Moonwalking with Einstein is a book by Joshua Foer chronicling his serendipitous stumble into The World Memory Championship.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
US Debt
Total US Government debt includes debt held by the public (T-Bills, etc.) and debt held by government accounts (Social Security, Medicaid, etc.). The idea of a debt ceiling appears first around the time of World War I and the issuance of the Liberty Bonds for financing the was efforts. The bonds did not go over very well and required selling below par value.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Fixing Things
I broke the main shaft on the Kohler Engine Starter - part number 32 098 01-S. Just the last in a line of broken household items, including the washer machine and my #4 fuel injector. What a month!
The Troybilt has been good to me, although I probably should be better to the beast. The Kohler Courage engine (PS-SV720-0018, 3533913593) is sometimes home to the resident mouse family.
The Troybilt has been good to me, although I probably should be better to the beast. The Kohler Courage engine (PS-SV720-0018, 3533913593) is sometimes home to the resident mouse family.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
My May Podcast Highlights
Software Engineering Radio had a very interesting interview with Andrew Brownsword on Modern Game Design and Development.
Very poignant and brusk interview with Ayende Rahien on the topic of Criticism on This Developer's Life. Then I went back to episode 1.0.9 on Management to hear about leaving the developer's mindset and enter the world of meetings.
Buck Woody gives an insightful interview on Deep Fried Bytes.
Glenn Block of MEF fame is interview on .NET Rocks about his work in the WCF Community on CodePlex. He clarifies the definition of the word RESTful.
Freeman Dyson is in his late 80's, yet is mind is sharp while his speech is slow. He discusses a range of topics on science and economics with the host of EconTalk Russ Roberts. And don't forget the see The Fight of the Century rap video.
Very poignant and brusk interview with Ayende Rahien on the topic of Criticism on This Developer's Life. Then I went back to episode 1.0.9 on Management to hear about leaving the developer's mindset and enter the world of meetings.
Buck Woody gives an insightful interview on Deep Fried Bytes.
Glenn Block of MEF fame is interview on .NET Rocks about his work in the WCF Community on CodePlex. He clarifies the definition of the word RESTful.
Freeman Dyson is in his late 80's, yet is mind is sharp while his speech is slow. He discusses a range of topics on science and economics with the host of EconTalk Russ Roberts. And don't forget the see The Fight of the Century rap video.
Monday, May 2, 2011
May Money Matters
5/2/2011 - Silver is high and volatile. SLV dropped hard today. Cummins (CMI) and Caterpillar (CAT) Millicom (MICC) may be done rising. Cliffs (CLF) is heading down. Crown Castle continues its drop back to support. PPH the Pharm index is nonstop up and definately needs a breather -- either stop out or hedge with a PUT. Same for Merck (MRK) only it is about done filling the gap. ABX is heading down again, however it never saw the highs of the other gold issues, an interesting factor is the high amount of volume.
5/18/2011 - The SLV PUT worked out well. Exiting the trade early didn't full capture the move, but who expected such a dramatic fall for the shiny metal.
5/18/2011 - The SLV PUT worked out well. Exiting the trade early didn't full capture the move, but who expected such a dramatic fall for the shiny metal.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
April Podcast Review
The Microsoft podcast sites are currently all about LightSwitch.
LightSwitch is touted as the lightweight developer's tool for rapid CRUD design. It fits in between the free Visual Studio Express and the workhorse Visual Studio Pro.
The future - one of the must interesting talks this month was the discussion on EconTalk with Gavin Andresen on BitCoin. The virtual replacement for our troubled currency.
The history - Robert Martins is odd, yet interesting on IT Conversations. He tells the story of coding and computers.
The Neuro Oriented podcasts have been very "Conscious" of how the brain works. Joseph Ledoux is both a neuroscientist and a rocker who talks to Natasha Mitchell on "All in the Mind".
- .NET Rocks with Jay Schmelzer
- Codecast with Beth Massi
LightSwitch is touted as the lightweight developer's tool for rapid CRUD design. It fits in between the free Visual Studio Express and the workhorse Visual Studio Pro.
The future - one of the must interesting talks this month was the discussion on EconTalk with Gavin Andresen on BitCoin. The virtual replacement for our troubled currency.
The history - Robert Martins is odd, yet interesting on IT Conversations. He tells the story of coding and computers.
The Neuro Oriented podcasts have been very "Conscious" of how the brain works. Joseph Ledoux is both a neuroscientist and a rocker who talks to Natasha Mitchell on "All in the Mind".
