Monday, September 26, 2005

Wasting some days again, in margaRITAville...

I made it through Hurricane Rita. Well, most everyone did. I spent a total of 7 hours in traffic trying to move around (successfully) and out of (unsuccessfully) the city. After making two miles in two hours Thursday morning, my fiance and I turned around [and] "sheltered" at her west side apartment. We watched a lot of TV, ate a bit of food, held hands a lot, and so on. I did manage to squeeze in an hour on the game Saturday night after we moved the furniture back.

The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security has been making the rounds at the office. I don't work on the system admin side of the house, but I have to pay attention to some security concerns as I develop apps. This article is a good, thought-provoking read that helps keep your head in the game. Check out the link [within the article] to the Feynman article on the reliability of the Shuttle.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Comment Spam

The previous post attracted a comment with an advertising link that had nothing to do with the post being commented on. I consider this comment spam.

I submitted a suggestion to Blogger that they come up with a feature allowing blog authors to "de-link" a comment. This would remove the link while retaining the text. I think a notation should be made to the modified comment to the effect that the blog author removed a link.

And I thought this was going to be a boring Friday.
Houston .Net User Group Meeting

I attended a meeting of the Houston .Net User Group (HDNUG) last night. It was great! The room was packed and the mood was definitely upbeat.

Jerry Fitzpatrick gave a Tip and Trick presentation on "Customizing A .NET Control". He derived a class in C# from Label and proceeded to show how the VS .Net IDE reflected changes made to the properties of the class. Once Jerry made a couple of properties read-only those properties no longer appeared in the properties window. Similarly, Jerry showed how he could create a new property and the IDE would make it available at design time. Good stuff!

Markus Egger gave a presentation on Avalon, XAML, and WinFX. I have got to get me one o' these! Avalon may not quite be a UI paradigm changer, but it's at least a paradigm nudger...a nudge like a baseball bat to the head. Awesome stuff. Excellent presentation. The animation demos made the best impression.

Apparently, Avalon is now called Windows Presentation Framework, and is available here.

HDNUG raffled off a dozen textbooks, a few coffee mugs, 3 copies of CodeSmith, and an 80 Gb USB hard drive. Sweet!