• JPEG files will now automatically be rotated and mirrored according to the orientation stored in the EXIF data.
• You can now enable an option called “Only generate sensible aspect ratios” for the “Automatically assign “Aspect Ratio x:y” tag” feature. This will prevent generation of tags like “Aspect Ratio 123:36″. It will now only generate aspect ratio tags with components <= 16 for example “Aspect Ratio 16:9″, “Aspect Ratio 5:3″.
• When using the “Quick Move” and “Give Tags” hotkey for the current wallpaper on the desktop, the OSD will now show a small preview of the image that will be manipulated.
• You can now choose between recursive/non-recursive selection of a wallpaper in a wallpaper layout object when that object is set to RandomFromSameCategory or RandomFromFixedCategory.
• When using the left/right keys in the fullscreen preview to preview the previous/next wallpaper, this is immediately reflected in the main window so that the feature “Give Tags” hotkey works correctly when browsing images in the fullscreen preview.
• Fullscreen preview: enter will now render the previewed wallpaper to the desktop.
• When closing the layout editor, WPC will now ask to save the changes or discard them. At the moment however, this is asked everytime the layout editor is closed even if nothing has changed in the layout.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When the screensaver was configured to use all available layouts, it would even select layouts in disabled categories. Disabled layout categories are now properly skipped unless you force the screensaver module to use a disabled layout category.
• Drag & drop of multiple wallpapers to a different category wasn’t working.
• When hitting the cancel button in the “select layout template” dialog, the creation of the layout is cancelled and the layout editor is closed.
• “highlight current wallpaper” didn’t work anymore. This also caused problems that WPC would rerender the wrong wallpaper when you hit Rerender wallpaper.
• Sometimes when adding a folder recursively to an existing category it would add all current child categories twice, closing the main window and reopening fixed this issue. This is now fixed, they shouldn’t appear twice anymore.

If you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to contact NuonSoft Support

The trip started in Los Angeles and continued to San Diego, Grand Canyon, Antilope Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Lone Pine, Bishop, Mono Lake, Bodie, Yosemite, San Francisco, Montarra, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and back to Los Angeles.

(Note: all pictures are copyrighted by me, Marc Gregoire. Please contact me if you want to use one.)

Some pictures from Los Angeles:

An image of the Hollywood sign:

The orca show in Sea World in San Diego:

A few images from the Grand Canyon:

Antilope Canyon:

Bryce Canyon:

Zion:

Las Vegas:

Death Valley:

Mono Lake:

Yosemite:

San Francisco:

Montarra:

The Universal Studios in Los Angeles:

Hopefully this move will make Wallpaper Cycler stable on Windows Vista.

On Saturday we visited Schloss Schönbrunn.

In the afternoon we went to the Prater park but didn’t stay long since it was getting late and we had dinner reservations in a Brazilian Churrascaria restaurant

On Sunday we went to visit the Silver Collection and the Sisi Museum in the Imperial Apartments of the Imperial Palace. Below are a few pictures of and around the Hofburg.

After the Hofburg we took a bus ride of 1.5 hours which drove past all important buildings in the city. However, since it was raining, we didn’t took any pictures during that trip.

I went to Schloss Charlottenburg which is the largest palace in Berlin. Below is a picture of the entrance. I didn’t visit the gardens because of the weather

Berlin was a long time separated in 2 parts by a wall, west and east Berlin. This wall was destroyed in 1989. Some small parts are still visible and serve as a kind of reminder/museum.

Below is a picture of a monument which symbolizes the reunification of west and east Berlin.

During my previous trip to Berlin I passed by this Ferrari and Bugatti Veyron shop but they were closed at that time. This time they were open and obviously I took some more pictures.

