For my day job, I’ve been trying to find the right solution to Silent Single Sign On using IE talking to a Java EE Server. In this case I’m working on Tomcat.
I’m documenting my troubles and discoveries so other people who head down this path will have an easier path to walk, knowing what is minimally required.
Any code I develop related to this I hope to get released back to the community.
- My Current Notes – This is actively changing.
Only one program on a desktop can bind any particular global hotkey at a time. If two programs overlap, the first one to get up and running and make the API request gets the notification of the key press.
Considering this scenario, the easy possible for overlap, you would think most applications that have a global hotkey would allow what key they bind to, to be configurable.
I have been using a program called Slickrun as a convenient way to navigate into my computer, launch url’s and access arbitrary programs. By default it binds to Win+q to bring itself to the foreground ready for input. Since I’ve been using this for the past 5 or so years, so I’ve grown quite accustomed to the key combo.
Enter Microsoft Office Communicator 2007.
One of the global hotkeys it registers is also Win+Q. Except Communicator has no configuration options to say which hot key you wish to bind globally. I’ve done a cursory search through the registry but so far nothing. So I’m at an impasse. Do I disable auto start for communicator or do I attempt to learn a new key combination for slickrun?
Of course I will send feedback to Microsoft about this.
Microsoft
I have enjoyed my Xbox. Great network play in college with Halo, excellent games like Kotor, Fable, Jade Empire, and Psychonauts (which yes, I bought when it came out), and the final stage of being the primary DVD player. I would love to buy an Xbox 360, for wireless controllers, media center functions, and great games. Except I won’t because of your horrid failure rates. It has been almost 3 years since the console hit the market, and STILL buying one of those console is playing russian roulette, and I LIKE roulette. Looks like I’m going to be waiting for the next generation of your console, (with a 2 year wait time after release to watch for issues, like I did with the original xbox).
Nintendo
My former roommate had a Wii shortly after it’s release. A bit misguided about multi-player and the true power of having a networked device under the TV, still a excellent platform and I would love to own one. Except I can’t find one. I refuse to pay more then MSRP, camp out for it, or buy it in a bundle. I can’t order one from Amazon, I can’t walk into Target or BestBuy to pick one up. What is wrong? It’s been 2 years!
Summary
I’m a male 18-25, with the income of an established software engineer. I have the money to spend, I have the desire to spend, but I can’t. What sort of business model is this?
- Look into
- TaskTop and further work with Mylyn
- Cactus + JUnit
- Quartz Java Scheduling
- How could JMS be improved with concepts from Quartz
Noticing that my desktop was eating up 50% of it’s CPU while doing nothing more intensive then playing a mp3, I popped open Task Manager to see what was up. A single svchost process was eating 48-50% of the cpu constantly. Since Windows built in process manager is a load of crap, I went and grabbed Process Explorer from the now bought out Sysinternals.
Good olde PID 1772 was the culprit, being the service for HP Network Devices Support. I have a HP Photosmart C6280 All-in-one in my office, which is a very capable network printer, but it currently isn’t connected to the network due to some needing to purchase a better wireless link for it’s area of the house. So there is no HP devices running on the network, nor does this svchost process have any TCP/IP ports open. So what the hell is it doing eating my CPU?
I’m going to leave this service disabled, and rely on the fact that, I’ve configured the printer to a static ip.
Once again, HP produces some amazingly crappy desktop software…
Note: You should kill off the service from the normal services menu, as attempting to kill it from Process Explorer, it simply re-spawned.