How We Found the Missing Memristor

IEEE Spectrum: How We Found the Missing Memristor:

"Memristor is a contraction of “memory resistor,” because that is exactly its function: to remember its history. A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance depends on the magnitude and polarity of the voltage applied to it and the length of time that voltage has been applied."

Anders Hejlsberg Video on C# Dynamic

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog : Anders Hejlsberg Video on C# Dynamic

Query: How to Cut Styrofoam

How to Cut Styrofoam | eHow.com - Brief list of various methods

Hot wire foam cutter - Instructables.com: Step by step design using yardsticks for frame.

Foam Cutter - A more polished design using a nicely built spring loaded frame and a custom power supply.

Rocket Team Vatsaas Hot Wire Foam Cutter - PVC frame and a model railroad transformer.

YouTube - DIY hotwire cutter for styrofoam shaping - Using a car battery charger. Not pretty, but it works in the video.

Your Single Best Action For Saving Money

The Simple Dollar - Your Single Best Action For Saving Money:

I like the quote from Mary in comment #21:

"...the best way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket!"

It's a reminder that, no mater how good the price, if you buy something you're not saving money.

Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes

Tim Sneath : Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes

Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits

Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits—By Wendell Berry (Harper's Magazine):

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning."

Kaxaml

Kaxaml:

"Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a 'split view' so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content (kind of like XamlPad but without the gigabyte of SDK)."

The 62.5% Solution

How to size text using ems | Clagnut : Typography : CSS techniques

body {font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */

Saw this technique used in the CSS for a WordPress theme but didn't know just how it was setting 1em to 10px. This explains it.

24 ways

24 ways - web design and development articles and tutorials for advent

Hadn't thought of celebrating Advent with web design, but why not? It's a geek thing.

PNG8 - The Clear Winner

SitePoint Blogs: PNG8 - The Clear Winner: "While there still may be times when full transparency control in all browsers will demand the PNG32 hacks, personally I think PNG8 should become the default choice for web transparency effects."

Amanda Ripley - Attitude: More Important than Exercise

Amanda Ripley - Attitude: More Important than Exercise:

This all reminds me of a fantastic quote by the theologian Charles Swindoll...

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home."

Free CSS Templates

Download free CSS templates - Free CSS Templates:

"All of my templates are free for any type of personal or commercial use (provided you follow the license) so you do not have to pay me anything to use them. All I ask is that you link back to my website in some way. I also update my site with new templates regularly so check back for even more free CSS templates."

PDFsharp

PDFsharp:

"PDFsharp is the Open Source library that easily creates PDF documents from any .NET language."

pyPdf

pyPdf:

"A Pure-Python library built as a PDF toolkit."

NolaPro

Accounting & Business Software | Free Web-Based NolaPro

NOTEPAD++

NOTEPAD++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

I have been using Notepad++ for several months. It works well for editing XML as well as source code and plain text. Looks like it can go well beyond basic editing too. There are many features and plug-ins that I have not explored.

Note-to-self: Hold Alt+Shift to enable column selection mode.

PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions

PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions:

"The PCRE library is a set of functions that implement regular expression pattern matching using the same syntax and semantics as Perl 5. PCRE has its own native API, as well as a set of wrapper functions that correspond to the POSIX regular expression API. The PCRE library is free, even for building commercial software."

RingCentral CAPTCHA Strikeout

I tried to sign up for a ringcentral.com account today but either I am dyslexic and still can't see the mismatch or their challenge-response system is broken. I did call the number and spoke with a gentleman (from his accent I assume he is in a foreign call center - but I only assume that) who offered to sign me up but didn't seem concerned that there may be a problem with the web site. I didn't pursue it further and I didn't sign up. If their web sign up system is broken I'm not sure I can trust the web-based tools they provide to manage account features.

I had TimeSnapper running at the time so I went back and looked at my attempts. These are screen clips from three different attempts to submit the form:



This is the dialog I got each time:



This was disappointing because it looks like they have a decent service. I may try again later. Maybe I am wasting time clipping screen shots and writing about this but I think this is something businesses need to be careful of. A poor challenge-response system kills confidence. I think the worst part is that this happens at a point where the customer has already decided to buy. Do you really want your web site to change their mind?

