David's Blog

How do I ??? with Git?

2012-02-03T14:09:00.000+02:00

The purpose of this post is to quickly go over some of the basic thingsmost developers would require from source control software.

I highly recommend reading either Pro Git orGit Community Book.

Undoing a commit

If you committed some code by accident you have the following options:

Undo option #1: Amend

If you just forgot a file or wrote the wrong comment,stage your changes and run "git commit --amend". This will mergethe new commit with the previous commit (overriding the old comment).

Undo option #2: Revert

Revert will create new commit which is the opposite of the commit you wish to remove, for example:

    $ git log

      dfdd917 added file2.txt
      fbe043e added file1.txt

    $ git revert dfdd917

    $ git log

      7bdd793 Revert "added file2.txt"
      dfdd917 added file2.txt
      fbe043e added file1.txt

If you already pushed the commit you wish to remove, this would be the best option.

Undo option #3: Reset

If you want to get rid of the last commit (or several last commits)you can use the "git reset" command which will make the HEAD and the current branchpoint on the given commit.

    $ git log

      fcd3f55 (HEAD, master) added file3.txt
      dfdd917 added file2.txt
      fbe043e added file1.txt

    $ git reset --hard dfdd917
    $ git log

      dfdd917 (HEAD, master) added file2.txt
      fbe043e added file1.txt

You might ask yourself, what happened to the third commit? is it gone forever?well... the answer is no, the commit is still there, it's just unreachable.

To see all of the unreachable commits use the "git fsck" command:

    $ git fsck --unreachable --no-reflogs

      unreachable blob a83ffd
      unreachable tree 984260
      unreachable commit fcd3f5

This shows us we have three unreachable objects:

file3.txt (blob a83ffd)
the state of the root directory including file3.txt (tree 984260)
the commit (fcd3f5)

Wait, what's --no-reflogs?

The reflog records every action you perform in a git repository,if we were to run "git reflog" after the third commit this would have been the output:

    $ git reflog

      fcd3f55 HEAD@{1}: commit: added file3.txt
      dfdd917 HEAD@{2}: commit: added file2.txt
      fbe043e HEAD@{3}: commit (initial): added file1.txt

After we run the "git reset" command the reflog will look like this:

    $ git reflog

      dfdd917 HEAD@{0}: dfdd917: updating HEAD
      fcd3f55 HEAD@{1}: commit: added file3.txt
      dfdd917 HEAD@{2}: commit: added file2.txt
      fbe043e HEAD@{3}: commit (initial): added file1.txt

As you can see the reset action did not remove the commit from the reflog,but added a new entry to the reflog saying that the HEAD was updated.

The "--no-reflogs" argument tells git to not consider commits thatare referenced only by a reflog entry as reachable.

What do I do now?

Well, you can just leave that commit there, it won't be pushed to the remote repositoryand you can restore it whenever you like by running:

    $ git checkout fcd3f55

If you want to remove you can cleanup you repository as described hereat the bottom (basically, you expire the reflog entries, and then remove all unreachable objects).

What if I already pushed the commit?

Then this is option is highly unrecommended, but if you need to remove the commit from the serverthen use the "-f" attribute:

    $ git push -f

Creating a remote repository

The two most common ways to create a remote repository are:

Use the web interface of services such as github or bitbucket
Create a bare repository by running the command "git init --bare"in an empty directory.

Using a remote repository

Option #1:

If you do not have an existing local repository, the you should just clonethe remote repository:

    git clone path-to-repository

Notice that you get a warning, "You appear to have cloned an empty repository.".

Option #2:

If you have an existing local repository and the remote repository is emptyyou should push the local commits to the remote repository:

Add a new remote to your local repository, name the new remote "origin":
```
git remote add origin path-to-repository
```

This command will add the following lines to the .git/config file:

    [remote "origin"]
      url = path-to-repository
      fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

These lines let git know that the "origin" remote is mapped to the specified url and that it should fetch the heads and the branches from the remote repository (this is the default behavior).

Pushing changes to a remote repository

At this point, if you make some changes, commit them and try to push you will get the following error:

    No refs in common and none specified; doing nothing.
    Perhaps you should specify a branch such as 'master'.

Since the remote repository is empty there isn't a matching branch in origin,so the first time you push you must define which branch to push:

    git push origin master

This command makes git push all commits in the "master" branch to the "origin" repository.

Note: if we had cloned a non-empty repository we could just run "git push".

Getting changes from a remote repository

To get the latest changes from a remote repository run:

    git fetch

This command will download all the commits made to the remote repositorysince the latest fetch (or clone).

If there are changes in the remote repository we have the following options:

Option #1: Merge

    git merge origin/master

This command will take all of the commits from the given branch (in this case "origin/master") and incorporate them into the current branch.

Note #1: make sure you're in the correct branch before merging(run "git branch" to see which branch you're in).

Note #2: You can do fetch+merge automatically by running "git pull"

Option #2: Rebase

If you have made your own local commits before fetching new commits your history becomes split:

    * my local commit #2
    * my local commit #1
    | * new remote commit #2
    | * new remote commit #1
    |/
    * last commit before the split

One option is to do a merge and incorporate all of the remote commitsinto the current master branch. This will cause the history to look like this:

    * Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
    |\
    | * new remote commit #2
    | * new remote commit #1
    * | my local commit #2
    * | my local commit #1
    |/
    * last commit before the split

This is ugly...

The better way to do this is using Rebase which basically takes commits andmodifies them (if needed) to match a different source commit.

So we can take the local master branch and make all of the commits fromthe split-off point match the current origin/master branch.

To perform a rebase we run:

    git rebase origin/master

This command will make all of the changes from 'master' to the previous 'origin/master' match the new origin/masterso the history will look like this:

    * my local commit #2
    * my local commit #1
    * new remote commit #2
    * new remote commit #1
    * last commit before the split

For a more detailed example of rebase you can see my previous post

Thanks for reading,I hope you find this article useful.

Until the next time,David.

Git Rebase Example

2012-01-29T23:54:00.000+02:00

What is rebase?

Rebase means taking commits to made to an older revision of a branchand applying them to a newer revision of that branch(usually when the origin branch has changed while we were commiting).

Rebase is an alternative for merge, it's main advantage over mergingis that it allows you to maintain a clean linear history.

Example

Let's look at this scenario:

User A and User B both clone the same repository. At the moment of cloning the repository had 2 commits:
```
  $ git log

  19abe80 - (HEAD, master) added file2
  8cb6ba4 - added file1
  
```
User B works on the project and makes two commits, so his repository looks like this:
```
  $ git log

  07c8c6d - (HEAD, master) added file4 <UserB>
  e404363 - added file3 <UserB>
  19abe80 - (origin/master, origin/HEAD) added file2
  8cb6ba4 - added file1
  
```
As you can see, User B's master branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits ('origin/master' is the master branch in the origin repository).

User B pushes the changes to origin (the original repository):


  $ git push
  $ git log

  07c8c6d - (HEAD, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master)
    added file4 <UserB>
  e404363 - added file3 <UserB>
  19abe80 - added file2
  8cb6ba4 - added file1

At the same time, User A makes two commits, so his repository looks like this:


  $ git log

  ef5b54f - (HEAD, master) added file6 <UserA>
  5f7cff8 - added file5 <UserA>
  19abe80 - (origin/master, origin/HEAD) added file2
  8cb6ba4 - added file1

When User A tries to push his changes, he gets this error:


  $ git push

  ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)
  error: failed to push some refs to '...'
  To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward 
  updates were rejected Merge the remote changes 
  (e.g. 'git pull') before pushing again.  See the
  'Note about fast-forwards' section of 
  'git push --help' for details.

Git notices that the master branch in the origin repository no longer matches 'origin/master' so it won't allow the push.

To solve this, User A first fetches the changes from the origin repository:


  $ git fetch
  $ git log --graph --all

  * ef5b54f - (HEAD, master) added file6 <UserA>
  * 5f7cff8 - added file5 <UserA>
  | * 07c8c6d - (origin/master, origin/HEAD) added file4
  | * e404363 - added file3 <UserB>
  |/  
  * 19abe80 - added file2
  * 8cb6ba4 - added file1

Adding --all to the log command shows commits from all of the branches and adding --graph shows a graphic representation of the branches.

The second step is to perform a rebase that will update the new commits by User A (ef5b54f and 5f7cff8) so it will appear as if they were commited after the new 'origin/master' (07c8c6d).

Since User A and User B's commits involve different files there won't be any conflicts (I will talk about conflicts later on).


  $ git rebase origin/master

  First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
  Applying: added file5
  Applying: added file6

  $ git log --graph --all

  * 4fca7e8 - (HEAD, master) added file6 <UserA>
  * 29ea4d2 - added file5 <UserA>
  * 07c8c6d - (origin/master, origin/HEAD) added file4 <UserB>
  * e404363 - added file3 <UserB>
  * 19abe80 - added file2
  * 8cb6ba4 - added file1

Now User A can push his changes to the origin repository:


  $ git push
  $ git log --graph --all

  * 4fca7e8 - (HEAD, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master)
              added file6 
  * 29ea4d2 - added file5 <UserA>
  * 07c8c6d - added file4 <UserB>
  * e404363 - added file3 <UserB>
  * 19abe80 - added file2
  * 8cb6ba4 - added file1

We now have a clean, linear history :-)

What happens when there are conflicts?

Let's look at a similar scenario:

User B added a line to file4.txt, commited and pushed:


  $ git push
  $ git log --graph --all

  * e1e4730 - (HEAD, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) 
              added a line to file4 (2 minutes) <UserB>
  * 4fca7e8 - added file6 <UserA>
  * 29ea4d2 - added file5 <UserA>
  ...

At the same time User A added a line to file4.txt, and commited:


  $ git log --graph --all

  * 77a6486 - (HEAD, master) 
              added another line to file4 <UserA>
  * 4fca7e8 - (origin/master, origin/HEAD) added file6 <UserA>
  * 29ea4d2 - added file5 <UserA>
  ...

When User A tries to push the changes, he gets the same error we have seen before. So, he fetches the changes and tries to rebase:


  $ git fetch
  $ git rebase origin/master
  
  First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
  Applying: added another line to file4
  Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
  Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
  Auto-merging file4.txt
  CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in file4.txt
  Failed to merge in the changes.
  Patch failed at 0001 added another line to file4

  When you have resolved this problem run 
    "git rebase --continue".
  If you would prefer to skip this patch, instead run 
    "git rebase --skip".
  To restore the original branch and stop rebasing run 
    "git rebase --abort".

While trying to auto merge file4.txt git reached a conflict and paused the rebase.

If we look at file4.txt we will see the following contents:


  file4
  <<<<<<< HEAD
  added a line to file4
  =======
  added another line to file4
  >>>>>>> added another line to file4

This is how git handles conflicts, now User A can open his favorite editor (vim) and merge the file manually:
```
  file4
  added a line to file4
  added another line to file4
  
```

After merging the file, User A must mark the conflict as solved (by using "git add") and continue the rebase:


  $ git add file4.txt
  $ git rebase --continue

  * c8c37cd - (HEAD, master) 
              added another line to file4 <UserA>
  * e1e4730 - (origin/master, origin/HEAD) 
              added a line to file4 <UserB>
  * 4fca7e8 - added file6 <UserA>
  ...

User A can now push the changes back to origin:


  $ git push
  * c8c37cd - (HEAD, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master)
              added another line to file4 <UserA>
  * e1e4730 - added a line to file4 <UserB>
  * 4fca7e8 - added file6 <UserA>
  ...

And again, we get a clean, linear history.

I hope you find this post useful.
Until the next time,
David.

Solving Coding Problems

2012-01-17T19:52:00.000+02:00

In all of my days as a programmer a lot of people approached me with the question "Why isn't my code working?" and it's usually because of one of the following reasons:

Syntax errors - missing semicolons/parenthesis, bad jQuery/css selectors.
Not enough knowledge about the problem domain or the technology.

A couple of days ago I was helping a good friend with a coding problem and hetold me: "Don't solve it, tell me the strategy to solve it", this was the firsttime anyone told me that and it got me thinking... he was right, by solvingevery problem I'm not allowing the young programmers to learn and that gave methe idea to write this post.

I tried to think of the ways I deal with coding problems and I came up with several principles.

1. Always write syntactically-clean code

I often see people writing code with no coding standard (inconsistent indentation, spacing, etc...), and when I criticize them about it they say "I'm just testing something, it's not production code, bla bla bla...".

And when they ask me to help and I take a quick look at the code and tell them they're missing a semicolon or something like that they're amazed at how I do it.

Well... there's no magic to it, I'm just always writing my code as clean as possible (perfectly indented, consistent spacing between functions and parenthesis, etc... all according to a coding standard for the language I'm currently using).

Once you get used to always writing and looking at clean and consistent code, then whenever something is out of place, it just pops out.

2. Don't write large pieces of code without seeing if it works

(In a positive form: "Write code in small iterations of write-test-write-test...").

I'm constantly seeing people creating a new project and writing a lot of codewithout even compiling and running. The first time they try to actually run itthey have no idea what's not working and have to go over a lot of code untilthey figure out what's wrong.

If you do have to figure out how to fix a large piece of code, the best way is to split the code to small chunks and check if they're working.Let's look at an example: People sometimes come to me with code like this (it happens a lot lately, I'm not sure why...):


  $('div.class1 a[href^=https://]')
    .doSomething()
    .doSomethingElse()...

