One of my favourite extensions is the spell checker for the editor, which is great for pointing out spelling mistakes, which for me can only be a good thing

To install the extension, it is as simple as downloading it, clicking on the downloaded file, restarting Visual Studio and using it.

The spell checker I use with Visual COBOL 2010 is:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/7c8341f1-ebac-40c8-92c2-476db8d523ce

For those interested, here it is in action…

Method chain can help simply the use class and allows more complex object initialisation without having to worry about the order of the parameters and be done inline.

Consider the use of an “Account” class that takes Name, Address, Telephone and Country. All of which are strings, the constructor with four strings would not be a great constructor.

So you could have a simple constructor and four properties/methods.. however so set up the object would mean you have spread the setup over multiple lines.

Using method chain you can overcome this and even space in the “value” area of the object in your storage area.

The trick of the pattern is to provide methods that always return this/self, so we can change the invokes together… For example:

This technique could even be used to build up a series of items required, for example, the preparation and execution of a sql statement comes to mind… in a similar fashion to Linq.

So… lets look at an example:

WIth the class being:

Which when run with Visual COBOL gives:

I especially liked my boss “The COBOLATOR“, who did a great talk about his experiences with Microsoft and his views on using COBOL. This combined we another great talk by Paul/PaulA and Mark about how COBOL is everywhere and how Visual COBOL can seriously help you take advantage of existing COBOL code as well as showing how great COBOL is for new development made a great conference.

When I was not seeing my colleagues perform on stage, I was at our stand meeting people and I have to say the people at the conference were amazingly friendly and very happy to talk mere developer such as myself. It was honestly refreshing to meet such open minded people with a honest interest in using Microsoft technology to its fullest.

Well that was then and now; me and several of my colleagues are trying to get home to the UK but due to the dust cloud caused by the Icelandic volcano we are stranded here. However rather than going completely insane, we have tried to keep busy doing some work and visiting some local sites.

To that end, I have placed some of my photo’s from, these can be found [Here].

I hope you find them interesting and thank goodness for the SkyDrive in the cloud

I noticed yesterday that “Doren Katz” over @ http://doronkatz.com/iriver-story-firmware-171-update has found a firmware upgrade for the iRiver story.

However, I failed to find the original download on any of the korean, china or japan iriver websites but non the less downloaded I downloaded it myself to have a look but rather than installing I decided to have a peek inside the ebook.hex file.

Firstly, this is really a .zip file with a false 128byte header, so its time to get the swiss-army does everything with files utility out and strip the header off with:

Next, lets look for what has changed between the different version’s, so as “unzip” includes the crc check for each file, we just need to create a text file with the files in sorted order with the appropriate crc check included. I used a combination of unzip/awk/sort

I did this for the ebook.hex from Doren’s site and the official 1.61 file.

So, what can I deduce from the update…

The big question is….. should I install it?

Update – Original link to firmware found @ http://zone.iriver.co.kr/service/cs_down.aspx?pGroup=8&pName=Story&Cate=1&VIdx=1&idx=1217

Update -2

A very quick translation, gives us the following…

Fixes include:

So, what’s my excuse.. Well we have been counting down the internal builds of Visual COBOL and we are pretty much ready to ship which is a relief since we are going to launching it at the Microsoft’s Visual Studio launch parties in Las Vegas and TechEd in Bangalore April 12-14.

Personally for me I am quite excited because I will be going to Teched in Bangalore to help show off Visual COBOL.

If would like a look at some of the Visual Studio 2010 integration Micro Focus has is about to release, pop along to http://vs2010.microfocus.com/ and see for yourself. Better still, have a visit to teched

I will finish the silly little blog with a link to a demo of Visual COBOL. Just because I’m proud of it…

ref: http://www.microsoftteched.in/
and http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-gb/products/2010/default.mspx

Anyway, instead of boring you with various evening’s development woos… I will just tell you what I ended up doing which was to use VirtuaBox with ubuntu x86 and use this tar file (eg: bunzip2 it, tar xvf into $HOME)

Then to compile it I first had to setup the makefile for rsync:

Then to build is was easy… I just did…

Next, I found a small USB thumb drive, formatted in ext3 using ubuntu, placed it into the pogoplug, logged into it, remount’ed the drives using:

You may need to change the mnt point, use mount to find it..

