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January 2010
13
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Delphi 2010 RTTI Contexts: how they work, and a usage note
Entropy Overload
– Delphi 2010 includes extended support for RTTI, also known as run-time type info or reflection. Many design approaches that have previously only been possible with managed languages like C# and Java because of the code annotation and introspection they required should now be possible in the Delphi ...
December 2009
3
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Playing DVDs in Windows 7
Entropy Overload
– Oh, how I pine for the blissful days of Windows XP, when menus were still in fashion, the start menu didn't contain a tree view, applications didn't require a half-dozen clicks to launch (to expand the tree view, you see), and the user's colour theme choices were respected. Better days, when the ...
13
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Commonly Confused Tidbits re .NET Garbage Collector
Entropy Overload
– I recently read a less than informed blog post purporting to describe the .NET garbage collector, but when pressed to point to a better one, I couldn't find a single concise article that covered everything I thought should have been covered. Type and Memory Safety We all know what the gist of GC ...
November 2009
1
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On the Difficulty of setting the Windows 7 Desktop Wallpaper
Entropy Overload
– You need to be a software engineer to precisely and correctly set the Windows background in Windows 7. I have a multi-monitor setup, and I use a very particular method for laying out windows on my secondary screen: I have them cascaded, from the top-left corner of the screen towards the bottom ...
October 2009
0
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Bad week
Entropy Overload
– It's been a bad week. My main hard drive crashed last Monday or so, while today my scooter is gone, presumed stolen. On the bright side, the final component of my new PC arrived and I was able to get Windows 7 up and running. The new machine has an i7 920, so things like %NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS% ...
July 2009
3
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Public interest rule of thumb
Entropy Overload
– TechCrunch is having a crisis of conscience over what they'll do with internal Twitter documents they've received. My rule of thumb is pretty simple. The documents are stolen. Unless the documents reveal wrongdoing greater than stealing, such that the public interest served in publishing is greater ...
0
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StackOverflow and religious language in programming
Entropy Overload
– I was reading Why I Don’t Listen to the StackOverflow Podcast any More, and in reading the comments, I found it interesting to see the amount of religious language. #21 (sbohlen) I’d have to agree that they do indeed appear successful, but success / failure isn’t a boolean [...] The world is ...
May 2009
1
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WPF / VS2010 Font rendering: blurryville
Entropy Overload
– I downloaded and installed VS2010 Beta 1 to see how it's looking. It's not pleasant though - it makes me feel like I'm looking at the screen through a layer of coke-bottle plastic: Compared to the old rendering, where my preferred fixed-width code / terminal font, Dina, is correctly chosen, as ...
April 2009
4
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Sharing a printer, the hard way: writing your own spooler
Entropy Overload
– I have an ultra-cheap HP Color Laserjet 1600 printer, the kind that costs less than a full set of replacement toner cartridges, and the ones that are shipped in the box are only 20% full. From the driver publisher info it appears the I/O protocol logic of the printer was provided by a company called ...
March 2009
0
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ZFS/Solaris as a NAS
Entropy Overload
– I've finally got a semblance of a Solaris system up and running with a nice fat ZFS storage pool. It was neither trivial nor pleasant, however. Here's the executive summary of what I learned: Don't use OpenSolaris 2008.11; use at least NexentaCore 2 instead; others may work. Don't use an Intel or ...
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OpenSolaris, ZFS, Dvorak and VI
Entropy Overload
– Been experimenting with OpenSolaris to try out ZFS. OpenSolaris is not a pleasant experience even after using an average Linux. Its termcap and terminfo databases don't include complete information for xterm as implemented by the very gnome-terminal it defaults to, much less gnome-terminal itself; ...
February 2009
0
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SecuROM and SysInternals tools
Entropy Overload
– If you're like me, you like visibility into the workings of your OS, which processes are running, what modules are loaded and from where and whether they are signed or not, what files are open, what files are being touched and what registry entries are being frobbed. I use the SysInternals tools ...
January 2009
0
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Irony
Entropy Overload
– I just received two magazines through my letterbox. This is the first one, addressed to a previous occupant of my home, is from the UK Ministry of Defense: The second is my weekly subscription:
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Awesome sentence fragment
Entropy Overload
– Best phrase I've read in some time: an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi
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Jeff is Wrong and don't listen to him
Entropy Overload
– I rarely (I hope) post specific corrections to misleading information out there on the web, not least because there's so much of it and it's usually a futile effort, but Jeff Atwood's latest post really rubbed me up the wrong way. In his post, Jeff writes some unidiomatic C and bewails its ...
