Version v = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version;
string About = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, @"YourApp Version {0}.{1}.{2} (r{3})", v.Major, v.Minor, v.Build, v.Revision);

Labels: .NET, noteToSelf, windows.forms

Stranger Things Happen

From Publishers Weekly
The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement. In "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," a na‹ve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover's physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in "Travels with the Snow Queen" reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clich‚s of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way. In the book's most effective tale, "Vanishing Act," a young girl's efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. "The Specialist's Hat" features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father's parental neglect as their mother's death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward freshman exercises in the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Pump Six and Other Stories 

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bacigalupi's stellar first collection of 10 stories displays the astute social commentary and consciousness-altering power of the very best short form science fiction. The Hugo-nominated The Calorie Man explores a post–fossil fuel future where genetically modified crops both feed and power the world, and greedy megacorporations hold the fates of millions in their hands. The People of Sand and Slag envisions a future Earth as a contaminated wasteland inhabited by virtually indestructible post-humans who consume stone and swim in petroleum oceans. The Tamarisk Hunter deals with the effects of global warming on water rights in the Southwest, while the title story, original to this volume, follows a New York sewage treatment worker who struggles to repair his antiquated equipment as the city's inhabitants succumb to the brain-damaging effects of industrial pollutants. Deeply thought provoking, Bacigalupi's collected visions of the future are equal parts cautionary tale, social and political commentary and poignantly poetic, revelatory prose. (Apr.) 

Magic for Beginners

From The New YorkerLink's second collection has a McSweeney's-like tendency to digress, but does so without irony. Whether describing witches filled with ants that carry pieces of time, or an orange-juice-colored corduroy couch that looks as if it "has just escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture," these stories examine American middle- and lower-middle-class life from unexpected angles that mix fairy tale, science fiction, and zaniness. In Link's worlds, a village takes refuge in a magical handbag, and a convenience store serves zombies as an experiment in retail. Two stories with zombies is perhaps too many, though the first effectively marries humor and horror. Reading Link, one has a sense that sometimes a person needs to wander off for a better perspective, and sometimes a person simply needs to wander off.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle 

Labels: books, Other Stuff

The cost to Samsung would, however, not be limited to whatever the court determines it has to pay Apple on a per-unit basis. There would also be the cost of having to maintain two different code trees (one for the U.S. and one for countries in which Apple has won or may win injunctions) for different jurisdictions.

Labels: apple, patents

In few words, as I have said already before, null is == only with null and undefined, which means we can avoid completely redundant code such:

// Mr D way
if (v !== null && v !== undefined) {
    // v is not null neither undefined
}

// thanks JavaScript
if (v != null) {
    // v is not null neither undefined
}

Labels: javascript, JSLint

UNHEX(REPLACE(uuid, '-', ''))

will convert uuid to 16-byte string
There's no easy way to do a reverse conversion yet. HEX() will do, but
you'll lose dashes.

Labels: mysql, noteToSelf

We use his adapter with my MacBook Air. Works perfectly. Now, he’s really pissed.
We get in the car, go to the apple store and talk to the folks there. After a bit of mucking around, they came up with a simple solution, which fixed the issue:

Go to System Preferences
    Open Energy Saver
    Select Higher Performance
    Enjoy the use of your adapter and monitor.

Labels: macbook, retina

Although Model-View-Controller (MVC) is known by nearly every Web developer, how to properly use MVC in real application development still eludes many people. The central idea behind MVC is code reusability and separation of concerns. In this section, we describe some general guidelines on how to better follow MVC when developing a Yii application.

Labels: coding, mvc

Allowing items to be dropped between arrays

The next feature that I wanted to support was allowing an item to be dropped between multiple arrays. The logic necessary to make this happen is quite similar, but we need to know a little more information when an element is dropped. We need to know the data item, the item’s original parent array, and the item’s new array.

Labels: coding, javascript, knockout, noteToSelf

All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed.

Labels: coding, javascript, JSLint

5.2. Why did I release it under GPL?

I'm using GPL programs for a very long time now and learned very much by having a look at many of the sources. Hence this is my "Thank You" to all programmers that also did so or will do the same.

Labels: diff, git, merge, tfs

VS 2010 introduces a new “View Call Hierarchy” feature that allows you to quickly discover where a particular method or property within your code-base is being called from, and allows you to quickly traverse the call tree graph throughout the code-base (without having to run or debug the solution).

Labels: visual studio

Put simply, an advanced breakpoint is a breakpoint with one or more modifiers applied. A modifier allows you to change the runtime actions or conditions that will cause the breakpoint to be triggered, or in some cases even set.

In order to set an advanced breakpoint, you must first set a normal breakpoint and then choose a modifier to set from a context menu.

Labels: visual studio

The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they've actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They're not sending bombs at each other.

I think both Tim [Cook, Apple's CEO] and Larry [Page, Google's CEO], the sort of successors to Steve [Jobs] and me if you will, have an understanding of this state model.

So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It's a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually assured destruction: patent Armageddon - an unending series of suits and countersuits that would hobble the industry and its customers

"It's a tinderbox," Moglen says. "As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere."

Labels: copyright, Google, linux, patents

We recommend minimizing the number of levels in a branching hierarchy. Adding an integration layer between Main and the Feature Team branches effectively doubles the merges required to move changes between the Main branch and the Feature branches. Branching helps isolate changes, but the cost of branching is the resulting effort needed to merge code between branches and to resolve merge conflicts that always seem to present themselves. Adding an integration layer doubles the merges and likely doubles the effort to resolve merge conflicts.

Labels: git, tfs

Labels: git, source control