To debug this you should use your browser's developer tools (FireBug, ChromeDeveloper Tools, ...). I personally prefer running test code directly in the JSconsole or adding console.log() calls as opposed to adding breakpoints (I don'tyet trust JavaScript debuggers):

First, check the jQuery selector (in the browser's JS console), see if it returns the correct elements.
If it doesn't, you found your bug (or one of them :-))
if it does work, move on to "doSomething()", again, test it in the browser's JS console using the result of the selector
and so on...

The best habit for this is to use TDD/BDD which will force you to write smaller chunks of code in every iteration.

3. Solve the bug, not the symptom

I often see young programmers try to solve bugs by treating the specific symptoms described in a bug report instead of trying to understand why that bug is happening and what is causing it.

Make sure you understand the domain of the problem and the technologies used in the feature,because if you don't, you'll just cause more harm than good.

I hope you find this useful,
Until the next time,
David.

CSS Sprites Generator

2011-11-05T22:01:00.000+02:00

I have been using CSS sprites a lot lately and wanted a tool to generate them automatically, so I wrote asimple python tool (using the python imaging library) to generate a singleimage (at the moment it just creates a simple horizontal merge of the images).

To use the tool just run the following command:


  sprites-gen.py {output-file} {input-file1} {input-file2} ...

You can also set a fixed height (it will rescale every image to fit the height) using the "--fixed-height" argument and define the quality of the output imageusing the "--quality" argument.

You can get this tool at https://github.com/elentok/sprites-gen.

What are CSS Sprites?

For those of you don't know what CSS sprites are, here is a short explanation:

CSS Sprites is a web development technique used primarily to improve performance by minimizing the amount of requests send to a web server.

Let's take for example a web site that uses 5 16x16 icons (a total of 3.8kb), to load these images the browser has to send 5 requests (the overhead of each request is usually longer than the time it takes to actually transfer the image data).

To solve this problem we create the following image (80x16 pixels):

This image will only require a single request to load (and it weighs 3.4kb which isn't a big difference but still a difference).

To use every icon in the web site we use the "background-position" CSS attribute.

For the example we will use the following HTML code:


  <a href="#" class="icon" id="icon1"></a>
  <a href="#" class="icon" id="icon2"></a>
  <a href="#" class="icon" id="icon3"></a>
  <a href="#" class="icon" id="icon4"></a>
  <a href="#" class="icon" id="icon5"></a>

And the following CSS code:


  .icon {
    background-image: url(sprites.png);
    width: 16px;
    height: 16px;
    display: block;
  }

  #icon1 { background-position: 0px 0px; }
  #icon2 { background-position: -16px 0px; }
  #icon3 { background-position: -32px 0px; }
  #icon4 { background-position: -48px 0px; }
  #icon5 { background-position: -64px 0px; }

Another very useful advantage of using CSS sprites is for rollover images,to avoid using javascript to preload the hover image (otherwise you will notice a lag between the moment the cursor enters the element and the moment the rollover imageappears while the browser loads the image).

So, instead of using a different background image in the ":hover" css block you just usethe "background-position" to define the offset for the rollover image.

For more information about CSS sprites I recommend the following article from "A List Apart":"CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death".

Custom CSS folding in Vim

2011-10-14T15:40:00.000+02:00

CSS files tend to grow very long, and even if you split them to smaller files, they are still not very easy to navigate.

To make things simpler I'm using Vim's custom folding featureto fold the CSS code into sections:

To add a folding section just add a line like this:


  /* Name of section {{{1 */

The "{{{1" defines the start of the section and you can define multiple levels by changing the number("{{{2", "{{{3", ...).

Each section ends before the beginning of the next section with the same level, but you can end a section manually by adding one of these lines:


  /* }}} */ (ends the last section)
  /* }}}1 */ (ends the last level 1 section)

All you need to do to enable this is add the following line to your .vimrc file:


  autocmd BufRead,BufEnter *.css setlocal foldmethod=marker

This line tells Vim that whenever a css file is opened, set the folding method to "marker" (see the help file for 'foldmethod' to see other options).

For excellent tutorials on Vim see VimCasts.org,for Vim beginners I highly recommend to start with the Modal editing screencast.

Thanks for reading,
David.

Install PHPUnit on WampServer

2011-10-12T12:38:00.000+02:00

I'm using WampServer 2.1 (with PHP 5.3.4) on Windows 7 64-bit.

This guide was made with the help of Itay Adler.

Step 1 - Installing the PEAR package manager

Add the php directory (in my case "d:\wamp\bin\php\php5.3.4") to your PATH (via Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables)
Download http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar to somewhere (let's say "C:\Temp\pear")

Open a new command prompt as an administrator:


  c:
  cd c:\temp\pear
  php go-pear.phar

Step 2 - Installing PHPUnit

Open a new command prompt as an administrator:


  pear config-set auto_discover 1
  pear install pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit

Step 3 - Testing PHPUnit

Create a file called "MyTest.php" with the following code:


  <?php

  class MyTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
  {
    public function testOneEqualsOne()
    {
      $this->assertEquals(1, 1);
    }
  }

  ?>

Open a new command prompt and run: "phpunit MyTest.php"

You should see the following output:


  PHPUnit 3.5.15 by Sebastian Bergmann.

  .

  Time: 0 seconds, Memory: 5.25Mb

  OK (1 test, 1 assertion)

Restart the Windows File Sharing Service to fix weird problems

2011-09-23T23:56:00.000+03:00

Every once in a while I get this annoying problem where I can't a access my windows shares from other computers on the network, and the only way to get it it to work again is to restart windows.I recently found out that to avoid restarting windows all you need to do is restart the "Server" service:- Win+R => "services.msc"- Right click "Server" and click restart.

Mercurial: Automatically run unittests before commit

2011-08-17T11:07:00.000+03:00

To force Mercurial to run your unit tests before each commit and not to allow committing unless the unit tests pass you can use the "precommit" hook.

In the repository root, edit the ".hg\hgrc" file and add the following lines:

  [hooks]
  precommit = path-to-tests-script 
              (e.g. "qtodotxt\test\runtests.py")

It is very important that if the unit tests fail the script will return an non-zero exit code, in the QTodoTxt test-runner script (you can the source here) I do the following:

Initialize an "exit_code" variable to 0.

I run the standard python unittests:

    tests = unittest.defaultTestLoader.discover('.', 
        pattern='test*.py')
    result = unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(tests)
    if not result.wasSuccessful():
      exit_code = 1

Then I run the doctests:

    for doctest_file in os.listdir(testsdir):
      if doctest_file.endswith('.doctest'):
        result = doctest.testfile(
            os.path.join(testsdir, doctest_file))
        if result.failed > 0:
          exit_code = 2

And at the end I use the "sys.exit" method to return the correct exit code:


    sys.exit(exit_code)

Tip: Removing a changset from a Mercurial repository

2011-08-17T10:48:00.001+03:00

The "rollback" command only removes the latest changeset, if you want to remove/undo multiple changesets (and all of their descendants) from a repository you can use the "strip" method that comes with the "Mq" extension:

Step 1 - Enable the Mq extension
The Mq extension is distributed with Mercurial so to enable it just edit ~/.hgrc (in windows: C:\Users\UserName\.hgrc) and add the following lines:

  [extensions]
  mq=

If you use TortoiseHg, then you can just open the settings page, and in the Extensions section enable "mq".

Step 2 - Remove a changeset
Find the revision number of the changeset you wish to remove (via TortoiseHg or "hg log") and execute the following command:

  > hg strip revision-number

If you mess up you can restore the changeset by running:

  > hg unbundle .hg/strip-backup/filename

Autocomplete textbox for multiple keywords/tags entry in PySide

2011-08-12T13:36:00.001+03:00

Last month I started writing QTodoTxt, a PySide (Python Qt bindings) GUI for the todo.txt concept.

While using it for my own todo list I noticed several features that were missing (I intend to implement them all in due time), one of these features was auto-completion for projects and contexts when editing or creating a new task, something like this:

After some googling I found the built-in QCompleter component that can be easily attached to any QLineEdit control and allow easy auto-completion:

  lineEdit = QtGui.QLineEdit()
  completer = QtGui.QCompleter(
      ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four'])
  lineEdit.setCompleter(lineEdit)

However, this only allows auto-completing for the first word and I wanted to auto-completion for every word in the text. So I went back to google and found a post in the Qt developers forum that shows a simple implementation of this in C++.

Instead of using the QLineEdit's "setCompleter" method (which wasn't available for QTextEdit he was using), his implementation handles opening the completer manually and just attaches the completer to the QLineEdit using the QCompleter.setWidget method.

To create my own auto-complete control I implemented his C++ control in python and added some extra features of my own. At first I created the AutoCompleteEdit class that inherits from QLineEdit and initializes the QCompleter:

from PySide import QtCore, QtGui

class AutoCompleteEdit(QtGui.QLineEdit):
  def __init__(self, model, separator = ' ', \
      addSpaceAfterCompleting = True):
    super(AutoCompleteEdit, self).__init__()
    self._separator = separator
    self._addSpaceAfterCompleting = \
        addSpaceAfterCompleting
    self._completer = QtGui.QCompleter(model)
    self._completer.setWidget(self)
    self.connect(
        self._completer,
        QtCore.SIGNAL('activated(QString)'),
        self._insertCompletion)
    self._keysToIgnore = [QtCore.Qt.Key_Enter,
                          QtCore.Qt.Key_Return,
                          QtCore.Qt.Key_Escape,
                          QtCore.Qt.Key_Tab]

I overrid the keyPressEvent method of QLineEdit to handle the completion manually:

  def keyPressEvent(self, event):
    if self._completer.popup().isVisible():
      if event.key() in self._keysToIgnore:
        event.ignore()
        return
    super(AutoCompleteEdit, self).keyPressEvent(event)
    completionPrefix = self.textUnderCursor()
    if completionPrefix != self._completer.completionPrefix():
      self._updateCompleterPopupItems(completionPrefix)
    if len(event.text()) > 0 and len(completionPrefix) > 0:
      self._completer.complete()
    if len(completionPrefix) == 0:
      self._completer.popup().hide()

This method performs the following tasks:

If the user pressed Enter, Escape or Tab the method ignores them and returns.
Every other character is forwarded to the base method.
Filters the items displayed in the completer popup to only show the items that start with the text the user started to write (the completion prefix).

Thank you for reading,
You can see the full code in my Bitbucket repository: https://bitbucket.org/3david/qtodotxt/src/ec1e74eef575/qtodotxt/ui/controls/autocomplete_lineedit.py

Please feel free to leave comments,

David.

Review: MIUI 2.3.4a on HTC Desire

2011-08-05T17:33:00.002+03:00

About five months ago I bought an HTC Desire smartphone (it came with stock Android 2.2), at first I was very impressed but as time went by I started noticing a lot of annoyances:

It required weekly reboots because it would get sluggish.
Hebrew support was less than standard, I needed to install a third-party keyboard, Hebrew text was aligned to the left and numbers in Hebrew sentences appeared backwards ("123" would appear as "321").
I couldn't use the Waze navigation application while playing music because the music would stutter.

I am very disappointed in google for releasing an operating system like this, I am used to much higher quality from google products.

I'm a programmer, I know it's nearly impossible to develop such a large application that runs on a vast range of hardware with zero bugs, but since they never release any updates, there's no hope for improvement. Unless you're willing to lose your warranty and install a custom ROM you're stuck with what you got.

Anyway, it took me about three months to snap and realize that I need to install a custom ROM. I started with CyanogenMod 7.0.3 (based on Android 2.3.3) which was a big improvement, much faster, out-of-the-box Hebrew supports and much more customizable.

After using CyanogenMod for a few weeks I started noticing some new annoyances:

Due to a memory leak in Android 2.3.3 I needed to reboot every two or three days.
Spontaneous reboots (once a day or two).
Much faster than 2.2 but still gets sluggish after using it a day or two.
The camera's flash would turn on spontaneously (yeah, CyanogenMod is very spontaneous...).
The data connections disconnected every hour or so, and then I needed to turn it off and on for it two work again.

Last week I installed MIUI 2.3.4a and was very impressed (but since I got burned before I decided to wait a week or two to see how it behaves in the long run).
So far I haven't had to reboot the device in over a week and it is still as fast as when it first booted, and there were no spontaneous reboots.

MIUI 2.3.4a is based on Android 2.3.4:

The people behind MIUI made a lot of changes to the default Android UI, they made it a little more iPhone-like.

For example, all of the applications are added the home screen by default (there is no applications menu). Don't worry you can still use widgets:

The dialer allows to search for contacts in a way similar to the HTC Sense's dialer, for example, by pressing "3, 2, 8" it will show me contacts that have "DAV, EAT, ..." in their names:

The lock screen has three unlock options: unlock, open dialer and open messaging app, and when you receive a call you have an option to reject it and send and SMS (directly from the lock screen):

In addition to the notifications in the notifications bar there are also "Toggles", this are toggle buttons that allow to turn various features on and off (Wifi, Data, GPS, ...). A useful extra feature is that a long press on one of the toggles open the settings page relevant to that toggle:

The built-in music player reminds me a lot of the iPhone/iPod Touch player:

It also comes with a built-in traffic monitor for Wifi/Data/Calls usage:

It also comes with a File Explorer, an FTP server, a notes application, and a clock that can set alarms that use songs from your music library as alarm sounds (CyanogenMod's alarm doesn't allow you to use songs from the music library).

The only thing that bugs me a little is that the camera's flash doesn't seem to work, but since I don't use the camera that much it (the Desire's camera is of low quality) it doesn't bother me that much.

