BNR Gadget | Radu Poenaru

Import CSV file and query it with LINQ

Assume that you have an plain text, old Comma Separated Values file filled with your precious export from a legacy system. How can you process it easily now? The first answer that comes to mind is to parse it and load it into a datatable and later process it by using DataTable.Select() method. But this approach has some limitations – like splitting data into several tables and then join them. One would imagine t...

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BNR exchange rate

In this global crisis, nothing is more useful than a good chart to watch your money as investment. That’s why I created a special page which collects freely available exchange rates from BNR (National Romanian Bank) and presents them in a graphical form. This way, the viewers of my website will always be on the edge with exchange rates, as soon as BNR posts them (usually around 13:00 GMT+2). ...

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GPS vs aGPS vs WiFi vs GSM localization

Each method presented has its strengths and weaknesses. None of these is the perfect positioning system, yet they all can collaborate in order to give the estimated position of a user. GPS, the veteran of the group, has a plethora of satellites at its disposal, offering almost anywhere in the world a precision in meters. The devices which implement this technology are small enough to be inserted even in phones,...

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How to add a nice jQuery slider

This weekend fun was adding to my website the cool sliding control from Jérémie Tisseau website. That pretty it was, I immediately started thinking it as a container to my BNR exchange rate page. The coded worked perfectly, with few modifications. Firstly, Wordpress uses the $ operator for Prototype library, so if you want to add your jQuery library the invocation to Wordpress Firebug will report the error “...

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Create a simple HTML .MOV player

As a Ruby developer, I work quite a lot with their “special” plugins called gems. The nice fact about the gems is that they bring lots of functionality. By example, there’s a gem for paginating a collection who takes just few parameters and not only that finds out how many objects the collection has, but also how to split them, generating the corresponding links and serving to the original container (that used to ...

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Google Visualizations

While working on my idea of presenting on this website also the Romanian National Bank exchange rates (very useful in this crisis time), I end up in choosing a form of visualization. One might argue that text is good enough, but for me frankly graphs and charts are the best. So I started looking on the internet for free and customizable charting tools. From the plethora of choices on the web I will present just...

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Working in Fraunhofer Institute of Technology

Starting today, I work as a Student Helper in Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology. The branch from Sankt Augustin, which I joined, is focused on the research of human-centered computing in a process context. I will activate in the Cooperation and Community Support department, which deals with the research and development of community portals, (mobile) communities and cooperation, Internet-based...

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How to add a Webslice

Cursul oficial BNR 5 It is very nice and user-friendly to have Webslices on your website. It improves the user experience by allowing visitors to be up to date with the latest content that you provide, assuming that it is fitted to this presentation style. Since my BNR exchange rates page was this kind, I pursued in adding a Webslice especially for it. Adding a webslice to your...

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MIX09 Scott Hanselman’s FILE|New Project …

Scott Hanselman had a presentation at Mix 09 conference - File | New Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. This was in its unique style – fun, rich in content, tricks, advices but most of all was fun. This year he managed to create a new type of presentation – without the actual presentation! No more constrained to some slides, just him, Visual Studio and the audience. Yes, the aud...

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Discussions with EyeStar Patient Coordinators

After setting my “eyes” (kind of strange to say that isn’t it) on a company that does LASIK, I started to use a very nice feature of their website: instant messaging with the Patient coordinators. First I discussed with Mr. Fred, who was more than happy to clarify all my doubts and respond to all my questions. Then I was impressed that they had a Romanian native speaker in their team and I...

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We're going on Arduino

From the last lab we had a week of accomplishments:we set our hardware to Arduino platformcompleted on Monday a little programming and testing of the hardware platformdecided the final idea of the gameand also set Adobe Flash as our interface and display applicationThe idea of the game remains as presented a week ago. We will have a screen acting as a pressure sensor (composed from at least 9 sensors to be more...

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PDC 2008 - Apps for babies in .Net 4.0

My personal Software engineer model, Mr. Scott Hanselman, had a very nice presentation at PDC 2008. He explained the usage of Microsoft’s .Net 4.0 framework in real life examples, creating an interesting environment for very young people (less than 4 years) using Silverlight, PDAs, the new Surface device, webservices, real time interrogation to data bases by auto updating reports and...

