my brain has fused the numpad / as the go-to key for opening a command prompt, so I need to fix that, too.

The solution, part 2

Another thread in the Salamander forums suggested using AutoHotKey to intercept NumpadDiv when Salamander has focus and using it to launch Console2. That kind of works, minus having Console2 launched at the current panel's folder. Well, remember the shortcut key I gave my automation script earlier? I can get AutoHotKey to intercept the numpad / and instead emit Alt+- when Salamander has focus:

#IfWinActive,ahk_class SalamanderMainWindowVer25
NumpadDiv::SendEvent !-
RETURN

Kazaam! Shazam!

Conclusion

All of this brouhaha could have been avoided if Salamander would simply let me configure what gets launched when I hit numpad /, hint, hint, nudge, nudge.

Don Norman at Business of Software 2009

There's an excellent video at Neil Davidson's blog of Don Norman talking about successful products and services, which he summarizes to the following ten points (1 and 10 are meant to be the same):

1. It's all about the experience
2. Design systems
3. Everything is a service
4. Everything is a product
5. Don't be too logical
6. Memory is more important than actuality
7. Complexity is good: Complicated is bad
8. Design for the real world
9. Design for people
10. It's all about the experience

On uninstalling Google Chrome

I finally gave up with Google Chrome on my laptop. Here's what popped up when I completed the uninstallation process, with my answers:

Google Chrome has been uninstalled.

Thanks for trying out Google Chrome. Please help us improve Google Chrome by telling us why you uninstalled it. Your feedback is much appreciated.

Which of the following best describes you?
I am uninstalling Google Chrome for now, but I may try it again in the future
I am permanently uninstalling Google Chrome
I am only uninstalling briefly. I am going to reinstall straight away (e.g. changing computer, upgrading operating system)

Why are you uninstalling Google Chrome? Please check all that apply
It doesn't load some web pages properly (please list any examples below)
It's missing some features that I use (please provide detail in the box below)
I'm concerned about privacy (please provide detail in the box below)
It seems to slow down my computer
It crashes too often
Other (please provide more details in the text box below)

Please provide any additional detail on your reason for uninstalling:

There are too many Firefox add-ons that I have come to rely on and using Chrome just leaves me "naked" in comparison. I blogged about this potential problem when Chrome initially came out: http://oliiscool.blogspot.com/2008/09/world-in-verdana.html

I first installed Chrome when I heard Gmail and Google Reader had exceptionally good performance in Chrome. This was true, but as soon as I clicked a 3rd-party link from within either, I felt I was abandoned and frequently would end up copy/pasting the URL into Firefox and continue from there.

I definitely appreciate the engineering skills and value of having a process-per-tab kind of browser, but that functionality alone is not sufficient for a heavy add-on user such as myself. In fact, I have checked the "slow down" checkbox since that model seems to in fact be a liability when viewing YouTube videos: I definitely notice much higher CPU usage from Chrome when visiting a site containing an embedded video than visiting the same page with Firefox.

Perhaps not all is lost: the process-per-tab model could still be applied to Firefox and a "Chromium Tab" Firefox add-on that worked similarly to the "IE Tab" add-on (in that it would enable the Webkit/Chromium engine on a per-tab basis) would be fantastic in my books.

So maybe I'll eventually re-install it. There's definitely value in the "application mode" as well, which hides the address bar and makes a "tab" its own window using the site/application's "favico" as the application window's icon, but that breaks quickly - as I described above - when you need to go outside that site/application. That "application mode" would also be a neat add-on/extension for Firefox. :)

Ego-driven software development

(or "How M.C. Escher Would Have Packaged His Software")

This was too "good" to not blog about. I heard about IronPython Studio, a Visual Studio-based IDE for writing Python code for/with .NET tools. In order to install this interesting gem, you first need to install its pre-requisites, which is one of flavors of the "Visual Studio 2008 Shell": Isolated Mode or Integrated Mode. Sounds easy, right? Wrong!

The actual downloads seem innocent enough (I got both, just to be safe -- as an aside it was hard to tell which one would suit me best): they arrive as executables. Here's how many levels of "packaging" there are:

1. Running either of vs_AppEnvRedist.exe or vs_ideredist.exe will create a temporary directory where the EXE's files are extracted and an "installer" is launched


2. You accept the EULA and click next a few times and what do you end up with? "The redistributable package has been installed". That's right, you ran an installer that installed another installer. Total disk space needed for this (at apogee): 400 MB for the original download, 400 MB for the temporary files and 400 MB for the "redistributable package" = 1200 MB


3. As you finish the first "installer", the temporary files are cleaned up, so we're back to consuming 800 MB. You run the second installer and the first thing it does is check its signature, which consumes 400 MB of RAM. It then proceeds to extract files to another temporary directory (400 MB again, although this time it's in a bunch of smaller files - 286 MB of which is various versions of the .NET framework), thus bringing our used disk space back up to 1200 MB. Those of you following at home will notice that I haven't actually installed anything useful yet. Accept another EULA, select the only feature (wut?), pick the destination folder and go (again)! At apogee: 400 MB + 400 MB + 400 MB + whatever installed size it was (I didn't check)


4. Oh, it looks like we're actually done! What was I installing, again?

I'm reminded of Adobe Acrobat Reader installers from, oh, I don't know, ten years ago, before one-file installers were even invented. IronPython itself is available in a single MSI file, while IronPython Studio's download options are both available as an MSI file in a ZIP file.

There is no technical reason for this. There simply is no excuse for these fractal installers except that someone (or an entire team of someones) at Microsoft decided they needed to be involved in the supply chain that brings us internauts this bare Eclipse-wannabe that does not even include a text editor. I mean, seriously, the only thing that could have been worse would have been to wrap the whole thing in a "downloader" (like Visual Studio Express) or in an ISO 9660 file (like Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1).

I have a special offer for the person in charge of the Visual Studio team: I will personally come over and deliver atomic wedgies to everyone responsible for these shenanigans! Just give me a call; you know how to find me.

There is some good news after all this: IronPython Studio not only just works, but so does its debugger. Kudos to that team.

"I must use this power only to annoy"

I clicked on an Amazon link to a product the other day and it lead me to its product page. Everything there is fine, except instead of a price, there was a link that read "Click here to see the price". There was also another link that read (Why don't we show the price?) which contained the following text:

Why Don't We Show the Price?

Manufacturers sometimes ask that retailers not display a price if it drops below a certain amount. The "click here to see price" message indicates that the price of the item is so low that the manufacturer requested that it not be advertised (that is, displayed). In a brick-and-mortar store, you would probably have to ask a salesperson what the price of the product is. At Amazon, by clicking on "click here to see price" you are essentially asking to see the price, at which point we show it to you.

Ummm... WTF? If I didn't see a price in a brick-and-mortar store, I wouldn't buy the item! You forcing me to click just to replicate that have-to-ask experience is forcing me to replicate my wouldn't-buy-the-item reaction. I hope you're happy about your lost sale.