Now-a-days everybody has a Multi-core environment and you are required to code threads and/or multiple processes to be scalable and fully utilize the current hardware systems. And yes, it also proves that you are a good coder and are keeping up and committed to development of multi-threaded, multi-core applications. Now, now, I am talking a bit silly since threading is a concept existing since the dawn of computing. It was pretty much explicit and you can feel the power when you code in C or C++. But when it comes to high level frameworks and languages like .NET, C#, VB.NET, etc. the simplicity of using threads might become a big problem and lead to no understanding of how things actually operate. Of course execution context is something to learn about and a good programmer should always be aware of what execution context his/her thread/process is executing in otherwise he/she would find himself/herself in a lot of problems related to thread synchronization, deadlocks, etc.

As I am working a lot with .NET these days, I was looking for some .NET obfuscators along with their license types, features, URLs, etc. I got a link to a nice URL which gives all the Info at: http://www.csharp411.com/net-obfuscators/

Enjoy & have fun computing…

I was developing a program which allows me to take a bunch of HTML files and put it into a single document. These files need to be put in as rendered in IE and the HTML code tags should not be visible. Still all the links, etc. should be along in the document so generated. Manual way to do it would be to open the HTML files one by one in Internet Explorer or any other browser, press CTRL+A, then CTRL+C, open the word document, go to End of File (EOF) and then press CTRL+V. One of the questions is the use case. Why would I need to do something like this?

Recently I had been working on a program to get a set of HTML files rendered in IE and then copy the contents from the IE window to a word document. I wanted to do this in VC++ since it provides very easy access to COM objects like IE, Word, etc. and I have also used it in the past to build BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and like. VB also supports COM but usually has pretty complex procedures to do minor things. And I forgot about .NET and the wrapper libraries around COM objects which provides very easy access. If I want to do something like that I would better use C# instead. But as it goes, I started coding in VC++. The basic logic of the code is as follows:

I was writing a small piece of code for Windows Mobile in C# and wanted to use GetKeyboardState() but after a lot of searching around found out that the API is not available. Also Mouse Hooks does not work in Windows Mobile. As simple as this information seems, it took me a lot of time to search and basically validate that information. Of course the various ideas and blog posts out there are pretty confusing and does not allow you to reach to a conclusion easily.

Last night I watched the movie District 9 (D9) and I was positively happy to have invested my time in watching the movie. It deals with quite a lot of issues about human kind, its so called humanity and the plights of so called aliens. In one form or another it shows the fight that exists between one so called well to do community and another. When the story is applied in another context we  see the same behavior repeated across various factions of the world and society in general.

Sorry to pick on IPhone but I hate cults and iPhone users are one such followers of the cult. Also known as Steve Jobs cult. I think he is a good man but as with all good man, wants to start his own religion ;)

Anyways, the latest in iPhone is Exploding iPhones. Look at the link below:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Exploding-iPhones-Are-Latest-Headache-for-Apple-618978/?kc=EWKNLNAV08202009STR4

Now the best part is the EU is giving comments and getting involved into such allegations. I hope they give a kick in Steve Job’s A** as they did with Microsoft. iPhone also has issues with applications such as GV, google voice, etc. and again they do not have a policy of how to accept and reject applications. They do it on their own whim like a dictator and that is what I hate the most about it.

It has been a long time that I did any batch programming in Windows (almost 10-12 years). Didn’t find a need for it. But with Windows Vista, I wanted to toggle my power schemes based on whether my baby was watching some videos in youtube or not. I generally want my monitor to turn off in a minute if nothing is happening. At the same time if youtube, etc. is running then the monitor should stay on. I created a power scheme for both these functionalities. Only problem was that I had to follow a long procedure to toggle between them. Right click on my desktop, click Personalize, select Screen Saver, click on Power settings and then the schemes would be visible. And Windows Vista is so good that it hides your most recently used power schemes. So you have to click on the down arrow and select the scheme that you want. Of course you need to close all the windows as well.