Philosophical GeekPhilosophical GeekDiscussions about .Net, C-sharp, Cpp, code in general, design, and occasional deep thinking about what it all means. Also my current projects and lego building. Articles
Lots of Good Movies This Year
2008-05-14 14:29:00 We might have to make a few exception this year to our decision not to go the theater anymore…hopefully won’t have experiences like the last time… Cloverfield The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Batman: The Dark Knight The Day The Earth Stood Still Get Smart Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince The Incredible Hulk Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Iron ... More About: Movies , Music , Film , Theater , Links
Tracking database changes using triggers
2008-05-13 14:00:00 Tracking changes in database tables is an incredibly useful feature–especially for operational data that can change often. Having recently had to implement this feature, I thought I’d share some of the techniques I learned. Sample Database First, let’s conceptualize a very simple database consisting of user information (name, date of birth), and e-mails. A user can have ...
Opening Visual Studio solutions from Explorer in Vista
2008-05-12 15:53:00 You’ve installed Visual Studio 2005 on Vista and dutifully changed it to run as administrator, like you’re supposed to. And then… Problem: Visual Studio 2005 solutions no longer open when you double-click them in Windows Vista. In fact, when you double-click nothing happens. Solution: Change them to open with Visual Studio 2005 directly instead of the vslauncher.exe ... More About: Opening , Explorer
Now twittering
2008-05-10 00:21:00 Thought I’d try it out. You can follow me at my twitter page and I’ll follow you back. Also trying out putting twitter status on my blog. I’ve been thinking about twitter for a while, but still not sure how I’ll use it. Tags: Personal, social networks, twitter
Software Pick: SyncMyCal
2008-05-09 14:58:00 With the acquisition of a Blackberry I wanted to be able to sync both my work and home Outlook setups to the Blackberry (and to each other). I tried a number of free tools (though they aren’t that easy to find) and quickly concluded I would need a better solution. Enter SyncMyCal. It’s easy, it’s cheap ... More About: Software , News , Tips , Link , Pick
4 Principles of Not Wasting Time
2008-05-06 17:35:00 There are so many postings out there on all sorts of blogs about how not to waste time that I’m not sure I can contribute something very meaningful (certainly not new), but since it’s something I’ve been thinking about, I might as well spill some ideas about it. Definition Any discussion of time-wasting is profitless unless you ... More About: Time , Principles
Announcing: GeekSoftworks.com
2008-05-06 00:24:00 I’ve setup a new domain for a front page for my software hobbies and what will eventually be my “store front”: Geek Softworks It uses WordPress, but it’s not a blog–it’s for the software I write. So far, only a few products are up, including DiskSlicer (a new version!), Windows Media Top 10 Plugin, and Word Count ...
I could get cable for this?
2008-04-29 21:51:00 My wife and I only recently bought a TV, but we still don’t get cable or even have an antenna. If we ever did, the only things we’d watch are Discovery, History, and Food. This is the closest I’ve come to signing up: Tags: inspiration, music, Personal, science, tv More About: News , Music , Film , Theater , Link
Please help with Word Count Plugin
2008-04-29 21:46:00 I was taking a look at the download page for my Word Count Plugin for Windows Live Writer. It’s gotten a few hundred downloads (thanks!), but the single review is actually spam. Unfortunately, I can’t remove it or even report the review from my account since it’s my own software. Plea for help: Can a helpful reader ...
Rudeness is destroying the arts
2008-04-28 21:59:00 or Why I Don’t Leave The House Anymore “Am I disturbing you?” The last movie I saw in the theater was the 3-D version of Beowulf. The theater was fairly empty–maybe 30-40 people total. Two teenage girls sat two seats to my left. A man was in front of me. The two girls talked loudly through before ... More About: Music , Film , Arts , The Arts , Rudeness
How to enable Simple Tags support in Windows Live Writer
2008-04-18 18:14:00 I’m using Simple Tags to do the tags on this site. I wanted to enable support for these tag links in Windows Live Writer (it beats having to log in and edit each post after publishing). Quite easy: Click on Insert Tags In the Tag Provider combo, scroll to the bottom where it says (Customize Providers…) and ... More About: Windows Live , Tips , Support
In this universe we obey the law of commutativity
2008-04-17 14:43:00 This kind of thing has happened to be a few times now, so I thought I’d share the fun. In one of our pieces of software we have a process that looks like this: void MyThread() { while (true) { DoFunctionA(); ... More About: Humor , Universe , Code
Need some new audio cable?
