http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlpyGhABXRA&feature=related

http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2010/03/15/the-nickname-cache.aspx

Customizing Outlook can be a nightmare. For example there are two basic ways to create an Outlook custom form. The first is to customize the standard email form which is OK for some kinds  of  in house  IT applications but are otherwise not very robust. The other is to use MAPI’s Form Server technology which involves creating a seperate application which Outlook communicates with.

I was once deeply involved with a MAPI Form Server which was quite a frustrating experiance because so much of Outlook’s behaviour is not accessable. The Outlook form I was developing needed to look for the most part like Outlook’s standard email form but with a custom Active X control managing the message body instead of a text box (eg Trident based HTML text editor, Word,  or a richedit control) that Outlook used.

While MAPI Forms give much more control and stability over the resultant custom form it is necessary to write all of the UI yourself. I have never understood why Microsoft did not write a bunch of ActiveX controls that allowed MAPI forms to reuse  Outlook UI such as the message header or toolbars. They could have arranged things so that ActiveX controls could only be used when used in a MAPI form server.

An excellent example of a part of the Outlook UI that should allowed reuse are the text boxes used to edit recipients within the Outlook email form. At first these controls seem to be simple rich edit controls except that they do useful things like the nickname list processing mentioned in the link above. They also treat resolved recipients as single entities which are protected from being edited and can be dragged and dropped between the ‘To’, ‘Cc’ and ‘Bcc’ edit boxes.

All this needs to be emulated by a third party form and updated everytime a new version of Outlook is released. The nearest that Outlook gets to reuse is the Address book which can be launched to select recipients. Another problem is that because Outlook uses it own version of MAPI so if Outlook stops using a MAPI function then the function can degrade overtime.

For example there is a MAPI function that provides a property page from message store providers. This is used on older versons of Outlook to provide additonal pages in the message properties property sheet in the standard email form. This same UI was available via MAPI to third party form servers. When Outlook changed and moved more message properties into the newer message options UI however then this part of MAPI became unreliable.

I don’t think anything is going to change because I suspect that most of the extensions to Outlook have already been written or will be Microsoft extensions which don’t suffer from these problems.

Some big changes have occured since I last blogged. After 20 years of living and working as software developer in the London and the surrounding area I have now moved back home to Northumberland. I still have my flat in Harrow at the moment so I can relocate back to London if I want to.

It took a while to settle back to my home town but its generally been OK. I’m now work for Sage which is a Software company based just outside of Newcastle. It a complete change of  problem domain for me as they do accounts software.

Although my first job in London was with a small software house that tried to produce a rival for Sage in the early 1990s I wasn’t involved in the core accounts bit. I’ve been used to working with telephony or multi media in form for or another for the last 20 years.

One of my friends fron the Avaya days, Gwyn,  is also now working for Sage also - although its for a team that doesn’t do the accounts stuff.

Well thats it for now but stay tuned as they say.

http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsArticle.aspx?AR=236796

The most interesting part of these plans for me is that Honda may revert to having a single worldwide version of the Honda Accord. This means no more Euro Accords or Acura TSX based on the Euro Accord. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or bad. Only time will tell. 

The Honda Legend may also disappear which is not supprising. From what I have read about the current generation Legend (or Accura RL) it has a really advanced 4WD system called SH-AWD which makes for really good cornering but is really let down by the suspension. Its also way over priced in the UK at least and has  only one engine option.

Most manufacturer backed teams – like BMW and Mercedes McLaren – can’t be happy with this situation and I assume that this was one of the reason why Honda pulled out.

Secondly Honda has announced that it’s canceling the next generation NSX

http://www.autocar.co.uk/News/NewsArticle.aspx?AR=236594

Not good.

Next Honda is scrapping plans to introduce the Acura brand to Japan. That means that I very much doubt that Acura is comming to Europe any time soon.

This bloomberg (or is that gloomberg) page summaries the finacial situation:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=asDCdNdT2a2E&refer=japan

To top it all I’ve managed to add some scratches my new Accord!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/startrek/

It seems to work a lot better with Firefox – IE seems to have problems with this page. I’m still not sure what to make of new movie. It doesn’t look much like any Star Trek I’ve seen before although perhaps its exactly what the franchise needs right now.

http://www.osnews.com/story/20208/Atari_s_History_1971-1981

I didn’t realise that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked for Atari and that Atari was offered the Apple I. I also can’t comprehend how you can make a video game out of discrete logic using a bunch of TTLs. Designing logic in hardware is something I’ve always wanted to do but its a lot harder to get into than software development.

There are simulators out there so you don’t actually have to build hardware but they all assume that you are a hardware engineer and that your actually going to build something.

Maybe I’ll write a simple simulator one day to teach myself about logic gates and stuff but that sounds like a lot of work.

From The Times online:

“People talk about Volkswagens being reliable, and Mercs. But if I may liken reliability to the M1, the German cars are only at Milton Keynes. Toyota is outside Leicester, whereas Honda is already on the A1, going into Scotland.”

        – Jeremy Clarkson [1]

[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article824066.ece

There now follows a small rant about Freeview – the UK’s free digital TV platform. For many years I used NTL (now Virgin Media) as my TV provider. Now NTL is worth a warehouse of rants all on its own but  I don’t want to start that just now it’s just too painful.

I was paying around £40 a month for analog cable TV service where many of the channels were encrypted. I decided to switch to Freeview a couple of years ago when NTL started doing really weird stuff like encrypting channels I was paying for so that I couldn’t watch them. They also did stuff like replace the History channel with UK History as if there the same thing!

I can’t get a satellite because I need to get permission from the building owner (I have a leasehold) and my flat is pointing in the wrong direction so that just seems like too much hassle to me.   

The problem with Freeview is that the number of available channels is limited compared to satellite and cable. For example ABC used to have a channel showing US imports like 8 Simple Rules which was OK. It was daytime only however.  They canned the channel because they could not secure an evening slot. I think that they must of thought the revenues of a day time only service was not worth it.

So with the number of channels limited what does Freeview offer? Well take ITV as an example. There’s ITV1 of course which is expected – it being a terrestrial channel. Things start to go downhill a bit with ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4. These channels seem to show the cheap stuff like repeats of ITV1 programmes, sport or the cheaper US imports.

So that’s 4 ITV channels. Except that there’s ITV 2+1 which is not some arty rebranding of ITV3. It shows all the tedious and annoying cheap stuff on ITV 2 but delayed 1 hour in case you missed something!  

It’s not just ITV, Channel 4 has Channel 4, Channel 4+1, E4, E4+1 and more 4. Then there are the shopping channels like QVC and Price Drop. Why?

Why can’t we just have more channel diversity and some competition? It’s just not fair.