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As a kid, I was a great space ship pilot. Since then, my skills might have gotten a bit rusty, but today while visiting my mother, I found by chance an old Mattel Electornics handheld electronic game, and decided to take it back home.
The game is called "Star Hawk", and it is from the year 1981, as you can see from the dust:
Nonetheless, this game works perfectly even today. And after 25 years, I can still shoot down those evil spaceships that try to invade this land.
The game itself has a simple joystick to control the spaceship with, plus some buttons. The colored Vacuum Florescent Display (VFD) is especially cool -- you can play in the dark!
Of course, since this is a hit game of the early 1980s, some chaps have compiled together a web page for it. And, they even have scanned the manuals!
I'm a fan of workflows and workflow management, which means Microsoft's new Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) is an area I watch closely.
WWF is part of the WinFX programming framework, so it is easy to program from .NET and C#. It uses XAML-based documents (think Windows Presentation Foundation or "Avalon") so you can expect nice support for it in Visual Studio's future versions, etc.
The January 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine has again interesting information about this technology. I wish I just had more time to learn what the magazine writes about.
Windows Vista betas are out, and the chances are you've seen them yourself, too. If you have, now is a great chance to let Microsoft know what you think about Vista, a.k.a. Longhorn.
There's a very simple feedback page on Microsoft's web pages, which I suggest you will fill in as well.
I used a few minutes this morning to test Delphi applications with the latest Windows Vista build I've got, the 5270. I was mainly interested in how Delphi applications written with the latest release (Borland Developer Studio or BSD 2006) would work in Vista, and how they would look like.
I tested a plain Win32 VCL application with several components from the Win32 tab, such as a progress bar and a page control, to name a few.
When such an application in being run on Vista, it by default has a "Windows 2000 look", i.e. gray appearance, rectangle buttons, and so on. However, if you drop the XPManifest component onto the main form, Vista will bring your application into life with the Aero theme.
Now that is cool. The only drawback is that ShowMessage and MessageDlg still look old-fashioned. But if you call the MessageBox API functions directly, Vista will displays its white colored message boxes all right.
I'm yet to hear of an application that doesn't use strings. That said, the System.String class (or the Delphi/C# string type equivalent) is one class I use very often.
But, did you take your time to study what's new in System.String when .NET 2.0 came out? Actually, there's a lot of new stuff! Late last year, I made a blog post about and MSDN article, but even that article only briefly touched the subject.
Well, I'm not going to do a full-fledged research either, but here are some pointers to methods that are new (or rather, have new overloads):
As you can see, there's lot to learn. For your information, I'm working on an utility to list all the changes between .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 for any BCL class. Stay tuned.
My old high school, Lauttasaaren Yhteiskoulu or LYK had today an open house, so I bicycled there (like the old days) with my EOS 5D to meet some old friends and see what the school is up to nowadays.
Of course, I don't know the pupils anymore, but it was fun seeing old teachers who happened still to recognize me (I don't know if it is good or bad :-).
If you have the latest Tietokone magazine (the first one for this year, i.e. 1/2006) you can find two my articles there.
The articles are about virtualization technologies and Ajax programming, total four pages. Enjoy!
Old cars have their quirks, and so has mine. But luckily, there was an easy fix: a new battery for 50 €.
I tried starting the thing this morning to drive to work, but she didn't want to co-operate. I guess she was just unhappy for I left her alone for three days and went to visit another town by train.
After popping up the hood and scratching my head for maybe 20 minutes how to remove the old battery from the car, I went to a local shop, bought a new one and installed it. Now it starts like an angel. Plus, it now again talks German to me, the language on the dashboard was changed to English on the previous visit to the repair shop last summer.
Now that the newest version of Delphi 2006 (or, should I say Borland Developer Studio 2006 or 4.0) is here, the chances are you've heard of its new memory manager.
The original memory manager of Delphi was developed at Delphi 1/2 time, and since then only small updates have been applied to it. The original memory manager has server applications faithfully, but modern applications with their huge memory demands and multi-threaded architectures have shown the limits of this architecture.
Luckily, all this is changing with BDS 2006. Now, System.pas defined a implementation of the memory manager, which is based on the open-source FastMM project. BDN (Borland Developer Network) has an article about this new memory manager. To use it, you just need to rebuild your application with Delphi 2006.
Microsoft's Dave Fetterman has written a short article to MSDN about handling and sorting strings with .NET 2.0. This best-practice document is worth reading, even if you need to explicitly manipulate strings very little in your applications.
Also, if you have installed the MSDN documentation (Document Explorer), you might find the new topic "Comparing Strings" useful. It is available through this URL.
Finally, it should be noted that .NET 2.0 adds new overloads to many methods of the System.String class. These overloads accept a new StringComparison parameter (System.StringComparison). The values of this enumeration let you specify how you want the comparisons to be made.
Just as with about anything in today's world, the Internet is a great place to learn more about the products and technologies that are in your mind. Well, this applies to photography and my new Canon EOS 5D digital SLR as well.
As I've now got this beast for about three months, I decided to share all those places on the 'net I've found useful. Of course, as with all information, it ought to be taken with a grain of salt, but if you get your information from respectable sources, it usually is OK.
DPreview.com, probably the best site when it comes to product reviews and (professional) discussion forums.
Other review sites for Canon EOS gear:
Three sites from Canon:
Some stock photography sites:
Okay, that was a lot links! But just to educate my European readers (and have a record for myself), I'm linking to two German web pages that allow you to compare pricing just about anything related to computers, electronics and photography. It is often said that these thing are cheapest in Germany, and so here you go. Of course, some knowledge of the German language is needed.
Enjoy!
When Windows or a Windows application has something to tell you, you will often see a simple message box on the screen, along with a traditional sound: a beep, pling, boing, or what have you.
A simple sound is a nice attention grabber, until the user gets tired of them and mutes the speakers. Of course, you can also play these so-called System Sounds (one can customize these through Control Panel) from your own applications, but surprisingly enough, there hasn't been anything in .NET Framework to help you do this. Instead, you had to resort to calling the Win32 API directly.
Luckily, as .NET 2.0 is here, Microsoft has added a new namespace to the .NET Base Class Library (BCL). This namespace is simply called System.Media, and it is implemented in System.dll, which means that you don't have to add any new references to your project to use this namespace.
This namespace has a nice class called SystemSounds which allows you to play any of the most common Windows system sounds, for example the ubiquitous beep. To make your application beep, you would simply do this in C#:
System.Media.SystemSounds.Beep.Play();
Naturally, you would also need to add a using System.Media; statement to your source file. Happy beepin'! :-)
Welcome to the new year! :-) I hope you enjoyed the fireworks and had a good time.
Also, if you are reading this using your RSS reader, you got the URL change right. :-)
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