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Book 'Em Dano
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman
- Numerical Recipes by Saul A. Teukolsky,William T. Vetterling and Brian P. Flannery
- The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Showers Market
4/7/2011 - Markets moving up.
4/12/2011 - Markets correcting downward. JDSU and MSFT down, while NFLX looks to be done pulling back. NVLS has been smacked back a few times, but still has upward quarterly MA. The stock at 34 is 18% off the recent high. SYK at 60, CAM at 53, and GLW at 19 look oversold.
While CTRP at 44 may be overbought. EXPE filled the drop gap and may be done rising for a while.
4/13/2011 - Stocks which may hedge against a toppy market - ARM at 19.5, MWW near 17, RSH filling the gap at 17.
4/ 15/2011 - What is going up in a down market? EIX, FE, PPL (Electric Utilities), CMA (Banks), VMW (System Software), COH (Apparel)
4/23/2011 - Between Good Friday (which was) and Easter Sunday it is time to reevaluate the market direction. On a quarterly basis, the overall market is on an uptrend with the QQQQ, DIA, IWM, IWB, and SPY. The QQQQ is a bit weak with the index falling below its quarterly moving average and the average looking to roll over. Only in the last week has that trend broken. The DIA is the only index breaking new highs, so far.
BDX and JNJ are nice PUTs for downside protection.
4/25/2011 Silver is up huge. Perhaps ready for a break. Watch SLV.
4/28/2011 Ben speaks, precious metals move up. Humm. NTAP, PCG, MHS, and WMT look set to pullback. On the other side NE, ROK, ABX, NFLX, and CMG could bounce.
4/12/2011 - Markets correcting downward. JDSU and MSFT down, while NFLX looks to be done pulling back. NVLS has been smacked back a few times, but still has upward quarterly MA. The stock at 34 is 18% off the recent high. SYK at 60, CAM at 53, and GLW at 19 look oversold.
While CTRP at 44 may be overbought. EXPE filled the drop gap and may be done rising for a while.
4/13/2011 - Stocks which may hedge against a toppy market - ARM at 19.5, MWW near 17, RSH filling the gap at 17.
4/ 15/2011 - What is going up in a down market? EIX, FE, PPL (Electric Utilities), CMA (Banks), VMW (System Software), COH (Apparel)
4/23/2011 - Between Good Friday (which was) and Easter Sunday it is time to reevaluate the market direction. On a quarterly basis, the overall market is on an uptrend with the QQQQ, DIA, IWM, IWB, and SPY. The QQQQ is a bit weak with the index falling below its quarterly moving average and the average looking to roll over. Only in the last week has that trend broken. The DIA is the only index breaking new highs, so far.
BDX and JNJ are nice PUTs for downside protection.
4/25/2011 Silver is up huge. Perhaps ready for a break. Watch SLV.
4/28/2011 Ben speaks, precious metals move up. Humm. NTAP, PCG, MHS, and WMT look set to pullback. On the other side NE, ROK, ABX, NFLX, and CMG could bounce.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Runnin' on MT
I spent a little time searching for some good running songs to round out and extend my Playlist. Most of the stuff I found was either Techno or Rappish, so I failed on the Google front. And you know what that means, I had to delve into my own kluttered mind to pull out songs like "Born to Run" by Bruce, "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits and one of my favorite songs "True Believer" by Ronnie Milsap.
For running outside I'm less picky, however this rainy weather forces me inside to the boring basement machine. I definately need inpiring 164 BPM tunes. My current playlist includes:
For running outside I'm less picky, however this rainy weather forces me inside to the boring basement machine. I definately need inpiring 164 BPM tunes. My current playlist includes:
Big Shot Billy Joel You May Be Right Billy Joel We Didn't Start The Fire Billy Joel Enid Barenaked Ladies Crazy Barenaked Ladies Red Lips, Red Eyes, Red Stockings The Red Elvises Jumping Cat Boogie The Red Elvises Walk Of Life Dire Straits Love Her Madly The Doors Riders On The Storm The Doors You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night) Meat Loaf Baby Likes To Rock It The Tractors True Believer Ronnie Milsap All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down The Mavericks All Revved Up With No Place To Go Meat Loaf Ring Of Fire Johnny Cash Somethin' Else Little Richard & Tanya Tucker Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard Simon & Garfunkel Late In The Evening Simon & Garfunkel Kodachrome/Maybellene Simon & Garfunkel Ketchup song original and full (have you ever heard this one) I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) The Proclaimers Under the Bridge Red Hot Chili Peppers Thunder Road Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Bruce Springsteen
Friday, April 1, 2011
Little Green Men
Robert Martin can sound like a Martian at times, but his words and insight are quite interesting and relevant.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Async has arrived
Tasks are the new Thread.