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Processing NSDate into an ISO8601 string

During the CSCW Lab, where I had the experience of working on iPhone, I had to connect to a XML RPC server. Some of the parameters of the request had to be formatted as ISO8601 standard. After some reading, I end up using the following code, managing both the conversion of a NSDate to NSString and a NSString to a NSDATE using the above format: NSString –> NSDate -(NSString *)...

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How to generate image_src for Facebook links in Wordpress theme

Sharing your article for free advertisement on Facebook is a fact. While using different Social Networks sharing tools I had a problem when sharing my articles on Facebook: sometimes the image that I intended to use to represent the article wouldn’t show in the list of the images who can be chosen. Why is that? It bothered me some while I got the some free time to actually look into this, between exams, work and m...

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Usability

Is Microsoft learning basic principles of Usability? Corrina Black, lead designer for the Silverlight platform, presents usability principles implementation in the newest Silverlight 3. She is focused very much on design, so no coding best practices will be heard here. Only good advices on how to create an appealing, easy to understand interface. She started by stating the design principles and explain them....

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Programming languages and sensors

For the moment we expect to use either one of those strategies to implement our idea1.Use Wiimote, an iphone, and a skateboard for implementing this game . Wiimote : as sensor for capturing the type of movement that is currently implemented.iPhone : read the sensed values from Wiimote and implement Game InterfaceExpected Language for implementation : Objective C . 2. Use iPhone , and adruino...

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Bonn dorms

Today I visited Bonn in order to find out how my possible future dorm will look like. This one is placed in Bonn, Pariser Str. 54. I had in my mind the dorm in which Loredana's friend lived in last year - clean white painted room with nice furniture and big window. Instead I looked at a white room with old furniture, a kitchenette with a grandma look - plastic was yellow instead of original color. The room is...

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Research on LASIK

When starting such an important process as LASIK surgery (on which your sight is affected) it is crucial to get as many information as you can. You might want to bing it, to Google it and also ask your friends about it. Also discuss with professionals! You never know when you will find someone who already had it and can give their own personal impression. I found a lot of information on the Softpedia forum, in an...

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Objective-C: NSDictionary and NSMutableDictionary can't keep the...

My latest task in CSCW Lab was to create the parser class for parsing some huge and multilevel XML. All nice and easy at first sight. Since the XML was the result of an RPC call, I got back some structures corresponding to NSDictionary and some arrays corresponding to NSArray in Apple's Objective-C. While iterating in the structure using NSXMLParser, a event-based parser, I kept adding the pairs as name and values...

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Softwise Development

Positions: Junior to Senior Developer, Project Manager Softwise Development is the company that shaped me as developer. I worked there for 2 years, between January 2002 and January 2004. I enjoyed there not only a good atmosphere, but also discovered a friend in the person of Mr. Dan Trutia, CEO of the company. I was his first employee and I believe that we created a good team. Together we raised the...

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My own LASIK experience

In this series of articles I will present my own experience with LASIK. All started around 4 years ago when I was so disappointed in wearing gasses in winter time. Any time when I went from freezing outside to the warm of a shop, by example, my glasses become full of condensed water. If you have glasses you understand what I mean, if not, think to the car’s wind shield in winter, full of water drops and...

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Changing the idea of the project

In the last meeting, our tutors, Mr. Heller and Mr. Karrer, shared with us some of their experience using the sensors which made us reconsider the project idea.The ideaBecause of the new introduction in iPhone programming and the rich set of sensors of this device, our project envisioned an iPhone attached to the board in order to track the skateboard movements. The data pulled out by the iPhone is the initial...

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Rhetorik und Präsentationsworkshop

On 9th and 10th of June I had two days of Presentation and Retoric workshop. Our teachers were Anton Schweizer and Christopher Schleiden, both being Microsoft Student Senior Partners. We were 5 students(unfortunately, one is missing from the picture), most of us Junior Students Partners. We were also preparing our first workshops. This training combined theoretical and practical knowledge, helping us in creating a...

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Novensys Corporation

Position: Microsoft Business Solution Software Engineer I was part of Novensys team from November 2005 till June 2006. When I started working with them, the first challenge appeared: being the first company that implemented Navision in Romania, they were exigent from the employment process. They also offered specialization classes in Microsoft Navision product, so I and the rest of the...

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How to make a Print Screen on Microsoft Source using WPF

After we took a look inside of Microsoft Surface, let’s see how to take a later look on the surface, by creating printscreens of the application. In some WPF applications you’ll need to take a quick screenshot of the user’s screen, allowing him (or them, in case of Multi User Surface) for later reviewing. Now, on Surface there can be only one full screen and active application. So it use the entire screen of the ...