Stack Overflow

Jeff and Joel have Stack Overflow up and running. I haven't used the site yet, just looked at it briefly, but I plan to check it out as development questions come up.

Bad Finance 101

Bad Finance 101 - A Programmer's Guide - O'Reilly Broadcast:

"O'Reilly's focus has long been on programming issues (or programmer issues) and that focus remains very much in place. However, it is worth understanding how the grief playing out on Wall Street will have a very significant impact upon the IT industry within the next four to six months, even despite the fact that up until now the contagion seems largely to have remained contained in the financial sector."

XSV

Current Status of XSV:

"XSV (XML Schema Validator) is an open source (GPLed) work-in-progress attempt at a conformant schema-aware processor, as defined by XML Schema Part 1: Structures, Second Edition of 28 October 2004. It has been developed at the Language Technology Group of the Human Communication Research Centre in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, with support for one of us (Thompson) from the World Wide Web Consortium."

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Download details: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats: If you have Office 2003 but people are sending you files from Office 2007 (such as Word .DOCX files) then you might find this useful. Just installed it. Only used it to open one document so far but that one worked.

Sound & MIDI Software For Linux

Sound & MIDI Software For Linux is a site maintained by Dave Phillips who sometimes writes for Linux Journal. Dave's most recent article in the October 2008 Linux Journal (which, I believe, won't be available online for a couple months) points out a number of resources for Linux audio and sound. I don't know if the old boxes I have running Linux will be up to the task but I'd like to check out these audio tools as time permits.

jEdit

jEdit - Programmer's Text Editor - overview:

"jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it."

Validator

Validator:

"Validator easily checks one file or a thousand. It efficiently assures all your XML is ready for your workflow."

XML Schemas: Best Practices

XML Schemas: Best Practices

Asteroid animations

Watch Mercury's master mapper's asteroid animations - Astronomy.com blog:

"In Dan Pendick's blog, 'Mercury's master mapper,' he told you we were converting two high-resolution animations from Robert Gaskell, a participating scientist in the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, of the asteroids Eros and Itokawa. Well, we're done converting them to Flash, and you can now view them."

Snoop

Snoop:

"A random utility made to simplify visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime. It's basically a collection of things that may have seemed useful at one time or another with the common goal of making it easier to track down bugs in WPF applications."

Query: VR8 WAV

I was curious if there is a program available that can convert the files (with a VR8 extension) used internally by the Roland VS-880 digital audio workstation to standard WAV files. I have a VS-880 (now quite "legacy") that I used to record the Shack Monks album. I don't really need a converter since I have already archived the audio (two tracks at a time through the S/PDIF port into CoolEdit with the help of MIDI sync).

The search for "VR8 WAV" revealed a forum thread on VS-Planet discussing a RDAC to WAV converter utility. There were also references to a plug-in for a PC digital audio workstation program named REAPER.

I've never heard of REAPER before so I explored that a bit. The company that makes it is Cockos Inc. which was founded by Justin Frankel who created WinAmp years ago. I may give REAPER a try later.

Also found a VStudio Utility Portal page but there's not much on it.

CONDG Meeting - August 2008

Links from the August 2008 Central Ohio .NET Developers Group meeting:

The presenters were from Exceptional Innovation. They discussed the use of Devices Profile for Web Services in their home automation products. After the presentation we were given a tour of their office which includes a model living area where they can demonstrate many parts of the system.

Also, I was not aware that there are different kinds of twilight: Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight, and Astronomical Twilight. This came up in the discussion on programming their Life|ware system. I can't recall now if their system included Nautical Twilight. It should, for the yacht automation market, you know.

And thanks for the pizza.

PowerGUI

PowerGUI.org - Open Source Windows Powershell Community

PowerShell Code Repository

PowerShell Code Repository:

"PoshCode is a collection of PowerShell functions, scripts and modules that are free for public use."

RELAX NG home page

RELAX NG home page:

"RELAX NG is a schema language for XML."

Amaya Home Page

Amaya Home Page:

"Amaya started as an HTML CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents"

Vervet Logic

Vervet Logic:

"Vervet's flagship product is XML Pro, one of the first shipping visual XML Editors. Geared towards making XML accessible to all user levels, XML Pro has an easy too use Graphical User Inerface, and support full validation."