Stephen Taub describes the new parallelisms in C#.
TPL Dataflow Preview
Stephen Taub describes the new parallelisms in C#.
- Await Keyword
- Multiple CPUs
- Task.Run
- Chain tasks together
- Throttle
- Action Blocks
- Similar to Iterators in C#
- Buffers
- Data Flow Library
- IEnumerate thread safe collection
- Concurrent collection uses snapshot
- System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow
- No more WaitHandle, SyncRoot or Thread
- Task - Sync Holder and Results
- Tour
TPL Dataflow Preview
Thursday, March 24, 2011
PowerShell
Adam Driscoll talks PowerShell on .NET Rocks.
- Modules and Providers
- Powered by .NET
- The return of the command line
- Inline Help
- Registry and other resources at your fingertips
- StudyShell for writing extensions to PowerShell in VS
- Hooking into debugger - sample debug engine product
- API based approach as with IIS
- Nice for Unit Testing
- SCEM
JavaScript on .NET Rocks
Kent Alstad has some keen insights into Javascript on .NET Rocks.
- Field Stories - event handlers
- Understanding the DOM; Parsing the DOM
- Minification, Compression, Beautification and Obfuscation
- Tools for splitting up the Javascript code like Closure from Google
- Pre-publish bug locating
- Optimization - waiting for the DOM to load (main bottleneck in Javascript)
- HTML5 - Websockets, Canvas and Videos
- MVC paradigm for Javascript has the Viewer on the browser
- Less on server, more on client
- Tricks - if you can scroll, the DOM is ready
- jQuery - build on the shoulder of giants
- Great distribution system and language of the browser
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
LightSwitch
We all know what a Light Switch does, but we may need a reminder of its power. LightSwitch is also Microsoft's newest turn key web/data development tool as Jay Schmelzer explains on .Net Rocks. Easy of development is the focus using boiler plate code. Read Beth Massi's article in Code Magazine.
- 5 data access stacks at your finger tips
- Visual Studio/MVC based
- Coding is required
- .NET/Silverlight
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Faking It
Do you ever just fake it?
In the day, I wood fake it in Fortran. Then I learned to fake it in Perl. Now I fake it with PV-Wave.
In the day, I wood fake it in Fortran. Then I learned to fake it in Perl. Now I fake it with PV-Wave.
Light Echoes
The March 1st eposode of Astronomy Cast looked into Light Echoes. Just like a sound echo, a light echo reaches us from somewhere other than the direct source and can tell us much about distances and hidden objects.
March Podcast Review
The Project Management Podcast had a special Pulse review of Project Management bloggers.
Monday, March 21, 2011
PodCasts Spring Review
The Disciplined Investor's Podcast is run by Andrew Horowitzk, CFP. I like Andrew's style and voice inflections. His show usually begins with a run down of the week market conditions, including any recent stats like unempoyment, inflation, and the plethera of other government reports.
My buddy Pat would consider him a "Data Dink". He teases out the data between the lines and points out the inconsistances. Feds funds rate spread was the big number, along with the core CPI number. He concludes that the rise is what the Fed wants and are choosing to inflate our way out of the slow down. Andrew tries to keep his political views close to his chest, as not to inject his leanings. Many of Andrew's guests are people he knows from the industry.
The interview contains friendly banter and never puts the guest on the hot seat. Scott O'Neil was on the show this week and represents his father's company -- William O'Neil of the publication Investor's Business Daily. I see the IBD as a very good source for company analysis both fundamentally and technically. Andrew's team uses a propriatary system of analysis called QuantaFundaTechna.
Scott O'Neil sees the market in a correction and is cautious about single day rallys. He suggests not getting too much into the talking heads on the news and looking for a reason to buy or sell. The price and price patter is an absolute must for the IBD analysis.
Good show. I usually listen to his show on the very day it comes out, due to its transient nature. Scott is big on the price patterns and structure. The low volume rallies don't appear to justify an imminent turn around to the bullish sign. He is looking for confirmation. The confirmation is used to avoid early entry whip saws. So, price, price, price and volume.
Scott likes CAT for the japanese rebuilding effort. I would recommend the weekend edition of the IBD in order to get a deluge of indicators, along with all the charts and editorial opinions. A reasonable price for the large number of tools you have available. Check out the trial.
