In my second year as a trainee (nine long years ago) I bought myself a Samsung R50 notebook to replace my aging desktop PC and also take it with me to school (and play games on it – at home of course). At the time this computer was very efficient from a mobile perspective and also well suited to play serious games. Of course, at some point several years later its age became apparent and this year on April 8 the installed operating system, Windows XP, finally became officially obsolete. Since then the computer was sitting at my mother’s house, waiting for… well… a resurrection!Read More »
The Most Powerful First Song of an Album (Pt. 3)
How about a little music again? In my two previous posts (part 1, part 2) I alluded that I had selected a total of fifteen songs from my music library which I consider to be a kick-ass way to open up an album. It has been more than three months now since the last post and it’s about damn time to conclude this series. Get ready to bang your head into oblivion.
Read More »
Performance Iterating Directories Revisited
I have written about the performance of iterating directories before, in the context of Java and its switch from version 6 to 7 that brought with it the new Java NIO API. For whatever reason I felt the urge to do something similar again, but this time I wanted to compare two different approaches to recursively scanning a directory’s contents:
- Use recursive function calls (a function that calls itself over and over again for each directory)
- Use an iterative approach (a function keeps a list of directories and iterates this list)
To make things more interesting, I implemented this in C++ using the Windows API and the Qt framework, in C# in combination with its buddy the .NET framework and, for good measure, I also threw in the old Java code from over a year ago.
Update (26.12.2014): I added additional data at the bottom of the article.
Read More »
WorkTracker v1.2.2 Released
It has been around three months since the last release, June 22nd to be exact. Since then I have made some small changes along the way, but didn’t publish them because they haven’t been in the shape that I wanted them to be for a release, but still good and helpful enough for me to use them on a daily basis. The biggest new feature is an editor. Second comes the translation and around them gather a few improvements regarding usability.
Visit the GitHub page to download the latest version.Read More »
Windows Phone: 3 Months Later
What started out as a reasonable decision at the beginning of 2014 now reached its climax with the Surface Pro 3: switching away from Apple, in every regard, and move to the Microsoft platform. First the PC, then the phone and lastly the tablet. Since having a Windows based PC is nothing unusual (although I might be one of the few that actually came to like Windows 8 – just as I was one of the few that liked Vista over XP; what does that say about me?) and the Surface is still too new to write about it in any meaningful way, that only leaves us with the phone.
Read More »
C# LINQ Performance vs. Iteration
It’s been a while since I have written something related to programming. Time to remedy that.
Just recently my interest for the C# language rose again and to get back up to speed with the fundamentals I swallowed all videos of an absolute beginners guide on Microsoft Virtual Academy. Something that has been touched briefly was LINQ and my initial thought was: how’s the performance of that compared to how I would usually write it in C++ – where my expertise is?
Mind you, I’m not comparing C# vs C++, but merely LINQ vs. old-school iteration. Let’s go and find out.
Read More »
The Most Powerful First Song of an Album (Pt. 2)
In the first „The Most Powerful First Song of an Album“ I stopped after five tracks, just because I had already written a lot of words. But it also made sense from the perspective of how many items I actually have on my list. If it all works out (read: this post will be quite long as well) then there will be another post with the last five tracks.
So, let’s continue with the next five songs, shall we?Read More »
Windows Phone 8.1 + Lumia Cyan Firmware
A few days ago Microsoft and Nokia released Windows Phone 8.1 through the Lumia Cyan Firmware update to the public (global availability). Typical nerd that I am, I passed on going to bed but rather installed it immediately.
Read More »
The Most Powerful First Song of an Album (Pt. 1)
It’s about time to get back to some music. This time though, I’m not writing a review of an album but I rather picked the first song of several albums I own, based on the premise that it is one hell of an opener to the record.
I developed the idea over quite a long time span, initiated by a few songs that are on the list and a few that are not, simply because they’re not the first track of the album. There are some songs that are so stunning that you can’t stop hitting replay once they’re over. They are just mind-blowing, either by very intelligent arrangements, melodies and outstanding individual performances or very simple, primal brute force. This is about those kind of songs.
Read More »
Camera Shootout: Nokia Lumia 925 vs iPhone 4s vs. Galaxy S2 (Switch From iOS Pt. 3)
Apart from being a phone, the second most important feature of a smartphone for me is the camera. As I have written previously, the most time I had spent on researching available phones went into reading camera reviews. Since I was committed to about 80% to the Nokia Lumia 925 I was most interested on how this phone compared to my then current iPhone 4S. Unfortunately there haven’t been any reviews comparing those two devices. Most of them used the iPhone 5 or 5s as an opponent, which already had a better camera than my highly praised 4s.
Until now!
Read More »
WorkTracker v1.1.0 Released
I have just released the first update to my work/time tracking tool WorkTracker, version 1.1.0. Included are a few visual enhancements, bugfixes, a new runtime and one feature I didn’t want to implement at first: resume a running task after application shutdown.Read More »
Windows Phone Contacts & Communication (Switch From iOS Pt. 2)
In part 1 I explained what finally made me replace my iPhone with a Nokia Lumia device. This little write-up describes the basic functionality of communicating with contacts, including managing contacts, instant messaging and e-mail.
Read More »
Switching From iOS to Windows Phone (Pt. 1)
As I have already mentioned in a previous post (8th paragraph), the Windows Phone platform had me hooked since day one. There was something to it that made it more interesting than iOS or Android. However, at that time the competition had been more mature – not only the OS but also the devices – and therefore I chose a Samsung (from now on called Copyshop) Galaxy S2 as my first smartphone. Android seemed the best fit back then (around 3 years ago), simply because of all the possibilities this platform offered on a technical level (I’m a programmer, that’s how I think). As it turned out, I basically used none of those things I found so interesting (like widgets) but rather tried to get a vanilla Android experience without the Copyshop bloatware – not to mention regular software updates.
WorkTracker, a Little Open Source Tool
Up until my last post I was working on a little tool that helps me track the time of all (or just one) the different tasks at work. Since the work intensity went down it opened up time (yay!) for some personal stuff. We’re required to record our everyday labor and sometimes it became quite complicated to calculate how much time was spent on a single task, especially when the day didn’t start at 08:00 o’clock but some randome time earlier and ended at some random time.
Introducing: WorkTrackerRead More »
The Bumpy Road to PC 5.1 Surround Sound
When building the PC for gaming on the TV one thing I had in mind was leveraging the already existing 5.1 sound system. After the move from the TV screen back to a desktop monitor I thought my headphones would suffice for the time spent playing games. At first that assumption turned out to be true, however, not only did I use the headphones for gaming but also when watching TV shows. In the evening, after work, I wanted to enjoy the audio but had no interest in disturbing my neighbors. After a while this led to the headphones becoming quite uncomfortable for all those hours wearing them, especially during the weekend gaming session when having them on the head for several hours.
So, what does a tech-nerd do about that? Buy himself a dedicated sound system for the PC, he does!
The Gameslinger 