One of the installation guides I used to install MIUI recommended to install the 5.14.05.17 baseband version, and since then there were no disconnections and Cellular and GPS reception has improved.

Also, there is a fully Hebrew translation package at http://hebmiui.com/

To sum things up, MIUI seems to be very stable, very quick, normal battery usage and very comfortable UI and I'm having a far better experience than the previous ROMs I have tried.

So thank you MIUI developers, wherever you are and well done on a great job!

QTodoTxt - Cross-platform todo.txt GUI

2011-07-05T20:11:00.000+03:00

Hi everyone,

About a week ago I noticed the todotxt-touch android application which uses a simple text file to store tasks (see http://todotxt.com/) and uses Dropbox to synchronize the file between the mobile phone and other computers.

I liked the idea of using a simple text file, but I couldn't find a good editor for this format so I decided to write one. Since I use both Linux and Windows I decided to use PySide (LGPL Qt bindings for Python).

Screenshot on Ubuntu 11.04:

Screenshot on Windows 7:

It's still in beta stages, but it's usable (I'm already using it), I will release a proper version with an installer a .deb package for Ubuntu very soon (I hope in a couple of days).

If you want to try it you can get the latest version from https://bitbucket.org/3david/qtodotxt

It's been a while since I did cross-platform desktop programming and I have to say I really enjoyed it, it took me a couple of days but once I got the hang of Qt and PySide I started to progress pretty fast.

I used Aptana Studio 3.0 as an IDE and I must say it has really matured since the last time I used it, the intellisense isn't as good as Visual Studio's, but that's just because Python is a dynamic language and as such it is very difficult to implement good intellisense.

Another thing I liked was the startup time is very quick (less than second on Windows and almost instantaneous on Ubuntu).

EDIT:
To install on Linux:

Install PySide (in ubuntu: "sudo apt-get install python-pyside")
Download the qtodotxt source code (see "get source" on the right) and extract it
Execute "bin/qtodotxt" (you might need to run "chmod a+x qtodotxt")

To install on Windows:

Install Python 2.7.*
Install PySide (for Python 2.7)
Download the qtodotxt source code (see "get source" on the right)and extract it
Double click "bin/qtodotxt.pyw" (you can create a shortcut for it)

I don't have a Mac to try it on, but it should be similar.

SharpDevelop dark color scheme

2011-07-04T19:50:00.000+03:00

EDIT (February 11th 2012): I uploaded the scripts to github, I hope this way it will never go offline again :-)

EDIT (July 4th 2011): I updated the URL again (here) and also added the version with highlighting for .NET keywords. If I have some time I'll try to port it to SD4.

I've been using SharpDevelop a lot in the past couple of weeks and I really like it, it's a hell of a lot lighter than Visual Studio and... it's open source!!

One of the things I was missing was a light-on-dark color scheme, so after a little digging I figured out how and here's what I got:

You can get it from here, just copy the file "CSharp-Mode.xshd" to "%UserProfile%\Application Data\ICSharpCode\SharpDevelop3.0\modes" and restart SharpDevelop.

WPF Pan, Zoom & Rotate Control

2011-03-31T19:15:00.000+02:00

In the past few days I have been working on an image viewer control that allows the user to pan (via scrollbars and by dragging the mouse), zoom (by mouse wheel and by buttons) and rotate (by dragging the mouse in "rotate" mode).

I must say this was the funnest of all of my WPF experiences, I really love the elegance of WPF. The implementation ended up being a completely generic viewer that can contain whatever you want (not just images).

The viewer is actually two controls: ViewerControl and FullViewerControl.

The ViewerControl is the inner part (without the toolbar and statusbar), its behavior is completely customizable by setting the MouseClickHandler, MouseDragHandler and MouseWheelHandler dependency properties (these are not events, but three different interfaces that contain a method that handles the action; this way they even be modified in XAML).

The FullViewerControl wraps around the ViewerControl, sets the default behavior (mouse wheel zooms, ...) and adds a toolbar (to allow changing drag/pan/zoom-in/zoom-out modes and auto-fitting the contents) and a status bar that displays the current zoom level and rotation angle.

To use the FullViewerControl in your code, just add the following:

<v:FullViewerControl>
    <v:FullViewerControl.ExtraToolbarItems>

      <-- insert buttons here -->

    </v:FullViewerControl.ExtraToolbarItems>
 
    <-- insert viewer contents here -->    

  </v:FullViewerControl>

The source code for the viewer is freely available as a part of my Elentok.Framework project (LGPL license) at https://bitbucket.org/3david/elentok.framework, in the "Elentok.Framework.Wpf" project, under "Controls/Viewer".

To build the framework project and test out the viewer, run the "Scripts\Build-Debug.bat" script and then run "Build\Elentok.Framework.Wpf.Demos.exe".

WPF and KeyboardNavigation.TabNavigation="Local"

2011-03-15T16:17:00.000+02:00

In my WPF projects I use a lot of data templates, and some of this templates require a custom tab order. To do this I set the "TabIndex" property on the relevant items inside the data template.

When I used the same template multiple times in the same page I noticed that the tab navigation didn't behave the way I wished it to (instead of jumping between indexes 1, 2, 3... in each template, and jumped between index 1 in every template, then index 2 and so forth).

After some googling I tried to set the attached property "KeyboardNavigation.TabNavigation" to "Local" (on the container in the data template). According to MSDN this way the TabIndex property inside the container is only considered within the container.

Setting the attached property worked, but with an annoying side-effect, for example, if we have a ContentPresenter (to incorporate another data template) and a button:

  <ContentPresenter 
    Content={Binding Something} 
    KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="0" />
  <Button KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="1">Ok</Button>

And the container in the data template of the content presenter has the "TabNavigation" property set to "Local", this will make the button focus first, and the contents of the ContentPresenter afterwards (I'm not sure why).

To fix this use the following code:

  <ContentControl 
    Content={Binding Something} 
    Focusable="False"
    KeyboardNavigation.TabNavigation="Local"
    KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="0" />
  <Button KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="1">Ok</Button>

Keyboard Friendly WPF Popup Control

2011-03-08T19:35:00.000+02:00

A couple of weeks ago I talked about various tips for building more keyboard friendly WPF application, now I will I am going to focus about the WPF Popup control.

To make the popup control more keyboard friendly we need to make the following changes:

When the popup opens, the keyboard focus should move to the contents of the popup.
Lock the keyboard focus inside the popup until it closes.

To do this, I created the "FriendlyPopup" control (or "EnhancedPopup" or whatever):

  public class FriendlyPopup : Popup
  {
    protected override void OnOpened(EventArgs e)
    {
      base.OnOpened(e);

      // move the focus into the popup when it opens.
      this.Child.MoveFocus(new TraversalRequest(
        FocusNavigationDirection.Next));
    }

    protected override void OnLostKeyboardFocus(
      KeyboardFocusChangedEventArgs e)
    {
      base.OnLostKeyboardFocus(e);

      // if the focus is still inside the popup, 
      // don't do anything.
      if (this.IsKeyboardFocusWithin)
        return;

      // if the popup is still open, keep the focus inside.
      if (this.IsOpen)
        this.Child.MoveFocus(new TraversalRequest(
          FocusNavigationDirection.Next));
    }
  }

Keyboard Friendly WPF Applications

2011-02-22T23:08:00.001+02:00

Back in my Linux-only days I used the keyboard for everything, and I barely touched the mouse, but during the last five years, working full-time as a .NET developer on Windows systems, I started to use the mouse a lot more than I used to.
Recently, I have been trying to cut back on my mouse use and go back to keyboard-only. This made me notice that some of my WPF applications are not very keyboard friendly (keyboard shortcuts, weird tab order, etc...).

In my search for improving keyboard-support on my WPF applications I found a few tips that I would like to share:

1. AccessText
To add access keys to your buttons and menu item you can use the "_" character (in Windows.Forms this used to be the done using the "&" character).

Since not all of the WPF controls supports this (as far as I know, only menu items and buttons support this), you can use the AccessText object for this, for example:

<AccessText>Sort _by</AccessText>

The access keys are then underlined like this:

2. Labels
If you want to allow the user to jump quickly to a ComboBox, ListBox or any control that doesn't have a label (like a button or a menu item) you can add your own label:

<Label Target="{Binding ElementName=myCombo}">
  <AccessText>_My Combo:</AccessText>
</Label>
<ComboBox x:Name="myCombo" ... />

3. InputBinding
You can use the InputBindings property to bind keyboard shortcuts to existing command.

For example, I have a ListBox that has a context menu, that context menu has a menu item that is binded to the "RefreshCommand" property of the view model, and I want to make the F5 run this command. To do that I add an input binding like this:

<ListBox ...>
  <ListBox.InputBindings>
    <KeyBinding Key="F5" Command="{Binding RefreshCommand}" />
  </ListBox.InputBindings>

4. TabIndex
Sometimes when you're tabbing between controls it gets messed up, to fix it you can use the "TabIndex" property and set numeric values for each control. The control with a tab index of 0 will be the first to focus.

5. Focusable
Sometimes you have controls that the user shouldn't focus on (it sometimes happens when overriding control templates), to disable a control from being focused on, set the "Focusable" property to "False", this way when the user tabs between controls this control will be skipped.

Record a stream using VLC

2010-10-20T22:57:00.000+02:00

To record a stream (mms for example) use the following command:

$vlc mms://server/path 
  --sout #transcode{acodec=mp3}
   :duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=raw,
   dst="radio.mp3",select=novideo}}
  --run-time=time to record (in seconds)

Extract audio from video files using VLC

2010-10-20T22:14:00.000+02:00

You can use the following command to extract audio from a video file using VLC:

$ vlc 
    "Source File" 
    --sout #transcode{acodec=mp3}
      :duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=raw,
      dst="Output.mp3",select=novideo}}

(Important!: The argument of "--sout" must have no spaces in it (except for in the "dst" attribute).

To only extract a segment of audio use the following command:

$ vlc 
    "Source File" 
    --start-time=start time (in seconds)
    --stop-time=stop time (in seconds)
    --sout #transcode{acodec=mp3}
      :duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=raw,
      dst="Output.mp3",select=novideo}}

Reset NTFS permissions

2010-08-16T15:02:00.000+03:00

Every time I reinstall my computer and then try to access my external hard drives I keep getting security errors and it won't let me access some of the folders.

After some research I figured out the way to reset the permissions on the drive:

Right click a problematic folder in the drive and press Properties.
Under Security press Advanced

Under the Owner tab:

Press Edit
In Change owner to: select the new owner (your user).
Enable Replace owner on subcontainers and objects
Press OK.

Close all of the dialogs until you reach the explorer dialog, and then open the Security\Advanced dialog again (after changing the owner you have to reopen it).

Under Permissions:

Press Change Permissions
Remove all NON-inherited permissions.
Enable Include inheritable permissions from this object's parent
Enable Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object.

AMail 1.9.2.4 BETA

2010-07-31T21:18:00.000+03:00

In the past couple of months I have been working on an email archive manager called "AMail" which is written in WPF.

AMail is not an email client, it's only meant to store email messages in an encrypted zip files (using AES256 encryption).

Why not just use an email client?
Well... I find gmail's web interface very comfortable and don't feel a need for a desktop email client. All I want is to be able to store sensitive emails (registrations, passwords, etc...) offline in a protected place in case my gmail account gets hacked, or I forget to log-off someday when connected from a public computer.

AMail allows me to import email directly from gmail (by copy&paste-ing the source of the email) together with all of the attachments.

The project is hosted in Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/amail-archive/

How to select a WPF TreeViewItem from code

2010-06-03T09:29:00.001+03:00

I've been breaking for a couple of hours now on how to select an tree view item properly by code. I'm using the ViewModel's "IsSelected" property which is databinded to the TreeViewItem's "IsSelected" property, but I've now realized that it's not enough...

Some googling brought me to this MSDN forum post, and apparently the problem is that only selecting the TreeViewItem causes problems, what you need to do is also focus it, and the simple of doing that (according to the post) is this:

In the XAML subscribe to the "TreeViewItem.Selected" event:

<TreeView TreeViewItem.Selected="TreeViewItem_Selected" />

And in the code-behind handle it like this:

private void TreeViewItem_Selected(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
  {
    TreeViewItem item = e.OriginalSource as TreeViewItem;
    if (item != null && !item.IsFocused)
      item.Focus();
  }

How to use your iPod Touch as an alarm clock

2010-04-17T18:27:00.000+03:00

One of the annoying features of the iPod Touch is the fact that you can't use music from the library as the alarm clock sound (the iPhone allows you to select ringtones but since the iPod Touch doesn't support ringtones it doesn't help).

I tried some alarm applications from AppStore but non of them worked (after the iPod is locked, 3rd-party applications can't activate it), the only method I found was to disable the iPod's auto-lock-after-X-minutes feature and just keep it on the whole night, but I didn't like it so I just gave up and kept using my cellphone as an alarm clock.

About a month ago I got an idea to combine the built-in alarm clock with a 3rd-party application, basically the built-in alarm clock wakes up the iPod Touch and a given time and at the same time the 3rd-party alarm clock (which has to be active before locking the iPod) starts its own alarm with music from the library.

It's not the perfect solution, but it works.

The 3rd-party alarm application I chose to use is the free iHome+Sleep application, but I believe this can work with any alarm application.

The first step is to start the built-in alarm application and to set an alarm:

It's important to make sure that the alarm you added is set to "ON".

