I’m not a superstitious guy by any means but there are few things that never fail to intrigue me; they keep me pondering “does it really work that way?” Even at times I find myself doing things, rather subconsciously, I believe would bring me better luck just because it produced better results in the past. This would even include something as unrelated and silly as using “one particular type of” pen for my univ exams. Every time I thought it was mere stupid I would very soon find convincing myself “there’s nothing wrong in using this particular pen; and just in case it brings luck, you never know.” At other times, these things don’t really seem all that unrelated as they apparently do. For example, using “a particular type of” pen actually would make me more comfortable while writing and hence wouldn’t infuriate me during a lengthy exam; and my result vastly depended on the variation of my mood along the length of the exam.

I just came to know about one particular office building which has gained some name as having good “karma!” I didn’t know that companies like Google, PayPal and LogiTech kicked off as toddlers from the same office space! Can a office space really posses luck? Read this and be intrigued.

Thanks a lot to Wasif who showed me these nice google search strings, whereby you can search stuffs on pages which you cannot access normally. For example you want to have a full mp3 song list of say Bryan Adams to be downloaded straight; you can use one of this search strings which will find the “index” pages that usually contain all the songs as normal file entries. Usually these index pages are not accessible from any websites. And guess what, it works and I already downloaded loads of stuffs . Try it out .

PS: If you know more google tricks, please let me know .

First of all let me thank Tahmid Bhai for introducing me with Google Reader. Since then I have kind of fallen in love with this yet-another-google-masterpiece (YAGM :p). The “My Shared Items” that you can see on the widget bar (Left or Right of this page, depending on the current theme) is just a manifestation of the Google Reader.

So if you are wondering what Google Reader is; It is a YAGM (btw, it’s my own term; if you are pondering) whereby you can subscribe to any number of blogs, RSS feeds and etc etc and can read each and every entry from one place. Whenever a blog gets updated, your Google Reader will notify you. You can also “Share” or “Bookmark” certain blog entries, which you find worth reading or interesting, and let other people have a peek at your “Shared” list too. This shared list of Blog entries can also be made into a RSS feed and displayed anywhere else: the “My Shared Items” on this page demonstrates just that. So whenever I “Share” one more entry from my Google Reader, this RSS (“My Shared Items”) gets updated automatically. It’s very cool, isn’t it ? . It helps you to have an eclectic collection of blog entries in one place.

I don’t want to stretch more on Google Reader as the details are all blogged down here.

1992, a guy from University of Edinburg was given the task to design a CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool to be run in both Windows and Linux system. At that point in time only a few cross platform GUI APIs were available and were very expensive for an university to spend on an in-house experimental tool. But that didn’t stop Julian Smart from designing his CASE tool. He realized that a cross-platform GUI has to be developed first and eventually wxWidget was conceived. Its is probably one of the most talked about Open-Source project after Linux itself !

I always had been an advocate for wxWidget since I used it for the first time with version 2.4. Coding with wxWidget is a pleasure. It’s amazing to see how simple the API is (as far as coding is concerned) yet how diverse and complex it’s outputs can get. It’s probably the only C++ widget set that takes native look, i.e. it takes the original look and feel of the platform it has been built for, unlike Swing of Java. An windows application will actually look like an windows application and similarly a Linux GTK application will look like a true GTK application. This feature is somewhat similar to the SWT (for Java) and is pretty cool. Another great feature of wxWidget is that it can save it’s GUI layouts and other details in xml format which can be modified without touching or rebuilding the code.

If you are thinking that wxWidget is only for Windows and Linux then get ready for a surprise because it has ports for literally all platforms on the planet including Pocket PC ! Even it has a port called “Universal” which has its own look and feel and is guaranteed to run in all Linux flavors, even if you do not have GTK !

The widget set is extremely diverse. You have almost everything you would ever need. However, you cannot make another Office-2007 or Visual Studio 2005 with it. Since the project is an Open-Source project a major part of it is community driven which means that components and widgets are developed almost continuously by someone somewhere. If you feel you need a certain component that doesn’t exists in wxWidget, just hold your horses and do few googles before you decide to write your own codes, because more than often you will find that a similar component has already been coded by someone and has been made freely available. In the current release of 2.8 they added one extra set of widgets called AUI which has a collection of advanced UI controls with docking capabilities and etc. wxWidget also participates in the Google Summer of Code and you can have a peek at what they do there (click).

It’s is quite amazing that over the last ~15 years wxWidget has almost become a standard for cross-platform C++ GUI application. The number and the names of the companies who have embraced this technology is quite envious. The list includes companies like AMD, AOL, organization like NASA, research institutions like Carnegie Mellon University, CalTech and etc. For a complete list click here. One extra bit of information I can share is that Electronic Arts, RedWood Shore Studio (Maxis Studio) is going to be added in that list very soon!

Even if you are not planning for a cross-platform GUI wxWidget can still be your solution, ofcourse if you are not planning to make another Office -2007 or anything alike.

Happy wxWidgeting

Z