Awesome photos of Colourful India.
Feb 02 2010
Interesting Find #19
Wow it has been a while since I posted an Interesting find and instead of the usual list I though I will keep this especially for timers. Timers Galore!
So I was looking for a simple countdown timer that I can run on my laptop to keep tracking of a few things and I found a few very interesting things.
If you prefer to download an app and run it from your desktop (Windows) then check out Timer from Orzeszek. There are a few other interesting dev projects there such as transferring large files over http.
If Windows is not your flavour of the day, or you don’t want to (or can’t) install an application and want to use a timer in a browser you can of course use something like online stop watch, but I suggest you check out e.ggtimer.com which is way cooler.
If you are like me and when running meetings or presenting tend to get too excited and run over, then maybe NextUp is the thing for you.
And if coffee is your not cup of tea (groan! 
) then check out Steep.It which is claims to be the simplest internet tea timer ever – telling you how long to steep your tea to get your perfect cuppa.
And if you are old school and prefer .ini files (whoa! programs still use that?) then check out eggtimer.
Jan 31 2010
Thinking of a new WHS device/machine
Not sure how many of you know, but I run my WHS on a old Dell Desktop (its about 8ish years old) which ran out of available USB ports sometime back and all my attached drives are also filling up and I am now running low on space. I was thinking of getting a dedicated WHS device/machine (not sure what to call it), such as HP’s MediaSmart Server or Acer’s easyStore.
Does anyone know any details of the next version of WHS (based on Win7)? When is it coming out, etc? If it is in a few months then I can hang on and clean up some space and make do. If it is in another year or so then that it too long to wait and I will probably go ahead and look to get something. Any ideas anyone?
Update: How eerie? Soon after posting this I find (via Twitter) this post from Mary-Jo talking about the next version of WHS codenamed ‘Vail’ is leaked. You can find screen shot here and a short video here. There is no mention of any time-lines though – any ideas?
Jan 31 2010
Geeky Joke #1
I am going to start posting the geeky jokes I find as a series. These are more for me to make them easy to find, as I cannot seem to recall any of them when I need to. Here is the first one which I also tweeted:
Yo mama’s so slow and dumb that she can be emulated on a 286.
Jan 24 2010
Win 3.1 experience in your browser
If you ever wanted a Win 3.1 experience in your broswer (why I cannot imagine – despite me running a VM), then check out michaelv.org. The irony of all of this is that there is a modern browser in that which seems to be compliant with the standards (it pases the ACID2 tests; fails the ACID3). 
Jan 23 2010
Copying strings in C++
Here is a good example on why either you love C++ or hate it with such terse expression oriented code; I think its pretty cool.
If you want to copy one string to another, one option can be something like this.
void mycopy(char *p, char *q) {
int len = strlen(q);
for(int i=0; i<=len; i++)
p[i] = q[i];
}
However this achieves the same thing as above and is more efficient:
void mycopy(char *p, char *q) {
while(*p++ = *q++);
}
Of course why would you write your own version when you have standard string copy fundtion strcpy in <string.h>
Jan 13 2010
Qt Eclipse Integration
If you are working in CDT and Qt then the Qt Eclipse Integration is quite handy and in my opinion much better than using the standalone Qt designer. Installation is pretty straight forward as described here.
Jan 11 2010
A Song of Silicon Valley
Ah, this brings back fond memories of my time in the valley – awesome!
Credit goes to this post of the NY Times.
Jan 10 2010
Permalinks don’t support quotes?
I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug or a configuration issue either with WordPress itself or how the web server is configured where this blog is hosted. I just posted something about compiler errors where the permalink had a single quotes in its title like : ‘qpainter-painter’-has-initialiser-but-incomplete-type. While this was handled fine by WordPress (I could successfully preview the post as well), once it was published I got the generic 500 Internal Server Error as shown below. So the question is what is wrong (if anything)? What is the expected behaviour? The only way for me to fix it was by removing the single quote in the permalinks as now you can see in the post.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, [email-address-removed] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Jan 10 2010
‘QPainter painter’ has initialiser but incomplete type
If you ever got an error something like [some-class] has initialiser but incomplete type, it basically means the compiler cannot understand the type and you need to add the include for it.
QPixmap pixmap(20,10); pixmap.fill(Qt::white); QPainter painter(&pixmap); QPen pen(Qt::blue);
Take the code snipped above when you compile it you might get an error something along the lines of the following for line 4.
‘QPainter painter’ has initialiser but incomplete type
To fix this you need to include the header file where QPainter is defined. The updated code looks like:
#include <qpainter.h> QPixmap pixmap(20,10); pixmap.fill(Qt::white); QPainter painter(&pixmap); QPen pen(Qt::blue);
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