Making it happen
Archive for April, 2006
Major OLE changes
Apr 28th
OLE was just revamped 
– a technology more than 10 years old. Having some memory problems with links (OleLoad/OleSave were throwing E_OUTOFMEMORY even if there was a lot of memory available) – I have not only changed the preferred format from metafiles to bitmaps (with dpi info on top) but also compressed the cached presentation to PNG format for much smaller files on the disk.
Unbelievable VS2005 add-in
Apr 27th
This add-in automatically generates comments in your code, like:
///
/// Return true/false if the command is undoable or not
///
///
public abstract bool Undoable
{
Microsoft patent
Apr 27th
Microsoft has a patent for their crap OLE cache stuff – like someone would steal their “invention” when designing an operating system .
InstallShield
Apr 26th
I promise this is my last post that is related to various bugs that I encounter – my blog should not become a knowledge base . If you ever find InstallShield Express to suddenly change the extension of files during compiling the setup (exe – exe2, dll – dll2), the ise file is broken. You’ll have to re-insert the files again in the kit (this is related also to changing the file paths from relative to the project folder to absolute).
3D object symmetry axis
Apr 25th
The easiest way to do it is take the farthest vertices and draw a perpendicular on them. This is very effective and I found it runs much better than having for example 5 of the farthest segments and averaging their direction (for having a better aproximate of the “farthest points” axis).
SQL Auto-completion
Apr 19th
It’s strange that, after they have implemented the best auto-completion ever in Visual Studio, Microsoft didn’t bother to have the same functionality in SQL Server Management Studio / Query Analyzer 
.
BirdSpot
Apr 18th
… is our project for Windows Challenge. The final report is unexpectedly good, with me being in charge of the image processing part – lots of work to do but it ended very nice.
The BirdSpot system automatically detects, identifies and classifies bird species based on visual information in order to determine the evolution of the population density of distinct species in a designated area.
It’s the avian flu that we are trying to stop spreading (!) with BirdSpot .
.NET 2.0 Exception
Apr 6th
All sample code I’ve downloaded, written in C# for .NET 1.1 and using Windows Forms, have thrown this at runtime:
Cross-thread operation not valid Control ‘ctrl’ accessed from a thread other than the thread it was created on.
After searching it I found out that cross-thread form/control calls were stated “to be avoided” in the .NET 1.1 docs. Still – why wasn’t this respected at all ?
Deftones will concert in Romania
Apr 5th
OpenGL draw object with single (constant) color
Apr 5th
I’ve achieved this using two passes, the first one with glLogicOp( GL_SET) and GL_COLOR_LOGIC_OP (to output a full white image) and another pass with glBlendFunc( GL_ZERO, GL_CONSTANT_COLOR) to blend a constant color over the already white background.
