New Blog

I’ve exported this blog to chrisjcowan.com/blog.

The Petzold Collection

I now have four books Windows programming books by Charles Petzold.

1. Programming Windows, 5th edition.
2. Programming Microsoft Windows with C#
3. Programming Windows Forms
4. Applications + Markup = Code

That weighs in to about 4100 pages. Now all I need to do is somehow use this knowledge.

StripRegions utility

I’ve posted a small utility, written in C#, to bitbucket: StripRegions.

One feature of the C# language that I dislike is “#regions”. They were added to hide computer generated code. Unfortunatly, real-live programmers like to hide their own rotten code in them too. This utility will strip out your #regions so you have no excuse but to design your code better.

Macworld 2009 keynote thoughts

There was nothing about the next OS X, Snow Leopard, during the keynote. Very disappointing. With Windows 7 getting some good hype, it seems odd that Snow Leopard wasn’t demoed.

A lot of the keynote seemed to cover iLife and iWork. That’s downright inane compared to previous Macworld keynotes, especially since some of the features they demoed can be found in other existing products.

New 17 inch Macbook Pro looks nice, but all this talk about batteries is not too exciting.

The iTunes store is ditching DRM, but with the tradeoff of variable pricing the record labels wanted so bad. This is good news. Maybe I’ll start using the iTunes store over Amazon.

Moved

I’ve got my own hosting, so I moved to chrisjcowan.com.

Well now. I never got a blog off the ground at my domain. On a whim, I’ve decided to move back to this short lived and neglected blog. I’ve also moved back to Texas, so maybe there’s some symmetry there.

Washington Photos

Here’s all the photos on flickr.com I’ve taken in Washington state (brought to you by the magic of tags). If you’re into that sort of thing, here is an RSS feed for all my Washington photos.

First impressions of Washington State

I flew into Seattle June 10, and the next day Mark took me to his place in Oak Harbor on Whidbey island. I already like it here; it’s much nicer than Texas, although it’s more expensive here.

Two things I like about Washington over Texas is it’s not so hot and it’s very green and pretty. When I left San Antonio it was near 100 degrees. Here on the island it doesn’t get above 70 degrees. I often need to put on a light jacket in the middle of June! Besides the pine forests, ocean and mountains, the people on the island seem to grow a lot of plants. They have these parks in Oak Harbor that look more like gardens. For some reason there are very little billboards and fast food restaurants. The effect is a beautiful area.

I think that if I stay here, the quality of life would be better. I hope the surroundings will be invigoration and inspiring.