How much is your house really worth in the long term? To answer this question, we calculate long term rent potential and subtract maintenance and loan servicing expenses. Try out our Property Value Estimator.
aleksey on 09.19.06 @ 01:27 PM PST [link]
I have built a cell phone customization site at http://csharpcomputing.com/webapps/cell.jsp. Use it to upload pictures and music to your cell phone. Please let me know what you think. 
aleksey on 05.03.06 @ 02:32 PM PST [link]
I have recently tested a T-Mobile MDA - one of the newest Windows Mobile 2005 devices on the market. This Windows Mobile phone is primarily indented for businessmen and geeks. In fact, I recommend this phone to anybody looking to impress his friends and associates with a really cool communicator.
T-Mobile MDA builds on previous Pocket PC phone devices and offers a valuable design improvement- full QWERTY keyboard. The device comes with 128MB of RAM and a 200 MHz processor and bright, colorful 240 by 320 LCD display that supports 65000 colors.
The back of the phone sports a 1.3 Megapixel digital camera that, by cell phone standards, offers a good picture quality for both still pictures and streaming video! The phone has a built -in Wi-Fi card that with Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP).
...Continue
aleksey on 03.31.06 @ 09:10 AM PST [link]
"The art of the start" is a guide to want to be entrepreneurs. It gives some unique insight to many aspects of entrepreneurship:
Business Ideas
Writing business plans
Raising capital
Bootstrapping
Recruiting
Partnering
Branding
Making money
Giving back
...Continue
aleksey on 03.31.06 @ 09:09 AM PST [link]
To cut communications cost, many customers are switching from regular phone services to VOIP. While a high speed internet connection is a requirement for a VOIP line it does not, by itself guarantee a reliable voice quality over the Internet. Before making the switch, test your Internet connection to verify that it is compatible with a VOIP service.
Will your internet connection support Voice Over IP (VOIP)?
So, will you get a good Voice over IP service? You can perform several tests on your computer to find out if your internet connection may work well with VOIP:
Confirm that you have a fast internet connection with 256+ Kbits/sec upload and download speeds.
Verify that you have a nearly lossless line. (Running either ping -n 500 google.com or ping -n 500 vonage.com from command prompt, should result in less than 1% packet loss)
...Continue
aleksey on 03.31.06 @ 09:06 AM PST [link]
After two years of development, Phishing Inspector plug-in has been released!
Phishing Inspector is an Internet Explorer plug-in that identifies a physical location of the web site registrant. If, for example, you are visiting a financial site, you can easily identify the site with a click of a button.
System requirements: Windows 2000,Windows XP, Windows Server 2003. Internet Explorer 6.0.
This product is licensed for a non-commercial single computer use.
Download here.
aleksey on 03.16.06 @ 09:45 PM PST [link]
2005 was a good year for global economy and high technology companies. Despite natural disasters, overheated housing market and war in Iraq, US technology companies earned record profits.
Google, Wall Street’s wander child, continues to report double digits growth (down from triple digits earlier last year)
Microsoft, Intel, EBay, Amazon and other well known technology companies continue to report solid profits.
Please see the remainder of the article here.
aleksey on 01.17.06 @ 09:15 PM PST [link]
I am reading an RFID book published by two former Sun's marketing executives. Even though the book is not about programming, and the authors are not programmers, the authors keep referring to Java based web applications as "standard based middleware" that is easier to integrate to than to other solutions. The book, which was published in the beginning of the year, has no reference to C# or dozens of other "standard based middleware platformts".
The book is published by Sun Micrososystems Press. Or, is Sun Solar systems Press?
aleksey on 12.24.05 @ 09:52 PM PST [link]
I have installed a new version of Google's desktop search and almost immediately started getting an annoying Client Authentication message. I will disable indexing and see if it fixes the problem.
Disabling indexing did not solve the problem. I am uninstalling desktop search.
aleksey on 11.24.05 @ 09:03 PM PST [link]
About a year ago I bought Norton Ghost 9.0. to backup my home computer. One of my hard-drives was a 5 year old 40GB Western Digital and I knew its days were counted. A couple of days ago the computer could not boot and the hard-drive was making clipping noise. Without waisting time, I went a nearby electronics store and bought Samsung 160 GB hard-drive and replaced the old one. I then inserted Norton Ghost 9.0 recovery CD (comes with the software) located the latest backup image and in about 30 minutes my computer was up and running on a new hard-drive.
