Dependency Walker

Don't know what program loads what DLLs?

Try:
http://www.dependencywalker.com/

wxWindows

Ah, the wonders of wxWindows, if you get an assertion failed problem: its because of wxWindows and VC2005 issues, so you will need to make the following modification:

open the file $(WXWIN)\src\msw\main.cpp, search for the function 'DllMain' and add the following lines:

#if _MSC_VER >= 1400 && _WINDLL
#undef _WINDLL
#endif


before the line:
#if defined(_WINDLL)

Germany

Got to germany now, and am in München working at TUM. Should be here till Feb.

Books

Some good books from the UWA library:
Influence; Science and Practice. Second Edition. Robert B. Cialdini
153.852 1988 INF
More Effective C++; 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs. Scott Meyers.
FIZ 005.133 1996 MOR
Working Together: A practical guide to collaborative decision-making. Dr. Bob Montgomery
658.3152 1986 WOR
Introduction to Robotics; Arthur J. Critchlow.
FIZ 629.892 1985 INT

And finally for those who follow dennetts work, a collection of short essays/papers:
Dennett's Philosophy; A comprehensive Assement eddited by Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson
hssmn 191.9 DEN

German holiday times

German holiday times:
(from http://portal.tum.de/studium/semestertermine)

Semester:
01.10.2006 - 31.03.2007

Teaching Semester:
16.10.2006 - 10.02.2007

Christmas Holidays:
24.12.2006 - 06.01.2007

Summer Holidays:
01.08.2007 - 30.09.2007

Additional Holidays:
Allerheiligen  01.11.2006 
1. Weihnachtsfeiertag 25.12.2006 
2. Weihnachtsfeiertag 26.12.2006 
Neujahr   01.01.2007 
Hl. Drei Könige  06.01.2007

Addsense site

How to make your own addsense site.

http://www.xedant.com/researches/crazy_adsense_experiment.php

Closing Apps on shutdown

Forcing Unresponsive Applications to Close at Shutdown
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/05/forcing-unresponsive-applications-to.html


I've not done it yet, since mostly its notepad asking me to save... but its tempting.

Women and Men - spacial skills

This is a great find:

Men and women differ in their ability to solve spatial problems. (...)
we found that the women relied on the object's visual features to solve the task, while the men used both visual and location information. There were no differences between the sexes in memory for the visual features of the objects, but women were poorer than men at remembering the locations of objects.

So now you know why women are always getting you to clean things up - they cant ever remember where things are. I always have a cluttered room, and as einstein said ""If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"

Now I can justify never cleaning my room again - it goes against the way I organize information, and people who ask me to clean it are just too dumb to organize by location as well as appearance. (Hmm, is lacking a certain capability dumb? interesting..)

see:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/05/visual-spatial-ability-sex.php

anyway, nice eye candy site, great idea:
http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html

DCOM & CoInitializeEx

Remember:
_WIN32_DCOM

How annoying is the new split of DirectX? Very. You want directshow?
Grab the latest DirectX SDK, install (so you can have ddraw.h -- how lame)
then grab the lateest Platform SDK (atm, 2003 server RC2)

inside the platform sdk is a media/directdraw/samples folder, where good old baseclasses sits, you need to create a project, cos there is none (how very very annoying) set the appropriate flags (above) set up your include directories, and build.... and wait...

The idea was that directshow users would not need to install directx anymore. Except ofcourse directshow depends on directdraw, and direct draw is part of directx... so now you need to install, not only directX, but also the full platform SDK..

can you say "lame"?

Perfect major

Results from my perfect major test:

Philosophy 92%
Psychology 92%
Dance 92%
Engineering 83%
Mathematics 75%
English 67%
Sociology 67%
Biology 58%
Art 58%
Anthropology 50%
Journalism 42%
Theater 42%
Linguistics 33%
Chemistry 25%

I'm quite suprised by the presence of 'Dance' - didn't even know you could major in that :P. Interesting that music didn't show up, not suprised by philosophy or psychology but interesting that it beat engineering & maths. No suprise chemistry was down the bottom - although interesting that it made it on the list at all, ditto english.

Last few weeks

So I've been busy over the last few weeks; reason being i'm doing a lot of teaching work, and trying to get pints going in the meantime.

Note for others, if someone asks you to prepare lecutres for a postgrad unit, realise that people who do it full time only prepare 2 units a semester, so if your doing one, thats half your weeks time gone. It is a great experience though - you realise just how much work it is to be a full time lecturer. Nice sneak peak into the academic world.

