Software utilities

Poor poor thing. I almost feel like singing him a lullaby and rocking him ever-so gently ‘til he falls asleep with his thumb in his mouth and a drool a mile long.

But I won’t.

‘cos …well….I think he’s got a gazillion million millions stuffed in his pillow for company.

You made the decision to leave, Billy Boy, so what’s with the choked-up speech and the misty eyes? You’re not dying, you’re just leaving, moving on. Change is necessary as you very-well know, Billy. All you have to do is look at all the different versions of Windows, Office, yadda-yadda-yawn, you’ve piled out to know that what I’m saying is true. One minute, it’s Windows 2000, then it’s XP, then it’s Vista. If we can live through those dramatic versions/changes, then you, my friend, can live with the almighty big one you’re about to embark on.

Imagine all the things you’ll have more time to do now. You could go on a holiday. Ever heard of that, Billy Boy? Hol-i-day?

No, not the song by Madonna, dufus.

Well, a holiday is when you jump on a plane (erm, in your case, I guess it would be one of your private jets) and go to a place where you can leave the world behind, relax, reflect and have fun. I heard the mangoes are really good in the Caribbean. Greece is heaven on earth. And Brazil will make you smile all over.

So how about it, Billy Boy? Go on a holiday and thank the heavens that you still have enough of your life (and your money) to enjoy the journey ahead (whichever path you choose to take).

It’s not the end, old man - it’s just the beginning.

You’ll be fine, Billy Boy. We’ll miss ya, but you’ll be fine.

Just fine.

.

It may seem a joke but it’s real! The Jura F90 coffee maker suffers from a vulnerability that allows for remote access to the system (windows XP based), to control the settings of the coffee machine, such as chaging the preset coffee settings (making it weaker or stronger), changing the amout of water or even breaking it. This is going to open a complete new scenary for the network hackers, denial-of-coffee!

I found out the first incompatibility with Firefox 3, it does not seem to work with Liberomail, an Italian provider webmail…

I just installed Firefox 3, and found out the nice new look of the location bar! It shows the title and address you can choose, and highlights it, so to bring more attention to the url. I just found out a problem: which order is used for the url??

While trying to transfer an application created using VS2005 to an embedded PC (VIA C3 M 10000 embedded PC), I run into this very annoying problem. First, I got a slightly different exception, which was due to the msvcr80.dll file missing. So, I used the VS20005 redistributable to deploy the application. But my journey through the DLL hell was only at the beginning, because I got this very strange error. I got this only in the release version of the application, while the debug one worked fine. Using dependency walker, I could check that all the necessary DLLs were there, so I didn’t know what was this. After a couple of days of googling, and an incredible number of rebuild and solution clean, I finally found out that it was due to a DLL (created by me) being compiled in release mode with support for SSE2 istruction set, which was not available in the VIA CPU (it seems that it only supports 3DNow! ones). After removing the SSE/SSE2 optimization, everything worked fine!