The next step is to open "iHome+Sleep", add a new "Sleeping Card", set the wakeup time and wakeup music and slide the card into the socket at the bottom:

The last step is to drag the "Bedtime" button to the right (so it changes to "Wakeup") and then lock the iPod (using the top-left hardware button):

The only catch is that the 3rd-party alarm application has to be the last active application before you lock the iPod (otherwise it won't start).

iHome+Sleep is also very useful if you like falling asleep with music in the background (just set the "Sleep-to" music and the "Sleep Timer" in the sleeping card).

Making the items in a WPF ItemsControl stretch

2010-04-01T17:43:00.001+03:00

I used the layout I described in a previous post in a Prism-based application where I used "ItemsControl" objects for regions, and the views I attached to them didn't stretch to fill the ItemsControl.

After some research I found the following solution: replace the default items panel template with a DockPanel.

Here's the code:

<ItemsControl 
  Name="MainRegion" 
  cal:RegionManager.RegionName="{x:Static common:RegionNames.Main}"
  Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="1">
  <ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
    <ItemsPanelTemplate>
      <DockPanel />
    </ItemsPanelTemplate>
  </ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
</ItemsControl>

Data-binding the SelectedItem property of the WPF TreeView

2010-03-20T22:06:00.012+02:00

In a new WPF application I'm writing I needed to bind the "SelectedItem" property of the TreeView control to the "SelectedItem" property of its ViewModel; but, alas, the TreeView's "SelectedItem" property is read-only...

After some googling I found the Versatile TreeView by Philip Sumi which adds the property I wanted, but since I'm learning WPF and want a deeper understanding I decided to write my own (and use Philip's TreeView as reference).

In the code I noticed a lot of dependency properties, and I figured its time to learn what are dependency properties and how do they work; again, some googling brought me to this post which I think gives a very good explanation of dependency properties.

Now that I knew what I had to do, I started writing the "EnhancedTreeView" class (which is based on the TreeView class).

At first I thought about overriding the "SelectedItem" property but it didn't go very smooth so I added the "SelectedObject" property.

I added a callback to the dependency-property-changed event (see "SelectedObjectChangedCallback") and when the property was changed I needed to change the selected item; but, alas again!, the selected item is read-only...

Some more googling brought me to this blog post which uses the "ItemsContainerGenerator" to find the matching TreeViewItem for the object I want to select.

And here's the final code:


/// <summary>
/// This treeview class allows databinding the
/// "SelectedObject" property
/// </summary>
public class EnhancedTreeView : TreeView
{
 #region SelectedObject

 /// <summary>
 /// The dependency property that allows use to bind the
 /// "SelectedObject" property
 /// </summary>
 public static readonly DependencyProperty
   SelectedObjectProperty =
     DependencyProperty.Register(
       "SelectedObject",
       typeof(object),
       typeof(EnhancedTreeView),
       new PropertyMetadata(SelectedObjectChangedCallback));

 /// <summary>
 /// Gets or sets the select object (a writable version of
 /// the "SelectedItem" property)
 /// </summary>
 [Bindable(true)]
 public object SelectedObject
 {
   get { return GetValue(SelectedObjectProperty); }
   set { SetValue(SelectedObjectProperty, value); }
 }

 /// <summary>
 /// This method is called whenever ever the selected
 /// object is changed, and if it was changed from the
 /// outside, this method will set the selected item.
 /// </summary>
 /// <param name="obj"></param>
 /// <param name="eventArgs"></param>
 private static void SelectedObjectChangedCallback
   (DependencyObject obj,
    DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs eventArgs)
 {
   EnhancedTreeView treeView = (EnhancedTreeView)obj;
   if (!ReferenceEquals(treeView.SelectedItem,
         eventArgs.NewValue))
     SelectItem(treeView, eventArgs.NewValue);
 }

 #endregion

 /// <summary>
 /// Searches the given item in the parent (recursively)
 /// and selects it, returns true if the item was found
 /// and selected, false otherwise.
 /// </summary>
 /// <param name="parent"></param>
 /// <param name="itemToSelect"></param>
 /// <returns></returns>
 private static bool SelectItem
   (ItemsControl parent, object itemToSelect)
 {
   var childTreeNode =
     parent.ItemContainerGenerator
       .ContainerFromItem(itemToSelect)
     as TreeViewItem;

   // if the item to select is directly under "parent",
   // just select it
   if (childTreeNode != null)
   {
     childTreeNode.Focus();
     return childTreeNode.IsSelected = true;
   }

   // if the item to select is not directly under "parent",
   // search the child nodes of "parent"
   if (parent.Items.Count > 0)
   {
     foreach (object childItem in parent.Items)
     {
       var childItemsControl = 
         parent.ItemContainerGenerator
           .ContainerFromItem(childItem)
         as ItemsControl;
    
       if (SelectItem(childItemsControl, itemToSelect))
         return true;
     }
   }

   // if the given item wasn't found here:
   return false;
 }

 /// <summary>
 /// When the selected item is updated from inside the tree,
 /// this method will update the "SelectedObject" property.
 /// </summary>
 /// <param name="e"></param>
 protected override void OnSelectedItemChanged
   (RoutedPropertyChangedEventArgs<object> e)
 {
   this.SelectedObject = e.NewValue;

   base.OnSelectedItemChanged(e);
 }
}

To use the EnhancedTreeView all you need is to bind the "SelectedObject" property:

<controls:EnhancedTreeView
 SelectedObject="{Binding SelectedObject, Mode=TwoWay}" 
 ItemsSource="..." />

It's important to add "Mode=TwoWay" to the binding, otherwise it won't work.

3-Pane Layout in WPF

2010-03-12T13:43:00.005+02:00

I've started playing with Prism again, and in the application I'm writing I needed a three-pane layout with splitters (ignore the ugly colors):

Now, I've done this before, but I couldn't find that code anywhere, so I started writing it from scratch. Apparently, there are several ways to do this, but the way I chose to do it works like this:

The primary container is a Grid
It has 3 rows and 3 columns
There are two splitters:
- The vertical splitter spans the entire middle column
- The horizontal splitter spans the entire middle row

There are three panels:
- The sidebar pane spans the entire left column
- The top pane is in the top-right column
- The bottom pane is in the bottom-right column

The hardest part was to get the "MinWidth/MinHeight" to work (if I hard-code the width of one of the columns, then the MinWidth of the other column is ignored), I ended up settings the width and heights of the columns/rows using "*".

And here is the XAML code:

<Window x:Class="WpfSandbox.ThreePaneLayoutWindow"
   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
   xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
   Title="Three Pane Layout Window" Height="300" Width="300">
   <Grid>
       <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
           <ColumnDefinition Width="1*" MinWidth="100" />
           <ColumnDefinition Width="4" />
           <!-- the splitter's column -->
           <!-- the "3*" will make the 3rd column 3 times as wide as the first one -->
           <ColumnDefinition Width="3*" MinWidth="100" />
       </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
       <Grid.RowDefinitions>
           <RowDefinition Height="*" MinHeight="100" />
           <RowDefinition Height="4" />
           <!-- the splitter's row -->
           <RowDefinition Height="*" MinHeight="100" />
       </Grid.RowDefinitions>

       <!-- sidebar (column #0, spanning 3 rows) -->
       <TextBlock Name="SidebarRegion"
                     HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
                     VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
                     TextAlignment="Center"
                     Background="Blue"
                     Grid.Column="0" Grid.RowSpan="3">
           Sidebar region<LineBreak />
           Column #0<LineBreak />
           Spaning 3 rows
       </TextBlock>

       <!-- vertical splitter (column #1, spanning 3 rows) -->
       <GridSplitter ResizeDirection="Columns"
                     HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
                     VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
                     Background="Black"
                     Grid.Column="1" Grid.RowSpan="3"/>

       <!-- top area (column #2, row #0) -->
       <TextBlock Name="TopRegion"
                     HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
                     VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
                     TextAlignment="Center"
                     Background="Yellow"
                     Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="0">
           Top region<LineBreak />
           Column #2<LineBreak />
           Row #0
       </TextBlock>

       <!-- horizontal splitter (column #2, row #1) -->
       <GridSplitter ResizeDirection="Rows"
                     HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
                     VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
                     Background="Green"
                     Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="1" />

       <!-- bottom area (column #2, row #2) -->
       <TextBlock Name="BottomRegion"
                  HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
                  VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
                  TextAlignment="Center"
                  Background="Salmon"
                  Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="2">
           Bottom region<LineBreak />
           Column #2<LineBreak />
           Row #2
       </TextBlock>
   </Grid>
</Window>

iPod touch and Edimax BR6204Wg

2009-11-07T10:46:00.002+02:00

My ipod didn't want to connect to the router using WPA.

After a couple of hours of research managed it to make it work with the following changes:

1. I upgraded the firmware to version 1.61
2. I changed the channel from 11 to 6.

Now it seems to work great (I'm writing this post from the iPod!)

Dell D630 + Windows 7/Vista + Bluetooth

2009-10-15T17:24:00.002+02:00

For some reason the default Bluetooth driver that comes with Windows 7 and Vista doesn't have the "Turn Adapter On/Off" option, so you can't turn on the bluetooth...

To install the correct driver do the following:

Run R155395.exe (Wirless 360 Module with Bluetooth) (Don't do the firmware upgrade yet)

Move "bth.inf" and "bth.pnf" from C:\Windows\inf to a temporary location

Uninstall the following devices: "Microsoft Bluetooth Enumerator" and "Generic Bluetooth Adapter"

Disable the wifi/bluetooth using the hardware switch and then enable it again.

Put the "bth.inf" and "bth.pnf" back in C:\Windows\inf (otherwise it won't install the driver)

Open the device manager:
- Right click the "Unknown device" and click "Update Driver Software"
- Select "Browse my computer"
- Direct it to "C:\Dell\drivers\R155395\Drivers"
- Now instead of "Generic Bluetooth Adapter" you'll see "Dell Wireless 360 Bluetooth Module"

Now install the driver again (by running R155395.exe again) and this time do the firmware upgrade.

My High-Definition Kit

2009-10-10T18:20:00.007+02:00

Every time I need to install the required software to play HD videos properly I start looking for links, so I decided to put everything in one place:

ffdshow - audio and video codecs.
Haali Matroska Splitter - required to open MKV files.
Media Player Classic Home Cinema - you can basically use any player, I just like this one

If you want some more control over the audio (surround sound, etc...) the you can also install AC3Filter.

Make Media Player Classic work with ffdshow:

By default, Media Player Classic uses its own codecs to play the videos, but I want it to use ffdshow (better performance with HD videos) so under "View -> Options -> Internal Filters" disable all checkboxes:

Make the keyboard's volume buttons change the master volume (instead of Media Player Classic's volume):

Open View -> Options -> Player -> Keys
Find the "Volume Up" and "Volume Down" commands
Change the "App Command" cell from "VOLUME_UP"and "VOLUME_DOWN" to empty.

Enable hebrew subtitles:

Open "ffdshow -> Video decoder configuration" from the start menu
Enable the "Subtitles" checkbox (so the subtitles will be on by default)
Set the "Charset" to "Hebrew"

Some VLC Tweaks (Smooth HD 1080 and Hebrew Subtitles)

2009-09-05T12:28:00.003+03:00

Getting VLC to show hebrew subtitles:

1. Open Tools -> Preferences
2. Select "Subtitles & OSD"
3. In "Default encoding" select "Hebrew (ISO 8859-8)"
4. In "Preferred subtitles language" enter "he,en" or "en,he" (when VLC finds more than subtitle file in the video file's directory, this will tell it which one to load by default).

Getting VLC to show HD 1080 videos smooth (with no stuttering):

If your computer is strong enough and VLC already plays 1080 videos smooth than you don't need this, but if it doesn't this trick might make it better:

1. Open Tools -> Preferences
2. Under "Show settings" in the bottom left corner select "All"
3. On the left open "Input/Codecs -> Video codecs -> x264"
4. Enable "Skip loop filter"

Alt + Drag on Vista

2009-09-05T12:18:00.002+03:00

For several years now I've been using the Easy Window Drag autohotkey script to simulate the Alt+Drag feature that allows you to drag or resize a window by pressing on the alt key and then pressing on the window (left button to move, right button to resize) and dragging the mouse (this feature is available in almost every Linux window manager).

Since I moved this script has started working weird, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and today I found an alternative that works and it's called AltDrag, it's open source project in google code written in C, and it takes less than 2MB of RAM (which is another improvement) and it works perfectly!

Getting the SVN Service to work on Vista

2009-08-29T12:19:00.003+03:00

Since I'm thinking of moving from SVN to a distributed version control system, the first thing I need to do is to try to convert my current repositories to the other version control systems and the first one I tried was git.

My repositories are local and I access them via "file://...", and apparently the "git-svn" application can't access the repositories that way, so I had the get the my repositories to work via the "svn://" protocol.

Step 1: Register the SVN service
To register the "svnserve" executable as a windows service we run the following command (in a command prompt window with administrator rights):


  sc create svnserve 
    binpath= "\"{Path to svnserve.exe}\" 
      --service -r {Path to your repositories} 
      --listen-host=mylocal" 
    displayname= "Subversion Server" 
    depend= Tcpip 
    start= auto

Where the "{Path to your repositories}" variable should be the path that contains the repository, not the repository itself, for example if you have three repositories:

c:\repositories\dev
c:\repositories\university
c:\repositories\work

you should put "c:\repositories" as the path to your repositories.

Step 2: Add the "mylocal" host to your hosts file
You'll notice that I added the "--listen-host=mylocal" to svnserve's arguments, the reason for that is that for some reason you can't access the server using TortoiseSVN and other tools unless they use a host that's not localhost (I'm not sure why that is, but that's how this guy solved the problem).