In Alexa I went to the Mediamarkt and when entering the TV floor I was greeted with a humongous 103″ (= 262 cm) plasma TV. The TV was playing a Blu-Ray movie in full HD and it was simply gorgeous. I could sit relatively close to it and still have a beautiful image. The price was also lower than I expected, “only” 49.999 euro, but still outside my budget though No picture of this, since I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside …

After leaving Alexa, it was lunch time so I went to the closest McDonald’s to have a Big Mac. I was planning to go to the Brandenburger Tor after lunch, so that’s what I did. However, on my way I bumped into a huge number of trucks playing music. It turned out it was the gay pride parade to celebrate the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender life. There were more than 30 different trucks all playing music and people dancing on them. They were driving very very slowly in the direction of the Brandenburger Tor. Below are some pictures of the parade.

After I saw all the trucks passing by I arrived at the Brandenburger Tor. The neighborhood of the Brandenburger Tor was completely car-free since there was a large stage and 3 or 4 humongous screens (80 m2) between Brandenburg Gate and Victory Column. It was a public viewing of the Euro 2008 European Football Championship and is the largest public viewing in Germany and probably in the whole of Europe. They were expecting between half a million and 1 million people to watch the final between Germany and Spain on Sunday.

On Saturday when I was there, there were some acts and groups playing on the stage. “Only” around 100.000 people were there on Saturday, estimated… Most of the groups I never heard of before, but all the German people did since they were singing along with them. There were two that I know, Hot Banditos and Rednex. Rednex played their big hit from the nineties, Cotton Eye Joe. Security was pretty tight on the event. When entering with a bag, security officers checked the bag for its contents. Also, most if not all people where strip-searched before allowed to enter. Below is a picture of this event where you can see 2 of the huge screens.

A picture of the Brandenburger Tor with the stage behind it.

There were a lot of places to eat something, mostly sausages, like in the following picture (Wurst = sausage)

During my sightseeing I also saw some interesting garages. The first one was a Ferrari garage displaying a used Ferrari F430 F1. It’s only 165.000 euro

The next was a huge VW garage. There I saw the usual VW cars, but more importantly, I saw some Bentleys and the cherish on the cake, the Bugatti Veyron. The first time ever I saw a Bugatti Veyron in real life. It was behind glass, but still, mighty impressive! Please bow out of respect and admire the next pictures

Of course I also saw some of the more usual things to see on a sightseeing trip through Berlin. Below are some pictures of this.

]]> http://www.nuonsoft.com/blog/2008/06/30/trip-to-berlin-germany/feed/ http://www.nuonsoft.com/blog/2008/06/24/kulendayz-2008-microsoft-community-osijek-croatia/ http://www.nuonsoft.com/blog/2008/06/24/kulendayz-2008-microsoft-community-osijek-croatia/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:01:31 +0000 Marc Gregoire http://www.nuonsoft.com/blog/?p=61 On 21st of June I went to the Kulendayz 2008 which is the first regional community conference organized by the Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia with support from INETA and Hupro. Since I’m living in Croatia at the moment and the Kulendayz location was only 30 minutes from my place, it was pretty easy for me to get there.

In the morning I went to a scrum presentation and to a session about advanced debugging of ASP.NET applications using windbg.
In the afternoon I went to a unified communications presentation, explaining the Office Communications Server.

The last presentation I went to was about concurrent/parallel programming in C#. This was one of the most interesting presentations for me (by Bernard Katic). It explained how to optimize code for running on multicore processors, which is becoming more and more important with the release of Quad-Core processors and Octo-Core and even 80-core processors in the pipeline. The session was focussed on the Parallel FX Library and Parallel LINQ. The Parallel FX Library allows you to easily “parallelize” certain parts of your application like for loops. Parallel LINQ allows you to do the same with your LINQ queries. There is an interesting article on MSDN called “Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines” that expains the Parallel FX Library with clear and simple examples.

It was interesting to find out that I was not the only belgian on the conference. Arlindo Alves from Microsoft Belgium was also there giving a presentation on Microsoft Hyper-V.

My friend Maja on the way to the zoo.

Me on the way to the zoo.

A cute little animal eating some apple

Some more pictures of animals:

Seems like the alligator/crocodile doesn’t really bother about the turtles. It’s a live alligator/crocodile by the way

Some general shots of the park.

