Hardcode
Making it happen
Process communication
Sep 19th
I heard some time ago of some software that performed inter-process communication using database access – so I propose a contest to the weirdest idea of communication between a process and another. My suggestion is to use text files for that 
.
Half-Life 2 HDR
Sep 15th
VALVe rocks again: “The Lost Coast” adds HDR into their “Source” engine – it looks stunning and works with anti-aliasing too, even on SM2 hardware. And they somehow managed to get Paul Debevec helping them for that.
Next version of Office
Sep 13th
ATI will strike again
Sep 9th
We are getting closer of ATI’s new lineup of video cards – rumors here, here and here [theinquirer.net]. nVidia has the lead since about two months with 7800GTX, however ATI’s new cards are designed from scratch, being completely new generation ones (with SM 3.0, HDR, H.264 decoding and so on). I’m pretty sure about upgrading my PC now !
Translation
Sep 9th
I’m in charge of maintaining a localization-aware version of the product we’re working at. So besides taking care all the strings are in resources and all the controls load their text from them (this in VB only), I find it pretty hard and cumbersome to get each new version of the product translated (a translated version is a set of resource DLLs, one for each application).
Rather quick-and-dirty (not so quick actually) improvements would be to parse the resource files, build a dictionary and have a tool to automatically re-build them from the dictionary (so basically take the english version – these are the resources used in the EXEs and in the development, duplicate them and change the messages with the dictionary), also it could report un-translated strings. Still I would have to check the dialogs and slightly re-arrange the controls to fit the new text ( problem also reported here – didn’t solve it until now).
Firefox
Sep 9th
The new Firefox is very nice – features tab drag’n'drop and vastly improves speed when using back / forward (Opera had this caching for ages though).
CMYK Jpegs
Aug 30th
I’m currently having a weird issue with 4-channel JPEGs in CMYK color space. The result of the decompression with libjpeg is different than the image as seen windows image viewer, MSPaint and Photoshop. Currently only Macromedia product display the bizarre jpeg file exactly like us. I suspect the whole point may be in the CMYK – RGB conversion.
Geeky rap :D
Aug 27th
Programming contests
Aug 22nd
Tonight is Google CodeJam qualification round, I’ll be coding there with username “Pisoi”. It is the first of the contests I will attent, the rest being ACM, CSIDC and Windows Embedded Challenge. My target is at least 3 out of 4 finals.
UPDATE:
FillRect & DrawText DC drawing mess
Aug 20th
Ok so in the last weeks I had some weird bugs involving drawing from an OLE server into the client-supplied DC. This DC had about 4000 logical points per device point, however a device point represented about 10 pixels on the screen. Because of the large logical points coordinates I found out that somewhere in FillRect they got truncated to the first word, so it didn’t draw correctly at all.
Another issue: because of 10 pixels per 1 device point the dimensions returned by GetTextExtent were all rounded to a multiple of 10 (!).
But the weirdest issue that I gived up solving was that a DrawText with DT_CENTER using the entire client rectangle was not centering it at all but rather drawing at a random position every time it was called. Some really strange things happening there… well in the end I wrote a workaround but eventually when I will have some more spare time I may again take a look at this.