ThinkGeek :: Kill-A-Watt

ThinkGeek :: Kill-A-Watt:

"The Kill-A-Watt allows you to connect your appliances and assess how efficient they are. A large LCD display counts consumption by the Kilowatt-hour, just like utility companies. You can figure out your electrical expenses by the hour, day, week, month, even an entire year. Monitor the quality of your power by displaying Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor."

LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux

LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux:

"PowerTOP combines various sources of information from the kernel into one convenient screen so that you can see how well your system is doing at saving power, and which components are the biggest problems."

Fiddler

Fiddler Web Debugger - A free web debugging tool:

"Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and 'fiddle' with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language."

moq

moq - Google Code: "The simplest mocking library for .NET 3.5 with deep C# 3.0 integration"

CONDG Meeting - May 2008

Links from the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group May 2008 meeting:

The presentation was given by Jeff Hunsaker who works for Cardinal Solitions (thanks for the pizza) and is also one of the founders of the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group. Slides from the meeting are available on his blog.

The presentation was on Microsoft's (ADO.NET) Entity Framework. Jeff asked the audience about Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) and what tools they were using. The most common response was NHibernate. Jeff mentioned Subsonic and gave a brief demo. He also did a demo showing LINQ to SQL.

Also mentioned at the meeting was the upcoming Lansing - Day of .NET on June 21, 2008.

CI Server: Redefine Your Build Process with Continuous Integration

CI Server: Redefine Your Build Process with Continuous Integration:

It is a bad practice to perform dirty builds. It is even worse to perform a "sourdough" build. This is where you require a previous build be present in order to successfully build.

LOL! ...but I totally get it. Just never heard that before. Now I want some pancakes.

CONDG Meeting - April 2008

At this month's Central Ohio .NET Developers Group meeting Scott Walker and Bryan Demuth, who work at TDCI, gave a presentation on debugging production applications. The presentation had a few bugs, some intentional (it was a debugging demo) and some not. In spite of the unintentional bugs I thought Scott did an excellent job of introducing some debugging techniques that are more hard-core than stepping through code in Visual Studio. Bryan was good at the Man in Black thing and from the entry on his blog I take it some in the audience didn't know who Johnny Cash was. What's that got to do with debugging? Nothing really.

Scott's blog has a link to download the slides from the presentation (and the slides include relevant links). Here are a few links related to the debugging tools discussed at the meeting:

Troubleshooting ASP.NET using WinDbg and the SOS extension

How to use ADPlus to troubleshoot hangs and crashes

ADPlus

A blog by Tess that has some detailed debugging info.

Also mentioned at the meeting:

COSPUG: Central Ohio SharePoint Users Group.

COALMG: Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group.

NClass - Free UML Class Designer

NClass - Free UML Class Designer: "NClass is a free, UML-based class diagram editor with full C# and Java language support."

Groovy

When I get a break from my current plunge into C#, Windows Forms Data Binding, and SQL Server I want to dig into Groovy. I was considering checking out Scala which is also a language that runs on a Java Virtual Machine. Groovy just sounds more... (what's the word I'm looking for?)

CONDG Meeting - March 2008

Here are a few links related to the March 2008 Central Ohio .NET Developers Group meeting:

The Central Ohio SharePoint User Group was mentioned.

James Bender gave a presentation on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

James recommended blogs by Michele Leroux Bustamante (That Indigo Girl), Shy Cohen, and Nicholas Allen.

COLUG Meeting - March 2008

I attended the The Central Ohio Linux User Group meeting yesterday. Rick German from Stoneware gave a presentation on their WebOS. In my over-simplified view, WebOS is a system that creates a virtual desktop within a web browser. The system is built around a set of Java applications running on servers that interface with a number of hosted applications including web services and Windows Terminal Server sessions. This provides a unified point of entry to multiple back-end services with single sign-on, and provides centralized control of who can run which applications and where. This looks like some pretty cool technology especially useful for organizations with a lot of users needing access to a limited core set of applications to do their jobs. Still there is something about the idea of the desktop within the browser within a host OS that makes me feel like this is only evolutionary. At some point that outer browser and OS should disappear like the legs on a snake.