Now you will be able to use rsync via ssh and use –rsync-path to point to rsync on your ext3 drive.

I required, I make the rsync exe + md5 sum available… just shout!

Here is what my Apple Software update said:

Digital Raw Compatibility Update:

This update extends RAW image compatibility for Aperture 3 and iPhoto ’09 for the following cameras:

Hasselblad H3DII-50
Leica M9
Leica X1
Olympus E-P1
Olympus E-P2
Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1
Pentax K-7
Pentax K-x
Sony Alpha DSLR-A500
Sony Alpha DSLR-A550
Sony Alpha DSLR-A850

Thank you Apple!

The good news, the file system is read-only, so it was pretty simple to work around, just use mount…

Amy Williams of Great Britain and Northern Ireland eyes the track ahead in the women’s skeleton run 2 on day 7 of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics on February 18, 2010. (Clive Mason/Getty Images)

re: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/02/vancouver_2010_part_1_of_2.html

And the output of the program is:

All you get is…

Come on Apple please sort it out and make Olympus PEN users happy!

To install the fonts, connect  your iRiver Story device via your USB cable, then select mount/drive etc..

Then browse via your explorer/finder to the font’s directory and just drag/drop/copy the .ttf to it, then disconnect.

Then goto ‘Settings/Change Fonts’, then when goto your Diary/Memo the font will have take affect.

Unfortunately I can seem to make it work for pdf files!

Sample fonts i played with are:

• Android fonts aka Droid font family
• Marydale fonts

Anyway, after some research, I found they British Gas just re-badged them from Drayton Digistat and here is the links to the pages that contain the .pdfs’.

http://www.gasapplianceguide.co.uk/DigistatPlus2.pdf
http://www.draytoncontrols.co.uk/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=4235

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition

The guide helps you to:

• Understand the underlying architecture and design principles and patterns for developing successful solutions on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework.
• Identify appropriate strategies and design patterns that will help you design your solution’s layers, components, and services.
• Identify and address the key engineering decision points for your solution.
• Identify and address the key quality attributes and crosscutting concerns for your solution.
• Create a candidate baseline architecture for your solution.
• Choose the right technologies for your solution.
• Identify patterns & practices solution assets and further guidance that will help you to implement your solution

The guide can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ce40e4e1-9838-4c89-a197-a373b2a60df2&DisplayLang=en

To update you use the “Olympus Master 2″ program, connect the cable from computer to camera.. click storage on the camera.. select camera… update and away you go…

If all goes well your camera should have the largest “OK” message on the LCD screen I seen in years…

Here is what they say has changed:

E-P1 Firmware Ver1.2 has incorporated the following upgrade.

[Modification]

• Reduced time of the MF ASSIST enlarged display to improve operability.
• REC VIEW enabled when the monitor’s backlight is set to off.

Interoperability between languages is very important to COBOL environments just as much as other languages. Some platforms such as Microsoft’s .Net with their CLR makes life much easier by allowing all languages to share a common infrastructure ie: the instruction set and the VM (MSIL and CLR) along with a base class library to get you started.

Environments such as Sun’s VM (JVM) provide two different approaches to interoperability with Java, the first is via JNI/JNA and the second is producing bytecode that runs as is on the VM.

Although the Micro Focus COBOL compiler does not support JVM bytecode or Java source generation it does have support for invoking classes/methods via the OO invoke verb.

