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What do Shakira and software have in common?

chris | 19/07/2011 06:56 | Categories: Development, Technical

No, I'm not turning this into a celebrity gossip blog, but there's one thing I noticed about Shakira that software developers would do well to learn from: her songs come out natively in two languages. The video clips are not just translated, the footage is actually recorded with Shakira singing in Spanish and in English. And regardless of whether you like her music or not, you have to [More...]

The End of a Nightmare

chris | 24/03/2011 16:56 | Categories: Development, Technical

If your local video store is closed and you are in the mood for watching something scary, I've got just the thing for you. Take a modern website and try porting it to Internet Explorer 6. [More...]

European Union Doesn't Like Sweets

chris | 05/03/2011 08:00 | Category: Technical

European Union keeps coming up with new legislations painted with broad brush strokes. Here's another one: starting on the 25th of May 2011 all websites hosted in the EU will need to obtain permission before storing cookies on the user's computer. It almost looks like the EU Council is purposefully trying to drive away business from its shores. [More...]

Captivating cryptography! Part 2.

chris | 02/07/2010 14:12 | Category: Technical | Comments : 2

If you have ever used a program like PGP, which uses public and private keys, you may be wondering how it is possible to encrypt something with one password and decrypt it with another. I'll show you how a public key algorithm works on an example of one of my favorite algorithms: RSA. [More...]

Searching for talent

chris | 28/06/2010 20:23 | Category: Life

It seems like the ability to find talent in people is a talent in itself. Goethe said, "The greatest genius will not be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources." Those who want to succeed in life should learn to find that hidden potential in other people and then bring it out. Here are a few "hidden potential" examples I found:

Albert Einstein was four before he could speak and seven before he could read. Isaac Newton did very poorly in elementary school. Walt Disney was fired from the newspaper where he worked because "he had no good ideas." Werner von Braun failed ninth-grade algebra and Leo Tolstoy flunked out of collage. Haydn gave up on teaching Beethoven, who seemed to have "no apparent musical talent."

Funny designer mistakes--Part 2

chris | 15/05/2010 12:14 | Categories: Life, Fun

More pictures of strange design mistakes. [More...]

Funny designer mistakes--Part 1

chris | 15/05/2010 11:38 | Categories: Life, Fun

If you are planning to hire a designer, make sure you don't hire the one who designed these things! [More...]

Captivating cryptography! Part 1.

chris | 12/05/2010 15:33 | Category: Technical | Comments : 1

Did you ever wonder how encrypting programs scramble your files and render them unreadable? Believe it or not, it all started with Julius Caesar. Let's explore some interesting facts about cryptography and learn to create good passwords! [More...]

Old age - the best is yet to come!

chris | 05/05/2010 12:24 | Category: Life

I was thinking recently about how quickly life passes. One week follows another and before you know it, several months have gone by. It really makes you want to live life to the full. But even if we do, we're not getting any younger. Now, here's something positive about getting older:

Not long ago I saw the results of a research that analyzed the histories of about 400 famous people: statesmen, scientists, painters, warriors, poets, etc. Out of the subjects' greatest achievements, 35% came when they were between 60 and 70 years old; 23% when they were between 70 and 80 and 8% when they were over 80. So 66% of the world's greatest works have been done by people over 60. I guess the best is yet to come! :)

 

Windows progress dialog

chris | 03/05/2010 11:43 | Category: Fun

I enjoyed this little cartoon, although having programmed several time estimation dialogs myself for different programs, I have to tell you that sometimes it's not easy to make them work properly. Even a simple copy operation can depend on different factors that vary the transfer speed, so especially at the very beginning of the operation it's not easy to come up with precise estimates.

 

What's the future of Delphi?

chris | 27/04/2010 13:27 | Categories: Development, Delphi

I used to program in Delphi for many years. In fact nearly 20 years ago I used to program in Borland Pascal for DOS, out of which Delphi for Windows was born. Right from its first release, it was clear that Delphi filled a very important void in the software world. Where is it headed now? [More...]

Save your eyesight

chris | 21/04/2010 18:52 | Category: Life | Comments : 1

If you work on the computer a lot, you probably realize that spending many hours in front of a monitor is harmful to the eyes. Here are some basic things you can do to help your eyes stay healthy. [More...]

Navigate away warning for all page controls

19/04/2010 11:31 | Categories: Development, Javascript

We have all seen the Javascript navigate-away warnings that display a message if you try to, well, navigate away from the current page. In this article I will explain a method I've been using for several years that makes it very easy to enable the navigate-away warning for all controls on the page without having to add an event handler to each control. [More...]

Freeware alternatives to commercial software

chris | 19/01/2010 14:14 | Category: Technical

 It seems like the freeware software world has in recent years made some good strides of progress, to the point that some freeware alternatives to commercial programs are usable on professional level. In this article I'll list the freeware programs that have replaced their commercial counterparts on my computer. 1. E-mail: Thunderbird + OpenPGP I had been using [More...]

Javascript trim function

15/11/2009 13:20 | Categories: Development, Javascript

I use trim a lot. It's available in most programming languages. Except for Javascript. I'm not sure why it's not there, but since we should always try to look at things from a positive perspective, we can be glad that it can easily be added. And not only as a standalone function, but integrated right into the string class. All we need to do is place this code somewhere in our Javascript [More...]

Html entities in input fields

15/07/2007 06:46 | Category: PHP

One difficulty that a lot of web developers face is handling of html entities. If you are a beginner web developer you'll probably notice that some text partially disappears from your edit controls from time to time. Well, the reason it disappears is that the text that the visitor typed into the control contained some character that conflicted with the html code that handled the display of the [More...]

Thoughts on Windows Vista

06/05/2007 12:05 | Category: Development

I just finished upgrading InfoStore to version 3.2, which is supposed to be fully compatible with Windows Vista. In order to do that, I had to take a good look under the hood of the new operating system. There are several major changes that were introduced, and they are generally an improvement, at least in the area of system security, but they certainly require programmers to acquire a new mindset. [More...]

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