Speaking of snakes, Python to be precise, Catherine Devlin announced PyOhio, a "daylong regional miniconference being planned for the summer of 2008 in Columbus, OH."

OpenDisc

OpenDisc: "High Quality Open Source Software for Windows"

Linux Home Automation

Linux Home Automation - Neil Cherry's blog. Neil is the author of Linux Smart Homes For Dummies.

30 Essential Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows

The Simple Dollar - 30 Essential Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows

Sells Brothers

Sells Brothers -- Chris's Home on the Web: "You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, Program Manager in the Distributed Systems Group at Microsoft."

Spending Smart Blog

Mcall.com: Spending Smart Blog: "Spending Smart offers useful, specific and often simple ways to cut household costs, with a focus on plugging the leaks of wasteful spending." - Gregory Karp

SevenPack Beer Blog

SevenPack Beer Blog

Keith Hill's Blog

Keith Hill's Blog: "undefined"

PowerGUI

PowerGUI - Administrative Powershell Console : Main

Andy Budd

Andy Budd::Blogography

Amazon DevPay

Amazon.com: Amazon DevPay, Amazon Web Services: "Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use billing and account management service that makes it easy for developers to get paid for applications they build on Amazon Web Services."

Give.org - Charity Reports

Give.org - Charity Reports

IDesign: .NET Design and Process Solutions

IDesign: .NET Design and Process Solutions

.NET Ramblings - Brian Noyes' Blog

.NET Ramblings - Brian Noyes' Blog

Beth Massi

Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB

DBAzine.com

DBAzine.com: Welcome! Portal for Database Industry

LOGIC, Inc.

LOGIC, Inc.: "LOGIC, Inc.
is resolved to provide you with the absolute best in cleansers and sanitizers for your craft brewing operation!"

BeverageFactory.com

Kegerators, Wine Refrigerators, Water Coolers, Beer Taps, Compact Refrigerators | BeverageFactory.com: "BeverageFactory.com offers the latest products at the lowest prices to make, store, dispense, and enjoy your favorite beverages!"

Homebrew Headquarters

Homebrew Headquarters

Good Brewer

Good Brewer

NORTHERN BREWER

NORTHERN BREWER

Alternative Beverage

Alternative Beverage, homebrew beer making and winemaking

Welcome to Beer-Wine.com

Welcome to Beer-Wine.com

Midwest Homebrewing Supplies

Midwest Homebrewing Supplies: "Home wine making supply and home brew supply available on-line at Midwest Homebrewing Supplies. Search for wine recipes and beer recipes..."

Shack Monks

Shack Monks: If you like classic rock then you may also like Cosmic Rock (whatever that is). Excellent CD to listen to while driving. It's a trip.

PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL Conversion Documentation

PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL Conversion Documentation - Converting to PostgreSQL from other Databases

iinnovate: Randy Komisar

iinnovate: Randy Komisar, Partner KPCB: "Randy Komisar is a partner at famous VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Ealier, he was a co-founder of Claris Corporation, served as CEO for LucasArts Entertainment and Crystal Dynamics, and acted as a 'virtual CEO' for many companies, including WebTV and TiVO."

CGI Environment Variables

CGI Environment Variables - These may be read using the PHP getenv function.

PHP Manual: phpinfo

PHP: phpinfo - Manual

The Joy of Code: Validator Module

Validator Module: "The idea is simple. Configure your website to use our Validator Module and every time a page is rendered you'll get a little report at the top or bottom of your page (your choice)."

Dynamic Drive DHTML

Dynamic Drive DHTML(dynamic html) & JavaScript code library: "Welcome to Dynamic Drive, the #1 place on the net to obtain free, original DHTML & Javascripts to enhance your web site!"

Dan Appleman: Kibitzing and Commentary

Dan Appleman: Kibitzing and Commentary

Simple Tools for Software Modeling

Simple Tools for Software Modeling -OR- It's "Use the Simplest Tool" not "Use Simple Tools" - Agile Modeling - Scott W. Ambler.

Charity Navigator

Charity Navigator - America's Largest Charity Evaluator | Home: "Charity Navigator, America's premier independent charity evaluator, works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of America's largest charities."