On September 22nd, Google is updating their requirements for the feed they accept for their Merchant accounts. We were successfully uploading over 6,000 items into their feeds previously and I needed to check that our feed would be accepted.

Luckily for me, Google recently added the ability to ‘test’ the data feed. I tried our old feed: 0 (zero) items imported. After taking a closer look at the new requirements, basically there was a re-arranging of the deck chairs. I created a new data feed, with new captions and a couple of their new required fields. Still 0 (zero) items imported.

After scaling down my test from 6,000+ items to 10, I was able to quickly turn test iterations around and found the simple solution to get the import to work. The past data feed required double quotes around strings in their TAB delimited format. This new format requires that there not be any double quotes at all. Basically the TAB character does all delineation between fields. Make sure that none of your fields include a TAB character in any of the strings or you’ll lose that record on the import.

Simple solution but it took me a small bit to figure out the difference from the old feed to the new one. I hope this post saves you a few minutes as well.

No graphics show in Real Studio IDE on Ubuntu 11.04

A small problem however. No graphic images show up in the Real Studio interface. I switched Ubuntu back to GNOME classic thinking it may have been the Unity interface causing the problem. No good. The images in the IDE still were not showing up. Perhaps it was because I did an “Upgrade” from 10.10 to 11.04.

This upgrade takes a LOOOONG time because of the download time to get all of those files. I recommend doing a fresh install of Ubuntu. By downloading using a torrent, the ISO comes down in minutes. Install onto a flash drive and an install takes about 30 minutes total. With the upgrade route, you’re looking at a couple of hours.

I did a fresh install of 11.04 and still no good. I did a fresh install of 10.10 and … the images were there. I liked GNOME better than the current Unity interface anyway.

Please don’t think I’m bad mouthing Real Studio. William Yu responded quickly to my posting on the forum and they’ll be looking into it and will probably have it corrected for Real Studio 2011 release 2. Especially if I help them test in the next beta cycle. Yup, I can be of help for the issues that affect me. This is a situation where the rapid release cycle, and an open beta-testing program really helps.

This issues, I’m sure are a small one. Probably having to do somehow with the internal representation of pathing to the graphics that appear in the IDE. Straighten that out and Real Studio is back in business. In the mean time, hold off on upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 if you do development in Linux until the next release.

I received an email from them describing the World Archives Memory Project.

The World Memory Project uses software and processes developed by the Ancestry World Archives Project, an established community that has spent years helping to preserve historical documents and make them available online for free.
It starts with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum creating digital images of historical documents. Then, using special software developed by Ancestry.com, contributors like you help make these documents searchable online by typing or “keying” information from the digital images into a database.

Cool. I love to give back. I’d love to be able to help others research their forefathers, especially when it will be made available for free. I’m a good typist and I can code tags or whatever is needed. I’m ready to sign up and get more information on what I need to do…

The software is Windows only. Dang. Really? This is 2011. They describe that Mac users need to run this in a Virtual Machine. I’m a big Linux user and I could do the same thing but … dang. I know they’ve just lost a *LOT* of their contributors right there! A good number of their potential customers won’t know what a virtual machine is, even though Parallels is pretty easy.

I was hoping to be able to type in the information in OpenOffice (Libre Office) and then paste it into a web form, or even use some sort of AJAXy web application to enter the information. If I’ve got to start up a Virtual Machine, and probably one just to install this software on, and *then* hope it submits correctly to their service, well, that’s too much work.

I’m disappointed. I was hoping to be able to help some people out but I’m thinking this is too much work now. I’ve got a business to run, and I already volunteer a lot of my time to charity. I’m sorry customers of World Archives Project! It’s a darn shame.

notify-send -t 10 "Header" "Body"

After Googling around for a while, I ran across a message board confirming what I was suspecting. Evidently this has been the behavior since 2009 at least and people are asking for a change in the documentation.

I would agree that the documentation should be changed to reflect the current state of the command. I’m a bit sad that this change has been needed for several years now and someone hasn’t been able to get the change in the documentation, or better yet, change the command so the notification timeout is honored.

I hope this helps someone else confirm this behavior more quickly than I was able.

End Function

You can see that there are many parameters passed to the CellTextPaint method of the ListBox object. In my example, I was adding a “” as a flag to the RowTag of the listbox. If the rowtag had that flag, it was a refund and we set the graphics object to have a forecolor of a dark red, and set the Italics to be true.

What originally threw me is that I have to think of g (Graphics object) as the “row”. A bit misleading but you can see it is very easy to adjust the font on a listbox. I hope this helps someone out! Even if it’s a future version of me!

ctEggTimer v1.6 for Winders
ctEggTimer v1.6 for Linux

Today was different, however. I am working on an application that needs to validate a domain name. I should note that this is just for US based domain names so I haven’t coded it for Unicode. That’s for another day. Take a look how easy it is to do in Real Studio:

DIM cDomainName AS String = "Reg+#(Ex Is Hard, and you!can'tClean$This*@*(#String"
DIM cNewDomain AS String = ""
DIM oRegEx AS NEW RegEx
oRegEx.SearchPattern = "[^A-Za-z0-9-.]" // Basically allow any alphanumeric characters plus a dash and a dot
oRegEx.ReplacementPattern = ""
oRegEx.Options.ReplaceAllMatches = True
cNewDomain = oRegEx.Replace( cDomainName )


There. I’m a RegEx expert! Right?!?! Perhaps not. But this is a great simple introduction to RegEx for us mere-mortals.

The first utility is “ESPEAK” and should be installed by default on your system. From the command line, give this a try:

espeak “Hello there. It is a beautiful day outside!”

To try out espeak with a female voice, try out:

espeak -v en+f1 “You rock.”

There is another utility installed on Ubuntu systems called “Festival”. On my hardware, the speech is of much higher quality. From the command prompt, start up festival by typing “festival”. Here’s an example:

festival {ENTER}
festival> (SayText “Hello Doctor Floyd. I am fully operational and all of my circuits are functioning perfectly.”)

Very nice. More information on Festival can be found here:
The Festival Speech Synthesis System

Now get out there and get your computer talking to you!

• ctEggTimer for Winders [3.9M]
• ctEggTimer for Linux [3.6M]
• ctEggTimer for Mac [9.8M] untested

Keep the suggestions coming and I’ll make adjustments as they come along. So turn off the email and browser and don’t answer that phone for the next 25 minutes and be productive!

Read more about the Pomodoro Technique here.

It was simple and it seemed to make sense to me. I need to increase my productivity, especially lately. I took this as a challenge and created a Pomodoro like software timer in REALbasic as an exercise. You can download it here for free. I hope this helps other people with their productivity too.

• ctEggTimer for Winders [3.6M]
• ctEggTimer for Linux [3.5M]
• ctEggTimer for Mac [9.5M] untested

When I’m in a 25 minute block, I turn off my browser (unless I’m developing a web application!), turn off my email, and don’t answer the phone. So far, so good! Let me know if it works out for you!