The water in the park is very clean and you can see all the way to the bottom.

I especially liked the following view.

A lot of the walking paths are made out of wood like in the following picture.

Some pictures of my friends Maja and Andrew and me.

Some pictures of me in the park.

This beta version contains the following changes.

New Features

• New functionality added to the image preview window, the window that appears when you press the spacebar when an image is selected in the main window of Wallpaper Cycler:
  • The preview window now allows you to use the left and right keys to move through the images in that category or search folder.
  • A small (optional) help text is displayed in the preview window.
  • Information of the image being previewed can optionally be shown on the preview.
• The tray menu now contains a “Tools > Find Non-Existing Wallpapers…” item.
• When a new update has been downloaded, WPC will now ask you if you want to run it immediately.
• The “Check for updates” feature will now calculate a checksum of the downloaded file to see if it was downloaded correctly.
• Text objects in layouts can now be linked to a wallpaper object in your layout. This allows you to use the %wallpapername% and other commands to display information about the wallpaper being shown in the linked wallpaper object.
• New option to disable word wrapping for notes in calender notes objects.
• Some Open/Save dialogs now have the true Vista layout when running on Windows Vista.
• When a layout doesn’t contain a wallpaper object with the “Which Wallpaper” property set to “Auto” a warning will be shown. This is done because in that case certain aspects of WPC will not work as expected. Double clicking a wallpaper in the main window for example will actually NOT show that wallpaper on your desktop because that’s the “Auto” wallpaper.
• You can make a printout of your calendar notes.
• %wallpaperfullname% can be used in text objects on layouts to display the full pathname + extension of a wallpaper and not only the filename part like %wallpapername% does.
• A new option in Tools > Program Settings > Global > Startup called “Delay load last WCL at startup”. This allows you to specify a delay in seconds before Wallpaper Cycler will reload the last WCL file at startup.

Bug Fixes

• The tree on the left of the main window was recreated every time you changed/added/deleted a category resulting in quite anoying visual flickering. This has been fixed now and the tree almost never flickers anymore.
• When running the trial version, when starting a new WCL file and then exiting Wallpaper Cycler, no question was asked whether to save the file or not.
• Increased the contrast a little bit of the Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget.
• The Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget didn’t display correctly when Vista was running in high DPI mode.
• WPC crashed when loading BMP files that where compressed with for example RLE8 compression.
• By default WPC will no longer make a sound when cycling or when CPU Load is too high to cycle. Of course this can be enabled again in File > Document Properties.
• The screensaver will now wait until the transition effect is finished before starting the timer for the next image.
• The “Circles Out” screensaver transition effect didn’t always completely covered the screen.
• Wallpaper Cycler didn’t always start automatically when logging in to Windows and autostart was enabled.
• cycle-at-time would not check exactly at the new minute when resuming from standy or hibernation.
• Fixed some problems with the cycle-at-time feature especially in combination with hibernation.
• You could press the “Delete” key on your keyboard to delete the “My Layouts” category which would crash WPC.
• oleacc.dll is now only installed on anything pre-xp
• When using “Random from fixed category” for a wallpaper object in a layout, WPC will now recursively select a wallpaper from the selected fixed category.
• Some configurations of wallpaper objects in layouts didn’t take disabled tags into account.
• The “Quick Disable” feature now properly checks all wallpapers currently on the desktop to determine if it needs to cycle when disabling a category or tag.
• WPC would crash with truncated BMP files.
• The Vista gadget didn’t install on vista 64 bit. (wrong program files folder)
• You were unable to specify “-1″ for the “Days After Current Day” in layouts > Calendar Notes Object > Edit Calendar Notes > General

