Have you ever experienced, the keyboard layout changes for no reason, and you struggle to fix it, may be you do fix it by going to the language bar and choosing the right layout. I find this VERY ANNOYING. You may experience this, when you choose a country with multiple languages, and Windows recognizes the keyboard layout for these languages.
When you choose Canada, you get both French layout and the English layout, and when the computer "seems"to switch for no reason, it can get annoying. After some digging (and luck!), I found out that the computer changes the layout when you press LeftAlt+Shift.
The seeming automatic behaviour happened because I don't just do Alt+Tab, but also Alt+Shift+Tab to switch between windows.
Well, so, I guess the FIX, is just press LeftAlt+Shift, when the wrong layout is chosen. OR better yet, just remove the other layout, if you don't use it!
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3.2 / 17 )I have been learning to use the DirectX API/Game Programing. Here are some neat articles/tutorials:
http://www.pluralsight.com/wiki/default ... orial.html - excellent explanation about views and projections in the DirectX sense
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archiv ... 40729.aspx - this whole series is good, its about game programming in C#
http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2 ... rojections - explanation with images showing difference in projections
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3 / 56 )I recently got my new laptop - hp dv2432ca. The laptop comes with Windows XP Home Premium edition. I just started exploring how cool really is Vista and I like what I see!
Here are the list of cool things, I have discovered so far:
* Cycle through windows (Windows Logo Key + Tab) and cycle through windows in task bar (again with preview) (Windows Logo Key + T)
* There is no outlook express (no..no..that's not the cool part
), instead Vista has a PIM (Personal Information Manager) built in. What I mean is there is a built-in Windows Calendar (thats the name as well). The calendar is not just some no-good barebone windows utility, but it actually is useful, it looks like Microsoft Outlook's (not Outlook Express) calendar interface* Cool search ... its search as you type. Now, you can add tags to photos, and search using the tags. It sort of is like Launchy, the search in the start menu, you can press the windows key and start typing and you see programs come up. Its like search is integrated in every place. The power of Search seems to have become very obivious after Google's popularity
* Live Previews!!! Doesn't matter if its Alt+Tab or Windows Logo+Tab or Windows Logo+T, its live preview, you see whats actually going on in the application including Videos!!
* I have not used this one, but it is just so awesomee... ReadyBoost - its like an external RAM! you can attach a flash drive onto your USB port and using ReadyBoost use that for cacheing ... providing improved performance. You ask how is this different from caching on the hard disk? Well, hard disk read/write speed is slow compared to flash drives, so the data access is much faster! and I am sure there are a lot of other reasons
* Background defragmenter - automatic defragment is run when the computer is idle. Let me be honest, of all the years I have used a computer, I have defragmented less that a dozen times in total! just because the computer had to take its own time and some bad experiences from the days of pre-XP
Overall, I love Vista. Its like Microsoft looked at all the great utilities used by users with Windows XP, and decided to integrate them into the OS. Sure, Vista is big...may be even huge...but common...we have the logical resources now, technology is moving forward...lets make the most of it
[ 1 comment ] ( 3 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 2.4 / 20 )I have a great interest in philosophy, specifically eastern philosophy, though I do respect the works of many western philosophers. Moving on...
This is something I have believed since a long time, though I seem to make more connections now. Our whole life is a balancing act, our actions are based on balancing acts.
Ying-Yang, and all conceptual variation of it, do hold and can be identified through careful observation. Take for example, when designing interfaces, you want to balance innovation with usability (familiarity); take security protection, you have to balance usability with security, you can't expect users to enter 18 different passwords within 128 seconds and a 3-limit wrong password lockout. I bet this configuration could prove quite secure, but rather unusable. May be thats too much Yang. Have a system that is too usable
, say you missed a capital letter, and the program warns you specifically at this time, check usage of capital letters. Worse yet, no login system...it is an open system, you enter your name from a list at one point and the system identifies you! Too much Ying!!Trying to be more technical - You have a risk present, you implement controls to mitigate the risk. When the system is under-controlled, the risk is beyond an acceptable level, when the system is over-controlled, you may be hurting other factors such as efficiency, usability etc. It is this balance that is needed. As a side note, that is where real
auditors come in, auditors investigate the risks present and controls to deal with the risk, check if the implemented (or said to be implemented) controls are effective, and check if the "implemented" controls are sufficient or is an overkill.I hope no one takes any offence by the term "real auditors", there is the stereotypical image of auditors (contrary to what you may expect, they are not real auditors ... at least in my mind) - people looking for the kill, they smell your fear, and dig deeper and deeper till they can find some bone to chew on ... eeekkk....
Coming back to the balancing act, take anything, you have to make decisions to do something. When you are making decisions, you are evaluating different setups (because of the lack of a better word); you come to a conclusion (balance) based on weighing the different setups. Granted, its not 2 things you are always weighing (at least at first glance ... thats topic for a whole new post
), its still balancing, at different levels, that you are doing.Until next time ... ciao
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3.1 / 21 )I have come identified an optimization problem (with real life use and example). Here it is:
Given a set of n items with weights w[j] where 1 <= j <= n, you are required to split the n items into subsets of size m, such that the total weight of each subset is optimally equal.
The ideal weight of the subsets would be ((Sum(w[j])|j=1 to n)/n * m), since this may not be possible, the optimal weights would be achieved through minimizing the distance between the ideal subset weight and the actual subset weights ... is that how R^2 is computed ... ?
I am doing some research into algorithms that can help me solve this problem.
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 2.9 / 18 )
Calendar
