Find Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows here: http://www.hanselman.com/tools Who is Scott Hanselman eh? Err.. I don't really know but the tools that he lists I know (well, some of them at least)! From his top 10 life/work changing…
I read an interesting article the other day that spoke about the various mechanisms a Win32 application can employ for deleting itself from the disk once execution completes. The basic issue is of course that while the module is being executed the operating system has the file locked. So something…
There was a small article writing contest in the company that I work for to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Indian independence. Two entries were selected as winners; one by yours truly and another by a colleague. We were asked to write what in our opinion was the single most…
Vendors of "free" software programs have started getting into this annoying habit of forcing updates down users throats these days! The sad thing is that these updates aren't updates in the traditional sense of the word; they just make you re-download the entire software again! The funny thing is that…
I have been dabbling with a bit of 3D graphics programming for the last couple of days; trying my hand at exporting models designed using the free 3D modelling software Blender and getting them rendered using OpenGL. Blender supports a Python based scripting system where pretty much everything in Blender…
I happened to install the 64 bit edition of Fedora Core 5 on my computer a few days back. Here's a log of all that transpired during that time before I could finally wipe the sweat off my forehead, heave a sigh of quiet satisfaction and watch GNOME load in…
There were some interesting Unicode related issues that cropped up recently in the project that I am working on that led to my doing a little research into what the fuss around unicode was all about. While I had some understanding of what Unicode was, there were a few things…
Terrorists must be some of the dumbest people on the planet to believe that terror can somehow further their cause. I wonder if in all of history there has ever been a case where terror resulted in something positive for the terrorists. End of day such acts only contribute to…
I ran into an interesting little issue at work the other day. There is this program that I am working on which happens to embed Office documents into a browser control hosted in a CHtmlView derived view window (that's right, we use MFC). The requirement was to popup a little…
If you've been compiling projects created using earlier versions of VisualStudio in VisualStudio 2005 then you have most certainly noticed the new security warnings that get displayed whenever an in-secure CRT routine is invoked from your code. If you call strcpy for instance, you'd see this: warning C4996: 'strcpy' was…
The Windows NTFS file system has for a long long time included support for what is known as "streams". The idea is to view a file as being a container for 1 or more data streams. Security information for a file for instance could be stored in stream A and…
Matt Pietrek has written a nice new article on MSDN about everything that you need to know to get started writing applications for 64-bit versions of Windows - otherwise known as x64. It is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/05/x64/default.aspx For your quick…
4 little babies of this animal were found in the attic of my home in Palakkad, Kerala. Cool eh? I am not sure what its called in English. The Malayalam name for this is merugu. …
I don't particularly mind dealing with bugs as long as they are interesting to fix and you learn something along the way. I was not always so well disposed towards them though. It is only after reading Debugging Applicationsby John Robbinsthat I realized how much fun fixing bugs can be…
The following is a link to an open source pre-processor program for Java: http://jappo.opensourcefinland.org/ I think it is shockingly short-sighted on the part of Sun developers that they are so obstinately refusing to include a pre-processor with the Java compiler. While MACROs are admittedly the source of…
The nerd is pleased to anounce the general availability of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) on Nerdworks Blogorama! Muaha! ha! ha! ha! Please use the link pointed at by the orange button on the right hand side of your screen in your favourite RSS feed reader. A screen shot of what…
The February edition of the Chip India magazine (the dead trees version that is) reports that the United States Department of Defense now has a tool that let's them remotely detect whether somebody is lying! The Remote Personnel Assistance (RPA) will apparently be used as a "remote or concealed lie…
I am currently working on an online e-learning/collaboration tool that features all the bells and whistles that one would normally expect of such a tool. The basic functioning of the application is fairly straightforward in that it let's a presenter collaborate with a set of participants by passing messages…
Google has launched a free 3D modelling software called SketchUp that lets you quickly create 3D models - a la dummies version of 3D Studio Max. As with most software coming out of Google stables SketchUp is also delightfully simple to use. There's a free and a pro version (that…
Hallelujah! The Nerdworks Blog is finally underway! Phew! I would like to say that this blog is a culmination of years of hard grinding work, only, it isn't. It actually took me 2 days to put everything together (and maybe another 1 day hunting around for a good ASP.NET…