This is a screenshot of: my newest application an example of a programmer not setting access keys Microsoft's latest soon-to-be acquired Outlook add-in a crap joke reflecting frustration with having to delete spam every day (no harm intended to DNJ, I know they're working on fixing the problem!) Mwahahaha...

Wow, Tejas points me to a barcode generator. So here's me in CODE128 (available from http://www.idautomation.com/java/linearservlet.html): I'm sure some interesting things could be done with these...

Woohoo, I got a new PC at work (my 4-year-old HP was getting a bit on). So for a couple of months at least I've got the newest computer in our little department, if you don't count my boss's shiny new widescreen Dell laptop ;-) Here's the specs: PC: Dell Optiplex GX280Processor: Pentium 4 3.0GHz (1MB cache, 800MHz FSB) with Hyper-ThreadingMemory: 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (4 x 256MB)Storage: 2 x 200GB SATA in RAID 1 ArrayCD/DVD: LG "Super Multi" write-anything/read-anything dual layer DVD burner (model GSA-4163B), plus a left-over TEAC DVD+RW (model DV-W58E) That's the new bits - I'm still using my old...

Jeff Atwood links to an online essay entitled “How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary” by Robert Read. Robert's article tries to deal with all the stuff a programmer/developer might face in his/her job, from technical (“how to debug“) to personal (“how to deal with difficult people“) to career choices (“how to grow professionally“), and he does it well. He makes it clear that some of the topics he covers are going to be subjective and represent his opinion only, but knowing that from the outset helps and I reckon that's OK to look at his essay...

One of the things I do really poorly is “networking“, say, among my peers. Too often I either (a) leave these kind of “networking“ moments, or (b) just hang around by myself. Option (c) would be to stick closely with fellow geeks I already know, which is becoming more viable as I gradually meet them. Of course the presence of Option C proves that I must meet some people ;-) As a result of attending Code Camp Oz and naturally bumping into other humans, I've added some subscriptions (in no particular order): Rory Primrose, who coincidentally has the exact same anniversary date as me (linked from Geoff...

Sashidhar Kokku points to Thinking Machine, a AI program that does a graphical visualisation of how a chess program is plotting it's strategy, while you play it in a game of chess. Cool. Make sure you check the About page on the site for an explanation of the visualisations.

This post is a mental placeholder for me and contain only links to articles discussing plugins in .NET. My task is to take these articles at some stage in the future and create a plugin-based approach to a Windows Forms application, using a central navigation “shell“ (like MMC) which provides services like logging, error reporting, user preference management, and most importantly, the ability to load the GUI from elsewhere. The GUI components - sets of related forms or “pages” - will be compiled into exterior DLLs (that's the plan, anyway). This will be used to manage related but separate areas of functionality...

The last installment of my Code Camp Oz diaries are now up - Sunday covers my interview with Geoff Appleby, a visit to the peer discussion room and the end of a great weekend.

Our test server crashed last week, and during the rebuild process I finally had the chance to install the Subversion source control system and get it up and running. The advice on Miguel Jimenez's blog was indispensable (Miguel, I can't leave you a comment as your CAPTCHA images aren't working - but, thanks mate!) I am trying to do the right thing here and have source control in place even for my single-user development, but I wonder if I trust our little test server...what arguments can I put forth to the powers that be to get them to put a source control...

Recently I had the chance to improve some old "previous instance" detection code to add the ability to activate the previous instance. The code I used to detect a previous instance looked like this: Imports System.Diagnostics Private Function PrevInstance() As Boolean If UBound(Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessesByName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly.GetName.Name)) > 0 Then Return True Else Return False End If End Function Looking at this code now I can see many ways to optimise it. It returns "True" if there's...