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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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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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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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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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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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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SpringBoard 2010 - RIA Business Applications
Today I had the pleasure to present the “RIA Business Applications”. This was a conference of Microsoft Student Partners, of which I am a proud member. My talk covered the Visual Studio 2010 RIA business template, Silverlight 4 in general, RIA WCF and more than this, the Business perspective on software development. Silverlight, Entities and RIA WCF service combined brings in business world a new approach, out...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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PDC 2008 – Developing Applications Using Data Services
This presentation, is done by Mike Flasko, Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation. Smart, well prepared and having good oratorical skills, he is one of the best presenters that I have listen to. He has several other blogs, interesting to see is also this one. He leads the Astoria team which has an interesting blog here. For all of us who didn’t had the pleasure to go to the actual event, the link is...

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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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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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Wordpress – Database backup and restore
From time to time, you’ll need to get a backup of your MySQL database and install it on a different machine – as I needed when reinstalling my Windows 7. I wanted to do something simple, as the last time. But now the database sql file is 11 Mb as opposed to merely 2 MB last time. But I thought that this would be a breeze for the MySQL interface that I use and enjoy – HeidiSQL. It’s free, easy to use and user frie...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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New team created for DIS2 Project
We are proud to announce that we created a team that will accept the challenge of the DIS 2 Project: design an Exertion Game. The team is formed by: Loredana Ene - 286052 Fariha Atta Poenaru Radu - 286053 Abd al Rahman We are students of RWTH Aachen, learning in Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology in Bonn. [Note: Here I will present my work, the entire project...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Ubisoft
Position: Senior Developer Ubisoft is a leading international developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment products. Between June 2006 and February 2007, I participated in a in-house project. It mainly customizes the data workflow through PeopleSoft implementation in manufacture. The goal of the project was to improve the workflow of the production process by combining the needs of different...

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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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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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Windows Vista Updates Download
In Windows Vista you are constrained to use the default tool,Windows Updates, which is set to download only the files which need to be updated, by example if xxx.dll exists in Microsoft’s database as a bigger version and needs to be updated, then only this file will be downloaded from the Microsoft servers. What if you need to reinstall your computer and you don’t have Internet connection...

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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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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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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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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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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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Change screen orientation of a Microsoft Surface application
Microsoft Surface is designed to allow MultiUser and MultiTouch interaction.While MultiTouch is easy to acknowledge, the MultiUser and designing a smart changing of Surface’s screen orientation is a little difficult coming from desktop computing, where the monitor’s down will be the same always. In order to understand the need of changing the screen orientation on a Microsoft Surface, you might want to think abo...

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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 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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Adamo by Dell – contralaptop to MacBook?
The newest line launched by Dell, having as target the MacBook fans, seems to meet the expectations. Slim, slick, powerful, with quite big battery autonomy, seems the perfect response to the Mac version. Since I can’t compare the systems more that by looks, seems that Dell slaps the Apple in face – it is the first time when a device really levels to the looks of an Apple MacBook....

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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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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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"Windows Live Writer" won't upload images to WordPress
I’ve used Wordpress for almost two years now and today I faced a big challenge: I couldn’t post my articles who contained images to Word press with my Windows LiveWriter application. Note: This comes after a long period in which I didn’t upgrade the plugins of my Wordpress application ( I had 11 of them pending upgrade). Also, I had a full system reinstall (you know, the one with formatting the system drive). After ...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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How to add Zend Debugging capabilities to Apache
Most developer use a local website to test and develop their applications. One of the most used servers is Apache. Since for many developers setting this complex tool is not worth spending their time, some use smart installers who can do those settings for them. I personally use Vertrigo server, who brings me the advantage of 0 time for install, 0 time required for setting and making other tools work together, like...

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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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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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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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Totalsoft
Position: Senior Developer I had the pleasure of working in Totalsoft Charisma team between the February, 2004 and the November, 2005. In almost two years, I had the opportunity of working on a large variety of the company’s products, but mainly I was a key member in the team developing the Charisma Business Commander product. Charisma BC is the solution which brought TotalSoft’s recognition on the mar...

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Baby step into Apple’s iPhone programming - Cocoa Touch
I just started the most interesting lab of my life : Programming Apple’s iPhone using a MacBook with Cocoa Touch.It is held in Frauhover FIT, under Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Prinz and Dr. Wolfgang Gräther. In this lab we will start develop an iPhone application using Usability principles, Apple’s User interface Guides. For me it’s the best opportunity to take a peak into the neighbor's(...

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The User Interface
A game should not have only a great idea, but also nice graphical interface. For this, we created an immersive forest environment where the user to be able to 'hunt' some animals.Underneath is the background of the application:

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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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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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Agile roots: Toyota Production System
This methodology and set of principles has the root in the company with the same name. After the Second World War, the Japan and its companies were almost ruined both physical and financial. To recover the economy, they had to rethink all the processes of production in order to maximize their efficiency. This was required because not only that they lack financial resources, but even the loans that they could do...

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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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LINQ wonder world
I am sure that, if you are a developer, at some point in your career heard about and asked yourself: what is LINQ? If not, there’s no problem, you’ll find out now : LINQ comes from language-integrated query and it is a collection of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It helps developers by extending both C# and Visual Basic, adding native que...

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Adding events to LINQtoCSV library
The User Experience that a library provides must be at least equal with is quality and speed. And frankly, CSVtoLINQ rocks on latest two, as I presented in previous articles Import CSV file and query it with LINQ and continuing in LINQ wonder world, but lacks a little on the User Experience(in our case Developer Experience) by not having some events of starting, progress and ending of the parsing. ...

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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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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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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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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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Posts tagged Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft Surface – What’s inside

Aug 1st

Posted by Radu Poenaru in 2009 - Fraunhofer FIT

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 a big horizontal “multitouch” screen, capable of acquiring and processing multiple inputs from multiple users in the same time. The Surface is far more advanced than simple multitouch devices, being capable to be aware of different objects by More >

Microsoft Surface, Surface SDK, Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft Surface – new task and new challenges

Jul 29th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in 2009 - Fraunhofer FIT

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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, I noticed that many events are new, a lot of new interaction techniques appeared ( the device can track up to 50 different fingers) and also the trackers who can be identified and corresponding More >

Microsoft Surface, Surface SDK, Visual Studio 2008

Scripting.FileSystemObject

Mar 8th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in My work

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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 ones that the gadget already owns.

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BNR gadget, Vista Sidebar Gadget, Visual Studio 2008