Also have some very good students in the class - which makes it far more rewarding and interesting than undergrad teaching.

So thats what I've been up to. PhD is getting into crunch-time soon, so will probably continue my habit of not leaving the lab/house.

Trentemoller

Trentemoller came to town - what a treat! Live performance with DJ TOM - awesome!

DJ TOM did some very very nice scratching - which was great to see, but you did get a bit of that 'show off' feeling. They started with a very minimal slow set, much like most of their other live sets, but then they really kicked it up a notch with royskpops remix and the afx remix. Unfortunately they played around a bit too much with rytekkid and it didnt quite have the zaz the original one had. The set then took a turn towards the more relaxed and they played some more stuff, as well as a bit of rock , blur, etc. Closed the set with physical fraction - a nice touch.

Lots of fun was had, they spliced in lots of little tunes from around the place, trentemoller was really having some fun with the sound machine.

Overall it was pretty much as expected with some nicer bits for royskpop & co, and a very pleasant suprise at the live performance. Shame about the thursday evening thing - it meant i got sick for the weekend :(

Appologies for mis spelt tracks.

SomovaW

Hmm, this needs to be backdated a bit, but anyway. Went to see somovaw a couple of weekends ago (st pats day), for their CD launch - nothing less than awesome. Really top notch stuff for a local group, but then again, I guess pendulum were a local group till not so long ago.

A great act, a much better atmosphere this time than at IM, the performers were happy, and enjoying themselves, and engaged the crowd a lot better -- probably because most of them were their friends.

I got a free CD, so I'm stocked!

The singer is great, shes really very talented, and good looking to boot (a bit skinny thou), great outfit too.

The live drummer was fantastic at the IM gig, really pulled up the vibe there, and can really work with the audiance well. Technically decent drumming, although ocassionaly gets a bit too enthusiastic and forgets to stop :P

The main highlight for me this time round though was the man on the synths, he delved into some other styles and it was fantastic - some nice techy sounds at a few points, very enjoyable. I'm looking foward to what he can produce. Some of the drum loops need a little work, they dont fit the sound of some of somovaws other stuff, but its all good.

Anyway, night was great, set was awesome, two very enthusiastic thumbs up.

Photoshop Tutorial

A nice little tutorial on photoshop touch-ups. Haven't tried it myself, but their results look convincing!

Infected Mushroom

IM were, well, fantastic. A nice way to recover from a disapointing (despite low expectations..) Two Tribes. I had an argument with a friend last year as to whether they were the best live act I'd ever seen. Contenders were Chemical Brothers, Kraftwerk, Binary Finary and Basement Jaxx (because the shows are kinda kool, and they are really nice and friendly people).

I'm afraid I have to declare IM the winners. Although Chemical Brothers are a very close second. IM just have got everything right - the guitar work is awesome, and its just an amazing event. I don't know how to describe it really I guess.

This year they did an extended-extended-extended version of 'Cities of the Future' and it was nothing less than absolutely fantastic. My only complaint was when they would 'swap' off the stage - sure, its a two and a half hour act, but you really noticed when someone left. It shouldn't be too hard for them to 'remix' theyre old stuff so it sounds a little more consistant. Then again, I'm sure there are fans that prefer the 'old' sound..

There was also a local group that came on before them - 'Somovaw' (NOT a catchy name!) but a great live act with a fantastic singer (female) and a great drummer. A nice touch with a violin player and obviously a couple of people behind them doing the wonders with the synths. They were a bit rough and needed some work - both on their live act and their tunes (some of the drum machine loops really stood out as needing some work at parts), but they got a good reaction from the crowd so I would expect them to put in the effort to scratch up - the next releases from these guys would be worth keeping an eye on.

The drummer I've seen around in other local acts and really pulled the live performance through - I hope the rest of the members of the group are buying him beer for being the 'public face'- the rest need to work on the shyness - especially the girl (because she's going to be a center of attention, so she needs to get used to it!).

Future prohpecies were also great, but no longer being a real d'n'b fan, I don't have much to say about them other than - I enjoyed it, and they had a pretty flawless performance. Nicely built up set, good stuff.

Two Tribes

I got suckered into going to Two Tribes - and it was pretty average.

