Smart Homes (Again)

I was cleaning up my documents, and found an old presentation where I talk about a lot of the new things coming out of Microsoft. Seeing this, did bring back memories. Some of it was very cool and head of its time. Not heard of DSL’s recently, wonder where the industry is heading.

Here are the interesting finds of this time around. IDA - A cool debugger which runs on most platforms and different from the MS variety. TypeScript - as the name suggests, it is strongly typed JS which compiles down to standard JS! This can only be good I think given all the crazy things one can so in JS. More details here . Can you hide anything from NSA? TV Tuners - did you know they can let you spy - who knew?...

Lessons from the Internet - If you never learn how to fail, you will never learn to scale!

Interesting read for any parent!

​I saw this awesome presentation on why rand() is considered harmful. When you need a random number, don’t call rand() and especially don’t say rand() % 100! This presentation will explain why that’s so terrible, and how C++11’s header can make your life so much easier. If you need uniqueness and non-deterministic, especially on the context of security or crypto then you need to think about a few things. For example the frequency, non-uniform distribution, and not using a pseudo random number generator (such as Mersenne twister ) and not a linear congruential generator ....

I don’t know how many people have heard of that NoReplyAll Outlook Add-In from MSR - which is a must have IHMO for everyone. With this enabled, you get the following new buttons in the Toolbar and when composing emails, it will restrict the others from replying-all and help in dealing with some of the email-storms you get internally! You can NoReplyAll add-in this from here .

Been a while since I posted on this series. But starting it again. Here are the latest few interesting finds I have stumbled across. Of course these are in no particular order. UTF 8 Everywhere - Argues the cause on why UTF-16 and Unicode is a default poor choice except for specialized libraries, which deal with text. Data discrimination for the poor - Means that if you are poor (i.e. not rich), then the internet you see and know might be different from the others....

Why did the cat meow? Because it’s a cat. Cats meow. (PS - I am not a cat guy, more of a dog guy)

(and also valid for the US Govt) *Ring* Hello, IT. *Sigh* Have you tried turning it Off and on again?

Don’t start an argument with a girl because they all have 4,30,50,194 GB memories and will bring up something you did at 14:27PM on 23/04/2008 (via ExtraGrumpyCat )

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 int MyFunction() { // There once was a man named Dave int Result = 0; // Whose code just wouldn't behave MyObject \*Ptr = new MyObject(); // He left to go to a meetin' Result = Ptr->DoSomething(); // And left his memory a leakin' return Result; }

two words never heard in polite conversation Microsoft Vista

You scramble me and unscramble me I’m putty in your hands ~ Only you

Sigh, why do I get to see all the ‘interesting’ errors. Not sure what do I get to make of this. :)

The wife recently bought a Nike FuelBand which she was loving. However in about 4-5 weeks of regular usage, the strap on it broke and the links which hold it together fell apart. The device itself is working, but it cannot be worn now as it won’t lock making it quite useless. 😢 I was quite surprised as this is supposed to last more than this given both what it is meant to do and the cost of the device as well....

No, there is no typo in the Subject, this advice is from NSA and should be good if you want to secure your data from NSA. The Register had this excellent write up on Guardian could have protected Snowden. I also like what The Register say: Use an old-fashioned air gap. Be paranoid You also could Steganography , using something like SteganPEG , but that is more obscurity, rather than security....

After my WHS died and I moved to a Synology DS413 and using that as a ‘home server’ and have been extremely happy with it! The only thing I miss is backing up the Windows machines automatically (as WHS did), but overall I think this is better, flexible and more powerful compared to WHS. I needed to look for a new wiki software. I recently moved from ScrewTurn Wiki (which was great BTW, but then is a dead project now) to DokuWiki which is perfect for my needs....

I have been thinking of doing some code ‘smelliness’ test, and am keen to automate code reviews (as much as possible). I am interested to know what tools have you guys used? I want to use the tools to find the low hanging fruits and know off the 80% of things and then we manually look at the more interesting aspects, which the tools don’t (or can’t) pick up. Ideally, I would like this as an add-in to Visual Studio, which can run as part of a build and depending on how one configures it, can get to a gated check-in and/or work-items being created in TFS which then can be assigned and tracked....

Who cares what it smells like, it’s what it sounds like that matters. See the first 54 seconds, and then you will be hooked.

Got a really good read from Jerome , fellow Avanade colleague - ten extraordinary things bosses give their employees. Not surprisingly, good bosses care about getting important things done. And exceptional bosses care about their people. Autonomy and independence Clear expectation Meaningful objectives The true sense of purpose Opportunities to provide significant input A real sense of connection Reliable consistency Private criticism Public praise The chance for meaningful future More details here ....

If for some reason when you try and run your code and you get a PINVOKE exception (like the one below), then most likely you don’t have the LeapMotion binaries in your Debug (or Release) folders. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 System.TypeInitializationException was unhandled HResult=-2146233036 Message=The type initializer for 'Leap....

I don’t know what WordPress thinks of IE 10 (running on Win 8), but when I upgraded to WordPress v3.6, and I login to the Dashboard, it does not like IE running in compatibility mode and shows me the following. It would think I am still running IE 6! Also whilst I don’t get this with the compatibility mode switched off, everything does not work correctly and one has to use either Firefox or Chrome....