• Say goodbye to “it does not happen on my PC!” with Azure

    It is not easy to monitor how our code behaves on a vast array of different machines. A myriad of different configurations can lead to errors that are difficult to reproduce and even more difficult to anticipate. And when the customer calls complaining about a crash, provided information on what…

  • Parallel loops in the AltaLux kernel

    The AltaLux plugin for IrfanView is now open-source (here is the GitHub link) and it is worth analyzing the different methods used for parallelizing the computational kernel. The filter factory, contained in the CAltaLuxFilterFactory files, can create one of four possible instance types (actually there’s a fifth one that you…

  • Transient objects with IoC containers like Castle Windsor

    Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) are popular patterns in modern software development that reduce coupling among modules and so improve the testability of the sames. As this article is not meant to be an introduction to DI / IoC, please refer to numerous introductory articles on the…

  • AltaLux filter for IrfanView is now open-source!

    I have just released the new version of the AltaLux plug-in for IrfanView on GitHub, clone it now! There are some good reasons for taking a peek: having a look at how to write a plugin for IrfanView discovering how the AltaLux algorithm works comparing different ways to divide the…

  • The best Diff so far

    We recently heard about two really far branches in our codebase. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is finding the changes and merging them. So I try a GIT diff within Atlassian SourceTree, my GIT client of choice, and the result is unusable: the developers not only made…

  • Opening password-protected PowerPoint presentations

    PowerPoint presentations can arrive in different file formats: PPT is the default file extension for saving presentations in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier versions. PPTX is the default file extension for saving presentations in PowerPoint 2007 and later versions. PPS is the the show mode extension in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier…

  • Fixing DB problems in Joomla

    Sometimes, this site goes down, and the following homepage appears: The jos_session gets corrupted, a frequent issue with Joomla 1.5.x installations. Luckily, fixing this issue is quite simple, just log into the phpMyAdmin site (usually at the following address: http://www.mywebsite.com/phpMyAdmin) and open the joomla database Locate the jos_session table, then…

  • Fixing Here Maps in Windows Phone 8

    After the map updates on mid-May, both the HERE Maps and Drive apps for Windows Phone 8 stopped working, even worse, launching them made the phone reboot. The obvious fix would be an hard reset of the phone, but that would mean a lot of work, backing up everything. Here…

  • Building Installshield LE 2012 setups from the command line for CI

    In Visual Studio 2012, after installing Installshield LE 2012, you can include setup projects into your solution, as shown below: Adding the Setup project to the solution, and including it into the Release configuration, makes for a quick, 1-click compilation procedure of both the main app and the installer. Still,…