This mechanism is very simple to use, you just need to let our object COBOL runtime know the class is a Java class, which can be done by placing $JAVA$ before the name of the class and ensuring the class itself can be found by the JVM itself usually by adding an extra directories or .jar files to the CLASSPATH environment variable.

With Java 6.0 and JSR 223 support for Java based scripting languages were provided via the package javax.script.

Java has a wealth of scripting languages from awk to xlst. My favourites being jpython, jruby and javascript.

The java.net website has a comprehensive list of scripting languages -
https://scripting.dev.java.net/.

To use the scripting packages, you first need to create a ScriptEngineManager, then use this to create a specific ScriptEngine object for your chosen scripting language and use it.

For example:

In COBOL this is quite simply:

The actual Javascript being execute is contained in the invoke statement, which is simply:

To use the above example, we first need to compile the code and run it.. which is done as follows:

This is just the start, the next thing piece that is required with interoperability to another language is the ability to pass parameters to in and out of the script. Luckily for us the clever chaps on the jsr group have provided ‘put’ and ‘get’ methods that allows us to simply put a name parameter and get the resulting updated or new parameter.

So consider the example, where we need to setup a parameter called ‘message’ for the script and then read a parameter called ‘replyMessage’ after the script has been executed. The javascript to do this is:

To setup the message parameter, we just need todo.

The after the script has executed, we just need to use the ‘get’ method..

The completed COBOL example below, uses a side file for the javascript too, the code is as follows:

As you can see from the code above, setting up parameter is pretty easy todo but sometimes we just want to execute a function in the scripting language such as:

The ScriptEngine object that we have created to use the scripting engine may implement an optional interface called javax.script.Invocable, if the scripting engine we are using does provide this interface then a method called invokeFunction(..) can be used.

In order to reduce the size of the COBOL code, I have coded a simple utils class in java as a simple proxy layer, the code is pretty simple but does make it easier for the COBOL to use the invokeFunction() method.

Which gives us the following output when executed.

The completed example is as follows:

Conclusions: Using a Java based scripting language from COBOL is quite easy, so feel free to use it. Now which scripting language should I use…?

So what is different?

1. Added Functions
a. Dithering function on PDF File and EPUB File
b. FB2Viewer function

2. Improvements

a. Loading Speed improved on PDF File

The firmware can be downloaded from [click on me].   Time to upgrade… fingers crossed it helps…

I have updated the firmware and it seems to basically work, for those that download it, here are the checksums:

Note: if you have downloaded v.1.6.1, the checksum’s should be:

If however your checksum’s are… then you have the earlier v1.6.0 which appears to have been removed from the website, so you need togo back to the website and re-download it.

I have been lucky enough to be reading a couple of books from O’Reilly which deliver their eBooks in multiple formats, as the iRiver supports both ePub and PDF.  I have chosen to install both versions of the same book, so if I experience a issue with one I can flip to the other.

Here is what I have found so far:

• Reading of PDF seems to be the most reliable
• Reading of ePub documents seems to very slow in comparison
• PDF reading can be pain with small text, reflow helps but destroys technical book formats that has embedded code in it
• Battery life is much better

I have had a couple of crashes/hangs of the iRiver but so far it has only been with ePub files.  So guess what… I will be avoiding them like the plague.

Has other people had the similar issues?

The default UK keyboard mapping on a MacBook are pretty much useless when using Virtual PC emulators such VirtualBox or VMWARE.

With this in mind, have produced a custom keyboard layout which maps all the keys to right place.

The only two exceptions are the two OPT keys, which I could only managed to map them to ALT-n keys, so the alternative mapping for these are:

€ aka left OPT 2 is mapped to right ALT 2

# aka left OPT 3 is mapped to right ALT 3

To use the customer keyboard mapping, download the .zip, unzip it.. and click on mbkbd\setup.exe and it will install the custom keyboard called “United Kindom – MacBook – Custom“.

And this me using it… boy did this make more productive!

This a screen shot me trying it out…

(link fixed)