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Objective-C: Putting markers on Map control

This article comes as a completion to my previous ones, XCode : using MapKit with no geocoding available out of the box and XCode: Modal windows – Google maps and shows how to add pins on your already created Map View. First of all, adding the points to the map is not as intuitive as it might seem, so let’s start by creating a new class called POI – point of interest. Its header must be filled...

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XCode: Modal windows – Google maps

From time to time, you’ll need to show in your iPhone application a view over the entire application without navigating and destroying your workflow of the application. I’ll present the mechanism of modal windows as it is implemented in Cocoa Touch. Lets take a real case: you have a view in which you want to input an address. Near the address you have a button which will show the user the Map centered...

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Customize your Gmail web interface

Google has been the most improving mailing web interface that I know. Having a whooping 2 GB storage space when launched, he slapped over the face all his competitors, whom at that time had 4- 5 MB of storage space. Now is 7.5 GB and increasing. The interface is very clean and intuitive, but not lacking the good looking ( example of bad looking is Squirrel Mail who looks obsolete, due to the right angle corners,...

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How to add ui-icons to JQuery tabs

While working in UniBonn, I have a lot of contact with Ruby on Rails and JQuery; I actually started loving its interactivity and stability. But lately I encountered a small situation with the tabs object that they offer. This is their default view, with Redmond theme applied. Nice and clean, you might say. But what’s missing? These tabs don’t support images. So you’ll not be able to show an image to speci...

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XCode : using MapKit with no geocoding available out of the box

One of the tasks in the CSCW lab was to create a map on which the users to see the location of a specific address. So I started working on it, knowing that the newest framework brings a lot of goodies, through which there is also a map framework. But surprise! Apple provides only reverse geocoding, not forward geocoding. This means that you can only transform a pair of Latitude / Longitude to the Map and it will...

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Wordpress- how to implement Syntax Highlighting

Some while ago, I started publishing code on this website. On that days I used the free Wordpress webhosting. But I wasn’t content with the representation of it. After some time, I moved my site to a payed hosting, where I could implement any plugin that I liked. Because I love sharing my knowledge and attaching the code to the article is the best way to explain, I searched for a plug-in that could do...

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Alensa Online

Position: Team Leader and Lead Developer in Alensa Online - Software Development department I was part of Alensa team between January 2007 and August 2008. Only the opportunity to study Media Informatics Master, held by RWTH Aachen University, could gave me enough reasons to leave Alensa Online that I enjoyed so much for almost two years. I was in charge with our brand new solution for an online Healthcare...

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Forecast on websphere: Flex or Silverlight or AJAX or JavaFX ?

Lately I had some interesting conversations with few of my developer friends regarding their opinions on which technology will rule the Rich Application Interfaces websites in the future. My strong believe is that there’s room for all four of these as per my experience and actual trends. More over, all these will have a separate slice of the market but overlap at only few areas. Let’s take AJAX...

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Windows Live SkyDrive – whooping 25 GB of backup

Being not a big fan of Microsoft Live products (I discovered few months ago Live Writer, but doesn't count) I did not know about this service. I had to hand in back to the company that I worked for the laptop, so I needed intermediate space in order to preserve my written knowledge. Getting started with Windows Live SkyDrive is very straight forward. If you don’t already have a MSN account, get one by signing up for ...

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Ruby on Rails & Agile development

Starting from the Fall of 2002 a close collaboration begin between the RWTH Aachen University, University of Bonn, the Fraunhofer Institute Centre Birlinghoven Castle IZB and the University of Applied Sciences Bonn Rhein-Sieg . They joined forces to establish the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT) who, as a collaboration, ranked the first university in Computer Science...

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DocVault

Uses: Borland Delphi 7 VCL, Windows API Data security is the priority of this program, mainly used for sending important data trough unsecured mediums - like internet or e-mail. The program uses state of the art algorithms in encrypting area (MD5, RSA algorithms with encrypting on different key sizes) and was developed while working in Softwise Development. The program is creating a file, the result of encrypting...

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URL Rewrite = mod_rewrite

SEO tools and mod_rewrite were out for a while. They do amazing things, like enabling humans to have a crisp view about the contents of a link. Unfortunately, until IIS 7 Microsoft didn't had nothing comparable as default, but some companies struggled to offer this basic service.The two options were the rather cheap IISRewrite and the free ISAPI Rewrite Filter. Mr Thomas Deml, Lead Program Manager in the IIS team,...

