ZoomIt at 9:57 AM

This post is mainly for my own recall.

Robert Shelton provides a link for the excellent screen zoom and annotation tool for Windows. It is quite useful for presentation of course, but also useful to zoom in/out high resolution screen during normal work.

I tried on my computer just now:

Traditional Chinese medicine to cure "incurable" diseases at 4:01 PM

I did not read technical books for weeks after I finished my project (which is rare for me), because I was reading/studying a more important thing for our daily life: traditional Chinese medicine, that can even cure some so-called "incurable" diseases, such as cancers, or AIDS!

Frankly speaking, I had been disappointed by Chinese doctors for a long long time since I was a child. My previous impression was Chinese medicine/method were too slow for illness, until recently I began to know several real Chinese doctors and their treatments.

One doctor is Mr. Ni Haisha (Please don't be cheated by his English site for Acupuncture, that is only because USA has no license for Chinese medicine yet). His Chinese site has far more great information about why/how about cancers than his English site.

Chinese medicine takes our body as a whole system. For example, the root reason for the breast cancer is because heart and small intestine are weak. But Western medicine takes our body as separate items. That is the reason why Western medicine does not work.

If Chinese medicine is so good, but why the medicine from many Chinese doctors is not effective, and even many Chinese doctors take western medicine by themselves for illness? The reasons are quite complex. Basically, Chinese medicine is like "art", not many good doctors exist; many Chinese doctors learned in a wrong way; Chinese government admired western technology too much and ignored real jewels/wisdom in the long Chinese history ...

How to find a good doctor? If your feet get warm after you take Chinese medicine, then that doctor is a good doctor; otherwise, if you still feel cold in your feet, and your symptoms still exist, then that doctor is likely a fake Chinese doctor.

Currently, I know two Chinese doctors are good: Mr. Ni and Mr. Huo

Crystal Report generates PDF in different fonts on different servers at 1:56 PM

We were satisfied with Crystal Report (CR) to generate PDF on the fly until we put CR templates on production servers.

The CR templates were tested on DEV and QA servers without any problem. But when the templates were put onto production box, we were amazed how messy the generated PDF looked like: the font size were mysteriously changed and paragraphs overlapped! @^@

I searched for reasons on Internet for hours, until I found one possible answer here: Typically when you are seeing page formatting issues on different machines, it could be because of printer drivers (or lack of). The reporting engine relies on the printer driver configured on the machine to provide information so that a page can be properly rendered. If you designed the report on your dev machine which is using PrinterA and then deploy to another machine using PrinterB, the formatting could be off.

My program was a .NET web service to create PDF document using ExportToDisk not PrintToPrinter:

oDocument.ExportToDisk(
     ExportFormatType.PortableDocFormat, sOutputFile);

so I wondered if the printer was the real problem. After I was told the production server pointed to the exact same printer as QA server, I reluctantly asked IT to check version of printer driver on both servers.

Then ... IT told me that the servers had different versions of printer driver even they pointed to same printer. After IT installed the same latest drivers on servers, the formating issue was resolved. :)

Although we had to postpone production delivery, it's good to know some software use printer driver to arrange layout internally.

A small compiler - Wilco Syntax Highlighting at 11:49 AM

Although I am quite busy these days for my projects at hand, I still try to find time to do what I really want: to dig into compiler, operating system, and CLR framework.

Yesterday, I spent hours to analyze a popular syntax highlighter tool - Wilco SyntaxHighter, because it is a small compiler to some degree. :)

The highlighter parses string source (the code to be highlighted) to scan tokens (comment, string, key word). Each token includes position/length information in the string source and related with highlighter style data. Then the parser reads the source again to merge those parsed tokens. The string segment of the token will be updated with style data. Other string segment will leave as-is.

The good feature of that parser is to build a scanner chain. For example, to parse C# code, these scanner will be used: CommentBlockScanner (/* ... */) -- CommentLineScanner (//) -- StringBlockScanner (@) -- StringLineScanner ("") -- WordScanner. When the current and following characters match CommentBlockScanner, the CommentBlockScanner will continue to read characters to the end of the comment block and take that block as a Comment token; if the current character does not match CommentBlockScanner, then it may match the next scanner in the scanner chain ... If the character does not match any scanner, then it does not belong to a token and should be ignored.

For different type of language (e.g. Java, CSS, etc), we can build and use different scanner chain. But the basic parsing logic is still same.

The concept of Compiler is very useful when generating code dynamically. When the theory of "Software Factory" becomes real, code generation tool will be the fundamental in the system.

That so-called security feature is still in IE 7 ?! at 4:10 PM

I believe you saw this warning window for many times when using IE. The reason is the web page of HTTPS URL includes both secure (HTTPS) and nonsecure (HTTP) content. When you view page source, you can see there is image, CSS source, JavaScript src, or other content that begins with "http://", not "https://".

I do not know the reason why IE team still keep this "feature" in IE 7:

1) Why should developer put HTTPS for a common image in web page? A common image should be fetched using HTTP directly because it is also shared by other nonsecure site
2) If I embed google map in a secure site, why should I use HTTPS for google content?

Although developers can write code to map URL from HTTPS to HTTP on web server to solve the problem, although users can change IE security options to enable "Display mixed content", one thing is for sure: This feature of IE is useless and annoying.