http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog The scratchpad, the holding area, the ranting place Sun, 28 Oct 2007 15:51:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My home PC is at the point where it needs to be rebuilt - things are crashing and stalling all the time, and it's just not a fun experience overall. At the same time, we've got an old dual-G4 mac kicking around that's only being used for video work, so I ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/10/28/switching-again-kindof/ Amazingly, this doesn't work: TableCell cell = new TableCell(); cell.Controls.Add(cell); Huh. http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/10/02/spot-the-stupid/ I saw yesterday in the Toronto Star that William Gibson was coming to town that night for a talk as part of This is not a Reading Series to promote his new work, Spook Country.  I didn't have time to pick up tickets, but gave it a shot at the ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/09/22/william-gibson-talk-notes/ The winner of the coolest thing I've seen today is the Seam carving demo video - content-aware image resizing.  OK, it's not exactly aware, but it has a novel way of detecting "less important" areas of the image for stretching and shrinking a picture without distorting the crap out of ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/09/18/seam-carving-omgwtf-want-want-want/ DemoCampToronto14 won the "swankiest DemoCamp" award thanks to the Toronto Board of Trade facilities, complete with buffet and fancy wooden chairs. As is the tradition, the format changed again - this time the demos were shorter and then there was an Ignite-style series of sessions, which I liked a lot. I didn't ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/09/18/democamp14-im-glad-i-wore-pants/ I swear, I was about to buy a new motherboard and/or reinstall everything. Firefox was working fine except for one tiny problem. Just a little one. Not a big deal. Every minute or so, it would hang. No click response, no keyboard recognition, the digital ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/09/17/norton-hates-firefox/ I ran into this one today, alternative solutions are welcome... If you're programatically adding items to an ASP.NET dropdown list, you do it with something like this: _cboDropDown.Items.Add(new ListItem("Item Text", "Item Value")); Which is fine for most cases, but unlike with, say, the Text property of the Label control, ASP.NET will HTML encode ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/05/25/encoding-html-entities-in-an-aspnet-dropdownlist/ I finally made it to a Metro Toronto .NET User Group meeting last night. The format was great, with 4 short talks ensuring that if something was too far out of my area of interest the night wouldn't be a write-off. As it happened, they were all excellent. I ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/05/23/metro-toronto-net-user-group-grok-talk-2007/ Minor site update - I dropped the Twitter widget from the sidebar, what with not having updated the thing in a while. I kinda came to dual realizations that a) I don't do a lot of stuff that anyone on my friends list would find interesting and b) I ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/05/22/de-twittered/ So today I got lured into a Yahoo News link to some video. I can't remember what the video was about, but golly whiskers, it sure seemed important at the time, so you could imagine my disappointment when instead of streaming video, I got a message saying that something ... http://www.thrustlabs.com/blog/2007/04/26/remember-when-you-got-what-you-paid-for/