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The User Interface

This week we work also on the User Interface - the Flash GUI. It was challenging since neither me nor Loredana had previous experience in creating games under this application. Because of this fact, we searched for some advices on the net and after quite a long trial and errors we found something interesting here . Even that it didn't met all requirements, this tutorial was what we needed to get a quick start. The...

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Gallery.live – only for Internet Explorer ??

If you want to improve your Windows Live Writer experience in blogging by adding some interesting plugins, you’ll be pretty disappointed if you use another browser than Internet Explorer. First I tried first to enter into Writer gallery with Firefox 3, which is my default browser, on http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?c=0&bt=9&pl=8 … but surprise ! Below is the same web address, but...

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Online Mov Player

Paste here a movie from http://railscasts.com/ Width in px:Height in px: http://media.railscasts.com/videos/188_declarative_authorization.mov

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CursValutar

Uses: Borland Delphi 7 VCL, HTTP, HTML Parsing, JavaScript, PHP server side script The program parses web pages from Romanian National Bank site (www.bnr.ro), offering the latest currency ratings, among with a currency calculator, a very useful converter. The program was designed by me in Softwise Development company as a low resource program, hidden in the tray bar of Windows, while periodically checking BNR site...

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Railscasts Silverlight video player

This is my second shot to create a better player for Railcasts. As you can see, it goes better and better. Who knows what might be next? If you want to know more about the process through which this player was designed you can read also: How and why I choose the Silverlight platform How to integrate your Silverlight content with your Wordpress blog (and presumable all blog systems who allow you to...

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GPS – Global positioning system

GPS is the oldest one from the frameworks available to the large audience. It isn't the first positioning system, but it is the one with the most success and longevity. It started as a military project in 1957. Because of the cold war, once the Russians sent to space the first man-made satellite, a team of scientists started monitoring its radio transmissions. The crucial discovery was that, because of the Doppler...

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Tweet your ideas through JavaScript

Do you have a website and would like to post your tweets from it ? Or maybe you want to create a widget that posts weather on your twitter account? I encountered this situation and overcome it with the following script. It is pretty simple, but beware that JavaScript is run on CLIENT side, thus any code must be sent in clear.Since it is needed that you provide a password for your account, would not be so wise to...

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Microsoft Surface - What's inside

After starting the task, I started to be very curios about the technology that drives this device.I started looking over the internet and I found this picture. Very interesting, isn't it? Basically contains a normal computer, linked to a projector and few infrared cameras. 1) Screen, the visual part of the device – Contains a special diffuser which turns the Surface’s acrylic tabletop into...

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Objective-C: Base64 to NSString and NSString to Base64

While working on the CSCW Lab project, I encountered a situation in which the XML-RPC call returned an image, of course encoded as Base64. And guess what – in its known style, Apple doesn’t provide Base64 encoding and decoding – quite lame, given the fact that this encoding is used everywhere in data transfer over the internet – e-mail, browsers, web services – all of them use at some...

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Flash UI changes

Since last week the Flash application changed- I added support for numerical keys for hitting. We mapped the numerical keys 1 to 6 to the 6 animals positions that can be hit. This way, it is enough to press a key to simulate the throw of a ball. The reason behind this application architectural change is that we needed an smart way to simulate the sensors that were hit, without actually having the entire setup in...

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How to add Syntax Highlight to Wordpress

I wrote quite a while ago about How to implement Syntax Highlight in your Wordpress blog. It used an forward, yet permanent approach: modify you’re theme’s header.php. But is it enough? Lately, I wanted to update my blog’s theme to the newest version. But hey! I had a lot of modifications such the one above that kept me from doing a smooth update: BNR Slider, custom images for RSS and Twitter, hints, Syntax Highl...

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Create GUID in Visual Studio 2005

From time to time you need to create a GUID (Global Unique IDentifier) in order to mark your dlls. Looking in my Visual Studio 2005 I saw that this command wasn’t available in any tools menu, nor in the Customize toolbars one as a shortcut to a command. After a quick digging on MSDN site I found this. It is written in Microsoft style – a lot of information, but no solution. It just mentioned something...