For this to work you have to define the "mylocal" host in your hosts file, to do that just add the line "127.0.0.1 mylocal" to the "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts" file.

Step 3: Start the service
Run "services.msc", right click on the "Subversion Server" service and press "Start".

Step 4: Test the server
Open a command prompt and run:


  svn info svn://mylocal/{path-to-svn-repository}

If it writes some information about that repository then it works!

Now open the same path in TortoiseSVN's repository browser.

Distributed Version Control Systems - Part 1

2009-08-28T10:46:00.009+03:00

Until about a year ago I was using the Darcs version control system (I used the command line interface), I liked it because it was a stand-alone executable, no external dependencies whatsoever (completely portable), and I could easy backup my repository to an ftp server, and use it directly from there.

The idea in a DVCS is basically that each user has its own local copy of the repository (not just a working copy, but the entire history, sort of a personal branch), so you can basically work offline, view the project's history, commit, rollback and w, andwhat else, and no one will see your changes until you synchronize your changes to the central repository.

The problem with Dracs was the lack of decent GUI, if I just wanted to see the difference between two versions of a file I had to write a really long line and remember the names or numbers of the revisions. I even started writing a GUI for darcs in python, but I never had the time to finish it.

About a year ago, a friend showed me TortoiseSVN, which was exactly what I was looking for, a very polished UI for a VCS. The only problem with it was that it wasn't distributed, and unless I work with a local repository there's no way of working offline (commit, rolling-back, etc...).

Back when I was using darcs the whole Distributed Version Control System field wasn't very popular, but lately I've started seeing a lot of projects that move from standard version control systems (like SVN) to DVCS.

The three main applications I've seen are:

Bzr - written in python
Mercurial - written in python
Git - written in C
Darcs - written in Haskell

I currently use SVN with TortoiseSVN, which makes life a whole lot easier, so I looked for something similar, and each one of these application has their own Tortise application:

Notable projects that use Bazzar:

iPython (enhanced python shell)
MySQL
APT (debian packaging tool)

Notable projects that use Mercurial:

Mozilla
OpenJDK
OpenSolaris
MoinMoin (wiki)
GNU Octave
XEmacs

Notable projects that use Git:

Linux kernel
Google android
Qt
Ruby on Rails
VLC
Wine
Gnome
GTK
FFmpeg
Fedora

I looked at the "Projects using Darcs" page but I haven't found any projects that I know.

In the upcoming posts I will review each DVCS and then I will decide which one I'm going to use.

An annoying windows stutter...

2009-08-05T07:52:00.002+03:00

A couple of months ago there my desktop computer started doing this annoying stutter, every 15-30 seconds it would just pause everything (audio, video, mouse, keyboard), and I couldn't figure out why, I tried uninstalling stuff I didn't need anymore, ran CCleaner, several anti-spyware software, stopped unnecessary services, I even tried to stop "explorer.exe", but nothing, it still stuttered.

Yesterday my laptop died on me (probably the overheating nvidia chip problem), and it will probably take some time until it fixed, so I took another shot at fixing the annoying stutter.

After googling more about the stutter I saw two forum posts about faulty wireless adapters that caused the system to stutter. I then remembered that in the last winter there was a really strong lightning one night that fried the built-in ethernet card on the computer (since then I've been using a pci ethernet card), so I tried to disabling the built-in card in the device and the stutter stopped!!!

Update in progress...

2009-04-29T18:12:00.003+03:00

Every Visual Studio user is familiar with this window... why didn't they just build the help when you install it? the installation already takes about an hour, so ten more minutes won't hurt anyone, but when you're in a hurry and just want a glimpse at the help files (and you forgot you've just installed) your visual studio gets locked up for about ten minutes, it's really annoying.

Don't get me wrong, I like Visual Studio, it's the best IDE I've ever worked with (and I think I've worked with at least 90% of the IDEs out there), and thanks to Microsoft Dreamspark I now have my own license key to Visual Studio 2008 Professional (I don't have to use the trial version anymore, woohoo).

First impressions of Ubuntu 9.04

2009-04-18T17:15:00.005+03:00

Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 (from 8.10), and I must say I'm quite impressed, it feels a lot more stable than previous versions, and a lot more mature.

In 8.10 Wi-Fi wasn't very stable, I kept having to boot to Windows and then boot back to Ubuntu for it work, and now it just works.

The new themes they've added are really good, I'm currently using "Dust Sand" which has a Mac-ish look it without being a Mac-clone.

The new notifications system is very nice:

They hide when you move the mouse over them (so they don't interfere with what's underneath them).

Also, they've finally added the ability to resize a window with Alt+RightClick instead of only Alt+MiddleClick (it's a real pain when you're using a laptop or when your mouse wheel isn't very good...), I remember writing a patch to metacity a couple of years ago and I'm glad they finally fixed this bug.

If you're using metacity just open gconf-editor and enable "/apps/metacity/general/resize_with_right_button".

If you're using compiz (if you enabled the visual effects) then:

Install "CompizConfig Settings Manager" (sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager)

Run it

In "Preferences" disable "Enable integration into the desktop environment" (workaround to bug #146736).

In "General Options -> Key bindings" disable "Window Menu" (or change it to something else).

In "Window Management -> Resize Window -> Bindings" set "Initiate Window Resize" to "Button3".

Day 3 - St. Nicholas Cathedral, Charles Bridge, and more

2009-02-25T23:13:00.006+02:00

Today was a sunny da with blue skies, we started today's trip by going to St. Nicholas Cathedral, an amazing, gigantic structure, these photos don't do it justice:

Everything in Prague is huge, even the pidgins, they're enormous:

This was taken outside the Church of Our Lady Below the Chain:

We visited the John Lennon Wall:

From one the bridges that lead to Kampa island:

This is Charles Bridge:

This was taken in a park near the bridge:

These are hare krishna followers singing in the street:

Day 2 - Old quarter

2009-02-24T21:13:00.007+02:00

It was a beautiful snowy morning here in Prague, in the next photo you can see the snowy view from our hotel room:

Here we are standing in the snow:

The architecture is beautiful, these buildings are enormous, you can't really capture their presence in photos, but i'll try anyway:

This is the statue of the Maharal which according to legends created the Golem to protect the jews of Prague from anti-semitic actions:

According to legends this statue is of a knight that murdered his wife and was punished for it by turning into stone and he can only be saved by the love of a young girl in a special moment once every 100 years:

This is the city library (it's gigantic!):

and this is an interesting book statue in the library's lobby:

These shots were taken from the top of the clock tower of the old city hall building:

Some more photos from around the city:

What? it's freezing in here:

Prague - Day 1 (First impressions of a European city)

2009-02-23T20:19:00.001+02:00

This morning (really really early in the morning) we have started our Prague vacation (my better half and I).

We reached the hotel at around 10am, fortunately we could check in immediately (and didn't have to wait until 2pm...) so we could get some sleep (hey, I woke up at 2am and couldn't sleep the entire flight! I needed some sleep...).

After a little rest we headed out of the hotel towards the old city.

This is my first visit to Europe and I have to say I'm really impressed, first of all, public transportation here is brilliant, the Metro (sub-way) is very simple to understand, there are three lines: red, green and yellow that can get you to almost anywhere. And instead of buying ticket per station you buy a single ticket that can be "activated" for a predefined amount of time (75 minutes, 24 hours, 72 hours, 120 hours) and while this ticket is "active" (you "activate" the ticket in the train station) it can be used for the Metro, the Tram and buses.

Another amazing thing, it's so quiet and peaceful here, no car honking, no one yelling, cars stop to let you pass, when the first couple of cars stopped I was shocked!

And the buildings... the architecture is really beautiful, I haven't taken any photos (I was too messed up from the flight and from waking up early), tommorow I'll start taking some photos.

Todo 0.1.2

2008-12-24T22:54:00.008+02:00

I've been looking for a decent todo-list application for a very long time, and last week I decided to write one, I call it "Todo" (I know, it's very original...).

It's features include:

Hierarchical tasks (each task can have sub tasks)
Sorts the tasks by "Vague" dates ("Past", "Today", "Tommorow", "This Week", "This Weekend", "Next Week" and "Somewhere in the future")
Dark background (can be changed via the "Todo.exe.config" file).
Each task has a notes area (multiline textbox)
Each task can have links to URLs, files and folders (which will open by double clicking or pressing Enter on them)
Keyboard shortcuts.

Download version 0.1.2.328

Screenshot:

Automated Build & Package System

2008-12-18T20:32:00.011+02:00

The purpose of Builder is to automate the following process of building and packaging software packages (at the moment only for C# and Python projects)

1. Get a specific version of the software from a source control repository.

2. Update the version in the source files:

In C# solutions it updates the AssemblyInfo.cs file
In Python projects it adds the version to the top of each file (after the shebang line) and updates the __version__ variable in each file.

3. Create a source package (zip file with only the source files)

4. Build the product (for C# solutions uses the msbuild.exe).

5. Create a binary package (zip file with only the files required to run the application).

Builder is written in Python, to use it you must first create a settings file (a ".builder" file which is basically an INI file).

This is the ".builder" file format for C# projects:


[Builder]
Name = name-of-the-project (this will also be the name of the archive)
Type = Cs
OutputDirectory = D:\Releases\MyProject

[CsBuilder]
StartupProject = name-of-startup-project
              (the files from {StartupProject}/bin/Release
               will be copied to the binary package)
Solution = solution-file.sln

[SVN]
SvnRoot = file:///S:/Subversion/MyProject
        (the path to the project in the repository).

And this is the ".builder" file format for Python projects:


[Builder]
Name = Builder
Type = Python
OutputDirectory = D:\Releases\Builder

[PyBuilder]
Message = This message will be added to all .py files.

[SVN]
SvnRoot = file:///S:/Subversion/Builder

To associate the ".builder" extension with builder you can use the "RegisterBuilderFiles.reg" file in the source archive (just change the path to where you put Builder).

Download version 1.0.4 here

Subversion: Allow changing log messages

2008-12-11T21:09:00.004+02:00

I've accidentally committed some changes to the source control without entering a log message, and when I tried editing the log message I got this error message:

Repository has not been enabled to accept revision propchanges;
ask the administrator to create a pre-revprop-change hook

After googling a bit I found the solution:

Go to the "hooks" directory in the root of the repository, create a file named "pre-revprop-change.bat" with the following lines:


set PROPNAME=%4

if "%PROPNAME%" == "svn:log" (
    exit /b 0
)

exit /b 1

This script will allow changing the "svn:log" property thus allowing users to rename commits.

Firefox Extension: ShareMyBookmarks 0.1

2008-11-29T18:56:00.005+02:00

For a long time now I've been using delicious to keep my bookmarks online so I can access them without logging in (I don't like entering passwords on other people's computers...).

It wasn't the best solution, but it worked.

Since Firefox 3 came out I started playing with it's bookmarks and I really like them. I played with Foxmarks and some other services that would allow me to keep my bookmarks online but I've failed to find one that will allow me to publish my bookmarks publicly.

Yesterday I started writing a Firefox extension that will allow me to upload my bookmarks in HTML format to an ftp server in a single click.

You can download it from here (version 0.1)

Changing Firebug's hotkeys

2008-11-13T21:56:00.005+02:00

I'm using firefox with two extensions that use the same hotkeys: Firebug (for web debugging) and del.icio.us (for online bookmarking).

After some digging I found that firebug keeps its keybinding settings in this file:

ProfileDirectory\extensions\firebug@software.joehewitt.com\content\firebug\firebugOverlay.xul

To change the default key for firebug's "Focus Command Line" command look for this line:


  <key id="key_focusCommandLine" key="l" modifiers="accel,shift"
       class="fbOnlyKey" command="cmd_focusCommandLine"/>

and change it to:


  <key id="key_focusCommandLine" key_code="VK_F2"
       class="fbOnlyKey" command="cmd_focusCommandLine"/>

And restart firefox.

Now, when you press F2 it will focus on firebug's command line.

Tired... ?

2008-11-05T20:00:00.000+02:00

WPF, ImageSource and Embedded Resources

2008-09-05T16:21:00.003+03:00

Well, it took me a couple of hours, but I’ve finally made it! I managed to load an embedded image from a dll using WPF.

In Windows.Forms I would just add a resource to the resource file, and I was able to access the resource easily via Resources.{name_of_resource_here}, but in WPF this doesn’t help me, because I needed an ImageSource.

After googling around for some time I found Tamir Khason’s blog post about his loadResource method, but I was having trouble loading the image since I was trying to loading an image from a referenced assembly (from within the assembly to an image that was supposed to be a resource within the assembly).

I played with different Pack URIs, the first one I found that worked was this:

“pack://application:,,,/{AssemblyName};component/Images/MyImage.png”

This is way too ugly, very non-C# IMHO, so I kept on looking until I found a relative path that was a little better:

“/{AssemblyName};component/Images/MyImage.png”

This isn’t the prettiest piece of code I’ve seen, but it’s a little better (the first one is an absolute uri, where the second is a relative uri).

I later added this method to my WpfUtils class:

public static Image CreateImageFromPath(string path)
{
Image image = new Image();
image.Source= LoadResource<ImageSource>(path);
image.Width = image.Source.Width;
image.Height = image.Source.Height;
return image;
}

Now, to load an image I can just use this one-liner:

Image image = CreateImageFromPath(“/{AssemblyName};component/Images/MyImage.png”);

WPF: Align text to the right

2008-08-29T23:45:00.008+03:00

Aligning text to the right... sounds like a simple thing to do, apparently not that simple.

