Dev Blog

Recently Amazon introduced the ability to buy instance hours on a ’spot’ market. Rather than try to describe the service myself, here is the description from the spot instances help page:
Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Instances are charged the Spot Price, which fluctuates periodically depending on the supply […]

A problem for the design challenged is the ability to create acceptable icons for desktop applications or for a web site. So it’s great to discover IconWorkshop from Axialis. The idea of the product is simple: compose an icon by layering visual components. The components are just PNG files with an alpha […]

In the previous post I wrote about how Visual Studio crashes seemingly when working with themes/generic.xaml The issue was reported to Microsoft along with a video but, no surprise, there was no response.
Well it seems I am able to fix these issues by deleting the project’s .suo file. I’ve no idea how to […]

Updated 2008-12-12: David LeBlanc has now published the corrected version of the Office Crypto documentation so I’m making my sample code available under a creative common share-alike licence.
Office Open XML decription code
At the end of June Microsoft released many documents which aim to provide normative information about various the protocols and file formats used by Microsoft products. […]

For the past 8 years (or may be longer) some of the ill gotten gains from the UK’s national lottery has been going towards funding sports excellence in the UK.  At the Athens Olympics four years ago the results were ambivalent.  The overall performance (as measured by medals awarded - especially gold) was not as good as […]

Totals at the end of day 15.  Numbers in brackets are medal totals normalized for population (China x 1, EU x 2, USA x 4).

Territory
Population (~m)
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Total

China
1200
49
(49)
19
(19)
28
(28)
96
(96)

Europe
600
89
(178)
106
(212)
101
(202)
296
(592)

USA
300
34
(136)
37
(148)
36
(144)
107
(428)

Medal statistics taken from the official Olympics web site.
Been a good games for Europe - Great Britain in particular.  Fourthin the gold medal league at the end of day 15 (and […]

How difficult can this be?  I later learned this activity has a geek score of 8.0 and the answer to the question is “more than you’d want it to be”.  The old adage has it that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing and I got caught.  The screen on my Inspiron 9300 […]