January 2004 Archives
This guy built a little computer like the PDA I wanted to build last year. I wish I knew how these people assemble these BGA-component-based boards. Do they send them out somewhere?
Here is a way for dads to contribute to the baby-raising process. You can make formula in batch!
You need a 32-ounce Nalgene bottle, an empty gallon jug, and a small measuring cup. Also, I assume that you have regular formula, which is one scoop per 2 ounces.
Why do radio news announcers sprinkle "of course" into every third sentence? Examples:
"Kerry, of course, leads New Hampshire primary polls by a comfortable margin..."
"The Lord of the Rings has of course been nominated for several Golden Globe awards..."
The dictionary definition is "as might be expected," but the colloquial use is more like "it's universally known that." Problem is, news announcers apply this to things that are not universally known. In fact, if the average listener knew both the facts in the examples above, nobody would need to listen to the news.
The Mars rover has been silent for 24 hours. I hope it's not dead!
Why doesn't my modeless WTL dialog act like a dialog? This is old hat for any MFC programmer, but it took me a little bit to get it right.
The Iowa caucus is tomorrow. Polls say that the four leading Democratic candidates, John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, and Howard Dean, are neck-and-neck in the polls. One might interpret this as negative for Dean: if he has captured the lion's share of press in the past few months, why isn't he farther ahead? I have an answer.
I'm having fun this weekend with WTL, the Windows Template Library. Feels a little like Java programming, oddly enough. All the code tends to get written in header files, inside the class declaration.
There is a huge amount of sample code on Code Project, often with helpful articles.
Mary called last night and said Emily has a tooth! It's a lower front tooth. This explains why she hasn't been sleeping so well the past few nights.
Today Martha went to the drugstore and bought pretty much every item they sold for stopping baby tooth pain. The Oragel reportedly worked like a charm.
I finished the refactoring of WRouter. The reason for the refactoring was my observation that each time I wrote a new object in the system, the unit tests were getting harder and more complex to set up -- each new object required instantiation of at least one of all the previous objects in the system. This was a clue that I wasn't encapsulating things very well.
All the sample code I found on the net dealing with async Wininet uses globals for various items shared between the main flow and the callback function. The use of globals masks a problem.
Mary and Emily are going to Arizona this weekend.
Emily has been pulling herself up to a standing position. Unfortunately, the trip back down to Earth is a little less graceful. She bonked her head on the wall and ended up with a mark.
