As a history buff I've always found older computers fascinating, both the computers themselves and the social phenomena they represent. If you're also interested in such things, make sure to read Fire in the Valley: the making of the personal computer, which is an astounding read which delves (in interviews, pictures and background stories) into the various aspects of the early PC era. Another interesting read is Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (which my brother Mickey bought me as a birthday present couple of years back. Thanks, man!)

normal

This value directs user agents to collapse sequences of whitespace, and break lines as necessary to fill line boxes. Additional line breaks may be created by occurrences of "\A" in generated content (e.g., for the BR element in HTML).

pre

This value prevents user agents from collapsing sequences of whitespace. Lines are only broken at newlines in the source, or at occurrences of "\A" in generated content.

nowrap

This value collapses whitespace as for 'normal', but suppresses line breaks within text except for those created by "\A" in generated content (e.g., for the BR element in HTML).

normal certainly isn't appropriate, because that would not preserve the indentation. pre is almost appropriate, however it disallowes the rendering engine to insert line-breaks, which means the div section the code is in may extend in width arbitrarily. nowrap is obviously inappropriate as well.

What I really need is something close to pre but which allows automatic line-breaks; problem is, to my knowledge there simply isn't anything of the sort!

If anyone has some good advice on how to add indented, syntax-highlit code blocks to my blog painlessly I would be much obliged. I know there are tools out there - I've tried one or two - but none gave me the sort of flexibility I require. I may just break up and write a parser/colorizer with a bit more customizability than what Drazen did (impressive though it is).

Turns out they were trying to bind to ldap://domain_name, where domain name was programmatically derived from System.Environment.UserDomainName; in some cases said property would return, instead of the logged on user's domain name, the local computer name. Thing is, you would expect a property in System.Environment to return the value of an evironment variable, presumably USERDOMAIN, which we verified contained the appropriate value.

Digging around in the documentation didn't help, so I turned to ye olde Reflector:

Note the function call in bold; a quick look in MSDN revealed the following information:

BOOL LookupAccountName(
  LPCTSTR lpSystemName,
  LPCTSTR lpAccountName,
  PSID Sid,
  LPDWORD cbSid,
  LPTSTR ReferencedDomainName,
  LPDWORD cchReferencedDomainName,
  PSID_NAME_USE peUse
);

Note the part marked in red: Environment.UserDomainName does indeed pass null for lpSystemName, so if the machine contains a local user by the same name as the domain user, the local machine name will be returned instead of the domain. This behavior is apparently by design, although I can't figure out how that makes any sense what-so-ever.

There are two easy ways to avoid this issue:

string userDomain = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable( "USERDOMAIN" );
string userDomain = System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name.Split( @'\' )[ 0 ];

Have fun.

'nuff said.

After the flash success of June's IGDA/demo-scene gathering, we've decided to, er, implement our own: a proper demo-scene gathering, complete with BBQ, showing of new as well as old demos, and whatever the hell else we feel like doing! So, without further ado:

When?

Thursday, July 28th 2005 at 20:00, give or take. Being late only means you get to spend less time here

Sponsorship

The event is hosted and sponsored by Monfort Software Ltd., which is where us organizers work; consider this a shameless plug: we're looking for great programmers to join our team! Want to work in a dynamic environment with a bunch of other demosceners? Want to work on realtime 3D engines, .NET applications ranging from enterprise systems to compilers to a huge variety of software products? Come have a look. I did.

I also blogged practically nothing interesting/useful for the past couple of weeks, so here's a collection of stuff I have in my "context" file (sort of a geek's to-do list):

• Apparently I've managed to thoroughly miss the whole Annoying Thing revolution; I've always known the source to be DengDeng but apparently it's evolved and is now officially out of control. Here's an interesting read.
• If you have any inclination towards industrial and/or goth music, check out In Strict Confidence. Of particular note are Zauberschloss and Engelsstaub (in German) and the terrific Love Will Never Be The Same (English). I've also given good listening time to Massive Attack's Mezzanine. On the web radio front I still listen to a lot of Nectarine radio.
• RMS has another thought-provoking artlce about software patents. RMS's usually extremist opnions aside, I'm finding what I see around me less and less to my taste, and as a software developer for a relatively small company I occasionally feel the results of software patents on my flesh, and it scares me. Patents are a necessary evil, but leglislators must be extremely careful in maintaining the balance between protecting innovators and stiffling innovation. I'll probably write a proper post about this soon.
• Get your own, before they run out!
• Ever had trouble remembering what a toilet in a particular computer game looks like? This site should alleviate your concerns.
• These are really cool. Too bad they probably sound like crap.
• Ho-lee shit.
• Evidently the Israeli customs office does not believe in free software (Hebrew only). Fortunately the story ends happily.

• A couple of interesting articles on the BCL team blog: this one elaborates on which language features cannot be expressed using CodeDOM (including .NET 2.0), and this one explains why parsers aren't included with CodeDOM (which would've saved me a hell of a lot of time on the C# to java source-level compiler I wrote a few months ago).
• BCL team's libcheck is an immensely useful tool if your team provides public APIs to other teams or customers (via Roy Osherove's ISerializable).
• Balanced matching with regular expressions: apparently the .NET regex implementation allows you to create "stack"-style expressions (so you can parse, for example, mathematical expressions with parentheses, C-style comments etc.). The syntax is somewhat convoluted and tricky to use though (via Roy Osherove's ISerializable).
• I've been asked how to create windows services in .NET on numerous occasions; it is, in fact, incredibly easy. Enter another great post from the BCL team, which will hopefully save me some hours of repeating the same explanations. Thanks, Dave!
• These seem like incredibly useful tools, though (seeing that my development focus has changed over the last few months) I haven't yet been able to try out: ComTrace hooks the COM system calls and gives you a filtered view, which is definitely handy for debugging COM issues. Conversely, the PINVOKE.NET add-in is a front-end for the PINVOKE.NET wiki - a respository for unmanaged API P/Invoke signatures and best practices.
• I always thought overhyped, powerful language features can be dangerous in the hands of the uninspired, but this is just ridiculous (thanks, Kuperstein).

• Send me an e-mail - make sure to change the at/dot text to the appropriate characters
• MSN Messenger alias tomer at tomergabel dot com (same comment applies)
• Leave me a comment on this blogpost

The second issue is that my "contact me" entry has disappeared from the blog entirely, and somehow the links were replaced with links to another entry. *scratches head* Guess I'll have to rewrite that post...