tommy.blog

I just finished watching Scarface, and I'm very impressed. I always thought Al Pacino was a great actor, but I had never seen any of his earlier work. This just adds a whole new perspective. The movie is strong and violent. It shows the other side of the American dream, it shows what power and greed can do to a guy.

I've just read that the Belgian government chooses OpenDocument as the standard format for exchanging documents within the government. They are however leaving the door open for Microsoft's Open XML, waiting for applications that support it. I hope they will accept OpenXML. I think it's a great file format, and it's just as open as ODF.

When you use Image.FromFile to read an image from a file, the file is locked. The following method reads an image from a file without locking it:

public static class Utils
{
    public static Image ImageFromFile(string fileName)
    {
        if (fileName == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("fileName");

        using(FileStream lStream = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
            return Image.FromStream(lStream);
    }
}

Here's an example how to use it:

// old method that locks the file:
Image img = Image.FromFile("picture.jpg");
// new method that does not lock the file:
Image img = Utils.ImageFromFile("picture.jpg");

I've updated my calculator tool to version 1.3:

• Fixed some bugs
• Added a Clear-action, to clear the input region
• Added some functions: arcsecant, arccosecant, secanth, cosecanth, arcsecanth, arccosecanth
• Added missing functions to the snippets
• Added some templates
• Added formatters, to format a result: euro, dollar, yen, pound, percent, degrees

If you can think of useful templates to put in the Templates directory, just let me know.
You can download it from the Sandbox at Channel 9.

I've updated my calculator tool to version 1.2:

• Fixed some bugs, and added some optimizations
• Added some buttons to the header of the input-region
• Added ² and ³ as synonyms for ^2 and ^3
• Added some functions: gcd, lcm, addTimes, round(x, n)
• Added a new menu to insert snippets
• Added the function New from template, and a directory with some templates
• Comments on a separate line are now also displayed in the output
• Embedded URLs are converted to hyperlinks in the output

If you can think of useful templates to put in the Templates directory, just let me know.
You can download it from the Sandbox at Channel 9.