Technasia and Dylan Rhymes were great, but unfortunately they were on from 2:30 to 4:00 ish. Personally disapointed by James Lavelle, but fans of Unkle assured me he was great. I heard no stuff ups, and some decent mixing, so hats of for that technically good performance I guess?

AVB was disapointing at best - the room was hot, and his set was,.. not. Kai tracid did a nice oldskool set, which I enjoyed, but his mixing effort was pretty poor. Perhaps he was disapointed at the crowd leaving after AVB to go see Erick Morillo.

Steve Angello played some great tunes but couldn't mix them together or build a set, so it was just like listening to an unordered playlist. Disapointing. Lee Coombs was pretty decent and DJ Die sounded alright.

Big Day Out

Oh yeah, we did Big Day Out again this year. Last minute notification that we were doing visuals. They had a big LED screen this year, and we got a visit from rachel, who does the vision stuff over east. BDO was definately the worst its ever been this year, and it was reflected by the crowd - I was stunned to see the venue so empty.

We did get free food for the first time this year though. Yay??

nullarbor

So I haven't posted in a while, so I should mention nullarbor. I organized a demoparty along with Martin Masek, and it went rather well. I have no idea on numbers, all I know is there were over 100 people at the first screening and 68 at the second.

We got 7 demo entries and 8 games - not a bad show for the first year.

Big ups to all the sponsors for the support, and yes, I still need to do the feedback forms and tie up loose ends.

More on this later.

VS 2005 - Platform SDK

quote:
Update the the Visual C++ Directories in the Projects and Solutions section in the Options dialog box.
In that section, you'll want to add the paths to the appropriate subsection:

Executable files - C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDK\Bin
Include files - C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDK\include
Library files - C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDK\lib

=========
Update the corewin_express.vsprops file.
You just need to take one more step to make the Win32 template work in express. You need to edit the corewin_express.vsprops file (found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\VCProjectDefaults) and change the string that reads:

AdditionalDependencies="kernel32.lib"

to

AdditionalDependencies="kernel32.lib user32.lib gdi32.lib winspool.lib comdlg32.lib advapi32.lib shell32.lib ole32.lib oleaut32.lib uuid.lib"

===========
In Beta 2, the Win32 Windows Application type is disabled in the Win32 Application Wizard. To enable that type, you need to edit the file AppSettings.htm file located in the folder “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\VCWizards\AppWiz\Generic\Application\html\1033\".

In a text editor comment out lines 441 - 444 by putting a // in front of them as shown here:

// WIN_APP.disabled = true;
// WIN_APP_LABEL.disabled = true;
// DLL_APP.disabled = true;
// DLL_APP_LABEL.disabled = true;
Save and close the file and open Visual C++ Express.

From the File menu, click New Project. In the New Project dialog box, expand the Visual C++ node in the Product Types tree and then click Win32. Click on the Win32 Console Application template and then give your project a name and click OK. In the Win32 Application Wizard dialog box, make sure that Windows application is selected as the Application type and the ATL is not selected. Click the Finish button to generate the project.

Random computer links

Fix LCD Monitor pixels, and Get XP Pro.

Been busy otherwise coding the MGF.. might even release it, except I'm a little ashamed of the code..

Computer stuff

Not that I plan on learning it:
Python cheat-sheet,
embedd google maps,
CSS star rating,
plus some nice leasons from MIT.

Especially:

Work Alone
Don't work with anyone else if you don't need to. I could have done the entire project myself in less time

Smart People Are a Dime a Dozen
So when I join a company and hear how smart the people there are - I'm not impressed. Unless they're also good people to work with. That's a lot harder to find.

The work alone really is a crucial point here, especially in software engineering. Ask yourself, if windows is written by a dozen or so people, is what your trying to do really as complex as windows? Do you really need more than 2 people working on it?

Programmers vs Computer guys

I'm A Programmer, Not A Computer Guy

They like to ask me lots of questions about their "Microsoft", as I've heard it called. I have an expert-shaking response prepared for any such inquiry: "I don't know."

"What does it mean when the computer says that------"

"I don't know."

With the simulated conversation to get the point across:

"Did you watch the Raiders game?"

"No, I don't follow football ------"

"What do you think of the new quarterback?"

"Really, football's not my thing. I don't know."

"I thought that you said that you're a sports fan?"

"No, I said that I watched tennis."

"Right, so what did you think of the penalty called in the Raiders game?"

"I watch tennis."

"Why would they call a penalty like that?"

Um.