• New functionality added to the image preview window, the window that appears when you press the spacebar when an image is selected in the main window of Wallpaper Cycler:
  • The preview window now allows you to use the left and right keys to move through the images in that category or search folder.
  • A small (optional) help text is displayed in the preview window.
  • Information of the image being previewed can optionally be shown on the preview.
• The tray menu now contains a “Tools > Find Non-Existing Wallpapers…” item.
• When a new update has been downloaded, WPC will now ask you if you want to run it immediately.
• The “Check for updates” feature will now calculate a checksum of the downloaded file to see if it was downloaded correctly.
• Text objects in layouts can now be linked to a wallpaper object in your layout. This allows you to use the %wallpapername% and other commands to display information about the wallpaper being shown in the linked wallpaper object.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• The tree on the left of the main window was recreated every time you changed/added/deleted a category resulting in quite anoying visual flickering. This has been fixed now and the tree almost never flickers anymore.
• When running the trial version, when starting a new WCL file and then exiting Wallpaper Cycler, no question was asked whether to save the file or not.
• Increased the contrast a little bit of the Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget.
• The Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget didn’t display correctly when Vista was running in high DPI mode.

auto something = 123;

The compiler will automatically figure out that something is of type int. The above is a very simple example and in this case the developer can easily figure it out. However, with template types and template meta programming techniques it can become difficult for the developer to figure out what the type exactly is.
Consider the following loop:

for (vector<string>::const_reverse_iterator criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

With the auto feature this could be rewritten as follows:

for (auto criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

which is much easier to type.

This auto feature is also useful for variables that store a function pointer or lambda expressions because the compiler will figure out the exact type for us. Lambda expressions will be briefly described in another blog post.

Now Microsoft has fixed the issue and SP3 is again available for download. The Dynamic RMS issue is solved with a hotfix. The recommended way of installing SP3 is by using Windows Update, which will download only what you need, saving bandwidth. That way it’s typically around 70 MB.

If you need to install SP3 on multiple machines, you can download an installation package which is around 316 MB. If you are running Microsoft Dynamic RMS, it is recommended to first install the Dynamic RMS hotfix from here.  SP3 can be downloaded from here.

SP3 contains more than 1000 hotfixes and patches. Some new features are also included but which according to Microsoft “do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”.

First of course a few pictures of the Space Needle. The last picture is a picture of the International Fountain.

One evening we had dinner in the rotating restaurant at the top of the Space Needle. The following is a picture taken during our dinner.

We also visited the Museum of Flight and there was a Blackbird on display as you can see in the next picture.

Since we both like animals we had to visit the Seattle zoo.

Some pictures from the Japanese Garden in Washington Park.

A picture of the Seattle skyline taken from a boat trip.

Me drinking a margarita cocktail in the hotel lounge.

And me eating some nice shrimps.

That’s it for my Seattle trip

Update: As response to some comments on this blog entry, below is a picture of my brother and me having dinner in the rotating restaurant on top of the Space Needle with downtown Seattle in the background.

Some flags welcoming all the MVPs on the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

One of the many Microsoft buildings on the campus.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in his closing keynote during a question and answer session with all the MVPs.

The Codeguru MVPs that were at the summit.

Often there is a discussion between newsgroup advocates and forum advocates. In one of the keynotes this was mentioned with the following slide

All in all the summit was great and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Personally I just cannot understand why people hack blogs or any other site for that matter Anyway, everything should be working again now…

• New option to disable word wrapping for notes in calender notes objects.
• Some Open/Save dialogs now have the true Vista layout when running on Windows Vista.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• WPC crashed when loading BMP files that where compressed with for example RLE8 compression.
• By default WPC will no longer make a sound when cycling or when CPU Load is too high to cycle. Of course this can be enabled again in File > Document Properties.
• The screensaver will now wait until the transition effect is finished before starting the timer for the next image.
• The “Circles Out” screensaver transition effect didn’t always completely covered the screen depending on your resolution.
• Wallpaper Cycler didn’t always start automatically when logging in to Windows and autostart was enabled.
• Cycle-at-times would not check exactly at the new minute when resuming from standy or hibernation.
• Fixed some problems with the cycle-at-time feature especially in combination with hibernation.
• You could press the “Delete” key on your keyboard to delete the “My Layouts” category which would crash WPC.