We ended up replacing the parts of the equation from this presenation at Stream 08 with something less inflamatory.

This replaces about 90 lines of code

For Each item In _source
    If Not (From control In Controls Where _
        TryCast(control, ISource) IsNot Nothing AndAlso _
        TryCast(control, ISource).Source Is item).Any Then
        Dim viewcontrol = FormsStore.Present(item, _mode, GetType(Control), _
                                             GetType(Control)).Transform(item)

        Controls.Add(viewcontrol)
    End If
Next

The andalso is a shortcircuit boolean. It prevents the runtime from rearranging the expression evaluations or branching them on different execution paths.

Visual Basic 9 is so compact o_O !

that’s what I think at least

In Europe and Americas we have to look after each unit to make sure their efficiency doesn’t drop. It’s about empowering the unit. Lean and mean human constructs push productivity. It’s important for the huma to lives long and well.

In BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) it’s about the mass. It’s unclear weather the full potential of any individual will ever be unfolded, and it’s unclear if that’s even needed. There is less specialization, less power in the unit, but numbers outdo quality wrt significance.

After a 3 month plan I terminated my hosting account with the Dotnetpark service.

Let me enumerate the problems I’ve had with the service:

• The first email I received with the confirmation and account details had holes in it, especially the MS SQL server details.
• Support is outsourced to India, with whatever that means to anyone who cares.
• The MSSQL itself never worked. I could never connect to it using the web interface, or the addresses they provided me with.
• There is no way to attach your IIS console to the server. You need to manage everything over their horrible control panel.
• Since day 1 the panel said I was being hosted in asp.net 1 mode. If I changed that eveything stopped working. One magic day, my sites stop working and apparently I should have been in mode 2 all along. FFS.
• Forget about backing up your stuff. Their file manager panel times out when creating large zip files. There is no other backup facility though. You just need to download the entire site from time to time.
• You get no indication that the zip files you get are corrupted. They even validate on Winzip. They caused me troubled though when I considered them as clean backups. They’re fucked up.
• After installing Frontpage extensions in one app (which installed it for the entire site and overwrote files of mine btw) file permissions got messed up all over the site.
• Over the time, I’ve had random files disappearing. Mostly files with great transaction volume such as flash and videos. Naturally though I can’t prove they deleted anything, and therefore can’t blame them.
• When you grant an application write privileges in their panel, you get to have it for the entire application only. Hello ? Malicious users, crackers, hackers unite !
• When I asked them to install Umbraco CMS for me, they said I should just copy paste and run it. Umbraco can’t be installed that way though.
• I asked them to install Graffiti CMS which needs to run an installer too,and mentioned that they say on their front page they’d install it for me. After some pressure they did it, although not using the MySQL database I had set up, but the embedded one. Oh well. It’s of not that they said they’d have it done in 20 minutes (after 40 in wait) and it got done some 12 hours later.
• Only the primary user gets an FTP account. The others get one too, but it doesn’t work anyway. If you have collaborations going on you’re screwed security wise, cause you can’t adjust their rights anyway.
• Their panel supposedly lets you create and delete databases and users on MSSQL. However when I tried to delete users or database I got a ‘-1’ error. Consistently.
• The web panel supposedly lets me create Sharepoint sites. Guess what doesn’t work ? Everything.
• The web panel supposedly lets me install outdated free software such as Dotnetnuke and PhpBB. Same here.
• The DOWNTIME IS HORRIBLE AND SO WAS THE SPEED !
• They dont admit they have downtime or speed issues.
• When I asked them to delete my account, they asked me for a document I never received, and after that for my username/password combination. I’m still waiting for them to sort it through their ‘financial dept’.

If you think I’m nuts, read the actual mail correspondence. It’s here.

Until now, I haven’t had any issues with my new host, DiscountASP.net . Any problems I had have been responded to and solved in less than 20 minutes each.

Για να κατανοήσετε το χιούμορ από τα αποκόματα στο τέλος βοηθάει πολύ να είστε φοιτητής του τμήματος Πληροφορικής ΑΠΘ

It’s 1:19am and I’m feeling peckish

What it does: iSpring will turn any presentation of yours into a perfect Flash object. Complete with navigation controls etc. Unlike other tools in it’s category and mediocre sites such as Slideshare.net it will preserve all your transitions, your animations and it also embeds in the right fonts, therefore your regional encodings won’t break.

I’ve been using this little tool for quite some time now, and I haven’t taken the time to marvel at how great a job it does. I can’t overstate the amount of goodness in this product. It does things right from the consumer standpoint, it’s architecture is sound and robust against future changes in powerpoint itself and so on.

Quality comes at a [quite high] price though, but for all purposes except custom players and related goodness, there is a free version you can get here.

To check out the results of such a presentation with a lot of heavy animation, click the image below.

I’m allergic to cats, period. But once in a while a cat comes by that cause little or no allergic reaction to me. One such is my 17+ year old Stirella.

and a newcomer to the house, the less than a year old Bastet

΅

Bast specifically is very odd, because male cats usually tend to provoke a killer reaction on me.

I think I’ll have them do a cat scan sometime soon.

Not so much.

I did an experiment. Over the past two weeks I had zero time and extreme pressure on many issues that I couldn't even entertain my mind off of.

Therefore I decided to stop reading them entirely.