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Objective-C: UIAlert or asking for confirmation

While start XCoding, I faced a new challenge : how to create modal, single use confirmation dialogs? So after some digging in the internet, I found out that this can be actually done pretty simple and elegant. This will be very useful if you want to display some deletion confirmation or ask for user permission to use the camera or GPS sensor. All you have to do is just create a UIAlert and the IBAction hooked up to...

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Media Informatics Master

In the Autumn of 2008 I joined the Media Informatics Master program, saying goodbye to Alensa Online team. It is part of the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT) and was created through the collaboration of prestigious German institutions: University of Bonn, RWTH Aachen University, University of Applied Sciences Bonn Rhein-Sieg, Fraunhofer Institute Centre Birlinghoven...

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UIImageView setImage problem

While working for this semester’s CSCW lab project, I encountered a strange situation: no matter what I did, the UIImageView didn’t load the image. After some digging on the Internet about this, I found out that first thing to look for is whether you're sending the setImage message to the UIImageView instance you expect. Being newbie in XCode and Apple’s technologies in general, I forgot to use...

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SCRUM Presentation

After a very intensive and practical Agile Lab, in which I had to prepare two talks - one on Agile techniques and other on Geolocation, today I had the pleasure of participating in a very nice SCRUM Talk presented by Mr. Jens Trompeter, Board Member in Itemis company. Itemis company is specialized in Model Driven Software development. Its products ranges from mobile and embedded applications to Eclipse Modeling...

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Scripting.FileSystemObject

While working on my new pet project, I encountered a situation in which I wanted to save some data to a file. From the Vista Sidebar Gadget point of view, you can do it pretty easy using Scripting.FileSystemObject. As in any Microsoft product, you should ask about necessary credentials. So find out that inside the gadget’s directory, you are free to create, delete, update files with no more rights required than the ...

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Objective-C: Use NSXMLParser

Almost any time you'll need to pull some data from the web. Using Objective-C you have at your disposal a pretty good XML parser - the event-based version. What really means is that instead of building in-memory tree with the structure of the XML you'll have some events raised when the parser encounters a special token - the most usual ones are tag start, tag end and found comments. The parsing goes node by node...

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1 month since LASIK

So it’s been now 1 month since I had my LASIK surgery. In this month I had a very strict program with my drops provided by EyeStar center. I used them as prescribed. I believe that my eyes didn’t need so much artificial tears, but if the doctor says it is important you have to take them! During my reading of the file that I received from Eyestar I noticed that they prohibit very clear to rub your eyes...

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Agile vs Waterfall

Waterfall model: Predictive model Optimized for a single purpose Hard to change eXtreme Programming Reusability Easy to change direction But no idea of next 6 months ...

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svn: Your file or directory is probably out-of-date

One of the most tedious bugs in Subversion, ever, is this one. If you want to commit changes to your working copy, and the response of svn is : svn: The version resource does not correspond to the resource within the transaction. Either the requested version resource is out of date (needs to be updated), or the requested version resource is newer than the transaction root (restart the commit). If you...

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Agile – techniques, principles and methodology

Because the software industry is so different than any other, the development model used prior of creating agile methodology was taken from the engineering disciplines, such as civil or mechanical engineering. Those disciplines put a lot of emphasis on planning before you build because the resources are very expensive and cannot be wasted because of bad synchronization or different physical characteristics like...

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UniBonn

Position: Assistant Researcher ( WHK or Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft ) Starting 1. March 2010 I work in Informatik 3 Department of Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. My master is a joint effort between Uni Bonn and RWTH Aachen. During my master, I had the pleasure to be part in the Agile Lab, where I encountered two PHD students, Pascal Bihler and Mark von Zeschau. They are true developers, ...

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Mergus Product Manager

Uses: Borland Delphi 7 VCL, Microsoft Access Database, User Accessibility This application was developed by me for Softwise Development to accomplish the needs of a client in administering its furniture chain of shops. So, as Project manager, I have designed a solution, keeping in mind the possible evolution of this enterprise. I was using a system of managing clients and suppliers, the available furniture, the...

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Xcode – String concatenation

Don’t be fooled that Objective-C is a Object oriented language. For decades operators overloading is something standard in almost all of them. But in Objective-C you don’t have it. Mostly, I believe that comes from the struggle of Apple guys to assure the stability of the system. A lot of errors can come from poorly designed overloads, thus the crashes can appear. Now let’s put some hands on...

