Entrian Solutions
 

Archive for February, 2009

Entrian Source Search 1.2.2 is now available

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 by Richie Hindle

1.2.2 comes with these enhancements:

  • Search results for .rc, .rc2 and .manifest files are now syntax highlighted.
  • Hits in files with very long lines (many thousands of characters) now display properly in the search results.
  • The “Share another solution’s index” menu now puts the solution for which an index was created above those that are sharing it (thanks, Dan).
  • If you have two Visual Studios running when your trial period expires, and you buy a license key and paste the key into one of them, the other will automatically pick up the new key (thanks, Andrew).
  • When an unquoted phrase ends with punctuation then an asterisk, eg. ClassName::*, Source Search no longer searches for a literal asterisk but instead does what you almost certainly meant.  You need to double-quote the phrase to really search for asterisks.  (Thanks, Dan.)
  • Fixed a bug whereby Source Search could crash if another process had an exclusive lock on a directory that Source Search wanted to index (thanks, Sebastian).
  • Fixed a bug when trying to connect to a deleted index (thanks, Dan).
  • Fixed a bug whereby a file could be added to the index twice, and cause a crash when it appeared in the search results (thanks, Dan).
  • Multi-megabyte source files no longer take huge amounts of RAM to index (thanks, Roel).
  • Source Search now copes better if your PC runs out of disk space.

Download from the usual place.

Spell checking entrian.com with Spellr.us

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 by Richie Hindle

I recently noticed a spelling mistake in one of my blog postings.  Yikes!  For a committed spelling geek like me, that’s really really bad! How did it happen?  I blame GMail.  For a time, GMail was making my Firefox crash.  So I switched to IE for a bit, and IE’s <textarea> doesn’t have a built-in spell checker like Firefox does.  Good grief – for my last few blog postings I’d been un-spell-checked without knowing it.

So I needed an online spell checker, and quick.  Spellr.us came to my rescue.  It’s very easy to use, and does everything I wanted:

  • One-off on-demand checks
  • Regular scheduled checks
  • RSS feed of new spelling errors
  • Custom dictionaries, that you can populate from the list of unknown words on your site
  • The ability to exclude areas from spell checking (eg.  blog comments, though I reserve the right to correct your spelling anyway 🙂 )

And as an unexpected bonus, it will even show you your pages with the spelling errors highlighted – very nice indeed.

Update: At the time of writing, Spellr hadn’t announced their pricing.  They now have.  Their free plan scans 20 pages 5 times a month with no scheduling and no RSS.  Their cheapest monthly plan is $24 and scans 1,000 pages 10 times a month with no RSS.  To get what I’d consider a sensible minimal service, daily scans with RSS, you need to spend $47 a month.

Too rich for my blood.  This might be one of those vanishingly rare cases where a software developer looks at the price of something, says “I could do it cheaper myself”, and is actually right.