Making it happen
Archive for March, 2007
Real-time video processing in J2ME
Mar 30th
An easy way to do it is using videoControl.getSnapshot to retrieve frames and then draw them using Image.createImage and drawImage. However, the default settings for getSnapshot may be jpeg or something, so the midlet will spend useless processing time with encoding and decoding the image.
Thus said, using videoControl.getSnapshot(“encoding=bmp”) is the best way to achieve near realtime framerates.
Softies on Rails
Mar 27th
Here’s a Ruby on Rails blog written by developers that were once using .NET. Read it carefully though, if you are programming in .NET you may find RoR so cool you may never want to go back!
ASP.NET Ajax
Mar 21st
Played with it a bit few days ago and it’s awesome! All you have to do is drop an asp:UpdatePanel control on the page and then move controls that require postback (like a datagrid) into the panel. That’s it – it takes care of routing the full-page postbacks via XMLHttpRequest and quietly updating the page with the result. Highly recommended!
OSX QuartzGL
Mar 21st
I could have bet that Apple was using desktop composition for a loooong time before Vista, well, it seems that actually Vista is the first OS with that <:-P. That is especially worthwhile considering Microsoft had much more 3rd party software to adjust compatibility for.
Apple is planning to integrate QuartzGL into next next version of OSX, 10.5 (Leopard).
1337
Mar 21st
I recently did a no-cd patch (for fun only!) of an existing program – after like 5 years of leaving the scene (just kidding 
). Still I’m in very good shape: less than 1h:30 while only using the Visual C++ assembly debugger (no Ida Pro or W32DASM) and a bit of symbol lookup using Depends.
Got some spare time ?
Mar 19th
And interested in CS problems ? Go solve the problem set [pdf] from the recently-finished 2007 ACM World Finals (btw congrats to Warsaw University for winning the first place!).
.NET arithmetic precision issues
Mar 16th
Adrian had a terrible issue with floating point errors in .NET – he discovered afterwards that C++ managed code uses single precision arithmetic everywhere (!), but in the end he managed to force double precision.
How to delete rows from a datatable
Mar 15th
dataTable.Rows[0].Delete(); // marks the row as deleted dataAdapter.Update(dataTable); // performs the actual delete
(this post because Criz told me I should study referrals and write about what they are looking for)
Trick to get transparent OpenGL images
Mar 13th
As the Microsoft OpenGL software renderer doesn’t support destination alpha you can’t directly get a transparent background (i.e. alpha 0) with some objects (alpha 255) on it. However you can do the following:
