Don’t know how I missed it when it came in February, but here it is – absolutely fantastic and hilarious viral video clip titled “Sony releases new stupid piece of s%#$ that doesn’t f#$%ing work”. Must see! :)
07
Jul
09
Viral Marketing in Action
26
Jun
09
ClaroVision.NET Platform Videos
My company, Oy ClaroVision Ltd, has been developing a media center (how we understand and see it) since 2006. What you get is:
- Digital Television PVR Record up to 6 channels and watch one more simultaneously
- Photo Album Organize your photos in a way most convenient for you thanks to extensive support of playlists (and, of course, you can view your photos too!!! :)
- Music (including CD) Take control of your music collection thanks to playlists and CD-ripping function
- Video (including DVD) Watch and organize all your videos, including DVDs (Blu-ray coming)
- Web Browser Access exciting Internet services on the living room TV (it is not a walled-garden browser!)
- Videophone Stay in touch with your family and friends
It is networked, so you can access content stored on your home PC/server as well. The main accent was made on usability – whole thing is very uniform and is controlled using remote control’s arrows, OK, Menu, and Back buttons.
We reached the beta milestone some time ago, and now we are ready to go to the public with our product. Here are some demo videos (all of them have HD version, so they are a bit bandwidth-demanding for proper watching) that make it easier to understand what we are talking about. You can find these same videos on our completely revamped website together with more detailed information about the platform and our company. Your comments are very welcome!
40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets lists essential cheat sheets for the most common web technologies, including both client-side (e.g. HTML, XHTML, CSS, javascript, jQuery, etc.) and server-side (php, ASP.NET, etc.) markup and development.
19
Jun
09
Font Burner
Font Burner makes it possible for you to use new fonts on your website, even if the end user does not have your chosen font(s) on his computer. There is nothing to install, neither on your computer nor on the end user’s, and the thing is free. The archive of offered fonts is really big (more than 1000 fonts). Really cool!
The only caveat is that, as it is using sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, see more info) to change the fonts, it is likely rather impractical to use it for anything bigger than headings. Basically it hides the text and puts a Flash file in its place, and that Flash file is able to render the chosen font.
19
Jun
09
Iconfinder
Iconfinder is to icons what Google is to the web – a search engine.
Nice collections of tips:
03
Jun
09
YouTube XL
YouTube has released YouTube XL – a video portal targeting big screens, e.g. TVs, and offering no-mouse navigation (this navigation does not work perfectly though, at least at the time of writing).
While searching for a solution to DRM-related troubles with film2home.fi video on demand service (gosh! no wonder that VoD purchasing rate is abysmal over here!) I have bumped into a Windows Media Player: WMP mini FAQ – an absolutely great collection of remedies to all kinds of Windows Media Player problems. Did not manage to solve my (in fact, film2home’s) problem though… :)
31
May
09
Today’s Sites/Blogs
- TomasP.Net blog by Tomas Petricek, author of Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# (have not read this book yet, so no idea how good it is), features plenty of interesting information about functional programming in general, and in F# in particular.
The Top 10 steps to optimize data access in SQL Server article series at CodeProject, despite some mistakes and arguable things, is not that bad starter’s guide for the SQL Server optimization question:
- Part I: Use Indexing
- Part II: Re-factor TSQLs and Apply Best Practices
- Part III: Apply Advanced Indexing and Denormalization
- Part IV: Diagnose Database Performance Problems
- Part V: Optimize Database Files and Apply Partitioning (is on the way)
30
May
09
Security: Banned C Functions
memcpy() Is Going to Be Banned article at InfoQ talks about dangers of memcpy (and other memory/string related functions). Microsoft has more in-depth explanations as well as the list of Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Banned Function Calls at MSDN. Also available from Microsoft is banned.h header file that, once included, will produce warnings for all the banned functions. Alternatively one can use the /W4-C4996 compiler option.
12
Apr
09
iFolder
iFolder is an open source file synchonization and sharing solution (commercial license is available from Novell). The main difference from all other Internet file sharing solutions is that you can host it on your server and stay in full controll over the thing.
Adobe did something I think all other smart software companies should do – started Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional for unemployed developers program. The program is open worldwide and targets all unemployed developers.
01
Apr
09
WPF: Data Virtualization
WPF: Data Virtualization article at CodeProject shows a different approach to the data virtualization for WPF ItemsControls – a collection class providing data virtualization with large data sets.
01
Apr
09
Is IE8 Really Fat and Slow?
Is IE8 really fat and slow? While not using IE8 yet (our software depends on IE7, so have no choice), found that post good to know, as it seems this is quite a common problem with IE8.