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Brainstorming 2

In a previous post I explained the facts that forced us to re-think our project idea. Basically, our cool idea of an iPhone tied to a skateboard to create a exertion game require too much programming time. So we searched another idea who is required to be simpler and easy to be implemented in the remaining time.So we got us a round table (the ones in BIT cafeteria are the best!) and put our minds to work.First step...

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Flex 3 debugging && Nod32 != Love

While working at Fraunhofer FIT, I had few small projects to develop internal modules for extending the interaction between researchers. The technologies were set from the start to Flex 3 and ActionScript. As starter in Flex, but not ActionScript, I was quite anxious to begin coding in this interesting tool. But after I created my new Workspace (seems that now everyone creates its own paradigm for Project) and...

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Wordpress – managing Post Revisions Tracking

A very interesting feature added in WordPress blog publishing system since version 2.6 is the post revisions tracking, like in version control systems. It simply adds a Wiki-like style tracking of edits that had been made to the posts or pages. This allows bloggers and authors to view, control and moderate - knowing who and when made what changes to any post or page. It also includes the ability to compare for...

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Microsoft Surface – new task and new challenges

New day, new task, new challenges – Today I started working on a social collaborative tool which will work on Surface, but extended eventually to Flex 3, Silverlight and iPhone. First impression: Visual Studio is an old friend. Still, bad news: Surface SDK is kept locked in a website, having access only those who bought a license. Shame, Microsoft! After installing the SDK I started running the examples,...

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How to Consolidate 2 Microsoft Certified Professional IDs

I am Microsoft Certified since 2006, Technology Specialist in SQL 2005 and Business Management Solution Specialist in Microsoft Dynamics. Thus, I already own an Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) ID that allows me to access Microsoft Certified Professional program.This program basically gives you access to review your certifications and the progress on your certification path. It also enables you to prove...

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Language switcher

Copyright : You can use the code below on your website as long as you keep a post with a link to my WordPress (http://radupoenaru.wordpress.com/) website on your WordPress website. Since I moved my presentation site to WordPress hosting, I searched for a simple plugin or widget to allow me to have content in many languages. The basic idea is that if I wrote all in English, my older relatives ( whom learned French...

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ASP .Net Page.Header with custom meta tags

One of this days a friend of mine shared with me some SEO techniques and one of them was to change the meta tags associated with a product page. So after a little research I found out a way to accomplish this : modify the Header property of ASP .Net page and add several HtmlMeta tags who can hold the data needed to be changed. Each ASP .Net page has a property called Header who is the “hidden” header...

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Google toolbar – Firefox enhancement

When I use Mozilla Firefox I want to be able to see the content of pages, not to have my screen cluttered with lots and lots of toolbars. But when doing searches with built-in search area in this browser, I lack the highlighting feature of Google Toolbar. Not to mention the word search, handled so easy in it by pressing auto created buttons for each word. So I tried to replicate the Google toolbar in the browser...

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PDC 2008 – Project "Velocity": A First Look

This presentation was held by Murali Krishnaprasad, who is a prestigious Microsoft professional. He is Principal Architect of Velocity - the distributed caching platform”. His presentation revolved around new methods and services for better caching web application, but also on scaling this methods for a computer farm or a cluster. Let’s take a look on the system architecture: First are presented...

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URL shortening too long? j.mp is the answer

First of all, what’ an URL Shortening service? URL shortening is a technique used very much lately on the World Wide Web allowing people to create a very short URL and make a web page available on it, in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://www.radupoenaru.com/handle-xml-with-namespaces/ has a length of 54 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25...

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Predator

Predator is a project engineered by me and later on in team in Softwise Development company to be a interface between Yahoo Groups site and the home user, giving to every one of these groups the ability to do almost anything that they can do directly at Yahoo. And this by using the Windows capabilities (multi select, multithreading download etc). You'll be able to download any file format (images, movies, archives,...

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How to create an favicon.ico and improve your website

As a business card represents your business or your position in it, the same applies to a website. By using a Favicon to you will improve your website personalization and when users will bookmark you, the picture will always remember them about you. Thus, the favicon is critical to it’s identity. We might consider the favicon placed in a website is like your photo in your ID Card. As the photo enhances the...

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Objective-C: allocation and deallocation

While reading the book by Mr. Kochan (1st ed): "Programming in Objective C" , I noticed that he uses the following code (you can see it at pages 342-344) to explain that the initWithString is preferable to stringWithString because the AddressCard class would own the name variable contents. Also, I don't get any errors making repeated calls to the setName version with the stringWithString...

