Graham Wheeler's Random Forest

A few people have asked how to limit search results to residential addresses. When you’re in the list of search results, if you click “Menu” then select “View”, you will see checkboxes for business and residential. By checking or unchecking these you can restrict results to just business, just residential, or both.

Several new Sprint phones come with Live Search for Mobile already installed, with a launch icon on the home page. Unfortunately if you update the application then this icon stops working. We changed where the app gets installed whereas the icon Sprint added has a hard-coded path. There is a simple fix, however. Install this CAB file on your Sprint phone and the icon should work again.

If you live in an area where there is no traffic coverage, you may not want to have the Traffic icon taking up precious real estate on your home screen. There is a way to re-order the icons, although it is not for the faint of heart. You need to edit the preferences.xml file in the \Programs\Live Search directory. In this XML file there is a section with tags <il>, and within this are entries with tags <it> and <ip>.

Windows Mobile 6 phones are out and about, and several of them have built-in GPS. Some people find that the GPS doesn’t work well with Live Search for Mobile, so I hope this post will help explain why GPS can be tricky. Note that you should make sure you are running the latest version of Live Search (from December ‘07) as this has some improvements in the timeout handling which will help.

After 3 months we have finally released the latest version of Live Search for Mobile. The Windows Mobile client now features speech input, better location handling, hours of operation on search results, better movie poster sizing. and gas prices. We spent about half the time on bug fixes and stability improvements. It’s a great release; get it at http://wls.live.com on your phone (download direct via your phone’s browser).

Assertions can be great for detecting unexpected state in your code. But when a state violation is caught in an assert, the next question is usually “How did I get here?”. A simple but effective way to track down this kind of issue is the following: in each class instance allocate a StringBuilder member (called, for example, stateLog). Then, at each point in the class code where the state changes, log the change with an appropriate message (usually a helper method that takes a string message is appropriate here - it should append the message plus a snapshot of the relevant member variables to the stateLog).

Ashley, Steve and I are giving a talk at MEDC on our baby, Live Search for Mobile. Ash will talk about interaction design for mobile, I’ll talk about lessons learned and useful tips for developing on Compact Framework (Live Search is built on CF 1.0 SP3), and Steve will talk about our uber-agile process. Stop by and say hi! Update: you can see the video here - although it seems to bomb out before I started talking.

My partner in crime on Live Search for Mobile, Ashley, has started a coding blog, which is much more interesting than mine. He’s currently very into functional programming but with a C# bent - basically a C# schemer - and there’s some cool stuff he’s been playing around with in .Net 2.0 and 3.0. Check it out!

I was searching a couple of days back for a tool that would generate dependency matrices for C# code. I didn’t find free ones, but I did find a plugin for Lutz Roeder’s Reflector that will do this for compiled assemblies, which is just as good. I haven’t done a fresh install of reflector for quite some time and didn’t know it supported add-ins, but it does and there are a few good ones.

Last night I decided to try write a web browser that has the ability to take screen captures. I have an rss2book program that I wrote for my Sony Reader which has been great at producing PDF content from the web (mostly RSS but it is not limited to that). However, I figured that for some content, especially that which is largely Javascript driven, it might be better to capture the full content of a web page as an image and then turn that into a DJVu document (the Sony Reader doesn’t actually support DJVu, but I imagine that there will be e-book readers soon that do - or at the least there’s always the Nokia N800).