Two weeks later, I come by and it's all still the same. I can't find a single headline that would have effected me decisively in any way:

• nothing that would make me change a decision of mine
• nothing that would change my decisions in an indirect way. Not a musing, no inspiration, no nothing.

Nothing that I hadn't already thought of, or already sort of knew by looking at announcements that were made at shareholder meetings. I wouldn't have guessed much of what eventually happened in these two weeks though if I were just reading regular blogs. The top 5 of tech for example.

In retrospect, I am now forced to categorize tech blogs in entertainment or techtainment if you will.

While Jyri for quite some time is spreading that he and Peteri were applying presence features throughout Google's properties, they were also leaving us with the perception that they were working on moving the original Jaiku on Google's App Engine.

It seems that they just finished that, and I simply can't believe that it took them so long. If it did, their engineers are either horribly inefficient or sidewinded by Google campus' free massages.

Dear IBM,
We've been working on the Jaiku service over the weekend after
finding an issue with one of our servers on Friday. As part of the
solution, we're moving Jaiku to a Google data center.
This is something that we'd planned to do anyway, as part of our
future transition to Google App Engine. Now that we've moved, we'll
need to ask you to review and accept a new terms of service and
privacy policy.
As a special thank you for your patience, we'd like to throw a
little nest-warming party and open unlimited invitations for Jaiku.
Please sign in at http://jaiku.com to review and accept the new terms.
Special notice to users of Jaiku Mobile: to reconnect Jaiku Mobile
after agreeing to the new terms, select 'Go Online' from the Options
menu on your phone.
See you there!
Jyri and the Jaiku team at Google

Compatibility Mode & Button Layout

Compatibility view with older IE versions with less support for standards in now a click away. It used to be that the entire browser window had to be closed, but not anymore.

Also the Stop and Refresh buttons are now separate, which doesn't really make sense. I liked the consolidation and look of Beta 1 more.

Process Isolation

I can't show that in a screenshot, but when a tab malfunctions in IE8, the tab dies not the browser. I can't stress enough how much we need that in Firefox.

Accelerators

The idea is that you mark a piece of text in your page, a button appears over it and then you get to do something with it.

In the image below I highlighted the word Chania, clicked the Activity button, and found the place in the map. Simmilar stuff can be done with blogging, search engines etc.

I personally find this feature much simple to use than Mozilla's Ubiquity which enables me to have a conversation with my web page,but is much more complicated that I'd like it to be for a browser.

Reopen closed tabs

When you open a new tab, you are given a list of the tabs that you closed earlier. Simple and elegant.

No update on the quick tabs front

Yeah it still feels boring and sluggish

In-page search

You can now search in pages the Opera/Firefox way.

This was available as a javascript plug in, but it's great to know that it's in the box. This will be especially useful when the Explorer control is inside a 3rd party application.

About time !

In-Private browsing and evidence elimination

Also known as porn mode. It essentially blocks all sorts of statefulness and rejects cookies that come to often.

Essentially this is a porn-mode. You know you're in the state when you see the InPrivate logo in your window

What is very interesting and distinguishes the feature from simmilar ones in other browsers is that you can have private windows and normal ones at the same time. Therefore you can also use it to check your email on someone else's computer without worrying about logging off etc. Just close the window and it's all lost.

Suggested Sites

The Suggested Sites feature is a simple recommendation service that finds sites you might like depending on your browsing habbits and sites you like to visit. Can't wait to see what suggestions it's got for people browsing porn.

Developer tools

In the page > Developer tools item, you get a program that analyzes your web pages simmilarly to Firebug. It can inspect elements in your DOM, explain why they look that way and even profile how much time each took to render.

The profiler can also time Javascript performance.

The explanation of why some elements look the way they do should be helpful to developers trying to get IE to show stuff how it's supposed to look like.

Troubleshooting the browser itself

In case of major frack up, you can also reset all of the browser's state. This should be very useful when assisting your parents.

Search completion

Standards - We've got a long way to go

CSS2 passes

CSS3 not so much

348 out of 578 Selector tests pass. Better than the near 0 of Beta 1.

   Πήγαμε να δούμε τον φρέσκο Batman, και είδαμε την καταστροφή. Δεν ξέρω από που να αρχίσω.

Απλώς θα αδειάσω τις φωτογραφίες.

Τρύπες στον τοίχο. Επίσης έκθετα καλώδια.

Το stand της ταινίας batman διαλυμένο. Ένα παιδικό σπιτάκι που ίσως έπρεπε να είναι σε αποθήκη.

Φώτα που κρέμονται. Πόμολα τουαλέτας που κρέμονται ( Η ΑΗΔΙΑ μέσα, πραγματικά απερίγραπτο το τι είναι πίσω από την πόρτα). Ένα σποτ καμένο, ένα να κρέμεται αναμένο, και ένα σωστό.

Στοκαρισμένες επιφάνειες, και σημεία που κάποιος ξέχασε να βγάλει τα χαρτιά που βάφτηκαν.

Κλασικά εφόσον δεν υπάρχουν ταξιθέτες μέσα στην αίθουσα, ο καθένας μιλάει όσο θέλει, ή παίζει τάβλι ενώ βλέπουμε την ταινία.

In the exam room. 1 hour before a professor hands out the examination papers and the bleeding begins.