Hardcode

Usually I'm coding interesting stuff however I have realized long time ago it's not enough :). So here's a brief list of what I'm doing in the spare time (not everyday unfortunately) to maintain a fresh mindset:
    - Reading CLR for the nth time and slowly getting closer to solving all the problems
    - Competing in programming challenges (not enough actually)
    - Studying  interesting papers, researches and publications (started with these ones) - very helpful for learning somewhat basic concepts I never heard of and also for staying in touch with the latest technologies, algorithms, and so on.

 Another idea would be to code small interesting apps (i.e. mashups) - will give it a try.
 

Well, I've solved the mystery: It's a ferrite bead and it's there for reducing / suppressing RF interference. Buy from here if you don't have one.

Did you know that menus are windows actually ? Sometimes (especially when explorer is laggy) you may end up with a modeless visible menu - active on screen but not disappearing when clicking away of it.

Inspecting it with Spy++ reveals that the menu is nothing more than a normal window, having the #32768 (PopupMenu) class:

Here's a great deal: one MSDN Premium Subscription Media Kit and five user licenses at the membership fee of US$375.

Outlook 2007 renders e-mails with Microsoft Word rather than with Internet Explorer - you try using Spy++ to inspect the window class of the reading pane. While for Outlook 2003 it is Internet Explorer_Server, the new version has a _WwG class there.

Not only that, if you select a picture in the reading pane it shows the Word handles - you can even try to rotate it:

Not sure if Word is more secure than Internet Explorer 7 though :) 

Oh well, it was incredible! To my knowledge, no gothic band has ever performed along with two choirs, sopranos and a complete orchestra! Although I'm not sure how much the Romanian orchestra did like Therion's music, they performed excellent!
Here's a picture, credits go to Flavia:

A very useful application for Symbian-based mobile phones must display a list of install Java apps and let the user send them via Bluetooth to nearby mobile phones. It's well-known that FExplorer doesn't allow this. Now I'm pretty sure that it's the operating system that stops this - I will investigate and eventually start writing it.

I so wish an application to control the CPU usage per process - Linux has it I'm almost sure. For the Windows task scheduler this shouldn't be much different from the priorities handling. As a side idea - CPU usage per user would be useful also.

There's an issue on N73 (or maybe on all S60 3rd edition smartphones?) in the J2ME implementation - the midlet crashes / exits if someone adds a command with a lengthy label set.

Nokia is doing great, and I am a big fan of them. However I disagree with their direction - they should launch fewer phones but with more personality (exactly what they were doing in 2001-2002). The bunch of products available now lacks style and individuality.

Instead of enforcing a standard look on all phones (even across S40 and S60) I would definitely appreciate having exquisite functions and themes. Ok, the fashion models have unique themes but that’s it. The same is to be said for hardware features – it would be interesting to have ‘exotic’ components, at least in some of their phones (hard drive and optical zoom are fine but still not cool enough).

As for the form factors - there is still room for out of the ordinary ones. People were expecting a lot from both the fashion models and 8800 and were disappointed to some extent.

- Somewhat hard to develop so the majority of people can't do it but easy enough so I can get it quickly working
- Not requiring maintenance and further changes
- Cool enough to generate hype :)
- Painless implementation by leveraging existing mainstream technologies