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iPhone Startup Tutorial

This is the start of all iPhone Developers. It will be an extremely brief tutorial meant just for those which are at the absolute start of iPhone development. First checks: 1. System requirements: verify if the iPhone sdk needs are met. 2. Go to Apple’s iPhone Developer Center , then download the SDK. 3. As you’ll need some experience and code to work on, download the Hello World sample application. 4. Dou...

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MCTS in ASP .NET – exam 70-562

Yesterday I’ve become Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in .NET Framework 3.5 ASP.NET Applications by passing the 70-562 exam! First, I want to share with you my web development background: I have around 4 years of ASP .Net experience. Mainly, my experience is on .Net 1.1 and 2.0. I developed for mobile devices when there weren’t yet smart phones around us. I’ve worked on a solution that c...

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Add SyntaxHighlight to Windows Live Writer in Preview mode

Windows Live Writer (shorter: WLW) is one of the most popular blog authoring tool that I also happen to like and use. And I say this because of its features – I especially enjoy the Preview tab. But what it really lacks is previewing the ENTIRE page - it will get only the html and some css. So no Syntax Highlighting of my code? Let me tell you how I solved this issue. As a blog writer I searched for something that ...

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cPanel: using Cron Jobs

First – what is a cron job? It is a piece of software which can be run at specific times by the cron service. By example, one could set a cron job to update his application exchange rates from a server every day at a specific hour so its application will be up to date. I used it because the Romanian National Bank doesn’t have a proper page to check for exchange rates – they present just the...

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Agile Lab - Coining the Agile techniques

The roots of agile programming as we know it can be traced back to 2001. At Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, a group of seventeen people met have fun, but also to find common ground on a issue that was too much discussed but no result can be achieved. They were the leaders of different currents of improving software creation techniques. They were adepts of Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM,...

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Choosing hosting for Wordpress

One of the most important questions in launching a website is the hosting. When moving to private hosting, I realized that I don’t need all features of the premium hosting plans, just a reliable hosting with basic tools to help me do my tasks easier, without too much investment. Also I wanted to continue using Wordpress and reuse the content already created in my old website. The requirements of W...

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Workshop: Introduction to ASP .Net

The next workshop of the Microsoft Student Partner in cooperation with the student body of Uni Bonn is coming! This time is about the basics of ASP.Net and Visual Studio 2010. The workshop provides a starting point in Web programming by many practical exercises in small groups. Aim is the development of smaller Web projects, such as photo albums or guest books. The registration is free. You can register until...

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Latest Flash UI changes

Final preparations for tomorrow's big show! See below the latest Flash movie. We added : sounds in our application, allowing user to get auditive feedback background and confirmation for hit sounds for improving the User Experience, creating an immersive experience who tries to transpose the user into the real wood atmosphere self generating levels, allowing users to improve themselves beyond our...

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Secure signed and encrypted Thunderbird for your Gmail mail

DISCLAIMER: The following steps were done on a Windows Vista Business x86. You can follow the next steps but on your own risk. Also keep in mind that different operating systems can behave differently. As I started the class of Security on the Internet, an interesting situation occurred: I needed to setup a signature and encryption for my emails. Our lecturer, Dr. Michael Nüsken, advised us to...

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Add Silverlight to Wordpress

As I presented earlier, you can easily create a Silverlight video player and you can see it working pretty nice. Not to mention that it can play a lot of formats and it is only 344 kb in size! Now let’s see how this is possible and how can one do it on his website. From the start, Silverlight was meant to be as easiest as possible to develop and deploy. Also, the cross browser (running on all major b...

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iMeet application presentation

Finally, the biggest moment: application is ready!! I am very proud of this application, as it represents my achievements in fast learning and adapting to: new way of programming, as XCode and Interface Builder truly represent the ModelViewController paradigm new language- Objective-C, which as any language has its pluses and minuses new device: mobile devices on which I didn’t work since my...

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Wordpress - How to Delete Existing Post Revisions

This is the second part of managing Wordpress feature of post revisions, for the users who had disabled or turned off post revisions tracking or versions history feature. As you already know, this feature exists in WordPress (starting with WordPress 2.6). After disable it (of course, if you really need to do that), it also make sense to also delete and remove all existing stored post revisions. By doing so,...

