General

185 posts

Fedora Core 8 released

Although I am a developer on Windows platform, mainly with .NET framework, I still try to keep up with what is happening in Linux community. Among all the major Linux distributions, Fedora Core is my favorite, and Ubuntu comes next. One of the reasons that I like Fedora Core is there are many developers supporting it by building many useful applications for this distribution. Another feature of FC that attracts me is that it makes […]

From Bugzilla to OnTime

We have been using Bugzilla as our bug tracking system for quite a long time, but recently my department decided to switch to OnTime by Axosoft because it meets our needs better, for example, OnTime has the ability to separate defects from features and incidents, and to generate professional-looking reports, etc. After the decision was made, I was assigned to make the switch as smooth as possible. The biggest challenge I had was to find […]

HashTable, ListDictionary, and HybridDictionary

HashTable is ideal for creating lookup tables because it can very quickly find the value of an item from a large collection of items based on the item’s key. However, it may become an overkill if the collection is relatively small, say about 10 items or less, because of the overhead of HashTable. In this case, ListDictionary is a better choice than HashTable. ListDictionary is a simple implementation of IDictionary with a singly linked list. […]

WordPress 2.3 is out

Just before going to bed, I turned on my computer to check my emails and to check my blog stats, which is my daily routine before the day is out. I noticed that WordPress 2.3 is released. This version is named “Dexter” for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. I am very excited about this new version, and cannot wait to upgrade my current version. Unfortunately, it’s about mid-night now, and I should be in […]

Missing hard drive space – Windows XP and 2003 Server

Here is the scenario: One day, you found your available hard drive space is very low, so you opened up Windows Explorer and selected all folders under C drive to see the total of the used hard drive space. You subtracted the total used space from the total hard drive space to see how much space you still have. Then you found a big and significant discrepancy between your calculated available space and the free […]

Write a blog post with MS Word 2007

Microsoft Word 2007 has a new feature that allows bloggers to write posts in Word itself then publish it later. When you click the Microsoft Office Button (the icon at the upper left corner of MS Office) and select “New”, you will be prompted with two types of new documents: Blank document and New blog post. MS Word will ask you to register your blog account first if you haven’t done it, and it supports […]

Add Bookmark dialog not working – FireFox

I have had this annoying problem with FireFox for a while: when I try to bookmark a web page, the “Add Bookmark” dialog does not respond after I click “Add”. If I select a different folder to save the bookmark, the “Add Bookmark” dialog will respond but only add the bookmark without a name – a blank bookmark entry pointing to the web page. I didn’t use FireFox as much as I do now, so […]

VMWare Server on Fedora Core 6

I am a .NET developer and work with the Windows platform almost all the time, then why Linux out of a sudden? The reason is Virtulization. Every developer should have some kind of virtulization tool to help them test their applications under different environments. Microsoft’s Virtual PC may be an option. But the problem with MS Virtual PC is that if I install it on my Windows PC, then I have to maintain the security […]

I love this error message!

I got a 503 error message the other day when I was trying to write a post, which made me love the WordPress developers more. Why? Look at the screenshot of the error message and you will see: BTW, “Matt” is one of their developers. Don’t you love these guys? Maybe I should ask my supervisor if I can write an error message like this and put his name in it. 🙂

Reflector 5.0 available

Just in case you have not heard about it, Reflector, a must-have for .NET developers, was released version 5.0. If you have not used it (shame on you – I am kidding :-)), here is what it is: “Reflector is the class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer for .NET. Reflector allows to easily view, navigate, search, decompile and analyze .NET assemblies in C#, Visual Basic and IL.” Reflector can be downloaded here.