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Posted by on 5th May, 2013

What is Bitcoin?

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is an entirely digital, global currency launched in 2009: it is a fully decentralized monetary system with no central authority that regulates the monetary base. What does this mean? Well, it is money, currency, that can be sent over the internet to transfer money or to make payments to anyone. However, it is not physical money. Think of how email allows us to send a digital message to anyone in the world, for free. Bitcoin is very much the same concept, but for money: Email is a digital version of paper mail. Bitcoin is a digital version of paper cash. You can store digital cash in your wallet or send a payments instantly to anyone, without having to register or sign up. You just send your bitcoins to the right address. Key properties of Bitcoin: Open source Completely open source, it is not managed, backed by, nor belongs to any central authority, country or government. It does not depend on any one economy or institution. RedundantUsing the internet, the...

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Posted by on 28th January, 2013

Single Arm Clock in HTML 5

Single Arm Clock in HTML 5

I t has been a long time since I have written an experiment and even longer since I have written any blog post, so here is my comeback. Now, I had already done a few experiments, but never one with HTML 5, so what better way than to try to implement an existing one? I took the Single Arm Clock and started playing with it. The Continue Time clock is an original, physical wall clock by artist Sander Muller. I had already tried this experiment this in Silverlight a long time ago, so let’s try this in HTML5. For this experiment, I decided to use the Kinetic JS framework, since it handles a lot of the manual work to working with Canvas objects. Toggle clock speed It didn’t go as smooth as I thought, nor nearly as fast as I had hoped. I don’t know why. Maybe I am getting rusty. My weekend is over and I am posting what I have. The most difficult part, which is to...

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Posted by on 7th December, 2011

Composite C1 content management system

Composite C1 content management system

I have been recently busy with a couple of projects and had to decide on a new CMS framework to build them on. I had tried Umbraco in the past and found I had some issues with the installation and just never couldn’t quite “get” it right away. I looked at Orchard after seeing it at MIX in Las Vegas and finally also tried Composite C1 from Denmark. I was quite impressed with the last one. It is not so much the features that come with the framework, but more the freedom it gives you to write your code whichever way you want. You can use the provided XSLT extension or provide your own and use them as controls. If you prefer to write your controls in C# code, you can do that to and call them exactly the same as you would the built-in XSLT functions. You can use it with existing MasterPages, MVC or old-school ASP.NET. It is free and comes with a bucket of ready to go plug-ins. Some of these components...

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Posted by on 2nd August, 2011

Screen capture software…

Screen capture software…

I find myself taking screenshots often at mostly portions of the screen; whether it is to show work in progress to others or something else. For those instance, I have been using SnagIt from TechSmith for years. This is a relatively cheap solution for performing these tasks. I loved having the ability to add arrows to the screenshot or a shadowed border that can then be immediately copied and pasted in an email or anywhere else. It is the reason I pay $49 for it. Now, if you just need to take screenshots, without any heavy editing, I have found two alternatives that come quite close. First one is Zscreen, an open-source screen capture program for Microsoft Windows. I find this app powerful and has more option than I have use for. Including automatic uploading to ftp servers, emailing, naming conventions, silent operations and performing custom actions on any images captured. Another, and possibly better one, is GreenShot. Very easy to use, very configurable and...

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Posted by on 17th March, 2011

Hyperlink in RichTextBox

Hyperlink in RichTextBox

Today I learned that the default C# RichTextBox control does not handle hyperlinks out of the box. Wait, it doesn’t..? How is that possible? Yes, hard to believe. So, two hours later, I found a workaround: if you do want to have hyperlinks work, you need to do the following: First, set the DetectUrls property on the RichTextBox control to True. Then, open the Designer.cs file and find the generated code block for the RichTextBlock properties and handlers. Add the following line: Add RichTextBlock handler this.myRichTextBox.LinkClicked += new LinkClickedEventHandler(this.myRichTextBox_LinkClicked); Add the Eventhandler method Add RichTextBlock handler method private void myRichTextBox_LinkClicked(object sender, LinkClickedEventArgs e) { system.Diagnostics.Process.Start(e.LinkText); } That is...

