BitWorking Theories on software development

2 weeks.

Anyone heard from Matt Griffith in the last two weeks? I hope everything is okay.

Don't just stand there, Do Something!

Larry Lessig says that we're not active enough politically and if we don't do anything our freedoms will be taken away. [aaronsw]

And from my own backyard in NC: Thanks to the Honorable Howard Coble for putting NC on the map for trampling citizens freedoms.

Ok, I'm suffuciently fired up to do something, but besides donate to the EFF and write to my represtatives what else is there to do? How does the WWF organize itself and get so much air time? We, tech people, need to take some lessons from the old hands at this...

Some days I need to slow down and listen more.

Of course Brad Wilson was perfectly correct when he pointed out:

An alternative to get "one happy feed" is to use the RSS XML to render your home page, using XSL-T or active code. Gets you to the same place by a different path...[dotnetguy]

Which is exactly what I'll be doing in my blogging software. RSS is cool and perfect for this application, but no, I haven't sipped the RDF cool-aid just yet.

diveintoaccessibility.org

Mark has finished his "30 days to a more accessible weblog" and launched diveintoaccessibility.org. An awesome resource, which I will carefully follow after I migrate from Radio.

Pamphlet

I may not have any code done on it yet, but I do have a name for my blogging software already picked out: Pamphlet. Common Sense will tell you why I picked that name.

Guerilla k-logging

David Gammel on guerilla k-logging (my term not his).

.NET GDI+

I have been able to dig into the GDI+ part of .Net thanks to a new project at work. I am amazed at the clean design and capabilities so far, this coming from a background of trying to do equivalent things using straight Win32 API from C++. You can import GIFs, JPEGs and even PNGs keeping the alpha layer intact. Stretch, skew, flip and rotating images is supported. Here is a simple program to display a PNG (with transparency) in a Window:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.Drawing.Text;
public class TestForm : Form {
	protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e) {
		BitMap image = new Bitmap("MyImage.png"); 
		e.Graphics.DrawImage(image, 60, 10);
	}
	public static void Main() {
		Application.Run(new TestForm());
	}
}

You don't want to see the equivalent C++ code...