First, you have to define a CellTemplate and a DataTemplate for the GridViewColumn with an internal TextBlock that has it's HorizontalAlignment property set to "Right":


<GridViewColumn Header="Size" Width="80">
  <GridViewColumn.CellTemplate>
    <DataTemplate>
      <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Right" 
                 Text="{Binding Size}" />
    </DataTemplate>
  </GridViewColumn.CellTemplate>
</GridViewColumn>

Then you have to add a style resource to set the HorizontalContentAlignment property of ListViewItem elements to "Stretch":


<Style TargetType="{x:Type ListViewItem}">
  <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" 
  Value="Stretch"></Setter>
</Style>

I can understand why it's like this though, basically you can put anything in those cells, and in some cases the alignment flag might not have any meaning... although it would have been very nice for the more simple apps...

Weird Visual Studio 2008 SP1 problem

2008-08-29T19:01:00.006+03:00

A couple of hours ago I've installed Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008, once I started working with it I noticed it crashed every time I opened a XAML file.

I started googling around and found a tip that said to try to open the toolbox before opening the XAML file, and it worked!

Weird.

Now everything is working and I can go back to working on my WPF CAG-based project.

Protect your genitals!

2008-08-09T11:18:00.004+03:00

Finally, I can use the laptop for long periods of time without being cooked alive!

I bought a simple wooden bed tray, on which I've got place for the laptop, a usb disk and a mouse.

Back to XP

2008-07-19T18:11:00.004+03:00

Well, that didn't last for long... but I had to check it out for myself.

Why? for several reasons:

Hibernation was way too slow, over one minute to hibernate is way too much, with XP it's about 30 seconds. And usually when I need to hibernate, it has to be done as fast as possible.
Sleep was also very slow, about 15 seconds compared to XP's 5~10 seconds.
Performance in power-save mode is quite slow (One time on XP when I plugged it in, for some reason it didn't switch to high-performance mode and I didn't notice until I opened System Properties and saw the CPU speed was 800MHz...).
I'm tired of constantly tweaking and disabling parts of Vista that cause lots of HD grinding. I don't want my computer to do things without me telling it to.

So, I'm now back on my good old XP, and maybe when KDE 4.1 comes out I'll give Ubuntu another try.

Trying out Windows Vista

2008-07-09T08:42:00.002+03:00

Yesterday something got messed up with my Apache installation (part of the WampServer package), I tried reinstalling it, I tried several other versions, nothing seemed to work. It kept throwing "Unhandled win32 exception", and after several hours of trying to fix it, I gave up and decided to reinstall.

On the way home I thought about maybe trying to install Vista (I got a Vista Business CD with the laptop), I heard all sorts of opinions about it and I decided to test it for myself (I tried it about a year ago on my old computer with only 1GB RAM, and I removed it after a week...).

The installation was very fast, about 20 minutes, drivers were easy to install (Dell's semi-automatic drivers cd is a brilliant idea).

I'm currently using Aero with "animate windows when minimizing and maximizing" disabled and it's very fast.

I haven't really installed much yet, so this is far from a true performance review, I'll probably know better in a couple of days.

The one thing I had a problem with is copying large file through network which kept hanging, but I found this forum thread that solved it by doing the following:

Open "Command Prompt" as administrator
Run:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
You should see an "Ok."
Restart and open "Command Prompt" as administrator again.
Run:
netsh int tcp show global
One of the lines should be this:
Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level : disabled

TrayDate 0.1.2 (first release)

2008-07-08T09:42:00.002+03:00

When I was using Slickrun I would set it to stay always on top so I could see the date, and since I moved to Launchy I’ve been missing that feature, so I decided to write a simple app to show the date in the tray.

TrayDate works by drawing two tray icons, one for the day and one for the month. In addition to showing the date it also has a list of countdowns and by double clicking the tray icons you can see how much time is left:

It’s released under the GPL license v3, and you can download it from here:

It requires .NET Frameworks 3.5 to work.

The Perfect Setup

2008-07-07T12:09:00.001+03:00

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with lots of software, trying to find the best solution for some things I needed (indexing solution, source control, etc..)

Well, I think now I have finally found my perfect setup, it probably won’t last for long since I’m always looking for the next application, for the better solution, and my requirements from the computer keep changing. But… for now it’s perfect.

Operating System:

Windows XP Pro, I honestly don’t have any complaints about it, I’ve been using it for years and it never crashed on me.

System Tools:

Total Commander, the best file manager ever written, with so many features, tabs, multi-rename, synchronization, thumbnails, ftp, open all sorts of compressed files, and so much more.
Launchy, the best application launcher I have ever used. I change the hotkey to Win+Space (because Alt+Space opens the window context menu). Version 2.0 is a little heavy, so for now I’m staying with version 1.25. I also use the Mathy plugin for some advance math.
Sysinternals, now owned by Microsoft, contains Process Explorer (Task Manager on steroids), FileMon (find out who’s accessing the hard drive), Autoruns (finds every application that loads on startup) and lost more.
Locate32, this is my indexing solution, it works like Linux’s locate, there’s a database file that is updated manually (or with a Scheduled Task), it contains only filenames, dates and sizes. Just press Win+F and you can search the entire hard drive in a second.
7-Zip, a file archiver that supports lot of formats, including their own high compression ratio format, very comfortable and lightweight program.
Tweak UI, change lots of hidden windows configuration items.
Avast Anti-Virus, I’m using the free version, and so far didn’t have any problems with it.
TrueCrypt, Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
KeePass, password manager.
Notepad++, I don’t use text editors much these days (I used to be a VIM-junky, but I’ve become a spoiled programmer after working with Visual Studio and Eclipse…), but when I do need to edit some plain text, html, or a short python/batch script this tool really comes in handy.
AltDrag, an Autohotkey script that I tweaked to work the way I like it. Basically what it does is simulate Kde/Gnome’s alt+mouse-click to drag windows and alt+right-mouse-click to resize windows).

Audio & Video:

Foobar 2000, the best music player I’ve ever used, quick, lightweight and full of features (tag editing, ReplayGain, file conversion, file operations, etc…).
VLC media player, open source video player, supports almost every codec (no codecs required for installing).
Quicktime Alternative, I only use it for watching trailers because it’s got this cool features of downloading the entire trailer, saving it as a file and playing it (I like watching the HD trailers, and it’s annoying to watch them in streaming).

Internet:

Firefox, Best web browser ever made! I use it with the following extensions:

DownThemAll
Delicious Bookmarks
PicLens
Aardvark
ScrapBook
Better GReader

Thunderbird, I use it with Gmail IMAP, works great!, I use the CuteBird theme to make it look more Mac-ish, and I use the Lightning plugin to add a calendar.
Miranda Instant Messenger, GoogleTalk, Icq, Messenger, all in one lightweight package. I’ve been using it for years.
WinSCP, free SFTP, FTP and SCP client. Supports scripting, synchronizing between local and remote directories and much more.
Windows Live Writer, Very comfortable blogging tool (I’m using it right now to write this post), you write the post as you’ll see it on the blog (see my previous post).
Google Reader, Not a desktop application (although you can use it with Prism and make it sort-of-a-desktop-app), but a still very useful application.

Graphics:

IrfanView, Very handy image viewer/editor, supports EXIF, simple editing (cropping, brightnest/contrast, smart rescaling and a lot more).
Gimp, The GNU Image Manipulation Program. I use it for enhancing photographs, doing HDRs, adding effects to photographs, making web design graphics, icon editing, animations and all sorts of other generic graphic work.
Inkscape, Vector graphics editor, the latest version is a lot more stable. Very useful for web design.
AutoStitch, I use this one to make panorama shots (combine single photographs into one giant photo).

Development:

Visual Studio 2008 Express, for all non-commercial C# work.
Eclipse/Aptana Studio, for most of my web work (PHP/html/javascript/css/etc…). Aptana is one of the best Javascript editors I’ve worked with, Intellisense works very well (a little buggy, but much better than anything else I’ve tried).
Python, best solution for quick&dirty scripting. I used to use it with wxPython to write GUI applications, but once I started using Visual Studio for C# GUI applications I couldn’t go back to wxPython.
IPython, an enhanced Python shell, makes testing pieces of code a lot more comfortable.
TortoiseSVN, Explorer-extension for SVN source control (also works inside Total Commander…), very easy to use and you can create a local repository with no web server required.
WampServer, easy-to-install Apache+MySQL+PHP package, has a tray icon to quickly start/stop the services.

Office Tools:

OpenOffice, the open-source Microsoft Office alternative. I actually like better than Office, since it doesn’t try to figure out what I wanna do, If I want something I just do it and that’s it, no false-positives. Another thing I like about it is the PDF export feature, you can easily create a PDF with bookmarks, hyperlinks, encryption, and more.
PowerPoint Viewer, Unfortunately OpenOffice isn’t 100% office compatible, especially for presentations…

New laptop!

2008-06-28T13:04:00.002+03:00

I just got my new Dell D630 a few days ago, and it’s great.

I’ve been researching laptops for a couple of months before my trip to Vietnam, and this was the best laptop I found in Israel:

14.1” with a 1440x900 resolution!!! - I think this is one of the best things about it, now that I’ve been working with it a bit I don’t know why I even thought about 15” with 1280x800… that would have been a huge waste of screen space.
Intel Core2 Duo T8300 – Good thing I waited until after the trip, because while I was away newer laptops got to Israel with the new 45nm technology.
160GB 7200rpm – I was a little conflicted about whether to get the laptop with a 7200rpm or a 5400rpm hard drive, due to heat and noise issues, but at the end I decided to go for the 7200rpm and I’m glad, it’s very quiet and stays rather cool.

I’m dual-booting it with XP Pro (It came pre-installed, part of the Vista Business downgrade-able license thing) and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

At the moment, I’m keeping XP, maybe somewhere in the future I’ll give Vista a chance.

My main OS is XP, Ubuntu is not enough for me at the moment (no Visual Studio, etc…) and I quite like XP, it’s stable, fast, I did some extreme-customization to make it fit me and it’s great.

I don’t know what will end up with Vista, but for now I’m happy with my XP.

The laptop does get a little hot, at a cooler weather it might be unnoticeable, but in this heat everything is too hot. To take care of this I bought a USB cooling pad with three fans that take the heat from the bottom and throw it out the back. Very useful little device, very quiet and keeps the laptop much cooler (also enables me to actually put it on my lap).

Windows Live Writer

2008-06-23T19:12:00.001+03:00

I'm uploading this post using Windows Live Writer and it's really comfortable.

It automatically loads the style of the blog so you can also know what it looks like when you edit it, and it loads all of the tags from the blog.

It's got tons of plug-ins like:

Polaroid Picture - add a cool Polaroid style to your pictures.
Insert Code - insert formatted code in various programming languages (C#, HTML, JavaScript, ...).
Paste from Visual Studio - easily transfer syntax highlighted source code from Visual Studio to elegant HTML.
and many more

Only problem I have noticed so far, Is the inability to insert local videos (Via the blogger web page I can upload my own videos and blogger converts them and creates an embedded video stream).

Screenshot:

Day 23: More of the Mekong Delta

2008-06-21T22:00:00.003+03:00

Well, we're back from the Mekong Delta group tour, it was very nice, we met some very nice people from all over the world (Australia, New-Zealand, Austria, China, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Japan), everyone was very friendly and we had a great time. It was a great way of closing our trip.

This morning we went to see the floating market, it was quite different from what I had imagined, I thought there would be lots of small boats full of fruit, but instead there were lots of big boats selling all sort of stuff, and each boat had a long bamboo pole on which they would stick the stuff they are selling so people around will know what they are selling.

Here are some photos of the boats:

Here's a little boy who sailed near us (with his mother of course, I doubt if he can sail by himself...) and tried to sell us some drinks:

There were some boats that matched what I had imagined:

Playing with the idea of Black&White photography:

Afterwards, we went to some village to see how they make noodles. At first they make these giant pancake-like things (they're made out of rice, tapioca, and maybe more stuff, I was tired and wasn't really paying attention...):

And then they leave them to cool or dry or something (again, I wasn't really listening...):

In the same village we saw Pigzilla:

This pig was enormous, but unfortunately this photo doesn't really show how big it was (and I couldn't take another photo because she kept looking away).

From there we went to see Monkey Bridge (no idea why it's called Monkey Bridge):

Well, this is the end of our trip, tomorrow we're flying back home, and I'm looking forward to it. Don't get me wrong, the trip was a lot of fun, but three weeks is enough for me, I miss home, where everybody speaks my language, I miss my family, my friends, I miss home food. I'm tired of living out of my backpack. I don't understand how people can take such long trips (four, six months and higher), I'd go nuts on such a long trip.

To sum things up, we had a lot of fun, we learned a lot (about Vietnam, about the people, about ourselves), there were some not-so-fun stuff, but what I take with me are the good memories (and the souvenirs...).

By the way, my estimation of 10000 photos is dead wrong, we reached somewhere around 2000~3000 photos.

Day 22: Mekong Delta

2008-06-20T17:59:00.005+03:00

Today we went to the Mokong Delta, which is the region where the Mekong River approaches and empties into the sea through a network of distributaries.

We took a boat trip to one of the islands, where we visited a few villages, to one of these villages we reached by horse:

We were brought to a place where we were served tea with local honey and some sort of cocount-covered peanuts (very tasty).

In the same place there was also a giant snake that everyone could take a photo with (I passed... I don't like snakes).

