It turns out that someone implemented a Mouse Gestures for Internet Explorer plugin. It seems to work really well!

If you’re wondering what Mouse Gesturea are, the short answer is that it’s a fast way to instruct a program to do certain things, like shortcut keys on the keyboard. They’re great for programs that require your hand to be on the mouse anyway, like web browsers. The user holds down a mouse button, and draw a simple shape on the screen really fast with your mouse. The application interprets it and translates it into a command, which it then performs.

For instance, by holding down a button and making an L-shape, the browser window closes. An up-down motion asks for a page refresh. Those are the simple gestures; they let you skip the button search effort. I guess it’s like learning a sign language to instruct the computer on what to do.

You can have more complex operations. Some that I’ve found useful are: clone the current page, open up a new (blank) window, show me the web page source, blank out this image. Once you consider a large number of operations, it’s easier to remember the pictographic gesture than which of the many buttons or menu options does what you want.

I highly recommend trying it out. It may sound hokey, but it grows you on you really fast.

The Siemens S40 and the Sony Ericsson T630 (which differs from the T637 only in GSM 850/900) have in common another characteristic other than being my latest two phones. They both come with synchronization software called XTNDConnect PC. Different versions, specific to each phone.

Now, I don’t know what the commercial version of that software is like, but the versions I used with the S40 and T630 are pretty finnicky.

1. You have to make sure you run the installation program as the user you intend to sync the phone with (so it picks the right Outlook data file). The program will need write access to files in C:\Program Files\Common\XCPCSync. Not well behaved multi-user or minimum-rights (i.e. non-admin users) behaviour, but this is okay with most people I’m sure.
2. It really doesn’t like being installed atop another version (or the same). This is a problem for many people, I’m sure. I think most people install new versions of software atop old ones. I know I did when changing from the S40 to T630. Always uninstall old versions of XTNDConnect before installing a new version.

#2 runs contrary to typical user behaviour (I believe), and uninstallers are known to become broken over time anyway. The bad thing about #2 is that it’s hard to determine what’s wrong once you do what #2 says not to. The error messages for XTNDConnect PC are terrible; they tend to be the same one for a variety of problems.

When I converted from my S40 to T630, I was a bad boy. Even when I uninstalled the old S40 software afterwards, the T630 version still wouldn’t install and run properly. As it turned out, the XTND version for the S40 left registry entries, and the the T630 version of XTND noticed them and silently did not replace and add to them as it should have. Had to uninstall everything, delete the registry, delete the two key directories (Program Files\XTNDConnect PC and Common Files\XCPCSync), and install the T630 software again.

And today’s event was the use of task manager to kill XTNDConnect after a snafu relating to Outlook and fighting for access with my Pocket PC (I think). Bad idea. Subsequent attempts to start XTNDConnect gave me “sync engine is already logged in for a different client”. Useful. I started looking for lock files. As it turned out, reading the help file reminded me there was a log file, and reading the log file told me one of my data files was corrupted. Oops. Although, what does this have to do with another user being logged in? Oh well. So I run the installer for the T630 XTNDConnect PC software again.

Wait, wasn’t there something about always uninstalling first?

So the installer failed to make the necessary modifications, seeing something there already and deciding to silently play it safe. XTNDConnect’s behaviour wouldn’t be so troublesome if it weren’t so tight-lipped. However, after uninstalling, and making sure the directories were pretty clean, it installed properly, and yes, actually works again.

Really… not the kind of program you want to be on the wrong side of.

Unix users know the value of symbolic links. Interestingly, the same sort of behaviour is available on Windows (NT, 2000, and up), although I believe they’re called “reparse points” and are quite different in the details. SysInternals’ Junction lets you create and manage them.

I use them mostly for two reasons:

• The directory I often want is buried somewhere obscure. This happens with my PDA’s mirrored directories, which end up in c:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\PDAname\My Documents. I point “C:\PPC” (Pocket PC) to that long mess, and when i put files in C:\PPC, I’m really putting stuff in that first directory. It’s like shorthand.
• Sometimes an application file dialog pops up and shows you the special “My Documents” folder (no leading prefix of directories). I find that folder annoying, since the Up arrow doesn’t really do anything from there. I know what directory it’s showing me, and I want to go up one further, but I can’t. The drop down list at the top often pauses when you click on it, as it checks \network drives and similar activities. So I create a junction in “C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents” that points to the directory I want. Don’t have to navigate any folders or fight Windows Explorer because it treates “My Documents” as a special folder that has no parent (even though it does).

I heard about JAXB from a coworker. When I first read about it, I thought it was a fascinating tool to abstract all the tedious composing and decomposing of XML documents. JAXB builds Java interfaces/classes based on an XML Schema, and handles convert between Java objects and XML documents.

From what I can tell so far, JAXB doesn’t handle extending complex types that well. For some reason, when I write complex types like this: and marshal it using the JAXB generated marhsallers, the generated document only has the Child’s properties, rather than Base+Child. So when it’s fed back through the schema, it’s wrong!

Reading the JAXB docs more thorougly, they seem to say that extensions aren’t wholly supported, but extensions for complex types are okay (yay!). On the other hand, as I tried to follow the instructions to enable it, it got increasingly burdensome the number of hoops I was jumping through just to use JAXB.

So I need to pause and consider for a moment: does JAXB still provide me with value, or is it as much work to get it working as to go it on my own? I don’t want to do custom development, but I can’t seem to get what I want: generate an object model that lets me work naturally in Java, and converts it to and from simple XML (no namespaces, etc.) to send over the wire. I feel like the JAXB implementors had a more lofty and complex goal than mine - probably handling the full XML Schema spec.