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This is not about dolphins, monkeys, cats or dogs. It’s not even about all the infrastructure that makes up the Internet – routers, servers, communication lines. This is just an unusual observation made by checking some publicly available statistics. Consider this : The average Internet user sends 4.9 emails every day. This is the global […]

Free PDF to Word converters are hard to come by. Fortunately, today I discovered a great online tool that will convert any PDF file to a Microsoft Word document, and it’s completely free.

A suspicious occurence – I got and e-mail today, with a (tracked & cloaked) link to a video tutorial about how to unzip files (note: the author keeps changing his permalink structure, so the link may stop working whenever). The weird thing was not the arrival of the e-mail – it’s was from a newsletter […]

Just a quick note – there’s the 24th generation of images up at Living Image Project – go and vote! I realized there was no way to be notified when a new generation is created, so from now on I’ll post a notice on this blog whenever that happens. By the way, I’m still unsure […]

Everything you need to know about what DAA files are, how to open a DAA file, how to convert DAA files to other formats and even how to play them as if they were normal CD or DVD disks. Useful if you got a copy (image file) of a DVD movie or game and don’t know what DVD software to use to open it.

I’ve decided to discuss free WinZip alternatives and .zip software in general. While WinZip is by far the most popular program for handling Zip files, it is only one of many. In fact, if all you need is something to open .zip files and you don’t need the additional “features” of WinZip (like FTP uploading or DVD burning which can both be handled by other software), you can easily make do with free Zip software and might be better off for that.

Yesterday I spent several hours trying to finally figure out why my wsTaskborg application failed to work when run run in a second session on the same PC. That is, when you first log on – using whichever account you have – it works fine. If you then use “fast user switching” and log on […]

Got a RAR file and do not know how to open it? This article about free RAR extractors will help you find the best .rar extractor for your operating system.

There’s been a lot of talk about Google’s corporate motto – “Don’t be evil” – for years. A fun bit of statistics – searching for “google is evil” yields around 41,700 results while “google is not evil” only produces 5,370 hits. Here’s my take on it – the motto is sound and being followed to […]

…because that’s what I tend to do. You know how it is – while browsing the web you come across some component library, API spec. or similar, and it looks so cool you wish you could immediately put it to use. I usually download those, store them somewhere, maybe read the docs/watch the demos… and […]

Let’s have a change of focus! I know, this blog has gone quite stale now. No posts for how long? – a couple months I’d say. Why? Let me tell you about that… Blogging isn’t really my “thing”. Blogging might seem like a form of “self-expression” (which is good) and such, but essentially it’s still […]

Long time, no post! 😉 Now that Christmas and New Year festivities are in the past, I’m going to tell you about one of the ideas I started lazily implementing during the holidays. Basically it will be (if I ever complete it) a simple 2D arcade snowfight with a side-view camera. After toying with GLScene […]

I’ve recently released the Ticker Editor – a shareware application that can be used to create pretty much any kind of ticker. Visit WS Tickers to learn more. While building this application I came accross some of the problems many programmers are likely to encounter when doing a “serious” project. Creating help files If your […]

This project has been going for a while, so I’ve decided to write a short overview of the results seen so far. If you don’t know what’s it about – The Living Image project is a website where anyone can vote for one or more digitally generated images. Those pictures are created by artificial neural […]

Recently I was doing a PHP script that combines some images and needed to clip some of them to a specific rectangle. PHP doesn’t have a function to do that explicitly, and due to some technical restraints I couldn’t compose the required image in another buffer (which would let me to clip it implicitly). After […]

Have you noticed it says “(and some magic)” in the subtitle up above? Well, here’s some of that weirdness. A while ago I reasoned it would be interesting to make some artefacts (“amulets” or “talismans”, if you will) out of old computer processors. It’s a fairly widespread belief that crystals are useful for magical practices […]

Handles can represent files, ports, mutexes and other objects. By using the undocumented Native API function NTQuerySystemInformation() you can list all open handles from all processes. Here’s a small program that does that. This is basically a ported version of “HandleList” application by someone known as Napalm on sysinternals.com forums. I added and removed some […]

Driver development has always been the privilege of C/C++ and Assembler programmers. If someone needs to write a device driver in Delphi, he has to settle for “adapter” drivers that would allow their user-mode program some ability to interface with kernel-mode functions. There are also “wizards” that (supposedly) allow one to create a driver without […]

To avoid any confusion, let me say that this article will talk about the taskbar buttons that represent the visible windows of currently running applications. I will not discuss the system tray or Quick Launch. Most information given here is applicable only to Windows XP and possibly newer versions of Windows (though I am not […]

If you’re ever out of ideas for new projects/things to research, you might find these topics interesting : Arithmetic coding/compression Many compression algorithms, such as Huffman, work by assigning codes to chunks of data and then writing those codes to output file. Chunks that are often encountered get short codes, rare chunks get longer codes, […]

Here and there, people keep asking – “How do I hide my process in Windows NT/2000/XP?”. Nearly everyone knows how to do that on Windows 95/98, but there is no definite answer for NT-based systems. So today I’ll give you a short summary of four methods that can be used to hide your process on […]

Did you know that under Windows 2000/XP (and possibly others) it is possible to rename the exe-file of a running program? Furthermore, you can even move it to another folder, provided it is still on the same drive. The application will then appear in the Task Manager with the new filename (not path), and even […]

Here are some tips about getting/controlling the memory usage of a given process… Current memory usage You can use GetProcessMemoryInfo() API function to get the current memory usage (in bytes), peak usage, number of bytes in pagefile currently used by a process, and so on. Add Windows to your uses clause and use something like […]

In this short tarticle I will describe how to obtain the CPU usage of a single process (like the “CPU” column in Task Manager). I have also created a small unit that implements this functionality.