Making it happen
Archive for December, 2006
Ever Wondered What’s This ?
Dec 22nd
Well, I’ve solved the mystery: It’s a ferrite bead and it’s there for reducing / suppressing RF interference. Buy from here if you don’t have one.
Menu Window class
Dec 19th
Did you know that menus are windows actually ? Sometimes (especially when explorer is laggy) you may end up with a modeless visible menu – active on screen but not disappearing when clicking away of it.
Inspecting it with Spy++ reveals that the menu is nothing more than a normal window, having the #32768 (PopupMenu) class:
Microsoft Empower for ISVs
Dec 13th
Here’s a great deal: one MSDN Premium Subscription Media Kit and five user licenses at the membership fee of US$375.
Designed
to help you succeed when developing software on the Microsoft platform,
Empower for ISVs is a one-year membership with an opportunity to renew
for a second year, and it’s only available once per company
to help you succeed when developing software on the Microsoft platform,
Empower for ISVs is a one-year membership with an opportunity to renew
for a second year, and it’s only available once per company
Outlook 2007 reading pane
Dec 12th
Outlook 2007 renders e-mails with Microsoft Word rather than with Internet Explorer – you try using Spy++ to inspect the window class of the reading pane. While for Outlook 2003 it is Internet Explorer_Server, the new version has a _WwG class there.
Not only that, if you select a picture in the reading pane it shows the Word handles – you can even try to rotate it:
Not sure if Word is more secure than Internet Explorer 7 though 
Therion goes classic!
Dec 10th
Oh well, it was incredible! To my knowledge, no gothic band has ever performed along with two choirs, sopranos and a complete orchestra! Although I’m not sure how much the Romanian orchestra did like Therion’s music, they performed excellent!
Here’s a picture, credits go to Flavia:
Symbian send application via Bluetooth
Dec 7th
A very useful application for Symbian-based mobile phones must display a list of install Java apps and let the user send them via Bluetooth to nearby mobile phones. It’s well-known that FExplorer doesn’t allow this. Now I’m pretty sure that it’s the operating system that stops this – I will investigate and eventually start writing it.
CPU quota per process ?
Dec 6th
I so wish an application to control the CPU usage per process – Linux has it I’m almost sure. For the Windows task scheduler this shouldn’t be much different from the priorities handling. As a side idea – CPU usage per user would be useful also.
N73 bug
Dec 5th
There’s an issue on N73 (or maybe on all S60 3rd edition smartphones?) in the J2ME implementation – the midlet crashes / exits if someone adds a command with a lengthy label set.
Nokia’s future ?
Dec 5th
Nokia
is doing great, and I am a big fan of them. However I disagree with their
direction – they should launch fewer phones but with more personality (exactly
what they were doing in 2001-2002). The bunch of products available now lacks
style and individuality.
Instead of enforcing a standard look on all phones (even across S40 and S60) I
would definitely appreciate having exquisite functions and themes. Ok, the
fashion models have unique themes but that’s it. The same is to be said for
hardware features – it would be interesting to have ‘exotic’ components, at
least in some of their phones (hard drive and optical zoom are fine but still
not cool enough).
As
for the form factors – there is still room for out of the ordinary ones. People were expecting a lot from both the fashion models and 8800 and were disappointed to some extent.
My kind of project ideas ?
Dec 4th
- Somewhat hard to develop so the majority of people can’t do it but easy enough so I can get it quickly working
- Not requiring maintenance and further changes
- Cool enough to generate hype
- Painless implementation by leveraging existing mainstream technologies
