Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Bill Gates!

Such an amazing person!

I didn't know, He published a paper with an University of california professor

www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/papers/Bounds%20For%20Sorting%20By%20Prefix%20Reversal.pdf

He is such an awe-inspiring combination of nerd and exceptional enterpreneur!

And to top it all, he is really humane! I have heard so many stories of his effort lighting so many people's lives!

May be I should add a link to his article in wikipedia in case you are lazy!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_gates

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Resharper

If you program in C# this is a must have add-in for Visual studio.

It has intelligent intellisense and 'goto a class', 'code generation' and saves a lot of time. It has nice refactoring as well as unit testing integration.
You never get a compile error and gives you so many suggestions which are small but add up, like 'make a field read only', 'delegate doesn't require parameters' etc.

ReSharper:: The Most Intelligent Add-In To Visual Studio

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

public restrooms in San francisco

Well, this topic might sound funny ...
...till you actually end up in the "dreaded" situation [of hurriedly hunting for one!]

It happened to me in San Francisco yesterday night!

I had to really really search for it and couldn't find one! I had some luck left to not be publicly embarassed till I reached the home from Market st to Greenwich st!

So this link should help you now:

http://www.thebathroomdiaries.com/usa/california/san+francisco.html

Friday, July 20, 2007

Locked out of bathroom!

Today at 2 am, I was locked out of bathroom!

Of all things, I looked in the net for help! Sure enough it was there!

In standard bathroom locks in US, there is a hole in the lock. You insert a small hard object like a nail into the hole and the door opens.

Of course I searched for a nail or nail like object. I found ear buds. I cut off the front part and used it to open the lock! voila! It opened!

This is the link I followed:
Locksmithing: Locked out of bathroom

XML diff and applying delta

There is a nice XML diff and applying diffgram to original doc. tool at:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/xml/patch/1.0/wxp/en-us/xmldiffpatch.exe

You can read more about this tool at:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302294.aspx

Sunday, July 15, 2007

looking inside library (.lib) file

If you want to see what functions are exported by a library use:
dumpbin.exe which comes with visual studio.
e.g.
dumpbin /symbols /exports kernel32.lib

it is particularly useful when you get link errors. I made the mistake of calling a stdcall function with cdecl convention and got linker error for unknown symbol. When I looked inside the library, I realized the error.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

seconds in decade!

Google search as well as live search has a nice feature where you can enter
equations like 72*34 or e ^ -2 which will return the answer.

In fact Google goes one step further. It even handles queries like "seconds in decade", 70 farenheit" [which I need all the time, because I don't have any feeling for farenheit!]. Seconds in decade didn't work in live search.