May 2007 Archives

Get all office buildings to turn up their AC thermostats 5°. Employees will be happier, companies will save money, and CO2 production will be reduced. The world will be a better place.

Someone on our QA team likes to post screenshots into our Bugzilla as MSWord docs. I find it rather obnoxious to have to open a new application just to view an image when the browser could easily handle a jpeg or png itself. Sure, it is convenient to Print-Screen-Paste into Word when you have no other option but it seems like if you are doing QA and taking screenshots on a regular basis, you’d save yourself some time in the long run to go ahead and install a decent screen capture utility.

Anyway, I did a little searching to see if I could find a way to extract the images from the doc file and view that in the browser. I found a suggestion on how to convert the file into a viewable format using wvWare and then open that in Firefox, on Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I’m kinda stuck on Windows at work so I’ve had to adapt the process. It turned out to be surprisingly easy.

First, you need to download and install wvWare for Windows.

Then you create a batch file similar to this:

echo off
set tmp="C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp"
set dir="c:\program files\gnuwin32" %dir%\bin\wvWare -x %dir%\share\wv\wvHtml.xml %1 -d %tmp% > %1%.html
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" %1%.html

Make sure you adjust the second line to match the user name on your system. I set this up for Firefox but I imagine you could adjust it for other browsers as well.

Now, when Firefox attempts to open a Word doc, tell it to open it with your batch file instead of Word.

My first day riding the train to work from the new house and the trains break down! We were stuck in the City Place tunnel for at least half an hour. Every few minutes, the conductor would make an announcement: “Sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll be moving shortly.” After saying that a couple of times you might as well give up because you’re loosing all credibility. Eventually we make it to Pearl St. but have to take a bus and/or walk (in the rain) to get to the other side of downtown. I finally got to work about two hours late.

I ate a banana on the way to the train but I seriously need a snack. Get some tea, grab some quarters and head for the vending machine. Hmm, no animal crackers or peanut butter toast crackers. Maybe some mini-muffins would be good but I’m 5 cents short. Back to my desk to grab a nickel and try again. But the bloody machine won’t take my f’n nickel! Walk across the office again to get some more change and cram it all into the machine. As I’m leaving the break-room, muffins in hand, some guy asks “how’s it goin’?”. I just nod and walk away.