Elentok's Blog

I'm using firefox with two extensions that use the same hotkeys: Firebug (for web debugging) and del.icio.us (for online bookmarking).

Well, it took me a couple of hours, but I’ve finally made it! I managed to load an embedded image from a dll using WPF.

In Windows.Forms I would just add a resource to the resource file, and I was able to access the resource easily via Resources.{name_of_resource_here}, but in WPF this doesn’t help me, because I needed an ImageSource.

Aligning text to the right... sounds like a simple thing to do, apparently not that simple.

First, you have to define a CellTemplate and a DataTemplate for the GridViewColumn with an internal TextBlock that has it's HorizontalAlignment property set to Right:

A couple of hours ago I've installed Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008, once I started working with it I noticed it crashed every time I opened a XAML file.

I started googling around and found a tip that said to try to open the toolbox before opening the XAML file, and it worked!

Weird.

Finally, I can use the laptop for long periods of time without being cooked alive!

I bought a simple wooden bed tray, on which I've got place for the laptop, a usb disk and a mouse.

Well, that didn't last for long... but I had to check it out for myself.

Why? for several reasons:

1. Hibernation was way too slow, over one minute to hibernate is way too much, with XP it's about 30 seconds. And usually when I need to hibernate, it has to be done as fast as possible.
2. Sleep was also very slow, about 15 seconds compared to XP's 5~10 seconds.
3. Performance in power-save mode is quite slow (One time on XP when I plugged it in, for some reason it didn't switch to high-performance mode and I didn't notice until I opened System Properties and saw the CPU speed was 800MHz...).
4. I'm tired of constantly tweaking and disabling parts of Vista that cause lots of HD grinding. I don't want my computer to do things without me telling it to.

So, I'm now back on my good old XP, and maybe when KDE 4.1 comes out I'll give Ubuntu another try.

Yesterday something got messed up with my Apache installation (part of the WampServer package), I tried reinstalling it, I tried several other versions, nothing seemed to work. It kept throwing "Unhandled win32 exception", and after several hours of trying to fix it, I gave up and decided to reinstall.

On the way home I thought about maybe trying to install Vista (I got a Vista Business CD with the laptop), I heard all sorts of opinions about it and I decided to test it for myself (I tried it about a year ago on my old computer with only 1GB RAM, and I removed it after a week...).

When I was using Slickrun I would set it to stay always on top so I could see the date, and since I moved to Launchy I’ve been missing that feature, so I decided to write a simple app to show the date in the tray.

TrayDate works by drawing two tray icons, one for the day and one for the month. In addition to showing the date it also has a list of countdowns and by double clicking the tray icons you can see how much time is left:

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with lots of software, trying to find the best solution for some things I needed (indexing solution, source control, etc..)

Well, I think now I have finally found my perfect setup, it probably won’t last for long since I’m always looking for the next application, for the better solution, and my requirements from the computer keep changing. But... for now it’s perfect.