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	<title>Philosophical Geek</title>
	<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com</link>
	<description>Code and musings by Ben Watson</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sun, 22 Nov 2009 07:16:16 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<item>
		<title>How to position windows correctly at 120 DPI in WPF</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you want to place a window at a specific place in WPF, it will work pretty much as you expect—unless your DPI is 120 (the default is 96). Here’s a sample that shows how to put it where you want. 
In this case, I want to put a window just under another control, aligned [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/11/21/how-to-position-windows-correctly-at-120dpi-in-wpf/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>A WPF Numeric Entry Control</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ When WPF first shipped, there was a noticeable lack of certain controls we’ve become used to in Win32 and WinForms: Calendar, DateTimePicker, and NumericUpDown. WPF 4 adds Calendar and DatePicker, but not anything for numeric entry.
For my solution I wanted something that behaved very similarly to the WinForms NumericUpdown control.
Some of the specifications:

Allows user [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/11/16/a-wpf-numeric-entry-control/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Review: The Code Book &#8211; the most entertaining book on cryptography you&#8217;ll ever read</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I recently wandered into a thrift store and as is usual in these stores I headed to the book section.(I live by the maxim that you can never own too many books.) The only thing that really caught my eye was a hardcover edition of The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/11/03/review-the-code-book-the-most-entertaining-book-on-cryptography-youll-ever-read/</link>
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		<title>Bing LEGO mosaic</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This is a simple project I’ve been working on during the weekends lately. It’s the Bing logo done in LEGO plates. I’ll be moving it into my office soon.
It took maybe 6 hours of work and is about 3.4ft (1m) wide.
Feel free to leave comments at flickr, or check it out at my other LEGO [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/24/bing-lego-mosaic/</link>
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		<title>C# 4.0 How-To now available for pre-sale!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ For the last year, aside from starting a great job with Bing, I’ve also been working on a book about C# 4.0 and the upcoming .Net framework. The news: it is finally available for presale! This book is not your typical C# reference. It’s designed to be an easy guide to how to accomplish [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/15/c-4-0-how-to-now-available-for-pre-sale/</link>
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		<title>Lots, and lots of tiles</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Over in my flickr account, I’ve posted a picture of&#160; part of the destruction of the LEGO shuttle. I just wanted to show the amount of tiles used in the project—it was a lot, but I didn’t count. The shuttle is sadly no more, but new projects are coming…
]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/07/lots-and-lots-of-tiles-2/</link>
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	<item>
		<title>Lots, and lots of tiles</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Over in my flickr account, I’ve posted a picture of&#160; part of the destruction of the LEGO shuttle. I just wanted to show the amount of tiles used in the project—it was a lot, but I didn’t count. The shuttle is sadly no more, but new projects are coming…
]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/07/lots-and-lots-of-tiles/</link>
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		<title>BrickCon 2009 this weekend&#8212;get your LEGO fix in Seattle!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you’re in Seattle this weekend, BrickCon 2009 is going on, and I’ll be participating for the first time, displaying my Space Shuttle model. 
The convention has more space than ever this year: 35,000 square feet.
The public hours are Saturday and Sunday, 11am-3pm. It’s only $7 per person (or max of $20 per family) and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/02/brickcon-2009-this-weekendget-your-lego-fix-in-seattle/</link>
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		<title>More Photos</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
I finally logged back into my flickr account and uploaded some recent photos from an evening trip to Mercer Island. It was around sunset, the light was beautiful, and I had about two hours to myself to just shoot what I could. 
This hand was part of many holding a chain along some docks. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/08/15/more-photos/</link>
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		<title>Some photos of Pine Lake</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ We went down to one of the many local lakes and I snapped a couple of shots of the lake during sunshot. It’s a small, beautiful lake with a tiny public beach, a dock inhabited by fishermen and a small swimming area. No motorized boats are allowed.
I’m sure there are hundreds of places within [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/08/12/some-photos-of-pine-lake/</link>
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		<title>LEGO Space Shuttle</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Over the last year, I’ve (very slowly) been working on a LEGO model of a NASA Space Shuttle. It’s finally finished, or as much as it will be. I need to move onto other things now.
It’s about 38” long. I have no idea how many pieces—many thousands because every surface is tiled over. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/07/19/lego-space-shuttle/</link>
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		<title>Photos from the 2009 Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon and Half Marathon</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ On Saturday, my wife ran in the Rock and Roll Marathon in downtown Seattle. I roamed around and took pictures of Qwest and Safeco fields and snapped a few of the race itself. Bib numbers I captured (where I could read them) are: 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 1275, 1347, 1350, 1356, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/06/29/photos-from-the-2009-seattle-rock-and-roll-marathon-and-half-marathon/</link>
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		<title>First Bing.com commercial</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Working on Bing.com for the last 9 months or so has been exhilarating. Finally, we can show the world the great stuff we’ve been doing. Here is (I think) the first TV commercial about Bing.com, running as of today.

