interactive timelines

You have to create, view and provide interactive timelines for your articles you might try out http://whenintime.com/.

Easy to use and customize with only a few bugs all of them can be easily worked around.
And last but not least the service is free of charge right now... but you should not contribute confidential content.

Compare PDF in automated test scenarios

Do you ever had to test a process which creates a PDF based on well defined test data? You want to ensure that the result is equal or confirms to an given acceptance criteria which you can describe by an existing PDF? You want to automate this operation?

In this case you looking for a tool which compares two PDF files and at least provide you the answer to the question "are those two files the same?". Based on your use-case this means:

• the contained text is the same on the same page of the PDF
• the contained appearance (layout) is the same

In addition you need an command line interface to use the function within automated test procedure.

As you might know Adobe Acrobat provides a compare function which is very sufficient (see http://tv.adobe.com/watch/acrobat-tips-and-tricks/comparing-two-pdf-documents/)  but requires a commercial license and to integrate this function in your automated test environment isn't simple (from technical and commercial point of view).

Fortunately the tool comparepdf is available as free software. It is very simple to install, integrate and use. It provides different compare modes for the scenarios mentioned above. In addition a rough overview of the kind of difference is provided and can be used to integrate in automated test reports.

Once you have identified a difference you might be interested what and where the difference appearce. Therefore the GUI based DiffPDF tool can be used free of charge. Not as powerful as the Adobe Acrobat compare function but in many scenarios it helps to see whats going wrong without the need to buy a Adobe Acrobat license.

lost in email threads....

One of the most time expensive daily tasks is to identify the email required for the the current task in mind.

You know that you already received a email for a particular topic and you want reference it, you require the technical details for a certain topic, ....

Using email tags and full text search of todays email clients is a quite sufficient help to get those kind of tasks done. But once you find a particular email, they is almost ever part of a thread back and forth and getting what you want requires to get the context of the found email. To get the complete context in emails thread isn't trivial, even with thread functions of the common email tools. Most of them are limited in what is shown in particular for long running threads:

• you loosing the message context around the identified message because the threading function re-arrange the way your inbox is displayed
• you don't have an easy to use visibility of what really happens, what are the timings for each mail in the task the corresponding sender
• you do not have easy navigation without loosing the context

Few weeks ago I got aware of ThreadVis a add on for Thunderbird email client.

Pretty cool, it provides a visual graph of the email thread based on the currently selected email with different colors for different sender, length indication for time durations and direct popup help for the content of each item:

You see where you are, what was and after and who was the sender. Even threads you not receive are visible. A easy navigation between the emails, and popup previous for each of the thread items.

Viola, what else could you want? Of course there are things can be improved by the way the basic idea and implementation is worth to take a look at....

utilities, utilities

daily work on Windows is pretty unproductive without so called utilities. small tools and extensions increase efficiency.

Hanselman Ultimate Tools List provides a good summary of utilities for Windows. Many of them i used as well for years.

who has locked my account?

if you have to identify on which windows client / server a given account is currently logged on sysinternals utility "psloggedon" is your friend.

a simple "psloggedon account" identifies all computers the given account is currently logged on (and part of the same domain you start this command).

this tool is part of sysinternals huge amount of useful tools and command line helpers which helps to answer or identify common maintenance issues, like

• does my application doesn't close all used handles
  Process Explorer
  
• which resources (filesystem, registry, ...) does my application access
  Process Monitor
  
• capture of debug output (traces using OutputDebugString, DbgPrint) without using a debugger
  DebugView
  
• .....

and all utilities are free. the team creating and maintaining those utilities are now part of Microsoft. up to now this has any negative effect to utilities they provide beside there is no source code available anymore which prevents to see how certain information can be / must be retrieved to be on the safe side.

Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft

finding free and often useful utilities from MS is sometimes time consuming.

this list can help

http://bhandler.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!70F64BC910C9F7F3!1231.entry?wa=wsignin1.0