Wednesday, October 17. 2007
Since the Silverlight 1.0 SDK only includes a template project for the non free editions of Visual Studio 2005, and since the 2008 version is still a beta (probably until early next year), I decided to create s imple template for the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition.
It's a very simple template which creates an empty web page with a silverlight applet printing the typical Hello, World! You'll still have to modify by hand the scripts on the js files if you want to change the XAML file names, but it's better than nothing.
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition isn't very XAML and Silverlight aware anyway, so you won't have any kind of editing help with those files. Let's hope Microsoft will decide to release the final 2008 version soon!
You can grab the template here: Silverlight Project Template for Visual Studio 2005 Express.
Sunday, September 23. 2007
This week we had a bug report of one of our products regarding some strange deadlocks in our database access. For those of you who don't know what a deadlock is, I'll try to summarize here what a transaction is in a relational database environment and why those transactions might lead to those nasty errors, and try to explain what was causing this deadlock in our SQL Server 2005 engine.
Continue reading "Repeatable read and deadlocks in SQL Server"
Saturday, September 8. 2007
Well, this is my first post after holidays and it won't be very long.
Imagine you are developing a rails application. Usually you have:
- a terminal with the server to see what petitions are received.
- a terminal with a tail of development.log to see what happens with the database.
- a terminal with a tail of test.log if you are testing something.
This are a lot of windows... And the other day one friends was very happy and after asking for a while I discovered that the reason was the simple line showed above... With only one Ctrl+C you can kill all this processes
Code (bash) script/server & tail -f log/development.log & tail -f log/ test.log & tail -f ; jobs -p | awk '{print "kill -2 " $0}' | sh
Wednesday, September 5. 2007
Finally I have added support for PowerPC Mac OS users. It will still need some more testing, tough.
You can find the download packages at the Sourceforge site. You can also visit the forums to get support and report bugs or make suggestions.
Some little bugs were corrected and now the ISO sizes is also shown.
Monday, September 3. 2007
One day and the first bugs have appeared
You can find the download packages at the Sourceforge site. You can also visit the forums to get support and report bugs or make suggestions.
I've also added more debug statements to the code and a Windows version which will output debug messages to a DOS window, helping me in the process of knowing where the program might crash.
Sunday, September 2. 2007
I'm proud to announce a new release of QPSPManager!
This is a major release, it has support for Linux, Mac OS X (Intel only at the moment) and Windows! And it has the long awaited Video Conversion feature (better late than sorry).
You can find the download packages at the Sourceforge site. You can also visit the forums to get support and report bugs or make suggestions.
Stay tuned for new releases in the next weeks!
Tuesday, August 14. 2007
Yes, I know we haven't been active this days but... we are in holidays! Well.. not exactly holidays but it seems that there are some interesting things to do in summer more attractive than playing with the computer.
I don't believe I had said this...
Sunday, July 29. 2007
One of the deficiencies of actual programming languages, specially those ones still widely used that are old, such as C or C++, is that they were designed having in mind the sequential programming paradigm. This usually means that those languages don't have standard ways to work with multithreading features, and you usually have to rely on third party libraries to develop thread safe software.
Today I'll be discussing a design pattern called Double Check, which can be widely used to manage the resource access, elimination and initialization in a safe thread way.
Continue reading "The Double Check Design Pattern"
Friday, July 27. 2007
Maybe one of the best ways to learn a new programming language is playing with it. Nowadays if you don't code in Ruby you aren't cool. I have to recognize that programming in Ruby is funnier than in other language and for the moment I don't have anything bad to say about it.
Well, I want to introduce Ruby Quiz. It is a collection of minigames prepared to learn Ruby (or to improve your skills). Every week they publish one game, and if you are brave you can send your solution to them and it will be public. I think it's one of the best ways to learn because you can compare solutions and find were you are weak in Ruby and redo your solution doing it smarter.
