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Summary of Communities to Communities (C2C) 2009 Conference

C2C is a history now. I attended .NET stream and one session on SQL. The conference as a whole was very interesting, well organised, and basically developing. It was a Polish conference so most sessions were conducted in Polish but there were a couple of speakers from abroad too, and they spoke in English.

Basically I’m happy I had a …

MonoRail – RenderMailMessage – System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: format

This was a nasty issue…

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.ArgumentNullException: 
Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: format
   at System.String.Format(IFormatProvider provider, String format, Object[] args)
   at System.String.Format(String format, Object arg0, Object arg1)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

Background

This is part of the stack trace I got in one of …

Web 2.0 buttons generator

Web 2.0-styled buttons are quite popular these days. In fact, they look fine. Actually, I love them icon_smile-7942167

Today, I learned you don’t have to do it on your own with graphic software. I’ve found www.mycoolbutton.com – Web 2.0 buttons generator. It allows you to create a button in four steps:

  1. define the size
  2. define the color
  3. set up the icon

Launchy

Have you ever lacked from run menu from KDE (Alt+F2) in your Windows? Try Launchy. It’s open source software that not only runs programs you have installed on your PC but also can launch your documents, project files, bookmarks etc.

I really recommend it! To learn more, see Launchy homepage.…

SQL: CONVERT to DATETIME

I’ve heard that SQL Server developers happen to have problems with CONVERT function when try to obtain a value of datetime type. Recently, I’ve had that problem during a Data Transformation Services (DTS) package implementation.

One of the task in that package was “Transform Data”, which transferred data between a source and destination. To retrieve that data, I used SQL …

Submission for ISWC ’07

Today we submitted yet another article; this time for The 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC ’07) that will take place in Busan, Korea, from November 11 to 15 (Thursday), 2007. I was the main author of the paper; i wrote it together with Sebastian R. Kruk, Tadhg Nagle, Edward Curry, and Adam Gzella. Its title is “IKHarvester – Informal

Xobni

xobni_logo-5856731-2

Xobni is declared to be a new look at your email. Even the neme is tightlt connected to email – “xobni” is the word “inbox” backwords icon_smile-8633161

All in all, Xobni is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that comes along with Microsoft Office. According to the authors Xobni allows:

  • fast email search
  • extract phone numbers from emails
  • fast access to email

Summary of our work in DERI

In less than two weeks I’m living DERI. I’m going back home in Poland. The plan is to defend my Master’s Thesis.

Before leaving, we (myself, Filip Czaja and Władysław Bultrowicz) are supposed to present the result of our work. We gave the presentation today.

First, Filip introduced ourselves and showed the context of our work:

contextderi

Then there was my …

Head First Design Patterns

Another book I recommend reading: Head First Design Patterns.

I need to say I only managed to read it when I tried for the second time. First time I gave up after three or four chapters. Although I believed the provided definitions, examples, code snippets were good, I was fed up with all this Zen talks, interviews with design patterns, …

Media convertion

Many times it happened to me that I needed to convert a file from one format to another (text documents, images, movies, etc). It can be difficult and expensive to download different pieces of software that can do that.

Media Convert service comes with helping hand. Let me cite the authors:

Media-Convert is 100% free. No software is needed, and