I have released a new product: Event Importer for Google calendar. It allows importing iCalendar files (.ics), downloaded via browser quickly and easily. Possible use cases: event export from Facebook, Meetup, other online services, e-mailed .ics files etc. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.
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Editing Markdown or txt files in OpenOffice
I have been introduced to Markdown format some time ago and today I find it extremely convenient for most of the writing I need to do. Markdown is essentially "markup without markup" - it requires you to do very little in order to format your text and it can be easily converted in a number of other formats, such as PDF, Word, ODT, LaTeX, HTML, Docbook etc.
Side by side editing of .resx files for localization
WPF allows you to create localized applications with relatively little effort. The localized strings are put into resource files (.resx), one per target language, and maintained as needed.
Offlineimap bugs
Offlineimap - a utility, used to synchronize between IMAP servers and Maildir style mailboxes on Unix systems, is very convenient. It can be used to back up your mail, stored on a remote IMAP server. Unfortunately, some releases of the utility are quite buggy - the latest version from the previous maintainer was simply broken, refusing to connect to many remote servers.
HTC HD2 (Leo) smartphone can run Android!
During the last day of 2010 news has leaked about a substantial breakthrough in the world of hacking. The quite famous and popular smartphone HTC HD2, also known as Leo, was hacked to run Android 2.2 and 2.3. Originally the phone comes with Windows Mobile 6.3 preinstalled.
Windows Phone 7 development in Visual Studio 2010
The recently released Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 does not support mobile development for OS versions prior to the new Windows Phone 7. If you want to write software for Windows Mobile 6.5 or lower, you need to stick to Visual Studio 2005. So much for backward compatibility.
iPhone OS 4.0 features
Apple has recently announced the long anticipated release 4.0 of their iPhone OS. The list of new end-user features is disappointingly short - the main item seems to be the addition of some GUI multitasking. Many important, easy to add and practical features, already found in the "jailbreak" versions are not mentioned.
Log viewer for Windows
Monitoring text log files is quite important activity in our day to day programming lives. Unfortunately, Windows operating system does not include convenient tools to perform the task by default. Nothing comparing to tail -f or GNU less is deployed with an installation of the OS from Redmond. Luckily, some free alternatives are available on the Internet.
Fedora Core 12
I have recently installed Fedora Core 12 on my server box. It was an upgrade from Fedora Core 9 and I had to do an intermediate upgrade from 9 to 10, since direct transition from 9 to 12 is not supported. Aside from this small annoyance the process went through very smoothly. It looks like Fedora Core 12 supports an "in place" upgrade mode, similar to recent version of Ubuntu.
Safe implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged interface
With arrival of WPF the usage of INotifyPropertyChanged interface has expanded dramatically. The most annoying and dangerous part of implementing the interface is, obviously the fact, that you have to pass your option names as strings. This leaves your code prone to bugs - if in 3 months time you rename one of the properties, there is very good chance that you will forget to update the string name as well. In order to overcome the problem we can use some reflection and a little bit of boiler plate code. The good people of the Internet have done all the work for us already, so just copy, paste and enjoy!