I’m innocently developing a device context class for my LFC framework and I want a method called SelectPen. All of a sudden I’m getting very weird linker errors about how SelectPen is not defined. It turns out that SelectPen is a macro defined in windowsx.h as an alias for SelectObject. #define SelectPen(hdc, hpen) ((HPEN)SelectObject((hdc), (HGDIOBJ)(HPEN)(hpen))) [...]

I recently embarked on a complete overhaul of my digital music library–including re-ripping all of my hundreds of CDs into WMA at 192 Kbps. It took a few weeks to get through  that, and now I’m going through each album “normalizing” it–fixing up names, album artists, composers, etc. It’s quite an effort and very tedious [...]

I needed a simple array of strings today, and I needed to be able to return it via a property. I could use a simple array, but that has some significant drawbacks. I could use an ArrayList, but the indexer returns an object, which would force the application to always cast it. I decided to [...]

NPR ran a fun story the other day about coming up with words to express feelings or situations that we don’t have a word for. My question is: what’s the word for the fear of writing “Love, ” (Like you would maybe automatically do to your spouse) at the end of an e-mail to your [...]

The problem with multiple choice/true-false tests is that the more you know, the more answers become “that depends.”

Much is being made lately about vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, and various people are either haughtily dengrating the Mac while others are pooh-poohing the results with bad logic. All of the ridiculous claims of “My OS is [better | more secure | safer] than your OS” is getting old. All these problems really do [...]

Our relationship has been a long one, but at long last the time has come to go our separate ways. I can’t say our relationship has been a happy one. I remember the long nights of walking up and down your aisles, looking in vain for a decent movie, only to return home empty-handed to [...]

One of my personal goals this year is to go through Petzold’s book on Programming Windows. During that 1500+ page journey I’m creating a framework class library for my personal use while developing Windows applications. This way I can simultaneously learn the intricacies of Win32 while at the same time developing a framework library that [...]