2008-04-15 19:36:00 Get it from Blue Jeans. Awesome. (BlueJeansCable .com) (via digg) Tags: Link s /News More About: Audio
How to work an 8-hour day
2008-04-14 21:03:00 One of the things I decided when I started working was that I was not going to be one of those guys who worked 12 hours a day for a company (if I ever become an entrepreneur, all bets are off since I’m working for myself). So far, I’ve been pretty successful, and I’ve noticed ... More About: Work , Hour
GetTextExtent vs. DrawText (with DT_CALCRECT)
2008-04-10 20:35:00 Working on an MFC app that has just been converted to Unicode (finally!), I noticed that one button (which is created dynamically) is too small to fit the text in Korean (and Russian and a few other languages). The code was calling something like: CSize sz = m_btAdjustColors.GetDC()->GetTextExte nt(sCaption); It seems correct, but these script languages are throwing it ... More About: Code
How to catch a NetFlix thief
2008-04-08 20:50:00 Via Geekologie comes the hilarious tale of a man (boy, really) caught stealing NetFlix DVDs from a mailbox. The comments are funny, too. Some seem like they’re obviously written by the neighbor. One issue I didn’t really see addressed in the comments on the post is the overall issue of mail safety. People need to consider ... More About: News , Humor , Links , Link , Netflix
The Bugle podcast
2008-04-03 16:30:00 I just discovered this gem of a podcast. The Bugle is a podcast published by the Times Online. Better writing than the Onion, and funnier than the Daily Show. It’s basically two Brits being witty about the week’s news. I’ve only listened to episode one so far, but found myself laughing too hard to concentrate ... More About: Humor , Podcast , Link
10 Ways to Learn New Things in Development
2008-04-01 20:46:00 Expanding upon one of the topics in my post about 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Developers, I’ve been thinking of various ways to kick-start learning opportunities in my career and hobbies. 1. Read books. There are tons of books about programming–probably most of them are useless, but there are many, many gems that can greatly influence ... More About: Development , Things , Learn
Installed Vista SP1 - no problems
2008-03-21 18:36:00 I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this morning. It took about 45 minutes, two reboots, and afterward I had no problems. It never showed up in Windows Update for me so I used the standalone installer (linked to above), fully prepared to reinstall some drivers. But afterwards, no drivers seemed to have any problems–Device ... More About: Tech , Problems
How to file good bug reports (from Frank Kelly)
2008-03-19 15:41:00 This is an issue I run into constantly at my job. Frank Kelly wrote up a good summary of some items. They’re simple, easy to understand, easy to follow, even for non-programmers. In fact, I’m sending this link out to everyone in my group here at work. Technorati Tags: testing,programming,bug reporting More About: File , Code , Good
Never make assumptions about performance
2008-03-17 14:47:00 The importance of measuring performance changes is a topic that has been covered by others smarter and more experienced than me, but I have a recent simple tale. I’ve simplified the code quite a bit in order to demonstrate the issue. Suppose I have a wrapper around an image (it has many more attributes): ... More About: Performance , Tips , Code , Make , Forms
6 Ways to Increase Your Confidence As You Code
2008-03-06 22:03:00 One of the key requirements for being able to reliably update software is the confidence that the changes you are making are safe. The amount of confidence required increases with the complexity of the system. In my day job I work on a real-time messaging system that can have very, very little downtime. As the service ... More About: Code , Confidence
Why I love LEGO
2008-03-03 16:43:00 For Christmas, I got my wife a neat little townhouse. A LEGO townhouse. She loved it–until she got towards the end of the first model. There was a single piece missing. I went to LEGO’s web site and filled out a simple form. A few weeks later, I got the part and a really nice ... More About: Personal , Love , Lego
5 Books to make you stupider
2008-02-29 16:49:00 Well, after a week of investigation, I’ve settled on a social network for books: Shelfari. It’s attractive, easy-to-use, easy to manipulate many books at once, they have a mobile version, and I have one friend on it (who invited me). Goodreads.com also looked nice, and it almost won. bookwormr.com, the one I originally found was just ... More About: Personal , Books , Sites , Make
Unit testing benefits programmers who are already good
2008-02-28 21:39:00 In order to kick my unit testing skills up a notch, I’ve been reading a lot about it lately. Today I had the thought: “Unit testing only helps already-good programmers.” My reasoning is that bad programmers are going to write bad tests, or not enough test cases, or bad test cases, or won’t take the effort ... More About: Philosophy , Testing , Good , Benefits , Process
Tip: Easily using WaitCursor
2008-02-22 17:31:00 This is really simple and probably common, but it’s a useful tip anyway. Say you need to set a form’s cursor to the wait cursor while you accomplish something. You would do something like this: this.Cursor = Cursors.WaitCursor; //do something this.Cursor = Cursors.Default; Of course, what if “do something” throws an exception? Then your cursor won’t be set back to the ... More About: Tips , Forms
Online reading list - bookwormr
2008-02-20 20:16:00 I found a great site I wanted to share with everybody: bookwormr. To explain: I’ve got 3 large books on my nightstand at the moment: Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Much of my heritage is Scottish, and I got intensely interested in Scottish history during our trip to Edinburgh last year. Code ... More About: Reading , List , Online
Dear Spammers?
2008-02-15 16:16:00 Thank you for your increasing interest in my blog, which is apparently slowly gaining in popularity with legitimate readers too! Unfortunately, my dear spammers, you are idiots. 100% of comments on this blog are moderated–99.9% are filtered before I ever see them. The rest are fairly obvious scams. None of your stupid spammy comments will ever ... More About: Personal , Spammers
Amazon Kindle + Audible = Killer-app?
2008-02-14 14:18:00 My wife sent me a link to the Amazon Kindle the other day, and asked, "Have you heard of this? what do you think?" I think she wants one. I have to admit that the thought of such a device is appealing. I have tried reading e-books on my PDA and BlackBerry occasionally, but other than ... More About: Personal , Tech , Killer , Audible
.Net Reflector
More articles from this author:2008-02-13 16:58:00 Lutz Roeder’s .Net Reflector has been discussed on many blogs before, but I want to give it an additional plug. I recently had to emulate some C# serial-port code in our C++ app. The .Net SerialPort class is great, easy-to-use, and works well. Unfortunately, we’re using a C++ serial port library that does not support ... More About: Tips 1, 2, 3, 4 |
|
 |
|
 |
