Balafon

In case anyone needs to send Outlook meeting invitations from C# (or VB.NET, etc.), I have found the following resources useful:

• http://chuckdotnet.blogspot.com/2007/10/send-outlook-meeting-requests-with.html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/461889/sending-outlook-meeting-requests-without-outlook
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2654743/cancel-outlook-meeting-requests-via-mailmessage-in-c

It turned out that adapting none of the code in these links worked correctly (the goal is to have Outlook add the “Attend”, etc. buttons) the only way that worked for me was to send a request, and then cut-n-paste the resulting ICAL file, filling the relevant fields with my data.

It seems Outlook is incredibly finicky in what it accepts, and incredibly liberal in what it generates.

The first self-replicating pattern has been developed in Conway’s Game of Life.

Developing in Visual C++, I came across the dreaded “Application failed to initialize properly” error. This is usually caused by a missing DLL, but in this case all the DLLs were there.

I finally realized that a static variable in one of the DLLs was throwing an exception in its constructor, causing the load to fail.

I ran into the strangest problem today. After upgrading to IE8, my Visual Studio 2005 (this is for work on a legacy system) debugger would detach all by itself soon I hit F5 to debug an ASP.NET page via IIS.

Turns out this is due to IE8′s use of separate processes for tabs. To disable this behavior, set a DWORD value of 0 in the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\TabProcGrowth.

Of course this negates the benefit of running tabs in separate processes, but the debugger will not automatically detach.

Update: make sure you set the registry value in the 32-bit hive.

So I’m trying to build NeuroLab on OS X. It builds and links, and I’ve written a script to munge the libraries’ names.

It crashed on start, due to a different order of static member initialization in libraries than on either Win32 or Linux. Fixed that.

Now it just randomly crashes deep in the Qt library, while drawing text. I can’t figure out how to point gdb to the Qt sources.