Surprisingly, the only program that would not work after recovery was Norton Ghost 9.0. It was related to having a large hard-drive with large LBA support disabled in the registry.
Unfortunately, time again, Symantec's web site was poorly organized. It took me a about an hour to locate Symantec's tech support email. By that time, I had already enabled large LBA support in the registry and Ghost 9.0 was up and running.
aleksey on 11.24.05 @ 03:56 PM PST [link]
I was working remote debugging a C++ app and came across this error:
HEAP[IBDialog.exe]: Heap entry 801690 has incorrect PreviousSize field (6576 instead of 00cc)
Unhandled exception at 0x77f9193c in IBDialog.exe: User breakpoint.
To find memory corruption, I simply set
_CrtSetDbgFlag ( CRTDBG_CHECK_ALWAYS_DF);
in the beginning of the main method.
This is all very dandy. Let's step into the code...
The first corruption occurs on this line : char *t=new char [8]; Is there anything wrong? Has char type been compromised? No. VS.NET 2003 incorrectly reports heap corruption when it is running through remote debugging. (debuggee addresses do not match debugger addresses).
aleksey on 10.11.05 @ 10:37 PM PST [link]
According to Chris Sells, publishers think that people are reluctant to buy volumes thicker than about 800 pages. Well, "Inside MS Windows" has 900 pages in its third edition. The fourth edition of the book just came out and it is almost 1000 pages! David Solomon and Mark Russinovich probably do not need to worry about the size, because they have excellent reputation in the programming community.
The book has 14 chapters and provides detailed explanation of internetworking of the Windows Operating System. Authors have access to Windows source code and provide architectural overview with numerous diagrams and kernel debugger exercises. First 6 chapters of the book are a very useful reading for a software engineer, a system administrator or a technical support specialist. The remainder of the book is somewhat more technical but is probably the only place where you can find detailed information on such Windows Internals as memory, storage and cache management, as well as, networking I/O and crash
aleksey on 06.03.05 @ 12:17 AM PST [link]
Design Patterns by Gamma et al has been a bestselling programming book for the last 10 years. It is often said that every serious programmer needs a copy of this book. Once you open it, you will quickly learn why. It tells you how objects interact and form solutions to programming problems. Check this out.
aleksey on 05.26.05 @ 10:06 AM PST [link]
Avoid default constructors if you can. Avoid deep inheritance trees. Do not call virtual methods from constructors and do not shadow. These are some of the lessons you will learn from my OOP note.
aleksey on 05.24.05 @ 07:37 AM PST [link]
The outcome of RUP is that you end up with extremely
well documented TERRIBLE designs. Unless you have a good OO designer
to start with. In which case they'd have come up with a good design
anyway, but on less paper.
link
aleksey on 03.07.05 @ 02:59 PM PST [link]
It took a few years for spammers to figure out that Blogs are an excellent place to post spam messages. Blog spamming software is becoming widely available and my blog started getting junk posts.
I have disabled comment posting capabilities for now. Please contact me by email (see home page).
aleksey on 03.01.05 @ 09:34 AM PST [link]
Retirement accounts are a great investement when taxes are high and employers make matching contributions. However, if a retirement account has high expense ratio, perhaps it would be better to invest somewhere else? Find out how much money you can make with or without a retirement account with Investment Calculator.
aleksey on 03.01.05 @ 12:03 AM PST [link]
CNET reported today that shipments of Handheld computers (mainly PocketPC and Palm) are down 10% compared to one year ago. The problem with Palms and PocketPC is that they lack functionality, expensive and not easily extendable. I got to work on a Pocket PC (IPAQ) back in 2001. It had a wireless card a built in browser, pocket outlook and an organizer. Nowadays I work on Pocket PC (Axim X 50) that costs about as much and has a wireless card and a built-in browser and organizer. In four years, Pocket PC (a.k.a Windows Mobile) did not acquire a significant new feature.
I am yet to try Pocket PC Phone Edition, but besides being expensive, Pocket PC Phone Edition is appears bulky and much slower than a regular Pocket PC. The key to new hi-tech products is innovation. And if Microsoft and Palm Source do understand that Handheld computer is not a smaller computer with a subset of features, but a completely new gadget, we will be waiting for interesting Handhelds from other companies.
aleksey on 02.02.05 @ 11:19 PM PST [link]