I kissed Google goodbye more than a year ago and haven’t looked back. I think once people [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/06/03/first-bingcom-commercial/</link>
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		<title>New apps and features from Live Search</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve been meaning to highlight a few of the cool things we’re doing in Live Search. I don’t have any direct involvement in the development of any of these—I just think they’re cool.
Answer Suggestions for IE8
IE8 is awesome, so go get it. Live Search has these things called Instant Answers where it can respond with [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/02/20/new-apps-and-features-from-live-search/</link>
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		<title>Updated CPU usage article</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I made a important changes to the CPU usage code and have updated the article to reflect it. Instead of a critical section, the code uses just the interlocked increment/decrement functions. I also updated the sample demo to use multiple threads to read the CPU usage to demonstrate the thread safety clearly.
]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/02/04/updated-cpu-usage-article/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>How to learn WPF (or anything else)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve recently been learning WPF. This is a huge topic that is uncontainable by any single book, tutorial, or web-site. The complexity and breadth of this framework is nearly oppressive, but the results are incredible. Or rather, I should say, potentially incredible.
From everything I’ve read, people who have suffered through the WPF learning curve have [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/01/29/how-to-learn-wpf-or-anything-else/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Determine CPU usage of current process (C++ and C#)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Updated 2/4/2009: I changed the implementation of these classes from the original:

Instead of a critical section, InterlockedIncrement/Decrement is used.
The sample driver program now demos using multiple threads using the CpuUsage class to show thread safety.

Download the C++ and C# projects that accompany this article.
Just to make it clear, there is no API called GetProcessCpuPercentage(). To [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/01/03/determine-cpu-usage-of-current-process-c-and-c/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>An easy stack layout panel for WinForms</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This is a simple, but useful tip. Users of WPF are spoiled. They have all sorts of layout options. Those of us still working in WinForms have FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel. That’s it. WPF has those and more.
For my current project, I needed a panel to layout controls vertically. The TableLayoutPanel can be awkward to work [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/12/12/an-easy-stack-layout-panel-for-winforms/</link>
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	<item>
		<title>Malware Detection in Live Search and Webmaster Tools</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Live Search has recently released some great new features that I want to highlight. The first is from the Webmaster center, which is the team I was hired on.
With the new Webmaster Tools, you can now see which pages on your site are infected with malware (aka drive-by downloads). The links are clearly highlighted and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/12/04/malware-detection-in-live-search-and-webmaster-tools/</link>
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		<title>NDepend: A short review</title>
		<description><![CDATA[NDepend is a tool I’d heard about for years, but had yet to really dive into recently. Thanks to the good folks developing it, I was able to try out a copy and have been analyzing my own projects with it.
Here’s a brief run-down of my initial experience with it.
Installation
There is no installation file—everything is [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/11/29/ndepend-a-short-review/</link>
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