Monday, July 16. 2007
This morning I was working on a project at work. It's a Web Application using the ASP .NET 2.0 framework and C# as a code behind language. My friend Ioannis came over to see what was I doing and when he saw I was appending some strings together he asked me this question: "are you using a StringBuilder to use those strings?". And I replied with this answer: "no, I am not". This kind of stupid dialog came over because last week we were discussing about using StringBuilders instead of the default String class operators to append strings each other in Java. It seemed using the StringBuilder class resulted in an overall performance gain. It was then when I asked: "don't tell me this happens with C#, too?". And he answered: "yes, it does!".
So, what's the matter with StringBuilders in C#?
Continue reading "C# and the StringBuilder class"
Tuesday, July 10. 2007
As a Linux fan I am, I am waiting to see when the explosion of desktop linux arrives. But now I began to be tired of this endless wait. I know that desktop area has been always the pending subject of linux but since I am a linux user I heard some encouraging news almost every year.
In case you don't believe me I have collected some links:
Some days ago we showed how to subversion a rails application, now is the time to show a new killer app! Warehouse has just been released and it is a new subversion browser made in rails!
As they say Finally, A Web-based subversion browser that doesn't suck. I haven't had the opportunity to try it but I have it in mind for the near future. It costs 30$ and there is a demo available to try it online. The only con I see is that isn't free software but nobody is perfect!
Monday, July 9. 2007
Nowadays computers still can't pass the Turing Test (but some researchs show that they will pass it at 2029) , well, there are still some humans that can't. But they have achieved to pass some captcha images.
Continue reading "The madness of captchas"
Sunday, July 8. 2007
Suppose you have an iPod. Now suppose your music library size is by far bigger than your iPod memory. This is not an unusual situation, specially if your iPod is a Shuffle, Mini or Nano version, since the ones able to play videos usually have much more memory.
Now suppose you're a busy person or simply don't have the time to select what music you'll want to hear every morning before going to work, so sitting in front of your iTunes program and selecting what you thing you're in the mood to hear is out of the question. But of course, the chances you want to listen to different music from yesterday is high. And because you are a pragmatic geek, you're trying to find a way to perfectly update your iPod music to fit your needs automatically.
Smart playlists come to the rescue!
Continue reading "Managing the music between iTunes and the iPod"
Saturday, July 7. 2007
The 2007 E3 is coming this week and I'm reading at The Magic Box that the PS3 sales continue being simply disastrous (specially in Japan).
Well, I'm sure the extremely high price is the one to blame right now, but to be honest, no killer games have been developed for the Playstation 3, or at least, there's none that I want to play right now. Specially considering the price of the console.
This year's E3 is coming this week (and we hope to have it covered a litthe here in Think in Geek) and for Sony's sake, they better have something really nice to show up or they'll continue selling like shit everywhere.
Those are the numbers in Japan:
- NDS Lite - 157,435 [3,969,227] units
- Wii - 73,919 [1,954,752] units
- PSP - 38,305 [1,083,147] units
- PlayStation 2 - 16,316 [420,373] units
- PlayStation 3 - 11,914 [492,931] units
- Xbox 360 - 3,154 [118,583] units
And this means basically two things: one is that Nintendo rocks, and the other is that Sony sucks. They are even selling more Playstation 2 than new Playstation 3 consoles.
And the best part of it is that rumors about a price drop have been denied from Sony itself in USA, even tough more than one big videogame shop in the States have already anounced discounts from $100 to $200. One thing is clear: the strategy of a mega media center and multipurpose expensive machine has not been well received in the videogame market, and the idea of a console just to play has (you just have to look at the numbers from Nintendo and Sony sales this year).
Sony has clearly abused of its name, people is no longer willing to buy anything at any price just because it has the Sony and Playstation logos on it. So they better start showing something really funny or spectacular to play with, or the rumors of a price drop won't be rumors, they'll be just a must.
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Comments
Thu, 06.09.2007 08:20
Wow! That's amazing!
Sat, 18.08.2007 13:16
By the way I'm working on QPSP Manager 2.0, I hope to have a minimal version working for th e next week, and start a [...]
Sat, 18.08.2007 13:12
Ok, I am the one who is withou t internet connection so I can only write when my neighbour opens the wifi, and you, [...]