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C# .Net using Post with HTTPWebRequest

Just a reminder for posterity : posting with .Net its so easy! Check out the Cocoa touch framework to realize the difference! public string Post(string url, string data) { string strReturn = null; try { //Encoding the post vars byte[] buffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(data); //Initialisation with provided url HttpWebRequest WebReq =...

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Trip and LASIK Operation

After I did a lot of research on LASIK, chosen EyeStar for my treatment and speak a lot with their patient coordinators, it was time to choose a way to get there. On the center page, they offer also a free service of helping you book your transportation and reservation at one of the hotels with whom they have partnership. 1. The trip I choose to go back to Romania (now I’m in Germany) to see my relatives...

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Interconnecting Flex modules

Adobe Flex 3 has a very interesting component : LocalConnection. The idea behind is that the modules (which runs on client side) might change some data. The exchanged data is not limited at all to simple forms, but can be from a simple String to a XML or Arrays. Few things must be known from the start, but as any technology, only after you learn it everything becomes easy. First of all, the communication can...

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Windows Phone 7 Coding Camp

Just joined Microsoft Students Partners for few days, and me and my colleagues in Team West were invited to a Code Camp for learn developing for Windows 7 Phone with XNA. The camp was established in the castle, in Freusburg. We traveled from Köln after my RIA Business Applications presentation in the Springboard conference. This special event joined together five very known and respected Microsoft Evangelists: ...

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Silverlight VideoPlayer for RailsCasts

I am and will be a Microsoft Developer. While working for convenience with other tools, I love strong type languages. I don’t want to ship products because I saved once and hit “s” one more time, so my product will be shipped with that small, human and yet unpardonable error in code. How many times did you loose your time and effort with PHP in order to find a small mistake like this? In my pursue on Microsoft ...

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Forestry

Uses: Borland Delphi 7 VCL, Microsoft Access Database, User Accessibility Very technical project, using numerous tables from a database to estimate the average growth of a number of forests. I had developed it in Softwise Development company, having given by the client the tree characteristics (maximum age, average growth per year, indexes of growth etc) and the activities that must be done periodically to ensure...

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Change Browser’s UserAgent

The question of What’s that user agent string used for? should has been duly answered in the previous post. The next question is about How to change or spoof user agent string? The structure of Internet Explorer user agent string. The template of user agent string used by Microsoft Internet Explorer. Why there is a need to change or spoof user agent string? Well, this...

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Apple’s Xcode : symbol(s) not found at Line Location Tool:0

I am a begginer in XCode. My first real application for iPhone requires connection to a webservices. Since I wanted to use RPC XML or Soap, I searched on internet and found few examples (Apple programmers aren’t so into code sharing) to implement my requests. I want to mention that since the app is in the stage of proof of concept, the code is still not structured in classes separating the data and business...

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Add Webslice to your website

Cursul oficial BNR 5 You might ask: what is a Webslice? It is a chunk of information, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest news without actually needing open a website. They are added to special toolbars (special because they usually require a specific version of a browser, like IE 8). But...

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SCRUM

What is SCRUM ? one of Agile processes use incremental framework for developing complex software managing new products considered more like a framework in which you can employ various processes and techniques Key principle: during a project the customers can change their minds Manages complex processes by: Transparency The outcome of the product should be visible...

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Microsoft Student Partners

Today I had the pleasure to make the first step in Microsoft Student Partners organization (West Germany branch). It all started when I went to a very interesting workshop on Windows 7 VHD, presented by Daniel Neumann. So I applied by sending to Microsoft Student Partners enrollment e-mail address a cover letter, my cv and a short description. After a while, I got a call from Anton Schweizer, Senior Student...

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SyntaxHighlighter – how to use it and brushes available

The brushes used by SyntaxHighlighter are in separate syntax files named brushes. The following can be used to format the <pre class=”brush: brushname”> that you want to use. Brushes () in alphabetical order: Brush name Brush aliases File name ActionScript3 as3, actionscript3 ...

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Technorati checks my blog

So I applied for Technorati enrollment and they gave me the KNQ3S98TZ58S token for verification. I have to just create a new blog entry and publish in it to verify my domain claim. That’s the price to get into their area. Enjoy!

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BNR exchange rates

Please select your desired exchange currency to see its chart and then modify the period range as desired. The default range is from 3 January 2006 until now.

Curs valutar BNR

Selectati valuta dorita pentru a vedea graficul ei si apoi modificati durata dupa dorinta. Perioada initiala este de la 3 ianuarie 2006 pina acum.

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