My buddy Pat would consider him a "Data Dink". He teases out the data between the lines and points out the inconsistances. Feds funds rate spread was the big number, along with the core CPI number. He concludes that the rise is what the Fed wants and are choosing to inflate our way out of the slow down. Andrew tries to keep his political views close to his chest, as not to inject his leanings. Many of Andrew's guests are people he knows from the industry.
The interview contains friendly banter and never puts the guest on the hot seat. Scott O'Neil was on the show this week and represents his father's company -- William O'Neil of the publication Investor's Business Daily. I see the IBD as a very good source for company analysis both fundamentally and technically. Andrew's team uses a propriatary system of analysis called QuantaFundaTechna.
Scott O'Neil sees the market in a correction and is cautious about single day rallys. He suggests not getting too much into the talking heads on the news and looking for a reason to buy or sell. The price and price patter is an absolute must for the IBD analysis.
Good show. I usually listen to his show on the very day it comes out, due to its transient nature. Scott is big on the price patterns and structure. The low volume rallies don't appear to justify an imminent turn around to the bullish sign. He is looking for confirmation. The confirmation is used to avoid early entry whip saws. So, price, price, price and volume.
Scott likes CAT for the japanese rebuilding effort. I would recommend the weekend edition of the IBD in order to get a deluge of indicators, along with all the charts and editorial opinions. A reasonable price for the large number of tools you have available. Check out the trial.
Market in Spring
3/21/2011 - Recent options in MSFT, CAT, CLF, XLE and XLB have performed well, yet the market seems perilous and vulnerable. The above call options did indeed do well over the last few days, but the rise has been on low volume. CAT, XLE and XLB (basic materials) seem poised to do well in the current climate of energy scares and natural disaster rebuilding. MSFT on the other hand has simply been beaten down to the point of exhaustion. Todays bounce was nice, but it gave a good chunk back before the day's end. And the volume was lack luster.
3/24/2011 - The market has been moving up since a week ago Thursday. The question is is this a fools rally. Gains in CAT, CLF, XLE and XLB may travel, however the Dow Jones is showing a weak pattern. The average hit its high on February 18th and has twice tried to rally back with each high less remarkable. Over the last week the volume has been trailing off while the average increases.
SBUX has been all over the place with spikes, drops and more spikes. The oil holder OIH gapped down on the 9th and has now filled that gap on decreasing volume. Although, it looks like it might be an expensive summer for gas. Individual oils pulled back early in the month and now are on the rally. COP looking to recapture the highs. CVX bounding off the 100 mark for a break to new highs. The industrial spider XLI appears to have broken the down trend. Gold is also on the rise, interestingly enough. Brazil (EWZ) is trying to turn it around.
3/27/2011 - ADTN has pulled back from a tear and may have found support. The Dow is looking strong, but the broader market isn't as powerful after the Japan earthquake. Compare the three ETFs -- DIA strong, SPY okay and QQQ timid (renamed from QQQQ).
Pullbacks: RVBD, AMP, JDSU, and ADBE
3/24/2011 - The market has been moving up since a week ago Thursday. The question is is this a fools rally. Gains in CAT, CLF, XLE and XLB may travel, however the Dow Jones is showing a weak pattern. The average hit its high on February 18th and has twice tried to rally back with each high less remarkable. Over the last week the volume has been trailing off while the average increases.
SBUX has been all over the place with spikes, drops and more spikes. The oil holder OIH gapped down on the 9th and has now filled that gap on decreasing volume. Although, it looks like it might be an expensive summer for gas. Individual oils pulled back early in the month and now are on the rally. COP looking to recapture the highs. CVX bounding off the 100 mark for a break to new highs. The industrial spider XLI appears to have broken the down trend. Gold is also on the rise, interestingly enough. Brazil (EWZ) is trying to turn it around.
3/27/2011 - ADTN has pulled back from a tear and may have found support. The Dow is looking strong, but the broader market isn't as powerful after the Japan earthquake. Compare the three ETFs -- DIA strong, SPY okay and QQQ timid (renamed from QQQQ).
Pullbacks: RVBD, AMP, JDSU, and ADBE
Refactoring, In other words...
Refactoring: coding metrics, extracting methods, patterns, factory...or in other words "making my code better in small increments".
Refactoring is not a solution, rather a mindset. While you have the hood open to check the oil, why not polish and clean up a bit.
