Hardcode

Besides BirdSpot I'm involved along with Pisi and some other excellent writers into the technical side of a hypertextual novel (or something like that).  Written initially using a wiki, it will be spread on various media all over the Internet and ... more to come.

Recently I had to deal with the famous problem of non-uniform text scaling (the issue is that doubling the height does not mean necessarily a double width). Of course this is only for TrueType fonts.
A way of solving it is to draw char-by-char and occasionally skip pixels so that the final width of the text rendered equals the initially computed (zoom 1.0 width multiplied by zoom) correct width. Still it may look weird in some cases (the i's may stick together in some fonts) - so there's still some research to be done for a correct way to do it (like MS Word).

Adrian found a weird C++ issue - at the first-glance it seems a bug:

class A
{
    protected: int a;
    protected: A(int a) { this->a = a; }
    public: A() { a = 15; }
};

class B : public A
{
    public: B(const A & a)
    {
        this->a = a.a;
    }
};

The compiler will throw an error in B's constructor at the assignment - you can't access protected data from other instances of A than the current one i.e. the one included in B.

We are in the finals ! (The Release Candidates)

Congratulations! Because of your team’s hard work and exceptional final report, you have been selected to take part in the Windows Embedded Student ChallengE (WESC) 2006 World Finals!

A list of 30 teams is up on the site - almost sure these are the qualifying ones, and we are there ! (via Alin).

Update: the previous 200-team list is now there again - we have to wait for the final results.

I just can't believe so many people with smartphones are virus-infected (viruses on cellphones? WTF? :D ) - everytime I am leaving bluetooth on and go in the city I found someone trying to send me infected programs. So ensure to take mobile software only from *safe* places and p2p networks like dc++ is not one of them.

Get the week day for 1st of any month:

int firstday = (1 + 2*m + (3*(m+1)/5) + y + (y/4) - (y/100) + (y/400) + 2) % 7 - 1

Simple, right? Don't remember where is it from.

... means going to the seaside - so here are some (terrible!) pictures from Vama Veche, together with Pisi.

  

Microsoft had tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer since the first MSDN release ?