Friend of mine sent me course of lectures recorded as mp3 files. All files untagged and named alphabetically. I decided to add folder to my music library to listen it on iPod. Should be easy. Now, here is a quick quiz: what will happen if you open some popular music management software, say iTunes or Zune, and do “add folder to the library” thing? More...
And why they don’t take over the world. If you ever wonder about it, you probably already came up with perfectly good explanation. I’ve heard and read quite a few and agree with most of them, but still want to add my two cents. IMO, in open source there are generally two kinds of approaches. More...
A lot of "power bloggers", prefer to use Windows Live Writer instead of built-in web editor. No matter how good web editor is, desktop publishing is just too hard to beat, at least at the moment. I personally like WLW myself and use it whenever I can. But this is not the only choice you have on the desktop; another big one is MS Word 2007. I'm not an Office guru, but if you watch the video at the end of this post you can get ideas how easy and intuitive content creation can be when you have the right tool at your disposal. You can set it up with BlogEngine just as easy as WLW. Simply open new document and go to Publish/Blog in the office menu. More...
Small little tiny but mostly good things. More...
I use thumb flash drives quite a lot moving between computers. It is still much faster to load a gig or two from the flash drive than to use Skydrive or other "cloud" alternative. For the most part it is painless - stick it in and OS will find and mount it, no setup requires. But one day perfectly good USB drive stopped working all of the sudden on one specific computer. It works fine on the others and other USBs work fine on that computer too. What's going on? More...
Do you use design patterns in your daily development? You probably should, and if you don't you might start with reading some books on the subject. I would suggest one from Head First series, although not everybody is a big fan of this book. But I found it fun and easy reading that can trigger your curiosity and encourage you to dig dipper. It is written for Java developers, but language samples presented in the book are minimal and, if you don't understand Java, you can refer to this project for C# translation. More...
Don’t be jealous – I haven’t had real vacation for more than three years now, since my kids were born. These few days in Vegas are well deserved! I’m leaving early Saturday and will be back Wednesday, hopefully in one piece and not much poorer. And I’ve done everything I’ve promised: Dark Blog is up and running and Mp3 Player got face lift and don’t choke in IE any more. What more do you want? No, seriously…
In case you didn’t notice, I “enhanced” this site with SnapShots. If it annoys you too much, you can easily turn it off by opting “disable” in the upper right corner any pop-up that jumps when you hover over some of the links (you’ll have to delete cookies to re-enable it again if you’ll get bored afterwards). I can turn it off all together if you’ll start complaining, but so far I’m more like having fun with these little guys. It took about five minutes total to register and set it up, so if you are into this kind of things go ahead and add it to your own blog, it is really that simple. More...