what should I hide?

I'm going through Code Complete 2 and got to this key point on chapter 5 about hiding information

"Get into the habit of asking "What should I hide?" You'll be surprised at how many difficult design issues dissolve before your eyes."

I think it should be quite the opposite, you should be in the habit of hiding everything and asking your self "what should I show?"; in C# if you omit the access modifier it defaults to private, and that's there for a good reason

You have to think in terms of what would someone else do, if they were trying to mess up with your code or get that precious information that your project is accessing

Of course not all projects are that critical that you should worry about securing every single aspect of the application, but you should get into the habit of hiding as much as possible and only making visible what you actually need, that way you'll be programming in a more secure way by default without even thinking about it

share keyboard and mouse accross computers (software driven)

This little tool allows you to share your keyboard and mouse accross multiple computers, even with different Operating Systems loaded, that's pretty dang cool

the only thing is that the configuration part of it is really buggy and makes the program die after it gives you the error message, basically you have to use the default options or it will crash

but after you get it working it does just what is supposed to without getting in the way, you don't have to switch from your laptop to your regular pc keyboard and back...

basically what you have to do is
- install the server in the machine where the keyboard and mouse is hooked phisically and
- install the client on the machines where you want to use the same keyboard
- then you start the app on the server,
- chose the "share this computer's keyboard and mouse",
- click the configure button,
- add the "screens" (machines), in that screen you can specify if there are some corners where you don't want the mouse to go over to the other machine, just make sure you specify a size greater than zero, or it won't work
-once you add your screens (normally 2), you go to the links

where you specify something like:
0 to 100% of the "right" of "main pc" goes to 0 to 100% of "secondary"

basically saying the right part of the monitor on "main pc" goes to the other pc; you have to specify the other way too

0 to 100% of the "left" of "secondary" goes to 0 to 100% of "main pc"

click start (in both computers) and you're good to go, if you need to change the config, close the program (in both sides) open it again, and go in the configuration button (in the server only)

I'm loving it =oP

.9 = 1

this post has generated so many comments and is so interesting (if you're not that good at math) you have to check it out

the point is simple:

.9 (repeating) = 1

not just close to 1... it is 1, if you don't believe it go check it out

technorati tags:curious, math

VS2005 Set Multiple Startup projects

To set multiple startup projects
1. In Solution Explorer, select the solution.
2. On the Project menu, click Properties. The Solution Property Pages Dialog Box opens.
3. Expand the Common Properties node, and click Startup Project.
4. Click Multiple Startup Projects and set the project actions.

How to: Set Multiple Startup Projects

This is more of a note for my self, but I'm sure a lot of people doesn't know about this feature, supposedly even the debugger attaches to the multiple projects, that's really useful when developing multi layered projects

technorati tags:visual-studio, tips, tricks

Visual Studio Environment Animation Speed

this is a little trick I hadn't heard of, some items in the Visual Studio IDE have animation, e.g. when you open/close the properties, solution explorer, etc windows, there is some animation to make the windows appear/dissapear, sure is visually nice, but if you're like me, you don't want little whistles taking up your computer resources, I've seen those animation get quite slow specially when I have my machine loaded with a bunch of other stuff

there is a way to speed up those animations or even disable them completly

in the menu Tools, Options, Environment, General

bump "animation speed" all the way up, or uncheck the "animate environment tools" checkbox to disable this feature

this applies to both VS2003 and VS2005

blogging from flock

this is just a test from the flock browser, it has built in blogging capabilities and some other goodies, is based on Firefox, so check it out

World Cup live scores and schedules from google

Yesterday Edgar posted about a little program written by Microsoft to keep track of scores and stuff on the World Cup, and I just noticed that google has created something similar, but right into their web page

nice!

MSDN VS2005 & 2.0 framework Wiki

this is nice, Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET framework 2.0 documentation now on a wiki where everyone can collaborate

good job MS

browser sync for Firefox

"Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions."

I don't know that I could use this, but probably some people would find it useful, I prefer to use delicious for that kind of thing, but anyway...

notice how it is only for Firefox... evil google!