And afterwards we went on a boat trip back to the next village:

In the last village we met a family that makes coconut candy. At first they grind the coconuts into powder:

Then they put the powder in this machine that separates the coconut oil and milk:

Then they boil the coconut milk: (they use the coconut shells to keep the fire alive - there's coconut oil in the shells so it keeps the fire burning for a long time)

After the coconut milk boils (I think they sugar and some stuff when they boil it) they create long stripes of the candy, cut them into cubes and put in boxes:

They also combine the candy with peanuts, chocolate, banana and more.

After the villages we went on the ferry ride to the hotel. On the way to the ferry we got stuck in traffic jam, so the bus driver just went into the other lane (in the other direction of the traffic...) and passed like a hundred trucks waiting to get on the ferry:

View from the ferry:

Remember in the previous posts when I said they use the motorbikes to transport all sorts of stuff, well this is an example of what I meant:

Day 21: Cao-Dai and Cu-Chi tunnels

2008-06-19T16:23:00.009+03:00

Today, we went on a group tour to the Cao-Dai temple and the Cu-Chi tunnels.

During the three hour drive, I finished Monkey Island 2 and started Maniac Mansion.

On the way to the Cao-Dai temple we stopped at a place where they make all sorts of boxes, vases and stuff. In these photos you can see them adding patterns to the items using egg shells and broken sea shells:

Cao-Dai is a religion that is a combination of Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity. This is what the Cao-Dai temple looks like from the outside:

And from the inside:

During the service:

After the Cao-Dai temple we went to eat lunch and then about an hour and a half ride to the Cu-Chi tunnels (again, an hour of playing Maniac Mansion...).
These tunnels where used to fight the Americans, the people would live inside them, cook, sleep, everything.

Here you can see the guide trying to fit into this super-small hole:

This is what the hole looks like from the inside:

This is one of the booby traps they used:

When someone steps on it, it flips and that someone falls on poison-covered spikes:

Here's an M41 tank:

And some more booby traps:

They would use the metal from American bombs to build booby traps (those are dummies in the photos...):

Here's me standing on top of one of the tunnels entrances (as you can see I can't even fit my legs in there):

In the souvenir shop there were some toys made out of bullets:

Rotem coming out of one of the tunnels (I didn't go in because I'm not a big fan of small-closed spaces...):

The smoke from the underground kitchen comes out through several holes in the ground so it can't be easily noticed from the outside:

They were wearing sandals made out of tires:

Day 20: Saigon

2008-06-18T13:51:00.003+03:00

This morning, we went for a walk around the city, and on the way there we saw a funeral:

It all happened very quickly, all of a sudden the street was flooded with tons of a people walking after the coffin and playing some music with drums and stuff.

Oh, I'm not sure the decorated cars at the first photo have anything to do with the funeral...

From there we went to the market, did some shopping, I bought a DVD of "Stargate: The Ark of Truth" on a DVD store on the way, and on the way back we found a Falafel store:
(It even has a Hebrew sign!)

It's weird to be served Falafel with a fork and a knife...

Day 19: Saigon... There and back again

2008-06-17T15:31:00.000+03:00

We're now back in Saigon, after a five hour bus ride which passed rather quickly (I played Monkey Island 2 for about four hours... long live ScummVM).

Well, we have tonight and tomorrow for some extreme shopping so we're going to check out the city.

Day 18: Mui-Ne

2008-06-16T12:21:00.008+03:00

Wow, time flies when you're having fun, I can't believe it's already day 18...

I'm writing this post from this laptop (same as yesterday):

I've been playing with it for a while now (blogging, uploading photos, emails, etc...), and I have to say that I'm now sure that 1280x800 resolution for a 15" monitor is a real waste of space (unless you've got really bad eye sight), and I think the Dell D630's 1440x900 on a 14.1" monitor will be perfect for me.

It also made me pretty sure that I don't want a 12" laptop, the keyboard is just too small (and I've got big fingers...), and a lot of keys (like page up/down, etc... are set as combinations of the Fn key with other keys, it's very uncomfortable...)

Well, this is our bungalow:

And this is the view from the bungalow:

We're having a great time in this hotel, this morning we went for a walk on the beach:

We collected several kilograms of sea shells:

Afterwards, we went for a swim in the hotel pool:

Butterfly sitting on a flower:

I have to say, writing a blog is much funner than I thought...

Day 17: Mui-Ne

2008-06-15T11:20:00.001+03:00

Today we took a bus from Da-Lat to Mui-Ne, and now we're at a hotel/resort called "Little Mui-Ne Cottages", it's very nice here, it sits directly on the beach and we have ocean view from our room.

I'm writing this post on the hotel's Dell Inspiron 700m, it's a 12.1" laptop, it's cute but a little too small, and the reflective screen is one of the most annoying things I have ever worked with, it does look quite sharp, but it's hard to see anything with all of the reflections from the sun (I'm under a roof, but there's sun coming in from the outside).
This experience has made more sure that the choice of Dell D630 is the right one. (also, the keyboard is a little too small, but maybe it's the vietnamese characters on the keyboard that are confusing me...).

I've also had a chance to play a little with ACDSee 10 Photo Manager and it's really comfortable (I used it to resize&rotate the photos I uploaded).

Maybe later I'll upload some photos of the hotel and the view (I'm tried from uploading all of the photos of the previous post...).

Well, I'm going to the pool... bye for now.

Day 16: Da-Lat, lots and lots of Da-Lat

2008-06-15T08:06:00.019+03:00

(I'm posting this on Day 17, since only now I have decent internet, so read as if it's yesterday).

Today we went with our guide Vui, who has a Hebrew sticker on the back of his car (left by one of his other tourists):

We first went to see some temples (don't remember their name), it's a big park with many temples:

This huge bell is inside the previous temple:

The inside of the bell is covered with notes:

The view from the area:

Some weird kid who kept taking photos of us on his mobile phone (these people are really amazed by my beard for some reason...):

Later on, we went to see some waterfall whose name I can't remember...

Rotem under the waterfall:

A bridge near the waterfall (it's a small park):

An elephant people can ride on (one of the attractions in the park):

Afterwards, we went to see Chicken Village (the guide said they're called Chicken Village because they have a giant chicken statue at the front of the village).

The people in this village don't speak Vietnamese, they have their own language.

Here's the giant chicken statue:

This is a well from which they get their water:

A little chick near the pot in the kitchen (hmm... I wonder what he's doing there... wink wink):

In the center is a woman and around her are her seven children:

A big piggy and a little piggy:

After the village, we went to see a Chinese pagoda called The Agalloch Buddha Pagoda. It contains three giant buddha statues made of aloe wood (each statue is 4 meters high and weights 1.5 tons), these statues were brought from hong kong in 1958 when the Pagoda was being built (it was reconstructed in 1989).
Archaeologists say that these statues were made in the 16th century, but no one knows the exact date.

Here are the three statues:

A cute little puppy we met in the pagoda:

I saw this shot, and I thought it looks interesting:

After that we went to the Chua Linh Phuoc pagoda:

This is an interesting building near the pagoda:

Funny looking lion statue in the pagoda:

Inside the pagoda:

Dragon statue in the pagoda:

Another giant bell, this time inside the tall building 4 photos ago:

That building is currently being built (or restored, not sure), they are using broken plate parts to cover the walls with pictures (they are breaking the plates and pasting their parts on the wall to create all sorts of forms):

Afterwards, we went to eat lunch in a very nice little restaurant called "Peace Cafe" (57 Truong Cong Dinh St.), it's also recommended in Lonely Planet.
The owner of the restaurant is called TU ANH, she's a very nice lady, knows some Hebrew words, she's very hyper but very nice:

After lunch we went to Valley of Love, one the most kitschy place we've ever seen, full of pink hearts and stuff like that.

Here you can see Rotem laughing at how kitschy this place is:

A cool miniature waterfall thingy:

An eagle statue from up close:

The view:

"The bench you are sitting on is sponsored by PEPSI"...

Later (yeah, we were in lots of places...) we went to the Crazy House, it's a really strangely designed house (by a very crazy architect), it's like a maze in side.

Here are some photos:

There are rooms inside that you can rent:

One of the construction workers (this place is still under construction) showed me were I can take a good photo of one of the towers:

At the end of the tour, we asked the guide to drop us off at the town center and we walked around the market.

Some old lady in the market:

Motorbikes, motorbikes, motorbikes, ...

As I mentioned in a previous post, the motorbikes here are family vehicles, and are also used for transferring large things like huge bags, closets, fridges. We even saw a motorbike-mounted kiosk.

Day 15: The road to Da-Lat

2008-06-14T15:57:00.003+03:00

Since I couldn't post this yesterday (wi-fi problems) I'm posting this on day 16, so just read this as if it was yesterday...

Last night we landed in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and today we took a bus to Da-Lat (8~9 hours ride... but it was quite a comfortable ride and time passed a lot faster than I thought).

Da-Lat is an amazing place, it looks a little like a European ski town (except for all of the vietnamese people and the thousands of motorbikes....)

When we reached the hotel there was a power shortage (there are a lot these all over Vietnam) so we went for a walk in the town. They night life here is very similar to Eilat.

For some reason I can no longer upload photos from the pocketpc to blogger, so I'll upload some photos when I get a chance.

Edit: Some photos:

View from the hotel:

Interesting house on the way to the town center:

Da-Lat at night:

Weird stuff on the menu (Ant eater??):

A little frog we met on the way back to the hotel (probably escaped from some restaurant...):

Day 14: Phuc Kien Assembly Hall, Japanese bridge and more shopping

2008-06-12T10:16:00.004+03:00

Hi everyone,

This morning (instead of yesterday afternoon because it was way too hot) we went on a tour of the city, we saw the Phuc Kien Assembly Hall (according to the guide the Phuc Kien are a community of Chinese people who live in Vietnam), you can the see in this photo:

Inside the hall there is a temple where the Phuc Kien people pray to several gods, one of these gods is the Money God:

(There are many stores here were people have a small alters with a small Money God figure and they pray to them).

Later on we went to see a 400 year-old Japanese bridge (according to the guide the Japanese people were here before the Chinese people, and when the Chinese came the Japanese build this gate to act as a dividing line between the Japanese and Chinese parts of the city):

Not a very impressive bridge... (And why is it pink?)

The guide said they don't know exactly when it was built, but since there is a statue of a dog in one end and statue of a monkey in the other end they think it was started in the year of the monkey, and ended in the year of dog (maybe in reverse, don't know much about the animal/year Japanese thing...).

Here you can see photos of the monkey and dog statues (try to guess which is which :)... )

This guy is a fisherman we saw while walking along the river:
(Slight resemblance to Herman Toothrot...)

An example of what the streets here look like:

After the tour ended we went to pick us some clothes we had ordered, and went back to the hotel. In a couple of hours we will be flying to Saigon.

Day 13: MySon, Silk factory and more

2008-06-11T17:25:00.004+03:00

It took me like an hour to upload this post, the internet connection in this hotel really sucks (half an hour to download IrfanView so I can resize the photos to upload them).

Today we went to see MySon, a Hindu temple complex about 30km from Hoi-An.

It was the site of religious ceremony of kings of the Champa dynasty, and was also a burial place of Champa royals and national heroes.

According to our guide (this is what he said, I never checked the facts...) in the days of the french occupation the vietnamese people were split into two, the north and the south, the north was controlled by the communist party with Ho Chi Minh at their head and the south was under french control. After the french fell, the Americans took over and turned the government to a more western one. In a few years the north wanted to take back control over the south, this was done by the Vietcong who infiltrated the south and fought the Americans.
It was a very conflicted war, because many vietnamese people supported the US (mostly the younger ones, because at the south they could get better education and better jobs, and the western way life is more appealing to the young generation).

The MySon complex was heavily bombed by the Americans during the war (the Vietcong hid in the temples, and when they cooked, the Americans saw the smoke and bombed the hell out of the temples).

Here are some photos of the temples:

Here's another little lizard:

Later on we went to a silk factory and saw how silk was made, at first you can see the worms:

The worms become cocoons:

The cocoons are turned to silk strings by this machine:

And finally, silk fabric is created from the strings by this machine:

Afterwards I bought a boat (about 50cm long boat model), I always wanted something like that!, isn't it awsom?

By the way, an interesting fact: there are over 500 tailor shops in Hoi-An!

Day 12: Still Hoi-An

2008-06-11T03:52:00.002+03:00

Hi everyone,

We went shopping until noon, and then came back to the hotel for a refreshing dip in the pool. While swimming one of the screws in my eyeglasses got loose and my lens fell off, so I went to the reception and told them (there was a swimming class in the hotel pool at the same time and I didn't want anyone to get cut by it), they went to the pool and ask the swimming instructors to dive and search for it, and they found it!

I picked up the jacket and it came out very nice so I also ordered a shirt.

Unfortunately, Rotem didn't have much luck with the dress, we came to the shop to find a dirty dress (full of stains everywhere), the stripes were made from old material that got partially yellow from the sun (it was supposed to be white) and the dress was very far from what she asked for (they ignored a lot of details from the photo of the dress she gave them), after arguing with them for about two hours (we had to go back and forth twice because the one that made the dress wasn't there, and then they forgot the photo at their house) and getting some insults from the very rude tailor we managed to get back half of the deposit.

It was very disrespectful of them to try and sell us old and dirty fabric hoping we wouldn't notice. When I bought my jacket and shirt, they tailors were very nice (HOA cloth shop) and the fabric was clean and everything was perfect on the first time.

