Month: January 2010

Thinking of a new WHS device/machine

Not sure how many of you know, but I run my WHS on a old Dell Desktop (its about 8ish years old) which ran out of available USB ports sometime back and all my attached drives are also filling up and I am now running low on space. I was thinking of getting a dedicated WHS device/machine (not sure what to call it), such as HP’s MediaSmart Server or Acer’s easyStore.

Does anyone know any details of the next version of WHS (based on Win7)? When is it coming out, etc? If it is in a few months then I can hang on and clean up some space and make do. If it is in another year or so then that it too long to wait and I will probably go ahead and look to get something. Any ideas anyone?

Update: How eerie? Soon after posting this I find (via Twitter) this post from Mary-Jo talking about the next version of WHS codenamed ‘Vail’ is leaked. You can find screen shot here and a short video here. There is no mention of any time-lines though – any ideas?

Win 3.1 experience in your browser

If you ever wanted a Win 3.1 experience in your broswer (why I cannot imagine – despite me running a VM), then check out michaelv.org. The irony of all of this is that there is a modern browser in that which seems to be compliant with the standards (it pases the ACID2 tests; fails the ACID3). 🙄

Copying strings in C++

Here is a good example on why either you love C++ or hate it with such terse expression oriented code; I think its pretty cool.

If you want to copy one string to another, one option can be something like this.

void mycopy(char *p, char *q) {
	int len = strlen(q);

	for(int i=0; i<=len; i++)
		p[i] = q[i];
}

However this achieves the same thing as above and is more efficient:

void mycopy(char *p, char *q) {
	while(*p++ = *q++);
}

Of course why would you write your own version when you have standard string copy fundtion strcpy in <string.h>

Permalinks don’t support quotes?

I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug or a configuration issue either with WordPress itself or how the web server is configured where this blog is hosted. I just posted something about compiler errors where the permalink had a single quotes in its title like :  ‘qpainter-painter’-has-initialiser-but-incomplete-type. While this was handled fine by WordPress (I could successfully preview the post as well), once it was published I got the generic 500 Internal Server Error as shown below. So the question is what is wrong (if anything)? What is the expected behaviour? The only way for me to fix it was by removing the single quote in the permalinks as now you can see in the post.

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, [email-address-removed] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

‘QPainter painter’ has initialiser but incomplete type

If you ever got an error something like [some-class] has initialiser but incomplete type, it basically means the compiler cannot understand the type and you need to add the include for it.

QPixmap pixmap(20,10);
pixmap.fill(Qt::white);

QPainter painter(&pixmap);
QPen pen(Qt::blue);

Take the code snipped above when you compile it you might get an error something along the lines of the following for line 4.

‘QPainter painter’ has initialiser but incomplete type

To fix this you need to include the header file where QPainter is defined. The updated code looks like:

#include <qpainter.h>

QPixmap pixmap(20,10);
pixmap.fill(Qt::white);

QPainter painter(&pixmap);
QPen pen(Qt::blue);

Is it time to relook at Facebook again?

I still don’t get Facebook – despite being on it. If I want to talk to someone I will call them, email them, text them, meet them, have dinner with them – get the picture?

I am quite worried about the security and privacy elements of it – or rather the lack of it. Those who know me well (anyone?) 🙂 know I was not always this paranoid but after attending a few Security courses – I cannot bury my head in the sand anymore.

The main issue I have is the commercialisation of the information and it will just get more as Facebook heads to compete with Google – it is my information after all and I don’t feel comfortable sharing so much of it – even after locking it down and setting the various privacy settings. It is very easy to exploit. Take the example where Facebook changed the settings where Google by default would be indexing a lot of this information. And it is you and I as users who had to login and explicitly change a setting to stop it from doing that. Furthermore, despite all the security measures that Facebook might have in place (and they don’t mention how internally within the company walls is the information protected) all it takes is one disgruntled employee (or soon-to-be-ex-employee) to take it all and walk out the door!

The secondary issue I have is the fact that more and more of the information, friends, contacts, etc is marketing and spam (a lot of what we see on Twitter as well). I personally am (thankfully) seeing much less spam on emails these days; but on the flip side I see a dramatic uptick of spam on social site. Not sure if this is because our email spam filters are finally smart enough to work, or perhaps the spammers found the social networking sites to be richer pickings?

It is good to know that there are others out there with the same concern and with some sites such as Suicide Machine allow you to “all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego” [sic]. Of course, all has not been peachy for Suicide Machine at the same time. 🙂

If you are thinking like me and really giving it a go then suggest you seek some help as well to make it easier.

The irony of all of this however is that I will be posting this it to my Facebook wall and also tweeting it.