Taken May 19, 2008 in a Sharper Image while on vacation:
Month / May 2008
Waiting on a plane … can it be beautiful?
When your plane is scheduled to depart — yet you can see into the cockpit of the plane that the pilot is not sitting down — that usually indicates there will be a delay. After a long hour and a half wait for a “in 13-minutes status update”, I noticed the sunset over the plane to our right and snapped this. The photo is as good as I could do through a scratched marred outside window.
Technical Interview Question #6
Write code which determines if 2 arrays of Points (x, y), in a two-dimensional coordinate system, could likely represent a “pinching” motion made famous by the iPhone. Consider the Points to represent a series of touch-coordinates by a user.
Bonus: Make it so that the code works for either as a pinch or a pinch-to-expand.
Not a WPF Annoyance — IsOpen on Menus, etc.
I saw this post earlier:
For all you people Googling frantically wondering why there’s no .Show() method or a direct replacement on ContextMenus in WPF, it’s because someone had too much to drink and replaced it with simply setting the .IsOpen property.
It’s intentional and makes sense if you understand WPF, although some might find it annoying (I don’t). The IsOpen property is a Dependency Property which you can use with triggers (for animations, etc.). There’s no reason to add a method that sets the property (and the corresponding Hide). It may not be entirely consistent with other frameworks you’ve encountered, but it’s a reasonably consistent and important pattern in the world of WPF.
Comboboxes are similar, having a IsDropDownOpen property.
The slight inconsistency comes from the Window class Show method. That one is a bit trickier as it’s a synchronous call, whereas setting Visibility to Visibility.Visible is an asynchronous set (meaning that it returns immediately, even though the Window may not be visible yet and any events that may be attached to the window may not have fired).
More Presentation Tips
I’ve been to a few conferences recently where the speakers were diligently following the guidelines I set forth early this year: How to give the worst possible presentation.
Scott has a few serious tips here:
Of all of the tips — the one that consistently frustrates me is: FONT SIZE. “Can you see this?” Arrgh. JUST MAKE THE FONT BIG TO BEGIN WITH. Even though many in your audience CAN read your 9 pt font just fine, MOST would rather not if they had a choice.
What have you seen recently that has driven you nuts at a presentation?
I’ve seen far too many “readers” and too many that spend 2 or 3 minutes on walking through the agenda for a 1 hour presentation.
I’d like to propose that in conference scenarios the presentation agenda and session title are put up on the screen prior to the session starting. Then, just jump right into the content when the session starts.