CD Baby has finished setting up my CD for sale. You can now buy it at the following link for the low, low price of $10.95: http://cdbaby.com/cd/avianwaves.

Unbelievably, I've already sold a copy, before any promotion. I think I like this CD Baby thing...

In case you haven't noticed, I have a thing for birds. I just read this article on Yahoo (happened upon it by accident, like most things on the internets) about how a new avian species was just discovered. It's wonderful to read about new species being discovered when so many other species are going extinct every day.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080314/sc_nm/bird_indonesia_dc

I am writing an application for Windows Mobile 5/6 that needs to enumerate all running processes on the system (in order to find the main window handle of another program). I found example code on MSDN here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446560.aspx. Half the time it works and half the time it gives me the "Unable to create snapshot" exception.

Well, it turns out the problem has to do with flags being sent to the CreateToolhelp32Snapshot function in toolhelp.dll. I found a great blog post on how to fix it here: http://nativemobile.blogspot.com/2006/01/k-jam-and-toolhelp.html. The author did this to fix a bug for K-Jam (HTC Wizard) phones, but the problem happens at least also on my Sprint Mogul (HTC Mogul/Titan) phone and I suspect other WM5 or WM6 devices.

As a side note, for some reason the developer of the MSDN sample code stores the PID of the process in a property he calls "handle." Do not be confused as I was at first. This is NOT the window handle (hWnd). It is actually the PID of the process! And he stores it in an IntPtr to make it even more confusing (even though he always uses it as the casted "int" value). To get the window handle (if you need it), you have to use the managed .Net "Process" class like this:

Dim p As ToolHelp.Process = ToolHelp.Process.GetProcesses(0)
Dim hWnd as IntPtr = Process.GetProcessById(p.handle.toInt32).MainWindowHandle

The SNOCAP store on the front page and the MySpace page is currently offline as new MP3s are validated by SNOCAP and come online. In support of the new album release, I've re-encoded ALL singles from the self-titled album using LAME. I used the original 96Khz/24bit masters as the input files and used LAME's "extreme" quality option, which uses variable bitrate compression for maximum quality. The files are a little bit bigger, but none exceed 16 MB (and that's two songs in one file: Out of Darkness + Toward the Light). Price is 99 cents per song (the usual cost).

Note for DJs: The SNOCAP singles are not cross-faded together (except for Out of Darkness + Toward the Light, which were recorded together and so are not easy to break apart), like on the retail CD. I have my artistic vision and all that for the album, but the SNOCAP singles can be arranged however you want. That makes these singles ideal for radio/club play.

Coming soon: Ring tones!

So you painstakingly set up your Quick Access Toolbar preferences in every Office 2007 application to your liking. You have your favorite shortcuts for composing Outlook emails, setting up charts in Excel documents, and your obscure not-so-easy-to-get-to-in-the-Ribbon formatting control in Word. But now you have to set it all up again at home. There has to be an easier way!

Well, the officially supported way is to fire up Windows Easy Transfer or the User State Migration Tool, since Office 2007 defers settings transfers to those tools instead still offering the greatly missed "File and Settings Transfer Wizard" made famous in Office 2003. But both of those methods require (A) administrative access and (B) a lot of time. Maybe just setting it up again is easier...

Well it's not! The easiest way to transfer the Quick Access Toolbar from one computer to another is simply copying a few files in your Application Data folder. Here are the locations:

XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\*.qat

Vista:
C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\*.qat

Simply copy the QAT file associated with the application (or form) you want the customized quick access toolbar for from your source computer to your destination. Done!

Additionally, if you are interested in exporting other settings (kids: don't try this at home), HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0 contains a wealth of settings that are ripe for exporting and importing. However, DON'T WRITE OVER THE "Registration" KEY! If you do, you will invalidate your Office Activation and you might have trouble reactivating it.

Well it took forever and a day, but the Avian Waves CDs are now in my hot little hands. Once I get some mailed off to CD Baby, they will be available for purchase! Now I just have to figure out how to market them so I can, you know, make a little money here and there...