Refactoring is not a solution, rather a mindset. While you have the hood open to check the oil, why not polish and clean up a bit.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Emergence
Whether open source programming, human evolution or free markets "Emergence" is the key. Emergency is the antithesis of top down design.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Abstemious Development
.Net Rocks interviewed Joe O'Brien on the topic of Ruby for Windows. Joe mentioned that many Ruby developers worked in a simple text editor, rather than an elaborate IDE. That same sentiment was echoed by Jon Snook in regards to CSS coding. What appears as an anachronism ends up working for some leading edge developers. The conversation gave me a new light on our current 4GL development and incorporating high level concepts to bare bones languages.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Back Packing
September of 2010 was our latest back packing trip. Pat, Brad, Tony and I took to the Smokey Mountains for some bear avoidance. The trip photos tell the story.
March PodCast Notes
DotNet Rocks
The DotNet Rocks guys interviewed Mark Miller and Seth Juarez about their recent immersion into the Kinect. Mark Miller is always an entertaining, yet scattered, personality. Mark and Seth are working on extending the Kinect as a software development tool.
A good update on HTML5 was provided by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. The interesting aspects include Widgets, Canvas, Streaming Video and more.
EconTalk
Russ Roberts has a wonderful conversation with an aging Freeman Dyson on a wide range of topics, mostly scientific, but not exclusively.
The DotNet Rocks guys interviewed Mark Miller and Seth Juarez about their recent immersion into the Kinect. Mark Miller is always an entertaining, yet scattered, personality. Mark and Seth are working on extending the Kinect as a software development tool.
A good update on HTML5 was provided by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. The interesting aspects include Widgets, Canvas, Streaming Video and more.
EconTalk
Russ Roberts has a wonderful conversation with an aging Freeman Dyson on a wide range of topics, mostly scientific, but not exclusively.
Google Code
IT Conversations had a brief talk with Chris DiBona of Google Code. He talks about the trends of programming languages and what is hot or not.
Monday, March 7, 2011
HTML5
Ian Hickson, editor of both the W3C and WHATWG. I can only imagine that his insanely ugly website is a parody of the fact that he is the keeper of the HTML standard.
- Widgets
- Canvas
- Webforms
- Polyfill
- XHR
- Content editable
- Drag and Drop
- Web storage (local)
- Webkit (open source)
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Friday, March 4, 2011
Commodities
The latest round of Mideast revolts seem to be influenced by record high food prices. The FAO has the data on its site.
World Food Index
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/en/
World Food Index
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/en/
ClickOnce
ClickOnce deployment solves a number of maintenance and logistics issues, while adding a few new concerns. No longer does a warm body need to run around updating PCs.
But how do you update and track various versions? The manifest contains information about a specific version of a ClickOnce application and the various supporting assemblies in a human readable XML format. The "assemblyIdentity" element specifies the primary assembly for the application while the "dependency" element lists all the prerequisites assemblies.
The manifest is also accompanied by a precompiled manifest named *.CDF-MS.
Walkthrough: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xc3tc5xx(VS.80).aspx
Look into using MSBuild to publish the ClickOnce to the Web.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165431(v=vs.80).aspx
For concurrent deployments, make sure to change the assembly name and product name.
http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/clickonce-installing-multiple-versions-concurrently/
But how do you update and track various versions? The manifest contains information about a specific version of a ClickOnce application and the various supporting assemblies in a human readable XML format. The "assemblyIdentity" element specifies the primary assembly for the application while the "dependency" element lists all the prerequisites assemblies.
The manifest is also accompanied by a precompiled manifest named *.CDF-MS.
Walkthrough: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xc3tc5xx(VS.80).aspx
Look into using MSBuild to publish the ClickOnce to the Web.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165431(v=vs.80).aspx
For concurrent deployments, make sure to change the assembly name and product name.
http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/clickonce-installing-multiple-versions-concurrently/
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
VB.NET -- Checkerboard in PictureBox
Private Sub CheckerBoard() Dim rect As New Rectangle ' create a Graphics object to draw into it Dim pbox As Graphics = PictureBox1.CreateGraphics mSquWidth = PictureBox1.Width / CDbl(mCols) mSquHeight = PictureBox1.Height / CDbl(mRows) rect.Width = mSquWidth rect.Height = mSquHeight Dim r, c For r = 0 To mRows - 1 For c = 0 To mCols - 1 If ((r + c) Mod 2) = 0 Then ' create a Graphics object to draw into it pbox.FillRectangle(Brushes.Azure, rect) pbox.DrawRectangle(Pens.Pink, rect) Else pbox.FillRectangle(Brushes.BlueViolet, rect) pbox.DrawRectangle(Pens.Red, rect) End If rect.X = c * mSquWidth rect.Y = r * mSquHeight ' create a Graphics object to draw into it pbox.FillRectangle(Brushes.BlueViolet, rect) pbox.DrawRectangle(Pens.Red, rect) Next Next End Sub
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
All She Wrote
Maybe I'll get a little time to review the books I've been reading lately.
