For the last couple of years I repeatedly see submissions of spam comments to my web site, which advertise "essay writing services" (read - cheating at course assignments for money) for students. I receive at least a couple a day, sometimes tens of them. This is despite having enabled CAPTCHA validation of comments submissions. The spammers' software manages to circumvent this protection, albeit not always - most of the undesirable … more »

Python allows you to send calendar appointments (invitations / events) directly from your code. It is quite easy to create a new appointment in the standard iCalendar format (ics). You can do it by hand or use a convenient icalendar open source module. In order to convince Outlook, however, to present the iCalendar events as native calendar appointments, you will need to make some effort. Fortunately, other people have already … more »

You might have heard, that Trolltech has recently released a new version of their famous QT library with preliminary support for Android and iPhone (iOS) support. This is, actually, pretty exiting news, because it means that, at least in theory, one can have a single mobile application code base for two most popular smart phone platforms on today's markets. And, possibly, for most desktop computers as well, because QT runs … more »

Released some time ago new C++11 standard introduced lambda functions - long anticipated and exciting feature. On the other hand, boost::variant has been around for awhile and is used successfully in many projects. The recommended and type-safe way of applying type-specific logic to values of variant types is using visitor pattern. However, a visitor is a functor, which until now should have been defined separately, in a class of its … more »

Vim is a very powerful and convenient text editor for Unix environments. I certainly don't wish to start any disputes along the lines of the old vim/emacs frontier, especially since I used both of them for long periods of time and find unique features in each. However in recent years I tend to use vim most of the time, mainly because it is quite lightweight. In order to benefit the … more »

There is no doubt - spammers are becoming cleverer every day. I've added CAPTCHA verification to my site in order to prevent spam comments from being submitted. It really helped - previously I used to remove about 10-20 of them on daily basis, offering everything from child pornography to grey mortgages. However, even after the new safety measures have been introduced, I still get a couple of comments a week, … more »

Google provides APIs to access its data using various languages. You can manipulate Google calendars, contacts, documents etc. Most of the time the usage is pretty straightforward, but sometimes it is not clear how to achieve a specific goal. For example, it took me some time to figure out how to download all events for a given calendar. The main reason behind the difficulty is the upper limit Google places … more »

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. From experience I … more »

If you want to right-align the "Help" (or any other) menu entry in your menu bar in a WPF application, you can use the following example: Code sample taken from here . more »

WPF is still relatively new and many developers are only scratching the surface of its abilities. Coming from a different framework, one must learn anew how to do the familiar tasks. Sometimes you need to to trigger a click or some other event for one of your WPF controls, such as a button, a menu or a checkbox, directly from code. There are no methods on the controls to invoke … more »