People who are completely paralyzed due to illness or trauma are getting help communicating with a new technology that connects their brains to a computer. Scott Pelley reports.

Or you can watch the video here.

The Wikipedia article on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) and the How Stuff works explanation.

We’ve been using AnkhSVN as the subversion client within Visual Studio for over an year, but there’s always been a problem: How to change the subversion user?

After digging for a while - along several months - i’ve just found it.

Subversion caches the authentication credential on disk. These are the credentials AnkhSVN uses.

So, to change the user, remove (or rename) the credentials cache file located at:

%APPDATA%/Subversion/auth/

The next time you use the AnkhSVN plugin, it will ask for credentials.

That’s it.

Since i’m already talking about AnkhSVN, the new 2.0 version is available and it’s much better than the previous - great job guys:

What’s new in 2.0

* Pending changes window; subversion status and commands available in one place.
* Full support for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008; AnkhSVN is now a SCC package instead of just an addin
* Better log viewer
* Merge support
* Property editor
* AnkhSVN now supports most project types previously unsupported via the SCC api.
* All solution explorer actions (rename, copy&paste, drag&drop) keep subversion history now.
* Enhanced build process and setup
* Automatic check for updates
* And last but certainly not least end user documentation

I’ve talked of lookout before, as it’s my favorite outlook search plugin.
Today i updated my Office 2003 to Office 2007. With that, lookout stopped working. And that was bad.

But, there’s a solution (found in a this comment):

1) Install lookout
2) Download and insert the patched Inventures_Olk.dll into the Lookout folder (C/:Programs/lookout). Just click overwrite. You can download the patched file here: http://www.wirwar.com/blog/wp-content/inventures_olk.zip
3) Download and insert the patched Lookout.dll into the Lookout folder (C/:Programs/lookout). Just click overwrite. You can download the patched file here: http://www.scw.us/win/FixingLookout/lookout.dll

By the way, the lookout.dll patch fixes the date parsing errors.

Yesterday i was trying to force a usb pen and disk to always map to the same drive letter, when i found the following screen

Does this mean there is no need to use the “Safe Remove Hardware”?

I haven’t tried it, but it seems so.

Here’s the way to get to the previous screen:

To find the information an Active Directory has about you, run:

net user <USERNAME> /domain

The info includes the AD groups you belong to.

If you need to collect some kind of statistics from a database, but don’t want to use the live database, use a copy of the database data or use dedicated software for it, maybe a star schema is for you.

What is a Star schema?

The star schema (sometimes referenced as star join schema) is the simplest style of data warehouse schema. The star schema consists of a few “fact tables” (possibly only one, justifying the name) referencing any number of “dimension tables”. (from Star Schema wikipedia article)

Here’s a nice introduction to the subject: Designing the Star Schema Database

diz-se PATH e não PÁT
diz-se QUAISQUER e não QUAISQUERES

e para comemorar: LABORATOLARILOLELA

Já agora, apresento-vos a versão original. Nunca ouvi ninguém dizer M S N e Powerpoints com tanta pujança.

Attached Media: audio/mp3 ( 0 ko)

Instant Messaging
At work, we’ve been using bonjour with pidgin to talk to each other since some of us aren’t in the same office area, and using email or phone isn’t the best solution. After some remodeling, the team is now in different subnets, which complicates things with bonjour. So i installed a Jabber server - Openfire. Problem solved.
Just 2 notes:

• When using pidgin to create an account on the server, use a lower case login. Otherwise you can create the account, but can’t login.
• File transfer doesn’t work. I’ll have to look at it.

XSL
Been working a lot with xslt and xpath. Nice features and not as slow as i thought it would be. A good experience.

Reflector
Reflector for .Net A great application. Although it shouldn’t replace the frameworks documentation. Couldn’t “live” work without it.

MSBuild
To avoid having to build deployment packages by hand i had to turn into some automated build system. Looked at NAnt but it didn’t work with Visual Studio 2005 solutions. So i turned to MSBuild (Cruise Control was just a bit too much). It’s been a very nice surprise, but for the “full experience”, install the MSBuild Community Tasks.

Virtual Machines
Moved some development virtual machines from Virtual PC to VMWare (Player) and today to Virtual Box. Virtual Box can use VMWare’s virtual disks and it’s Seamless mode is very useful. Don’t think i’ll use VMWare Player anytime soon.

Subversion
I’ve been asking myself how can Visual SourceSafe (6.0) still be used…. Finally we’ve (about 2 months ago) moved a project to Subversion (using ankhsvn as Visual Studio Subversion plugin). Some light at last.

Wiki
Although i’ve been using trac for some time in personal projects, only now i’ve installed a wiki - ScrewTurn - to keep track of projects at work. Let’s see how it goes…

Proxies suck
Yep…. proxies suck. That and web applications that need a specially configured Internet Explorer to work. And even then they don’t work because…. proxies suck.

I just found out that it’s possible to create an alias for Namespaces or Types.

As simple as:
using System;
using AliasToMyClass = NameSpace1.MyClass;

I was getting tired of changing Internet Explorer’s and Firefox’s proxy configuration - including all the exceptions - every time i changed network.

