Making .ico Icons With Paint.NET

Giving your application an icon can be that finishing touch that says “application, I love you.” Unfortunately, the icon designer in Visual Studio 2005 isn’t a very friendly tool for creating nice looking icons. Wanting to make a cow icon for a quick 12/24 hour converter I wrote for my girlfriend, I went running to my favorite image editing program – Paint.NET.

Paint.NET it turns out doesn’t support saving images in the windows-standard .ico format! Luckily, someone was as unhappy with this as I was and created a filetype plugin for Paint.NET that grants the ability to work with and save images as icons. The download link is here. The plugin is awesome, it supports editing and saving images to be used as cursors also. And both formats, icons and cursors, can be saved with multiple image sizes in one file to support multiple icon and cursor sizes. While it is overkill for my application, this feature will save time in the future by allowing  icons and cursors to be designed once (as a larger image) before being automatically scaled to each of the smaller sizes. The same feature addresses large icon and cursor sizes for users that require higher accessibility (another extremely important aspect of software development that is far too often ignored) making this plugin an all-in-one hit.

So while my girlfriend will never appreciate the depth and accessibility her little cow icon provides, it makes me smile knowing that in a pinch it could be blown up to all its 256×256 32bit glory :)

Enabling Remote Desktop Remotely

I found this page on how to enable remote desktop remotely, and found the tip handy enough to pass along.

Too bad it won’t work if access to the registry via the network has been disabled :-/

Windows Server 2003

Reinstalling Windows Server 2003 isn’t necessarily difficult. However, when you introduce 3rd party disk controllers and no floppy drive, things get tricky.

The question here is simple: Why Microsoft, WHY!? Requiring a floppy drive is ridiculous, especially on newer servers! Please allow, at the very least, a usb flash drive to be used instead. Thank you.

Meta Tagging in Vista

Tagging documents and files by one or more categories is, simply, pretty damn neat. It’s been supported for a long time on sites like flikr and the ever popular gmail, and I am certainly not the first person to comment on the advantages of sorting and searching by category instead of filing things hierarchically in complex folder structures.

When I heard Windows Vista was going to support tagging files, I got excited. When I used Vista’s implementation of meta tagging firsthand, I became sad. For what it works with, the system is well done and I enjoy how the results come back with regular search items in the new Windows Search interface. What I don’t like is that the system doesn’t work with music or video files, or any ‘new’ file formats. I’m not going to lie and pretend I know everything about Vista and why this is so, but here are my thoughts.

The operating system is in control of the file system. Vista is using NTFS as of now, and has full control over both NTFS and the soon-to-come WinFS, which both support alternate data streams (ADS). With ADS, a file can store information (such as meta tag information) without affecting the file, and as far as the operating system is concerned, without changing the size of the file. So why don’t all files support meta tagging through storing data in an ADS? Seriously, I’m asking. Because I just don’t understand.

Windows Path

The Windows PATH environment variable, as most of you probably know, is delimited with colons. We ran into a problem at work where some systems weren’t running properly because it couldn’t find some libraries. The problem? A space was inserted after the colon and before the next path element. Seeing as there is –never– a space as the beginning of a path in Windows, why isn’t it just parsed out? It would increase readability and eliminate problems like this.

Grumble.