Hey out there,

pretty long no post by me :-( Well, since beginning of August I have holidays and I spent most of the time @ home with my parents and there I have just a lousy internet connection... with that surfing is no fun anymore.
But I updated my homepage with a little tool called 'Desktop Symbol Utility'... was quite funny to code it... dll injecting into explorer process... Would I have done it in Win9x, I would have seen more blue screens than anything else, but fortunaly XP is much more stable if you crash explorer.exe :-))))

Till now, I had just one written exam (in Computer Architecture) this summer. The subject matter was pretty easy but the exam was a bit strange... won't be a good result I guess. After that, I had enough time to relax, to meet old friends and to make party... it's the time of the wine festivals now :-) Unfortunately the weather here in Germany was really terrible, just rain, and I didn't make holidays somewhere else. I was out of luck this summer. Slowly I have to start learning fot the other two exams... well no stress, some time left.

Every now and then, I coded a little bit my project called FolderInfo. It's gonna be a little tool which shows information about harddrives, folders and files (which type of files are most in a specific folder, which subfolder is the biggest and so on). But I'm quite bored coding it: cause it's plain Win API in C++, I have to code the whole GUI with the fancy Windows API and this is killing me! So I decided to freeze this little project... perhaps I have more motivation one day or other... Here a screenshot of the current state:



Cya.... and keep party!!!

Nice Article

Hi,

well I spent most time outside in the sun, so only few time for computer. But I came across a nice article about some pitfalls in c++... just wanna give it to you. Worth reading for beginner/intermediate c++ coders... Enjoy it
-> Click here

C ya

We badly lost....

Hey out there,

well, no post for a long time. But I really enjoy summer (great weather for several weeks here in Germany) with all its partys. Really cool! And yes, a bit work for my study also... Exams are getting nearer :-(

I was never really a soccer fan, but the Fifa World Cup this year definitely changed my mind. Okay that's probably because it's in Germany which makes it a bit special for me. Thousands of people go to the parties in the city, everybody is nice and happy... it's just another nation. I would have never ever thought that it's would become such a cool event and that so many people make party and enjoy it. Just gorgeous!
Well, but I have to admit that I was really disappointed on Tuesday when Germany has lost against Italy. I know, they played a bit better, but it would have been so fantastic if Germany would have reached the final :-( Cause I was also a fan of the Australian team (they stayed in a hotel just a few kilometers away from my home) and they also lost against Italy... Hm, I have the feeling Italy will win the championship... but let's see what will happen on Sunday.

Btw, my BAC calculator is now available on my site in English and Germany. Works fine, but the database is a bit small... hope I will feel like adding some more items.

Enjoy the World Cup Final on Sunday!

BAC Calculator in progress...

Hm... finally summer arrives here again in South Germany after two weeks of rain and coldness. Although I chill the most of the time in the sun I find some time for coding... I'm working at a little applet matching perfectly the summer party time: a blood-alcohol-concentration-calculator (hope that's not too wrong and you can understand me). It uses two scientific formula (Watson & Widmark formula) which give a good approximation of the alcohol in your body. Well, it's nearly finished, here a pic of its current stage:


There will also be an English version of it. The data is stored in an xml file so I can easily update it. Nearly all functions work by now, but perhaps I improve the layout a bit....
Well let's see...

Problems with Outlook :-(

Hi,
just started Outlook to check my mails... and all my contacts were gone! Hm... strange... a few hours ago everything was fine. Clicking on the adress book just gave me a nice message telling me that it is corrupted and I should reinstall it! But all my emails were still there...
Ok, so I searched for the adressbook file (*.wab), and doubleclicked it.... same message. Importing it in outlook also failed (what a surprise ;-)
So I searched in the world wide web... and found:
1) the path in the registry pointing to the adress book is most likely corrupted -> so I had a look but everything was fine
2) the adress book file is write-protected -> no it was not in my case!

So searching again and finally I found it... Three days ago (!!!) I installed the security update KB911567 from microsoft's windowsupdate.com ... That's s the reason. It modifies outlook files and kills the adress book. Fortunately you can uninstall it! But I don't get why it still worked the last days and suddenly (3 days after installing this update) it collapsed.

Well, I hate such shit. You think you do something right by installing updates and then it fucking kills your adresses! Bah! PURE HATE!!!!
I think I will drink a beer know to come down....
Good night!

Fancy code for swapping integers

Good evening.

While surfing the internet, I just came across some articles about bitwise operations in C. There I found a fancy code snippet for swapping two 'ints'. Well I never thought about it but if I had to code a little swapping procedure, it would probably something like this:

void swap(int* x, int* y)
{
int z = *x;
*x = *y;
*y = z;
}

Ok, quite easy. Just use a temporary variable... but there is another approach without a third variable, just look at this:

x ^= y;
y ^= x;
x ^= y;

Really cool xor-action, isn't it? Try to figure out what's going on here. (Tip: x ^ x = 0)
Well, every day I learn something new... but that's enough for now.
Good night. :-)

Got a blog :-)

Hi out there...
Finally I've also a blog... just don't wanna be out-to-date :-)
No, a joke. Hopefully I have enough time to leave some message regularly. So be prepared to read here about coding, reversing, real life issues and many more topics...

Well, while trying to adjust the layout of my blog to fit it a bit to my site, I recognised (again) how ugly html code is. Perhaps it's due to the fact that I don't know html... but if there is also javascript and css code, it's getting soooo unclear and deformedly... Bah! Just compare it to well-structured, commented java code or plain C code... That looks good! It's really like heaven and hell in my opinion... Ok, Im out! Till next time!

Stay tuned,
your Sunshine