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Posted by on 6th March, 2011

nopCommerce Ecommerce platform

nopCommerce Ecommerce platform

While researching options for a shopping cart module for an ASP.NET application, I came across several packages. Of course, I had already gone through the list of the popular players in this market: dotshoppingcart vevocart znode volusion aspdotnetstorefront Microsoft Commerce Server. And there are likely several more. However, most of these listed carry a hefty price tag and the ones that don’t just didn’t feel like the right choice for the app I am developing, based on reviews of developers who have had to work with them. However, one package, NopCommerce, impressed me out of the box: it is an open source e-commerce solution that is based on ASP.NET 4.0 and installs using Microsoft Web Platform Installer (in my case, on Arvixe Hosting). I was able to use it right away and the list of customizable features and options is vast. The jury is still out until I play with it some more, but from my initial research, this is the one I will be using for this project....

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Posted by on 4th October, 2010

Swype for mobile devices…

Swype for mobile devices…

I have had a Nexus One cellphone for a while and with so many applications available, it is usually a common topic to ask what the best application for an Android device is. The same is true with many iPhone users trying to brag about how cool their phone is compared to an Android. When that happens, I mention Swype. Unlike many apps that are cool, I have yet to see something as truly revolutionizing as Swype, not just for mobile devices, but for all keyboard entry enabled devices. Swype is an alternative virtual keyboard, that instead of recognizing single letters (it can do that too, by the way), it recognizes a shape drawn over the letters that make up a word. It then compares the trajectory of the shape within its library and guesses the word for you. We have had many alternative pointing devices in the last 20 years…however, keyboard devices have stayed relatively pretty much the same, other than a slight variation in shape. Imagine a...

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Posted by on 12th February, 2010

Silverlight Validation & Tooltip Styles…

Silverlight Validation & Tooltip Styles…

Silverlight 3 comes with built-in validation for many of the input controls. Setting them up is fairly easy and they are styled well enough that you could use them right out of the box. If you would like to know how to set it up and also would like to customize the look and feel of the fields and validation message, this short tutorial will explain how to do just that. Silverlight...

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Posted by on 18th January, 2010

Wavelength to Colors

Wavelength to Colors

I did a short experiment several years back on Wavelengths and colors. I was working for Beckman Coulter on their latest Flow Cytometer, which involved working with dozens of lasers of different wavelengths. These lasers would be reflected and filtered to obtain different wavelengths and this needed to be displayed to the user in an intuitive UI. Back then, I wrote a little Windows application that would convert the wavelength to RGB colors, for my reference. I figured I could take the same approach and make it a Silverlight application and here it is… As you can see from the code I am using a PolyBezierSegment and modifying the location of the three points of each wave when the trackbar slider is moved. The corresponding wavelength in nano meters corresponds to the actual color of the light wavelength. The watermarked curves mark the margins of the visible spectrum. Go ahead and move the slider below: mainpage.xaml.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using...

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Posted by on 27th September, 2009

Another Clock experiment

Another Clock experiment

I seem to be unable to break free form any projects that are somehow related to clocks or watches. This time I saw a YouTube movie about an unique clock with a very creative way of displaying time. It is a design is by Sander Mulder and can be seen here: Continue Time Clock. It allows a single arm that is segmented in three parts, to show the hours, minutes and seconds with each correspondent segment at the same time, and although it may not be very intuitive, it is extremely creative and elegant at the same time. Here is my attempt at re-creating the mechanism of this clock in Silverlight 3.0 … It turned out to be relatively simple, by creating a class for each arm and let the hour arm class contain an instance the minute arm class and the minute arm class an instance of the second arm class. This way I could just spin them around their RenderTransformOrigin and they would maintain their relative position...

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