New blog, my blog?

After a long time I decided to write my own blog engine, it's not like blogger doesn't do it's job well anymore, it does, just that being a developer and using a blogging service doesn't sounds cool. Anyway it appears that I'll have a lot of free time, so it's a good idea to put all that energy into something (although not only this project). Lets see how this will turn out, it's not so big deal, I may even get bored and don't finish it, anyway stay tuned.

Mono support for Windows Forms 2.0 is (almost) complete!

Mono team announced that the support for Windows Forms 2.0 is "almost" done, and is now API complete. Mono team also released first public Moonlight release supporting Silverlight 1.0. This is great and exciting news, congrats to Mono team!!! they deserve all the cakes in the world :)

how (not) to write a ASP.NET control

<ctl:Image id="companyImage" runat="server" src="/resources/images/CompanyLogo.jpg"/></img>

As you can see the control is broken, it renders a image without closing the opening tag. Now imagine this control is part of a framework and anyone is using it like that, and somebody wants to fix it... :) bonus points for the editor error message

yay, received my Visibone BROWSERBOOK

The package (free shipping):



Package contents:





...



P.S. Some photos are at low-res for obvious reasons.

sorting a matrix by rows and by columns

One day at work, me and one of my colleagues had a discussion about Microsoft interview questions, I don't remember exactly the whole conversation but I remember I asked him about what kind of algorithmic questions do Microsoft ask, he told me "how would you sort a matrix to ensure that all elements are sorted by rows and by columns at the same time?" I didn't know he was kidding (he's speaking in Russian, I in Romanian, and sometimes I don't know Russian so well...), I actually thought this is Microsoft question so I starting to think (on paper of course):



Like in the old days at university I tried to look for a pattern, but I didn't found one, from the start I thought the problem is not solvable and tried to find a excuse not to solve it :) like "it's not practical etc.", on the next day, * tada *, the solution is fairly simple, it's like "treating all rows like one big array and just sort it":



So if you have a 3x3 matrix, you need to sort it by walking in this order: x00, x01, x02, x10, x11, x12, x20, x21, x22.

Of course you'll say: "big deal, what a stupid problem", yes it may be, it's a Bogosort after all, but it's fun to solve, or not...

Halo 3 made it in Terminator SCC

If you watched episode 8 "Vick's Chip" from Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles you've probably notice Halo 3 on that 3 big screens:

cool :P it's the first time when I see Halo 3 in a movie

Assassin's Creed Menu

The menu looks very cool, video games always had cool menus and teached us something about good UI, well at least some of them... You could also check Need for Speed Pro Street for similar experiences.