03
Mar
09
Win32/C++ Resources
A “healthy set” of Win32 and C++-related links (related stuff, anyway):
- MVP Tips, Techniques, and Goodies by Joseph M. Newcomer has a lot of C++ and Win32 topics, covering all “gray” areas like asynchronous operations, synchronization, threading, memory leaks, optimizations, various Windows APIs, device drivers, etc. For example, there is An introduction to memory damage problems that goes thoroughly through the topic, or absolutely fantastic The n Habits of Highly Defective Windows Applications that nicely enumerates ugliest “no-no’s” one should avoid in his code if he wants to sleep well :)
- C++ In Action, book by Bartosz Milewski. Cool thing is that there is a web edition of the book. Additionally, on the C++ Resources page there is Windows API Tutorial, RSWL: Free Windows Library, and some other papers and presentations, including topics on Resource Management, something called auto_vector ;) , and rather interesting Dealing with Software Complexity presentation.
- Win32 samples has a lot of samples for Net*() APIs, as well as for LSA, NTFS streams, processes, security
02
Mar
09
Quince – UX Pattern Explorer
Found Quince – UX Pattern Explorer (UX stands for User Experience – a “modern” hype-replacement word for the now “old fashined” UI) some time ago and decided to save it. It is what it claims to be – the explorer of the user interface patterns. It is one of the few things that Infragistics ever got right, perhaps the only one.
02
Mar
09
“Bit Twiddling”
Needed to do some “weird” things recently that involved bit operations, e.g. to create masks with certain number of bits set. During my “research” I found few interesting places:
- Bit Twiddling Hacks – lots of snippets related to bit operations, e.g. counting, reversing, swapping, interleaving, testing, etc., etc., etc.
- Creating multiple numbers with certain number of bits set – this was the answer to my need, clean and simple
- Technical Interview Questions – has a lot of interesting topics, nicely categorized, although not all-encompassing, if comparing to the first link above
03
Feb
09
WPF: A Graph Control
WPF : A graph control by Sacha Barber at CodeProject is a very nice article showing how to build a graph control in WPF, in a very detailed and elaborated way. The control looks great, by the way :) .
26
Jan
09
Google AJAX API Playground
I am not using AJAX at this moment, but nevertheless Google’s AJAX API Playground looks quite interesting and can really simplify lives of AJAX developers.
07
Jan
09
browsershots.org
browsershots.org site helps to check your web page for browser compatibility by providing cross platform browser testing in form of taking screenshots of your web page in all kinds of browsers/OSes. It supports seemingly everything there is out there (main page has something like 100 checkboxes for various browsers) and you can customize all kinds of options like screen resolution, Java version, etc. It is a free service, but there is an option to get “priority lane” for money.
UPDATE Just found 10 Browser Testing Tools: Roundup for Web Designers by Bryan Connor – a nice collection of browser testers with short reviews.
06
Jan
09
CommitMonitor
CommitMonitor is a small footprint system tray tool that monitors Subversion repositories for new commits. I think it is the best utility in this category – IMHO much better than SVN Notifier.
There are a few more interesting tools by same author on his Stefan’s tools site, including FavIconizer that can scan all your favarites’ links and updates websites’ FavIcons, grepWin – a simple search and replace shell-integrated tool supporting regular expressions, StExBar that provides useful extra commands for Windows explorer (my favorite is ability to rename multiple files using regular expressions; you can add custom commands to it), and DemoHelper – an annotation and screen zoom tool you can use for technical presentations that include application demonstrations.
Shit! I have already once posted about problems with Acrobat Reader. And, here it comes again! I am really tired of getting stupid “The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running cannot be used to view PDF files in a web browser. Adobe Acrobat/Reader version 8 or 9 is required. Please exit and try again.” message almost (almost, but not always) every time I try to open PDF document from some web site. Both solutions I found suck big time:
- Uninstall Acrobat Reader 9 and install version 8
- Go to Edit > Preferences > Internet and clear Display PDF in browser checkbox (this is the one I am using now)
This problem is known to Adobe, but ignored by them for more than half a year. Boooooo…
31
Dec
08
CHDK: Canon PowerShot++
We were looking into supporting RAW images in our product, and purely by accident I bumped into CHDK (the name stands for Canon Hack Development Kit). It is a free firmware addon for Canon PowerShot cameras, enabling/adding many cool features, e.g. recording 10-bit/color RAW files (including experimental support for the open DNG standard), overriding camera parameters, bracketing for exposure, aperture, ISO, and focus, controlling video quality/bitrate, scripting, motion detection, live histogram, etc., etc., etc. Will definitely try it out as soon as will get some free time, but people are very excited about it. The risk is minimal, as it is not overriding the original firmware, but rather loading these extra goodies from the SD card.
27
Dec
08
How to Debug Crashes and Hangs
How to Debug Crashes and Hangs article by Kirill Osenkov [MSFT] summarizes useful things about debugging in Visual Studio.