Here’s where the Proxy auto-config file (PAC) came to use.

The proxy auto-config file defines how web browsers and other user agents can automatically choose the appropriate proxy server (access method) for fetching a given URL.

A PAC file contains a JavaScript function “FindProxyForURL(url, host)”. This function returns a string with one or more access method specifications. These specifications cause the user agent to use a particular proxy server or to connect directly.

With a PAC file, instead of having a static configuration, you have a dynamic script.

Where’s what i came up with:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
	var myip = myIpAddress()
	var proxy = "DIRECT;"

	url = url.toLowerCase();

	//detect in which network i'm in
	if(isInNet(myip, "192.168.1.0", "255.255.255.0"))
	{

		proxy = proxyHome(url, host)
	}
	else if(isInNet(myip, "172.X.X.X", "255.X.X.X"))
	{

		proxy = proxyClientA(url, host)
	}
	return proxy
}

function proxyHome(url,host)

{
	return "DIRECT";
}

function proxyClientA(url,host)
{

	var use_proxy  = "PROXY proxyurl:proxyport"
	var no_proxy  = "DIRECT"

	var hostip = dnsResolve(host);

	//proxy exceptions - default local networks
	if(isPlainHostName(host) ||
		isInNet(hostip,"10.0.0.0","255.0.0.0")||

		isInNet(hostip,"172.16.0.0","255.255.0.0")||
		isInNet(hostip,"192.168.0.0","255.255.0.0"))
	{

		return no_proxy
	}

	//proxy exceptions - special cases
	if(
		shExpMatch(hostip, "172.20.*")||

		shExpMatch(hostip, "172.23.*")
	{
		return no_proxy
	}

	return use_proxy
}

Put the previous code in c:\proxy.pac and configure the browsers accordingly (example for Firefox and Internet Explorer)

Now, every time you open a page, the browser checks which proxy to use, without you having to do anything.

Special note for Internet Explorer users:
IE caches the results of the PAC file and that can be a problem. To overcome it, you need to modify the registry so it stops the cache.

If you have a better idea, let me know.

I don’t like the ASP.NET Framework, postbacks and spaghetti code.

But i do like MVC. Now it seems that ASP.NET MVC Framework is coming to town.

Parece que não melhorou em nada.

É claro que a mensagem bonitinha só veio depois de muitos timeouts e mensagens como esta:
Message from the NSAPI plugin:
No backend server available for connection: timed out after 10 seconds.
Build date/time: Oct 4 2003 18:00:57
Change Number: XXXXXXX

Resumidamente, o site não escala….. nem às 6h da matina.

Curioso é a mensagem bonitinha ter “Para aceder ao e.escolas clique aqui“, em que clique aqui aponta para “http://www.tmn.pt/eescolas.html”, que está fora do “portal” dos gajos e que parece ser a única coisa que funciona.

It seems that Microsoft will release .Net Framework source code in “read only” mode.

There’s nothing new here, since anyone who needs to see how the framework works, just use Reflector, that is, by the way, a very useful tool.

So what’s new? You can get the frameworks debugging symbols. With them you can debug code that you can’t change and that should be treated by your application as a black box.

For now, the only benefit of this action by Microsoft is to allow the developer the read the framework source code comments.

Btw, How many swears will the be in the source?

Este fim de semana, as galerias romanas da rua da prata foram abertas ao público.

Mais uma vez, só soube depois.

Para quem, tal como eu, nunca lá foi e gostava de saber o lá encontraria, podem ver o seguinte vídeo e fotos.

Introducing Lookout, a great Outlook plugin to search trough all your emails without having to curse Microsoft for having such a frustrating search feature in outlook.

I’ve been using it for over a year, and just love it.

You can download the latest Lookout (version 1.30) - it’s no longer available on it’s official site.

From what i’ve read, it doesn’t work with Outlook 2007, as it is disabled when Outlook 2007 starts (a <ironic> nice </ironic> move from Microsoft to force users to use Windows Desktop Search).

For the curious, Lookout uses the .Net port of the very good open source search engine - Lucene - Lucene.Net.

After 195 days of uptime, i was forced to reboot my home server simply because i forgot the password.

Se portugal tivesse muitos fuzos horários, teriam de arranjar uma alternativa melhor.

Gostava de saber se estas “actualizações e manutenções” que impedem a utilização do homebanking também acontecem noutros países.

Já que estou numa de homebanking, porque não um formato standard para extrair os movimentos (acções, fundos, etc) das contas? É que cada banco tem a sua maneira de o fazer, o que impede qualquer utilidade prática.

it’s a feature.

I’ve been programming with php in linux for some years now. I’ve used, first Debian, then Ubuntu to set up my environments and never had big trouble with it.

So why would anyone would want to install XAMPP in a Linux production environment?
From what it’s on XAMPPs page, nobody should.

XAMPP is not meant for production use but only for developers in a development environment

Ok. Now that’s better.

But if it’s only for development environments, why does it include Webalizer?