Thursday, June 17, 2010

Divide by Zero Error

You'd think programmers would catch all those silly Divide by Zero Error errors nowadays, guess not:
Divide by Zero Error causes BSOD in Windows trying to print!

Friday, March 5, 2010

Apple discounts Mac Developer Program subscription to $99

It looks like we now know why Apple's ADC website was down yesterday smile
Apple discounts Mac Developer Program subscription to $99
Apple this week slashed hundreds -- and in some cases thousands -- of dollars from the cost of its Mac Developer Program annual subscription, which now carries a flat fee of $99 per year.

Previously, developers had to pay between $499 for the "Select" tier and $3,499 for the "Premier" categorization. The newly revamped Mac Developer Program is modeled after Apple's wildly successful iPhone Developer program, and offers technical resources, support and more.

Now the ball is in Microsoft's court and up to them to match Apple. Currently Microsoft cheapest offering in comparison is over $1000!
Compare MSDN and Expression Subscriptions

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Xcode: How to Change the Company Name

No need to use the command line to do this.
It's a lot easier than I"ve seen done in several books.
Just change the Company field on your Address Book Card

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Masterminds of programming

great quote from the book:
from one of the creators of Objective-C (Brad Cox):

Why is computer science not a real science?

Brad: Each time you encounter a new piece of software, you encounter something completely new and unique. How can you have a science where everything is unique?
... See More
If you study gold or lead from day to day, you can measure the properties and employ scientific methods to study them. With software, there is none of that.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Programmer Competency Matrix

Stuff that you should know as a programmer but will most likely never get around to LOL.
Oh well at least it gives a good high level view of how much stuff you don't know:
Note that the knowledge for each level is cumulative; being at level n implies that you also know everything from the levels lower than n.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Algorithms in C#: shortest path around a polygon (polyline routing)

Suppose you have to build a road to connect two cities on different sides of a lake. How would you plan the road to make it as short as possible?

To simplify the problem statement, a lake is sufficiently well modeled by a polygon, and the cities are just two points. The polygon does not have self-intersections and the endpoints are both outside the polygon. If you have Silverlight installed, you can use drag and drop on the points below to experiment:

new version of Visual Studio 2010 coming out soon

But like WTF it's only designed to run for a week before you gotta reboot your machine?
I guess that's Windows/Microsoft for you :(

The official sign-off criteria is that the end user needs to be able to keep VS open for an entire work week without any noticeable performance degradation (this means 5 days times 8 hours a day).

Sunday, February 7, 2010

What CSC Graduates Should Know

Fundamental Algorithms
These are algorithms that students should know from memory (or with very little help from a reference).


1. Insertion sort.
2. Merge sort.
3. Quicksort.
4. Root finding (binary search, Newton's method).
5. Matrix multiplication (basic algorithm).
6. Gaussian elimination.
7. Radix conversion (e.g. binary to decimal and vice-versa).
8. Tree and graph traversals (preorder, postorder, depth-first, breadth-first)

Eclipse and Java for Total Beginners

Free video's for using Eclipse and Java.
Unfortunately they are in Flash format :(

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Kasparov’s algorithm

Kasparov’s algorithm — “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and … superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process” — is that it suggests serious rewards accrue to those who figure out the best way to use thought-enhancing software.

Pretty cool!

Address Space Layout Randomization and VS problems

Error message when you use the Visual C++ 2008 compiler: "fatal error C1859"
When you enable the Create/Use Precompiled Header compiler option, the compiler requires that the precompiled header files and the relative modules do not move between compilations. However, the Address Space Layout Randomization (also known as ASLR) feature randomly relocates modules in a process. Therefore, the error occurs when modules move between compilations.