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.

Euclids algo is a nice one to find out the lowest common divisor for 2 given positive integers. I am once again going through Donald Knuth just for fun. Enjoy talking about it and posting your own suggestions / code on the following URL. You can also find my intial code on that link.

http://www.naresh.se/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5

Will keep posting and give you more of this useless (in terms that it does not help me in my daily work and probably will not help you as well, unless you are mathemacian but then you probably have more advanced libraries to carry out such stuff hence I am convinced that it is totally useless) albeit fun stuff.

I was trying to upload some photos to picasaweb and thought of doing it via google chrome this time. They would definitely have tested that site with Chrome and would make it better then the one in IE. Guess what, I can upload only 5 files at a time using Google Chrome. i.e. Chrome does not have support for extra addons / BHOs (browser helper objects) that IE or other browser has. So one gets reduced functionality with a reduced browser interface as well.

Referring to my article External hard drives not working in Vista! I did some more research and invested a lot of time googling and binging and finally found some reasons as to why the external hard drives were not working in Vista. One of the reasons was Vista itself. Well, I had to download and install the SP1 update to get some better configured USB drivers for Vista. I also had to apply the Cummulative update for USB core devices on Vista.