Tudor Vlad’s Blog

I received this link today, via Oszkar, about a robot developed by Boston Dynamics, called BigDog. As you can see below, this robot has very natural movements, is able not only to keep its balance, but also to regain it in case of abruptly loosing it. Move to second 35 to see what I’m talking about. Or better yet, watch the entire clip to see the whole feature set:

I have to say I’m pretty impressed. That was quite a kick! Robotics have evolved a lot during the last years!

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As you probably know by now, Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 were released last week. This is the RTM version of VS2008 (Release to Manufactures) and means that is available only through MSDN Subscriptions (the Standard, Pro and Team System editions) or free to everybody through the Express Editions.

Because I have an MSDN Premium Subscription through the Microsoft Academic Program, I started downloading the Team System edition. After some unexpected interrupts from the ISP and my PC going Standby, I had my ISO.

Instalation

Before I started the setup, I remembered that I read about some issues on Windows Vista. A quick search on the Web and I found the following posts about the problem: [Read the rest of this entry…]

Actually from 3. No: 4!

During this summer, some of my Microsoft Student Partners colleagues were selected for internships in Redmond, at Microsoft’s headquarters. Among them were my 2 good friends, Bogdan and Razvan Hobeanu, who worked in two separate teams, in the Windows division. They had a pretty nice adventure there, along with some other friends like Andrei Csibi and Alex Ghiondea, but you can learn more from them, here [Romanian].

We even got to talk on the phone from time to time, and on one of the occasions I asked them to purchase for some things for me and my father.

Well, today my package arrived, delivered by Andrei, who was in a short trip in Cluj-Napoca. My father was very happy he received his spare parts for an electric appliance and I was for receiving the Logitech G7 gaming mouse. Pretty nice of the Hobeanu brothers.

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<rant>

As time passes by, I personally find it more and more difficult to find quality products. Actually I mean quality products at an affordable price. There are a lot of products on the market, each one with extraordinary features at a very good price, accompanied by various awards.

But the fact is that I find it that most of these flashy products are nothing else that variations of some reference (and more expensive) product, made of inferior parts and manufacturing. And the awards… well, if you want to know, you should read Andy Brice’s article on software awards.

Besides this, the salesperson would always help you find the “best” products, better then the ones you originally wanted, that are not available.

This post is about a personal experience involving the employees of a company that sells computer parts and my quest to buy a computer, more specifically the case.

Monday I selected all the components I wanted. Because I couldn’t find them all at a single company, I decided to buy the separately. Because I don’t have experience installing CPUs and motherboards, I decided to start with the computer case, and after that to ask the service department from the other firm to install the 2 more sensitive parts.

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Static Constructors

As Wikipedia explains, a constructor is a special method that is used to initialize member data. This member data can be object’s data, i.e. for each individually object (instance of a class) these fields are initialized with specific values, or class’s data known as static data, available to all instance objects as 1 global resource.

We all know object constructors, but are there any other constructors? Well, YES: static constructors!

Static constructors are used like “normal” constructors, but are prefixed with the keyword “static” and are used to initialize static members. This initialization occurs when the class is used for the first time.

Here is a simple example:

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