Violin Iliev’s blog and homepage

I have just installed Windows Live and now I’m testing Windows Live Writer. It is very easy to use. I just entered my blog address, username and pass and it has detected everything for me. It allows me to preview my post and write them in a user-friendly interface.

Let’s test some of its features:

Here is how the interface looks like:

Map:

Tag:

Very nice application

The final of FameLab 2009 here in Bulgaria is tomorrow. I’ll do my best and I’ll post the results as soon as possible. I’ll talk about Multicore CPU’s but I might change the topic in the last time so who knows…

The show will be at Sofia Theater and starts at 17:00 PM - can’t wait…

PS: It was awsome. I wasn’t in the top 3 however, but it was a very good show and I’m glad I was part of it.

Finally the video of my “presentation” at FameLab 2009 has arrived.
High Quality (720×576) can be downloaded here and the subtitles here.

Only black ninja can kill a black ninja

Only ninja can kill a ninja

I took part in first round of FameLab 2009 in Bulgaria, Sofia on 30th of March.

Some info about FameLab:

FameLab is an initiative of the Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK and this is the first year the contest is going international in nine countries in South-East Europe through the British Council network. The aim of FameLab is to encourage young scientists (18 to 35 years old) to inspire and excite public imagination with a vision of science in the 21st century.

The competition is searching for the new faces of Science who will be able to develop their ideas and presentation skills for a TV audience. The model is familiar from TV programmes like Pop Idol and Mega Star – you have just 3 minutes to prove yourself to a panel of expert judges, with only the best going forward to the next round, and the talk should be entertaining and original, scientifically accurate but also engaging to a non-scientific audience.

Quote from http://www.britishcouncil.org/bulgaria-beautiful-science-famelab.htm

I talked about microcontroller. I was one of the five selected to go to the final round on 11th of March in Theater of Sofia.

I’ve finished my first PIC project - finally
So here it is…

I recently got about 400 comments per day waiting to be approved. Guess what - spam. I can’t check them all and it’s filling the database with useless information. So I’m closing comments until I find time to add some protection.

EDIT: 15.03.2009 Comments are open again…

On 04-06.07.2008 I was on a trip around the country with friends from work. We went to these towns: Kazanluk, Kalofer, Karlovo and village of Enina. We also visited Shipka, the russian church and we also climbed to the top of the mountain.
I want to share some photos I took with my GSM:
This is the hotel we stayed at:

This is the Russion church below the mountain top Shipka:


Going up to the tower on Shipka


The view from the top of the tower. You can see all the stair we climbed all the way form the bottom up to the top.


And that’s me in Kalofer. The sun is keeping my eyes a bit closed

Since I’m trying to switch to Linux(Ubuntu) as my primary OS and since I had some stuff I really need to do under Linux, I had to find alternative applications for my activities. Well I don’t play games much so this wasn’t a big problem. I mainly do all stuff of programming and there are plenty of development tools for Linux. The big problem was a project I am working on witch is based on some Windows API calls. The IDE used for the project is DevC++. So I tried to install it under Linux and see if it could compile. I installed the last Wine version (1.0-rc5) and installed DevC++ under it. Everything went fine. I created a new empty console project and it compiled fine. However my project didn’t compile at all :(. The IDE said that “windres.exe” failed with an strange error number. There was no way to make “windres.exe” work under WINE, so I decided to look for some alternative free Resource compiles. I came across GoRC by Jeremy Gordon. However it’s command line arguments are different form windres’ one so I had to write a wrapper. The wrapper takes the command line arguments that are passed to “windres” and then translates them and call GoRC. So I made a quick console project in DevC++(under wine) and created a simple wrapper. Then all I had to do is override the real “windres.exe”. However things didn’t went as expected. It turned out that “windres” produces COFF files which are then send to the linker but GoRC can only produce RES or OBJ files. I tried with the OBJ files but it was not the same COFF format. I was once again stuck. As I was searching for more info I found that “windres” can convert RES files into COFF files. I tried “windres” with a RES file and it successfully made a COFF file. It is not working well with RC->COFF, but it’s working fine with RES->COFF. So I made some changes to the wrapper. It first creates a RES file with GoRC and then convert it to COFF using “windres”. Guess what - IT IS WORKING!. I was able to compile my first Windows application with 2 RC files and everything went fine. However there are some problems. I tried another project and GoRC said that it could not find “windows.h” which is included in one of the RC files. So I had to copy that file to my project main directory and build went with no errors. The debugger is also working, with some problems, but it didn’t worked well under windows either.
So finally I have a cross-compile environment and I can compile my applications for windows from Ubuntu
If you have the same problems you could try my wrapper and the GoRC utility. You can download them with the source of the wrapper(very mixed and non commented code ) here;
Just copy “windres.exe”, “GoRc.exe” and “windres_real.exe” into your MinGW bin folder and override the files that exists. In my case the path is: “~/.wine/drive_c/Dev-Cpp/bin”

Yep, today is my birthday. I got some nice presents like a cool 6.1 sound system, a cash bonus for the holidays and I’m going to buy muself a new GSM , because my current one is old (Siemens M55)