The feeling when you type is just perfect. You will fell in love with the clicky sound the first time you press one of its keys. At first I was struggling whether to buy the silent edition or the Ultimate edition. I finally decided to go for the Ultimate and I don’t regret it. If you are already a decent typist you won’t miss the missing labels on the keys. If you aren’t you will adapt to it very fast.

The thing is just massive and is built to last. Definitely THE perfect keyboard. My search is finally over

It checks for achievements while you code

This is definitely a plugin worth taking a look at since it makes everyday coding kinda funny and lets you explore new ways of using Visual Studio.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

(yes that was not Voltaire). She nailed it with that. To destroy this ideology one must show these people how wrong they are. One must not simply forbid their opinion.

Oh and btw: Happy new year

If I just knew about this earlier. Creating folders using the mouse is just so much pain…

Since I found it I use it almost exclusively for writing assignments or stuff like that. In combination with LaTeX it simply rocks. You just type your text into WriteMonkey and do the markup later

The picture was taken in February this year in Cairo showing Christian Egyptians protecting Muslims while praying. Since quoting this comment describes best what I think about this, I’ll just do so: ‎”I’m an atheist and I find this beautiful.”

The world would definitely be a better place if there was more tolerance like in this picture.

And finally I found something: A little tool called ‘zend-db-model-generator‘. It takes away all the pain you have when manually typing your model and saves A LOT of time. Additionally the created model classes offer some handy functionality.

So when I’m done with the game I’ll be more active. Promised

Some FireFox developers gave them a certificate which they could use to sign their honey pot. Seriously? This has gone too far. Anonymous is just of bunch of random people and they are giving away certificates to them?

Actually this has destroyed ALL trust I ever had in Mozilla. If I would be using FireFox I couldn’t trust any plugin anymore that it doesn’t sniff sensible information.

FireFox just died for me. It was was good browser but it already was going down.

Also the assembly is now build using “Any CPU” so it runs as a 32bit application on a 32bit system and as a 64bit application on 64bit systems.

If you already have installed csx simply run “csx -u” from the command line or if you don’t have it installed simply download it from the downloads section.

For those of you who don’t speak german: The banner says ‘World-Ninja-Day’ and the guy is thinking ‘sad that no one showed up’

The biggest change that a user will see is that the start menu has been replaced with a new app screen. This screen has been inspired by the start screen of Windows Phone. With the same advantages and disadvantages. The new interface is clearly not meant to be used with a mouse. It purely touch-optimized and this is the reason why this preview will be short. I didn’t want to use the UI with a mouse and a keyboard. However the metro interface is perfect for a tablet PC. So if I ever feel the need to buy a tablet I’d really go for Windows 8.

One thing I already like about Windows 8 is the new explorer. Maybe you already heard of it but it features a new ribbon interface. Once you get used to them ribbons are more efficient than menus. The greatest thing: A customizable quick access bar. There you can place commands that you often use and reach them faster. This is especially cool for the ‘New Folder’ command that you can now reach by one single mouse click.

However if there won’t be any way to disable the metro interface I highly doubt that I will upgrade to Windows 8 any time soon. But there is still very much time before Windows 8 is going to be released so I won’t judge it now. It simply is way too early. I’ll give a judgement when I get my hands on the RTM version.

You all know what I think about Apple but I have to admit that Steve has done so much for the computer world that I just have to express my condolences.

Without Steve we wouldn’t use smartphones or tablet PCs as we do today. Yes he did not invent them but he pushed them in the right direction to become a success.

So rest in peace.

They only needed like 20 years to get this done. I’m soooo proud of them

You can read a detailed preview about Windows 8 some time in the next week when I finally get internet access in my apartment. For those of you that can’t wait: It’s different

 MSBUILD : error : Xap packaging failed. Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

when you are trying to deploy a WP7 app there is probably a file missing that you are referencing in in your app. To find out which file it is check the “WMAppManifest.xml” file in your App’s Property folder. Every file that is reference there has to exist.

The nasty thing about this is that if you included a file as a link it won’t be found by the deployment mechanism. So be sure that these files really exist and aren’t just links inside Visual Studio

And for those of you who use their own software but didn’t bother writing documentation for it (hey you wrote it, you know how to handle it), here is a little story for you:

One or two years ago I wrote a tool for renaming multiple files at once. Yes I know there are of bunch of tools out there that do this but I wrote this tool when I was learning C# and I thought that this would be something cool to get used to the language. Ever since I’m really using this for my own. Not everyday but still once or twice a month. Now I wanted to integrate its functionality into something else and while I was looking through the code to find out what I could reuse and which parts I have to rewrite (hey just take a look at code you wrote two years ago. If it’s still the same you haven’t learned anything in these two years) I found out about functionality that I simply had forgotten.

The tool itself has an help button but I never bothered writing a documentation this button could display. Well if I did I’d probably know that all these functions exist in my code.

So even if you write tools that only you use it is helpful if you put some documentation together which will tell you in some years what the tool is really able to do

Problem was that the machine on which the program is running is inside a domain but the development machine is not. The solution in this case is to use an account with the same name and password on both machines. However after creating the accounts and setting up the necessary rights we still weren’t able to remote debug the application.

Now be prepared for a big laugh: Every time we started the Remote Debugger Monitor on the remote machine a message popped up. Stupid as we are we always clicked ok without reading the message. Today I finally decided to read the message instead of clicking it away. It told us that the remote machine was configured to authenticate remote users as guests. It was even kind enough to tell us what setting we had to change to which value. And guess what? After doing so the remote debugger worked flawlessly

So even if you think you have seen all error messages ever written you should at least take a quick look at it. Maybe you will be surprised with a plain written way how to solve your problem

If you want to brute force an AES-128 encrypted text you would have to try 2¹²⁸ (that is a number with 38 digits) different keys. Using this new method you would “only” have to check 2^126.1 (this is still a number with 37 digits) different keys.

So yes AES (and with it your banking information) is still safe. These things are most likely encrypted with AES-256 (which has 2^254.4 keys – a number with 76 digits).

Anyways this is the first real attack on AES that I know about. Quite interesting read

csx (which stands for C-Sharp-Executer) is a command line utility that acts as an interpreter for scripts written in C# 4. Using csx you won’t need any more scripting languages like batch, perl, php, or whatever you use right now but can utilize the full power of C# and the .NET Framework to write scripts that make your everyday life easier.

License

Copyright © 2011 Matthias Specht

This software is provided ‘as-is’, without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the author be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
2. This notice may not be removed or altered from any distribution.

Requirements

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
• Windows Vista or newer

Installation

This would change the resolution of the window to 1152×864. After you called this once you can use the shortcut you would normally do. The settings will be saved.