Jeff Jaffe now W3C CEO

Ex-Novel CTO Jeff Jaffe is now the CEO of W3C. Read the full story here.

Funeral held for IE6

More than 100 people, many of them dressed in black, were expected to gather around a coffin Thursday night to say goodbye to an old friend of ours.

Read more here.

Less than one second Linux boot!

The following video shows an instance where Linux has been tuned to start in less than one second. Interesting!.

http://www.embedded-bits.co.uk/?p=213

How to configure Facebook Chat on Pidgin

As Facebook Chat now supports Jabber/XMPP, you can integrate it into your favorite chat client. I have been a big fan of Pidgin for more than three years now. Therefore I have mentioned the simple set of steps for setting up FB Chat on Pidgin.

1. Launch Pidgin, go to Accounts –> Manage Accounts and click Add… .

2. Fill in the Basic tab as shown in the following screenshot.

Please note that here the Username is your Facebook username.

3. You need to make sure you have unchecked all SSL options on the Advanced tab.

4. Click Add and you are done.

Getting your Huawei E220 Modem to Work on Windows Vista

    I had been using my Huawei E220 on Windows XP for a couple of years until I got my new Dell XPS with Windows Vista pre-installed. I could not wait to get my first Internet experience on Vista and plugged my HSPA dongle in to come online as quickly as possible as it used to be on XP. Then only I realized that my Huawei E220 mobile broadband modem was not working on Vista. Apparently the device driver was failing to detect the plug-and-play device on Vista.

    I started to Google looking for some solution and found that it required a firmware upgrade. An office colleague of mine also told me that he managed to get his Huawei E220 to work on Vista by doing a firmware upgrade. Yesterday I also managed to get my dongle to work on Vista after a firmware upgrade.

    This is how you go about doing this simple upgrade process.

1. Go to http://www.huawei.com/mobileweb/en/doc/list.do?type=-1&id=736 and download the file E220 Client Software WINMACB300D00SP02C03 (UTPS11[1].002.03.16.03_MAC11.201.01.00.03) for WinXP&2K&Vista & Mac.zip.

2. Fix your dongle into a 32-bit Windows machine (say Windows XP) and execute this file to do the firmware upgrade. Please note that your dongle can become completely unusable in case you disturb this upgrade process.

3. Once it is done, you can use your newly upgraded Huawei E220 HSPA modem on your Vista machine without any issue.

Happy upgrade and Good Luck !!!

C++ - Referring to an enum inside a type

When you refer to an enum inside a type, you do not have to specify the name of the enum. See the code snippets below.

Say you have a class like what is given below.

class MyClass {
   enum MyEnum { a };
};

Incorrect use of a value of type MyEnum

int i = MyClass::MyEnum::a;

Correct use of a value of type MyEnum

int j = MyClass::a;

Why AFX_MANAGE_STATE is important in Windows programming?

I happened to write a Windows shell extension about an year back. It was this macro that helped me fix issues when my application was crashing here and there. I am developing an MS Excel extension for a client project and again I ran into the same problem. I spent a couple of days figuring out what was going wrong and finally found that this same old macro was going to fix my issue.

So what is this macro and what does it do?

MFC uses the resource handle of the main application to load the resource templates. If you have an exported function in a DLL, such as one that launches a dialog box in the DLL, this template is actually stored in the DLL module. You need to switch the module state for the correct handle to be used. Otherwise the program crashes as it tries to access some resource resides in a different module. You can do this module switching by adding the following code to the beginning of the function. That is just before using the resource from the other module.

AFX_MANAGE_STATE(AfxGetStaticModuleState( ));

This swaps the current module state with the state returned from AfxGetStaticModuleState until the end of the current scope. When the execution flow goes out of the current scope, the module state gets switched back to that of the current application.