Amazing Kinetic Illusions in Op Art – Articles

 

Stare this image for a while, do you see any motion? For more illusionist images like this one check out the article Amazing Kinetic Illusions in Op Art at Dr. Mercola‘s website

Η ελληνική «νύχτα των κρυστάλλων»

Επίκαιρο άρθρο στην εφημερίδα Καθημερινή.

Vista Task Scheduler Error “The task image is corrupt or has been tampered with.mcupdate”

I just happened to visit Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Task Scheduler and got the error:

"The task image is corrupt or has been tampered with.mcupdate"

Apart from the bad syntax of the message (should say [mcupdate] at the end, not .mcupdate), you have not many clues on what is throwing this message. Only if you navigate to Microsoft / Media Center at the scheduled tasks you see the message again, which gives you more clues on what is responsible for the error, in specific the "mcupdate" task of Windows Media Center.

According to a relevant forum topic on the Internet, you can delete the mcupdate task from folder:

C:\windows\system32\tasks\Microsoft\windows\Media Center

I opted to rename the file to _mcupdate instead which seems to also solve this issue.

I wonder though if some malicious code is related to this error.

Amazing Animal Videos

If you love animals like me, you should see these Amazing Animal Videos

Some bugs of NetBeans IDE

NetBeans is an IDE (and a Platform for making IDEs in general) that I like a lot (in contrast to Eclipse, which I feel is more like a sum of plugins dropped all together into a container, skyrocketing the complexity). However, while using the previous version of NetBeans IDE (6.5 has just been released), I noted various issues that I record here in case anyone with more free time can check them out at the newer version:

1. NetBeans highlighter (and background parser) doesn’t match correctly HTML tags in JSP pages if they’re not of the same case (say TD and td). This isn’t a problem for JSP servers, and shouldn’t cause parsing errors like "unmatched tag" in NetBeans, but some warning instead. It’s not only that the IDE complains about that, but that it can’t match the tags correctly in that case (pressing CTRL+] won’t go to the correct matching start/end tag)
2. There’s no "File / Close all files" menu option
3. When one tries to close an editor tab and is asked to save the modified file, if they press Cancel, the IDE goes to another tab (as if the previous tab had been closed)
4. Collaboration auto-reconnect dialog’s option "Don’t show this dialog again" is ignored and you get the auto-reconnect dialog popup every time the connection to the collaboration server breaks.
5. I’d like to be able to select multiple projects and then have Build, Clean and Build, Clean etc. common actions at the menubar and at the context-sensitive menu for the selection.
6. Selecting "Format" at the context-sensitive menu for a Java interface file, removes newline characters and moves all comments (tried the //… ones, maybe occurs for the /*…*/ ones too) at the end of the previous line of the comment
7. Selecting "Format" at the context-sensitive menu for a JSP file doesn’t format any Javascript code in the JSP page (maybe "Format" doesn’t work for .js files either, haven’t checked)
8. At NetBeans "Find" pane (say when showing results from "Edit/Find in projects" menu), I’d like to see Expand/Shrink all actions (open/close the found-items tree to all or no depth respectively)
9. If at the Projects pane we are in the middle of editing (typing-in) a new name for a project and press CTRL+F, find will be executed at the editor window, but won’t give results
10. When renaming a project (even when you use the wizard and ask it to do any refactoring needed), at project’s .properties file (the private and the public ones) you get "oldname-srcX…" entries (e.g. for src-dir) that need manual editing, else when you move the project to other machine you get unresolved references errors and have to execute rename with refactoring again at the target machine (that last action doesn’t solve the issue still, cause moving the project to other machine again still shows the issue, till you edit the .properties files by hand and fix the oldname to the newname of the project – I usually do a Find in projects and search at the whole project for the old project name to do this fix)
11. The find/replace preview pane should use syntax highlighting
12. The dropdown of the find in projects dialog doesn’t always work OK (can’t select previous item in the list using the mouse)

If you find that some of the above issues have been fixed at NetBeans 6.5, please drop me an e-mail…

NVIDIA® – Speak Visual

Just came across a very cool Flash website for the Speak Visual ad campaign by NVIDIA. Very cool blending of keyed video and animation. Do try it out!

Bjarne Stroustrup: The mis-education of software developers

Alan Zeichick’s Weblog quotes a very interesting interview of Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++) at the blog post "The mis-education of software developers", on the issue of the lack of education on programming style, even at Computer Science university departments.

Bjarne believes that, “few students see code as anything but a disposable entity needed to complete the next project and get good grades. Much of the emphasis in teaching encourages that view.” Ouch!

Anders Hejlsberg – Where are programming languages going?

In this video from JAOO Aarhus 2008 Anders Hejlsberg takes a look at the future of programming languages and sees the trends; declarative, dynamic and concurrent. As the chief designer of the C# programming language and a key participant in the development of the .NET Framework Anders Hejlsberg has a lot to say about this development – not just as a wish but also as something that can be realized.

Four Paths to Java Parallelism

An overview of parallel programming technologies for Java. With .NET 4.0 and its parallel programming extensions it seems both camps are looking forward to the global information cloud.

Citizens chase away rioters at Patras, Greece

Tonight citizens actively pushed back rioters who were throwing flame bombs at the center of the Greek city of Patras. Basically, I tend to support an active citizenship behavior when Police doesn’t protect people (cause of the orders they had to avoid conflicts in the fear of injuries or deaths). After all the Greek constitution calls for the Greek people to serve and defend the laws and the rights it defines for all of us. So when I heard that the mayor of Patras, Andreas Fouras spoke mostly about some right-wing extremists that were among the thousands of Patras people who fought against the rioters, I got very disappointed with his attitude.

However, listening to him on Antenna TV channel later on, he made it clear that all those people who chased away the rioters in Patras couldn’t have been right-wing extremists and he criticized those extremists that were trying to lead people to fight against each other in the streets, since Patras has suffered a death of a teacher in the past (Nikos Temponeras) during some high school students’ uprising and school occupations (when the state for yet another time wasn’t enforcing the law to open up the schools for all those who wanted to attend them), which is of course logical for a city mayor to say.

I believe the state must stand up immediately against those who don’t respect fundamental laws of the society, whether they are rich or poor. There is no excuse for burning down others property (including public property which belongs to all of us), putting people in danger, stealing stuff from shops etc. If the state doesn’t stop this, everyday people will start fighting with those other guys in the streets and this is exactly what happened in Patras.