Archive for June, 2012
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/08
Just came accross an interesting ethernet router: The Asus RT-N66U (N900) dual-band WiFi router.
It has quite a bit of horsepower, is passively cooled, might handle dual-WAN from the stock firmware, and it it doesn’t: it is supposed to run custom firmwares like Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.
Interesting…
–jeroen
Dual / Triple WAN How To – InfoDepot Wiki.
Posted in ASUS RT-N66U, Internet, Network-and-equipment, Power User, TomatoUSB | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/08
The ribbons in Office 2010/2007 take up a lot of sceen estate.
Luckily, it is easy to maximize space by “Auto-Hiding” the Ribbon in Office 2010/2007: put the Ribbon in “Minimize Mode”.
The Ribbon will un-hide when you:
- click on one of the Ribbon tabs
- press the Alt key followed by a letter corresponding to a Ribbon tab
How-To Geek explains (with screen shots) how to put the Ribbon in “Minimize Mode”:
To put the Ribbon into minimized mode, just right-click an open area on the Ribbon and choose Minimize the Ribbon.
Edit:
In addition to that (thanks Matthijs!) you can switch the Ribbon to/from auto-hide behaviour by double-clicking on a ribbon tab.
–jeroen
via: Maximize Space by “Auto-Hiding” the Ribbon in Office 2007 – How-To Geek.
Posted in Excel, Office, Power User, Word | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/07
On Windows, the keyboard shortcut [WayBack] Windows-L will lock your workstation and when [WayBack] Fast User Switching is enabled – and when your (corporate) policies allow it – shows your Switch User screen.
First of all, there is [WayBack] TSDISCON (which I found thanks to [WayBack] this thread). It is meant to disconnect a terminal services session, but when you are logged in on the console, it just locks your workstation.
It is small (about 20 kilobyte) and [WayBack] has been there since Windows 2000.
Then there is the [WayBack] LockWorkStation function that does the same.
Lot’s of people think you can call LockWorkStation using rundll32.exe. As per Raymond Chen: [WayBack] (404) Don’t do that: it has a different parameter count and different calling convention than [Archive.is] rundll32.exe expects (note that in Raymond’s article, the last link is broken).
So now you all go upvote [WayBack] the TSDISCON answer and downvote the ruldll32.exe LockWorkStation answers on this [WayBack] SuperUser.com question.
–jeroen
PS: [WayBack] Rob van der Woude published a list of Terminal Server commands including TSDISCON.
Posted in Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/06
There was a nice short discussion on Entropy Overload where Ivan Levanshew seemed to want to be Delphi way more C++ and Barry Kelly explains why Delphi isn’t C++.
Both Delphi and C++ are great languages, but both have weaknesses too. It is good that their individual strengths complement each other, and their weaknesses don’t crossover too much.
Ivan Levashew said…
It’s XE2 now, and there is still no proper RAII despite Delphi runtime already having all the required functionality for years. Variants copying and destruction is an example.
It’s a pity. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in C++, Delphi, Delphi XE2, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/06
Basically there are many ways to read/write Excel workbooks and worksheets:
- Use the open source EPPlus .NET assembly (which is based on ExcelPackage)
- Use the open source ExcelLibrary which seems to be derived from PHP ExcelWriter
- Use OleDB to read/write Excel with either the JET (Office <= 2003) or ACE (Office +> 2007) drivers
- Use COM/OleAutomation/Interop/VSTO
The latter is used by many many people, and has two big drawbacks:
- it requires Excel to be installed
- it is painfully slow
The others can run server side as they do not require Excel to be installed. They are also much faster.
I’ve used OleDB, and it is sort of OK, but hard work.
EPPlus is much faster and versatile and seems to be the most active open source project.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, .NET 4.5, ASP.NET, C#, Development, Excel, Office, Software Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/05
A long while ago I read about Embarcadero Discussion Forums: Barry Kelly on LLVM … I think it was 2010, the thread is gone now (probably because the Embarcadero forum index does not go back more than one year), but the title still shows up at Google search: Barry+Kelly+on+LLVM
Barry Kelly is one of the Delphi compiler engineers, so it got me thinking and made me archive some links (I wish I had archived the content as well as the Wayback Machine didn’t archive some defunct links.)
Today Paweł Głowacki presents the Mac and Mobile Development for Windows Developers event and indicated future Delphi compiler platform targets like ARM will indeed make use of the The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project..
(if you still want to come: you are welcome, there are a few spots left; The event is June 5, 2012 at 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM
at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven Conference Center, The Strip).
Delphi leveraging LLVM for ARM is important in more than a few ways: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Delphi, Development, FireMonkey, OS X FMX, Software Development | 10 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/05
Scott’s blog posts usually contain a truckload of side information in between the main topic.
He was discussing the new ‘designed’ look of Visual Studio 11 (the mantra: just give it a shot, and then tell how you like it; I like the new look and feel very much).
And he also mentioned a site of monochrome Glyphs I hadn’t seen before:
Glyphs are apparently a designer term for icons that are not colorful. You can see a lot of glyphs at http://thenounproject.com
Those glyphs are awesome!
–jeroen
via: Change Considered Harmful? – The New Visual Studio Look and Feel – Scott Hanselman.
Posted in Development, Software Development, User Experience (ux), Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/04
Because I tend to forget where Google keeps the information on dowloading the offline administrative and personal installers I have quoted their full help page below.
According to Google Employee Blair (Googler) (at 20100614 in topic Google Chrome Offline Installer – Google Chrome Help):
Be aware that the version of Google Chrome available from the link may not auto-update to future browser releases, meaning you could miss important security fixes and feature improvements. Make sure to check back often to download newer releases.
The standalone offline installers from the quote at the bottom of this post did all keep themselves up to date.
There is a bunch of version specific Google Chrome installers THAT WILL NOT AUTOUPDATE (they usually keep less than 2 months) with URLs formed like this: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/01
Since the auto-update nor manual update feature of Philips devices over the internet never seems to work:
Today is Philips firmware using USB stick and app update time (:
One bummer is that the “firmware installation instructions” do not mention that you have to start with a cold boot one time before updating the devices. If you don’t, then the devices (especially the TV’s) do not recognize there is an update available.
So: always start with cutting the power (either by switch or by plugging the cable) then enabling power again. You only need to do this once before plugging in a USB stick with the update.
Another bummer there is that Philips does not publish direct links on their site either, so you have to browse through pages, select languages, then download the stuff. But the actual files are still static.
So below are the URLs of the pages and download links I used.
Note the links have been static, even over firmware versions.
Some tips on the links of the Philips site above:
- Replace the 42 in the URLs with the screen size of your TV to get the download specifically for your TV.
- Replace DEU or ENG in the URLs with your own language abbreviation to try getting it in your language.
This is the list of language codes and languages that Philips uses: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Android Devices, HTC, HTC Sensation, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, LifeHacker, Power User | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/01
Is it coincidence, or not that these 3 got updates last week?
–jeroen
Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 