One of my friends is coming over later today – he has asked me to teach him Windows Programming. This might sound like an interesting task, and it is, but not in that way. It is more interesting because he is an excellent programmer, but has never done any Windows programming. He has been doing DOS applications, and has found things do not work really well with DOS under Windows XP.

I will be starting him off with VisualStudio – probably C# since he is a ‘C’ programmer. And that way he does not need to worry about the stupidness of C++, particularly under Windows.

The ‘Pragmatic Programmer’ has a link to a download of their latest book – ‘How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets.’. It describes, aparently, why Michael Faraday, steam engines, Ezra Cornell, the Van de Beurses family and the Edison Effect were so important to today’s computer business. I have yet to read it, but for a limited time it is a free download until it is actually published as a book in a few months.

On the same site there is an article called ‘Live In Concert’ which describes an engineering exercise involved with a piano recital for a long dead pianist, based on an old recording. The concert was played exactly how it was on the 1935 recording, but it was not played back from the record. Link

RitzCamera has an LCD Photo Keyring for sale for US$50. Not a bad idea. I am still waiting for LCD picture frames to arive in Oz.