Chris Hubbard

Recently, I read a post on Reinventing the Clipboard by Jeff Atwood.  Jeff described the advantages of using multiple clipboards and gave a review of ClipX. I tried it out and really liked it.

What interested me the most was the Google Search Hotkey.  It would launch a browser with a search started at Google based on the contents of your clipboard.

Often, I will get an email (or some other type of text) that contains a referenced resource that doesn’t have a hyperlink, but is easily recognized based on the textual context.  The most common is a bug id or an email address.  Email programs will attempt to automatically hyperlink some well known formats like email addresses (which can be annoying at time if you don’t want it to be a hyperlink).

For a while, I have been using a set of cobbled together scripts that would search the contents of the clipboard for certain regular expressions, if one was found, it would launch an browser with an associated URL using matching substitutions from the regular expression.  Here are a few examples:

Name: Bugzilla
Pattern to match: (?:bug|scr)?[\s:#]*(\d+)
Navigate to: http://bugzilla.inin.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=\1

Name: Perforce
Pattern to match: (?:cl|change|changelist)[#:\s]+(\d+)
Navigate to: http://perforce.inin.com:8080/\1?ac=10

Name: Email Address
Pattern to match: ([A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4})
Navigate to: mailto:\1

When I saw ClipX, I thought, "if only he could generalize the google search to allow regular expressions matches, then I could ditch my scripts and have multiple clipboards to boot."  I sent an email to the author of ClipX, Francis Gastellu, and he was very responsive.  Actually, by the next day he had released the Smart Navigation plugin to ClipX.

I was able to easily add the patterns that I had in my previous scripts.

He has a few Presets that are handy.  Actually the one that sold him on the idea was the Bugzilla pattern.

Editing the entry is straight forward.  The preview window is a really nice touch.  The boost regular expression syntax is used for the pattern matching.

For those fellow developers at Interactive Intelligence, I created an export of some common entries.  Please let me know if you know of other entries that would be helpful.

I’m here at the Indy Install Fest.  This is a very cool idea by Microsoft.  I have MSDN at work and technically I can run it at home, but I feel wrong about doing non-work development for professional development.  We each got a free copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional.  Now I feel like I will be more likely to do that at home.  Thanks Microsoft!!

Messianic Jewish scholar Dr. Michael Brown and Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of America’s best-known rabbis, argue for two very different interpretations of Scripture  Originally held in the summer of 2007 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, this debate features opposing viewpoints about the hard questions surrounding the identity of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53.

Did Jesus Die For Our Sins?

At work I use SlickEdit as my code editor.  There are several reasons which would take too long right now to enumerate.  One of them is that SlickEdit remembers cursor movements as part of the history and Visual Studio doesn’t.  This is a very handy feature. 

Well I found out that there is a option to Include insertion point movements in Undo list.  Thanks Sara Ford for the tip!

I have been reading Aaron’s blog and I have been impressed with the formatting and nice embedded pictures.  I know that he switched to Wordpress recently (which I use) and I have struggled with the web interface and getting images into the posts.  He said that he uses Windows Live Writer.  I downloaded it tonight and installed it.  I was very impressed how easy it was to connect to my blog and automatically configure the settings to work with Wordpress.  Very nice application.