- The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy
- Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
- Switch by Dan Health
- Getting Organized in the Google Era by Douglas Merrill, James Martin
- Spark by John J. Ratey
- Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
- 101 Theory Drive by Terry McDermott
- Sleight of Mind by Stephen L. Macknik, Susan Martinez
Real Estate and Financials
Interesting, stocks making new highs are REIT, Insurance Companies and other financials including RE, CBL, AIZ, MAC and UDR. Insurance companies have to invest their reserves somewhere safe.
Something Old, Something New
The chunky 4GL math library creates console applications with very little GUI grace. The solution to the quagmire came in the form of .NET wrapper around the console application. All the niceties of a modern GUI with the number crunching under the hood.
Being that the 4GL is strictly single threaded, a few tricks were needed in order to accommodate the inter process communication. Since the wrapper had no way to directly initial a dialog, the 4GL had to instigate the handshake.
Initially I established a channel using a network socket, low level stuff. I found it more responsive and robust to cheat a little. I set off a system file watcher thread from the .NET wrapper and created event handlers for the various types of files it discovered.
Being that the 4GL is strictly single threaded, a few tricks were needed in order to accommodate the inter process communication. Since the wrapper had no way to directly initial a dialog, the 4GL had to instigate the handshake.
Initially I established a channel using a network socket, low level stuff. I found it more responsive and robust to cheat a little. I set off a system file watcher thread from the .NET wrapper and created event handlers for the various types of files it discovered.
Phil Windley
Phil Windley does a great service in promoting technology and ideas via the IT Conversations web site. Find out more about him:
Phil Windley
IT Conversations
Phil Windley
IT Conversations
Go!
IT Conversations had guest Rob Pike describe the reasoning behind the Go programming language.
audio clip
audio clip
Monday, February 21, 2011
Umbraco or Bust
When Install the Umbraco CMS via WebMatrix I had to change my security setting to "SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode".
What's IT Cool
What is IT cool? IT cool is Dependency Injection, Silverlight, HTML5, Singletons, Fluent Interface, Test Driven Development, Refactoring, jQuery, Ruby on Rails, and we haven’t even reached the acronyms, MVC, MVVM, WCF, WPF, ORM,...
Of course, you need the right mix of languages. Start with an interpreted scripting base like Perl or now a days Ruby, then throw in the compiled language C#, Java or whatnot. And don’t forget the web languages; JavaScript and PHP.
Of course, you need the right mix of languages. Start with an interpreted scripting base like Perl or now a days Ruby, then throw in the compiled language C#, Java or whatnot. And don’t forget the web languages; JavaScript and PHP.
Monday, February 14, 2011
PodCasts
PodCasts are an incredible resource for sharpening the saw. For those, like myself, who have a chunk of drive time, podcasts are definately the answer. A key attribute is the cost all this information -- fee.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Color Palette
The color palette was a little tricky, when using the Forms.ColorDiaplog control and custom colors. The custom color list must be integer, but you can't use the color.toargb. The work around is
dim intColor = Microsoft.VisualBasic.RGB(color.R, color.G,color.B).ToString
for each color in the custom list. I'm not sure if the list is fixed at 16 colors, but when I assign custom color to a list of 50 colors the dialog only displays 16 custom color. In addition, the return color list is only 16 colors.
It helps to read up a bit on the Windows Color Model.
Another pitfall was attempting to turn the custom color integer list back into windows colors. You will be tempted to use the obvious
c = Color.FromArgb(intarr(idx))
routine, but no, you must use
c = System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.FromOle(intarr(idx))
dim intColor = Microsoft.VisualBasic.RGB(color.R, color.G,color.B).ToString
for each color in the custom list. I'm not sure if the list is fixed at 16 colors, but when I assign custom color to a list of 50 colors the dialog only displays 16 custom color. In addition, the return color list is only 16 colors.
It helps to read up a bit on the Windows Color Model.
Another pitfall was attempting to turn the custom color integer list back into windows colors. You will be tempted to use the obvious
c = Color.FromArgb(intarr(idx))
routine, but no, you must use
c = System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.FromOle(intarr(idx))
Saturday, February 12, 2011
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