I'm actually writing this post at the morning of day 13, and now we're going on a guided tour to some of Hoi-An's temples and ancient bridges.

Day 11: Hoi-An

2008-06-10T06:33:00.002+03:00

We're now in Hoi-An, the fashion city of Vietnam, it's full of tailors and clothes shop.

I bought a 100% silk tie for less than 3$ (I don't know what I'll do with a tie, I don't even know how to put on a tie, but it comes in a cool box with cuff lings...).

I also order a custom-made jacket for just 20$ (they measured me and everything), it will be ready tomorrow (well since I'm actually writing this post on day 12, it will be ready today...).

Rotem ordered a custom-made silk dress for also 20$ (we went through like 20 shops until she found the exact color of fabric she wanted...).

It's a nice town, kinda hot, but there's enough shade.

We went for a swim in the hotel pool (haven't been in a pool for over 10 years...), it was fun.

Not much more to say, this is a shopping town, the people here live at their stores (I mean that literally...).

The people here seem to get offended really quick when you bargain and offer a price that is too low (some told us to go away...).

Day 10: Hue

2008-06-08T17:23:00.006+03:00

Today we visited the Hue Citadel, very beautiful place, see some photos:

The palace of supreme harmony:

Cool statue of a lion:

Dragon ornaments on top of the citadel buildings:

Later on we went to visit the tomb of emperor Tu Duc, he was the forth ruler of the Nguyen dynasty, and regined from 1848 to 1883.

Here's a little lizard:

In this photo you can see four mandarin statues (the mandarin are officers working for the emperor), two civilian mandarin and two military mandarin. You can also see a horse and elephant. These are ment to go with the emperor to the next world:

In this building you can see his autobiography (since he didn't have any children, he wrote his own biography...):

The autobiography is written on a 20ton piece of stone as you can see here:

In the autobiography he speaks about his childhood (how he got smallpox, which is why he has no children..., etc...) and he mentions the three mistakes he made in his life:
1. Having no children
2. His brother tried to kill him when he became king after their father died (he was the younger one, but his brother wasn't fit for ruling, so his father picked him instead), after arresting his brother, the brother hanged himself in prison and people started saying that he killed his brother (he regrets the way he dealt with the whole thing).
3. He regrets that he didn't live a modest life (around 1,000 people died while building his tomb...).

This is where the emperor is buried:

He is buried somewhere under that area (there's a tunnel maze there), nobody knows exactly where the body is because those who buried him were killed right after the burial.

Hue and the horrible night bus

2008-06-08T05:47:00.000+03:00

We're now in Hanoi, we just ate breakfast.

The night bus from Hanoi to Hue was one of the most uncomfortable vehicles I ever been in, I think I could have gotten better sleep on a normal bus.
First of all, it's designed for small people, now, I'm 1.73 meters high (not that tall, but taller than the average vietnamese guy) and I barely had any room for my feet, I woke up every hour or so to rearrange my legs in a different position.
At the first and last couple of hours (when we were inside cities) you couldn't sleep because the damn driver kept honking like every five seconds, these guys honk every time they see a motorbike to tell it to get the hell out of theur way.
After all of the beds were full, they brought in some vietnamese people who slept on the floor between the beds, they stuffed the bus with people as if we were chickens. On one side I had this annoying vietnamese kid, and on the other side an annoying vietnamese lady (I think I bought something in her store earlier today, not sure...) who didn't stop talking for like two hours (with her friend and on the phone).
Whenever someone wanted to go to the bathroom they would try to climb over the people in the passage ways (somebody stepped on the store lady and she smacked him).

The last two hours (after there were no more extra passangers) were actually the best the sleep I had in all of the bus ride (I was probably too tired to hear all of the honking).

(by the way, it was a 14 hour ride...)

We're now off to travel Hue, good bye for now.

Some more photos

2008-06-07T09:54:00.002+03:00

We're sitting in a nice luttle café in Hanoi waiting for our lunch to come.
For some reason the Wifi in the hotel doesn't work at all hours (and I think I hijacked wifi from houses around the hotel...) so I only now managed to upload all of the photos for days 5,6,7 and 8. I updated their posts with the new photos so check them out.

It's been raining like hell over here for about an hour, and it appears to have stopped now (crazy weather here).

There's a gang of iPhone+laptop armed vietnamese people in a table next to us and I think they're trying to use Excel to calculate the bill...

I want a laptop too... :-(

Some photos:

Garlic Fries

2008-06-06T15:59:00.000+03:00

One of the best things I ate here is garlic french fries, it's basically regular french fries with chopped garlic (after the french fires are done, put them in a bowl and mix with some chopped garlic).

Day 8: Monkey Island and more

2008-06-06T15:54:00.001+03:00

Today we went on a three hour cruise around the islands (which I'm glad to say I survived without taking motion-sickness pills), we saw Tortoise Island and Monkey Island, we collected some cool shells on some island, and saw how the local people grow big-ass fish and all sorts of sea shells and stuff.

After the cruise we took a fast ferry back to the coast, and from there we took a car back to Hanoi, and now I'm lying on the bed, watching Friends on StarWorld and writing this blog post.

Since I'm writing these posts from my pocket pc I can't upload any photos. I hope I can upload some photos soon.

Well, good bye for now, have a great weekend!.

EDIT: Some photos:

Yours truly after breakfast, and in the back you can see the view from the hotel restaurant:

Top deck of the boat:

Tortoise Island:

Battle-Rooster: (they've got rooster fights here, this guy doesn't look so good, but since he's still alive it probably means he won...)

Sea star: (or whatever these things are called)

Rotem on board of the floating fishing village:

I think that little black spot on the top left is an eagle flying around the huge crusts:

Monkey Island:

Day 7: The infamous Cat-Ba Island trek

2008-06-06T15:53:00.001+03:00

Today we climbed five freakin' jungle-mountains (a huge jungle that has grawn over a mountain), it took us six hours (14km of rocky terrain), it was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. It was a really boring trek, for six hours I just looked at the rocks under me trying not fall. I am happy to say that I explored the jungles of Nam (long live Rambo!!) and survived, and it's nice to know that I can do it, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why some people find in treks? what's so much fun in swimming in your own sweat for hours on hours?

Oh, and the jungle was full of weird, creepy insects, and you have to be careful everywhere you touch not to get bitten by some creature (oh, there were also some snakes). There were tons of flying cockroach-like creatures called "Sikada" (don't know if I'm spelling it right) that made noises that made the jungle sound like a very busy sawmill).

Once we were out of the jungle (which was one of the happiest moments of my life), we ate lunch in a local village and then went on a motorbike ride (both of us and a driver on one motorbike, heavy rain and slippery, curvey road... it was really cool and scary at the same time - motorbikes in Vietnam are considered family vehicles) to get to a boat that will take us back to the hotel.

We came back to the hotel tired and exhausted, took a shower, watched some movies on HBO ("The Good Shepherd" - good movie) and tried to dry the rest of the laundry.

Photo: (I didn't many photos...)

Day 6: Halong Bay, Cat-Ba Island and a laundry attempt

2008-06-06T14:51:00.001+03:00

After breakfast we were picked up by the group tour bus and drove for about 3 hours to Halong Bay (during which talked to a nice Englishman who told us about his trip to China).
When we got to Halong Bay we went on a four hour cruise to Cat-Ba island (I was asleep for about three of them due to the motion sickness pill), the view is absolutely amazing, thousands of giant mountains.

After the cruise we reached the hotel, where we tried to do our laundry by ourself (the hotel wanted around 30$ for it). Since it was so darn moist, everything stayed wet and we had to use a hair drier to dry them.

Some photos:

Huan Kiem lake:

Some Halong Bay Photos:

View from the hotel on Cat-Ba island:

Back to Hanoi

2008-06-04T03:05:00.000+03:00

We're back in Hanoi (after taking the night train), we went to see the flower market and Hoan Kiem lake where we saw hundreds of people (mostly old people) doing morning workouts (walking, running, taichi, etc...)

Now we're back at the hotel and in about an hour we leave for Halong Bay.

Day 5: Cat-Cat and Ta-Phin villages

2008-06-03T08:41:00.008+03:00

This morning we ate breakfast (cooked by our guide)

Now we're back at the hotel, in a few minutes we'll head back out to visit some of the other villages in the area, and in the evening we will take the night train back to Hanoi.

I'll post some more photos when we have more time.

Edit: We're back at the hotel after visiting Cat-Cat village.

In a couple of hours we'll head out to see Ta-Phin village.

(by the way, we're taking about 200 photos/day each, which means around 10,000 photos for the entire trip...).

Some photos: (I also updated the previous post with more photos)

Rice for planting:

"You buy from me?" (again):

"What are you looking at?":

Hatuli junior:

The Love Stream:

Two kids trying to make noodle soup:

Day 4: Lao-Chai and Ta-Van villages

2008-06-03T05:06:00.009+03:00

Last night we went to sleep while the entire city (Sapa) was inside a giant cloud, it was quite extraordinary.

This morning we woke up to the sounds of rain, and since the plan was to walk through some of the villages, we postponed it and slept for a few more hours until the weather got better.

After lunch we trekked to see the Lao-Chai and Ta-Van village, very beautiful places. We met some of the local people (Black H'Mong, Dzay, etc..).

In the evening we had dinner with the Dzay family where we stayed the night (at Ta-Van village), we watched our guide cook the dinner (best french fries I ever ate).
Everyone is very nice, and our guide told us many interesting stories about vietnam.

The view is absolutely amazing, green as far as the eye can see.

Some photos:

Villages:

Rotem with our guide and some Black H'Mong people:

Black H'Mong lady with her baby:

Who's a cute little piggy:

One of the villages:

Village people working in the fields:

The house where we stayed (we slept on the second floor):

Buffalo:

"You buy from me?"

Cooking dinner at the Dzay house:

Day 3: Bac-Ha market and Sapa

2008-06-01T17:33:00.006+03:00

The night train was an interesting experience, we met a nice vietnamese couple which showed us videos of a cambodian wedding (the husband's sister).

We managed to get some sleep and woke up to see an amazing view, green trees and mountains as far as the eyes can see.

We were picked up at the train station, and after eating breakfast we went to the Bac-Ha market, the drive there was extremely curved and annoying.

The Bac-Ha market was very interesting, filled with people wearing different custumes, selling all sorts of stuff (see photos at the bottom).

After a couple of hours in the Bac-Ha market we ate lunch and went on a drive to a village in the area, in which we took a boat ride along the Chai River.

After the boat ride we moved on to Sapa and checked into the hotel (the view is truly amazing). We explored the town and bought some unique stuff.

Tommorow morning we will go to visit some of the local tribes.

Photos:

Rotem making friends with three vietnamese girls:

Bac-Ha market:

Village (For the life of me, I can't remember its name):

View from our hotel in Sapa:

Day 2: Tam-Coc

2008-05-31T13:44:00.004+03:00

Today, we went on a guided tour to Tam-Coc (which means "three caves"). At first there were supposed to be 16 people in the tour, but in the end we were only four.

Our guide for the day, ngoc, picked us up at the hotel and we began driving to Tam-Coc. It was about 2 hours of very bumpy roads (I've noticed they really like to honk around here). We made a short stop to see the temple of the first king of Vietnam.

Once we reached Tam-Coc, we got into small boats to explore the area where each boat has one or two vietnamese people that row (some even row with their feet). It's a very beautiful place, there are giant cliffs and rice fields everywhere.

Later this evening we will be taking the night train to Sapa.

Some photos:

Buffalo rider:

Tam-Coc boats:

Drinks at dinner:

Night train cabin:

Good morning Vietnam

2008-05-31T04:05:00.000+03:00

It's now morning, we're in the Hong Ngoc hotel in Hanoi, waiting to be picked up for a tour of Tam Cuc.

Last night, after about 12 hours of flight we reached Hanoi. We met with Dong from the , the travel agent who arranged this trip for us. So far, everyone here were very nice.

Waiting in the terminal

2008-05-29T22:23:00.003+03:00

While waiting to board the plane we looked around the Duty Free, and I have to say that the prices aren't as low as I thought (and why do we need 50 Hstern and Michal Nagarin stores for??).

However, I did get a chance to play with the laptop I want to buy (Dell D630) and it's an awsom laptop.

ok, we gotta board now, bye.

(By the way, i'm posting this from my iPaq)

Couple of hours to lift off...

2008-05-29T18:07:00.004+03:00

In a few minutes I'm gonna head out to the airport for my 3 week Vietnam trip, I downloaded some articles I never had time to read (ADO.NET Entity Framework, ActiveRecord, Run-as-not-admin, and other stuff), and hopefully they will help me pass the ~14 hours of flight.

Worst timing ever...

2008-05-20T09:03:00.002+03:00

Remember the "Untitled" cat from the last post? well, last week we managed to find her a home (my folks were gonna take her, they bought all the equipment needed, food, etc...), on the day they were supposed to take her, she disappeared.

For about a week, we've been looking everywhere for her, and there was no sign of her. Yesterday, after accepting the fact that she's probably never going to come back, my folks decided to adopt another cat.

This morning, she came back...

"Untitled" cat

2008-05-09T19:13:00.003+03:00

For the past couple of days, we have been hearing non-stop "meows".

Yesterday morning we found it to be a little kitten who has probably lost her mother (we later found out it was a she). It took us some time, but we managed to get close to her and give her some food.

Once she got accustomed to us we could play with her, she's just adorable!

We don't know what to do with her, since yesterday we've been going out several times a day to feed her, play with her and give her some warmth.

Here are some more photos and a video of her: