Background

Off and on for the last year or two, I’ve been intrigued by the simple UI idioms exploited by Quicksilver for MacOX X to enable fast, intuitive, and flexible access to the information and tools on one’s own machine and across the network.

I keep meaning to implement something similar for the PC (no, I don’t think AppRocket or Launchy even begin to approach Quicksilver’s coolness), but of course I keep getting distracted. At any rate, one of the most intriguing problems that I would need to solve in order to implement QS on the PC is the abbreviation matching algorithm.

In Quicksilver, you can select items from its catalog (the files and apps it found on your machine) by typing their names in a window that appears when you press a hotkey.

In my spare time here in Baghdad I’ve been playing around more with SQLite, my favorite lightweight open-source database engine. I wanted to generate some data access objects using CodeSmith, but unfortunately CodeSmith can’t use the generic GetSchema() functionality in ADO.NET 2.0.

Instead, CodeSmith has its own chinsy provider model to expose schema information from a database system for the purposes of code generation based on that schema. It ships with SQL Server and ADOX support, and leaves the remaining database systems as exercises to an intrepid reader.