My Tumblr blog is for the little things I find or think of that are too small for blog posts, but require more discussion than a tweet.  I’ve got a huge instapaper backlog of sites that I’m supposed to read later.  My del.icio.us list is tainted because coworkers follow it, so it’s more business than personal.  I needed something that I could use to find the little Youtube videos, quotes, and sites that I want to look back on every now and then, and Tumblr fills this need.

So the hierarchy of information about me is as follows:

• My Twitter account is for brief thoughts, discussions with other people on Twitter, and random retweets of links that look interesting.  Twitter doesn’t archive your stuff forever, so it’s all throwaway.
• Links, quotes, or thoughts that I want to stick around forever go to Tumblr.  In particular, if I have a somewhat long comment or want to call out a section of a page I’ll use Tumblr.
• This blog is where longer, more organized thoughts go.

I’m happy with this, it’s cleared up some of the problems I had with using instapaper and del.icio.us.

The next long post will be about the band that played before The Flaming Lips, followed by comments on the venue.  Both will be much shorter than the Flaming Lips blog post.  I’m going to wait a few days because I want this to have some visibility.

A pattern I’ve been following involves structuring my projects with a folder for each control I’m providing support for.  Each folder has its own resource dictionary in a Resources.xaml file, and the Themes/Generic.xaml includes all of them as a merged resource dictionary.  It works great, but I recently had a problem, couldn’t find the solution, and now that I know what went wrong I want search engines to help others out.

My metadata was loaded correctly, but none of my templates were being applied to adorners.  I thought something was wrong with the merging of the resource dictionaries, so I tried moving a template into Generic.xaml; no dice.  Nothing I did seemed to be making the project pick up the template.  I set up some small proof-of-concept projects, and couldn’t find anything visibly different about what was wrong.  The end of the day arrived and I decided I’d just delete the project and try again tomorrow.

Tomorrow became today, and the project was magically working.  I called a coworker over to witness the event, and he began to point at my project.  "Why do you need that junk in Properties; it’s a class library and you won’t use application settings and resources?"  I agreed; yesterday I’d deleted them too.  In fact, early today I had deleted all of them but our source control decided they were important and resurrected them.  I’m glad it did.

It turns out that in AssemblyInfo.cs, which I clicked on for kicks, there is a ThemeInfoAttribute that tells the project where to find the non-themed and themed resources.  If it’s not there, whatever is supposed to look for Generic.xaml doesn’t look there.  Oops.  When I deleted AssemblyInfo.cs, I broke the theming!

So, if you’re depending on themed or non-themed resources in WPF, don’t delete AssemblyInfo.cs!  Or, if you do, make sure to apply an assembly-level ThemeInfoAttribute somewhere else.  Don’t waste half a day like I did!

public void DoSomething()
{
     MethodCall();
}

Welp, either I did something wrong or WordPress lied to me. I’ll try upgrading this weekend.

*Update:* Turns out I needed to manually install this syntax highlighter.

So I ask Google to tell me what it knows about this; looks like a few results, right?  The first two I see are a The Code Project article and the MSDN documentation, which seems like a pretty good first two results.  Buried in the results is a forum post with a user asking about using SlipDx with the D3DImage.  The rest of the results are nothing but blog posts, forum posts, and news posts with nothing but "Dr. WPF wrote an article about this, here’s the link:"

Isn’t Google supposed to be smart?  Why can’t it filter out blog entries with non-ad content of less than 20 words?  I have to wade through a sea of these blog posts which are nothing more than internet trash to find any articles about what I’m interested in.

$40 for SmartFtp. $40 for Winzip. Multiply by all the small tools you need. I won’t even begin to get to get into real development tools like Visual Studio. Windows developers seem to be made of money. One of the reasons I got out of the Windows world a decade ago was the cash I was shelling out just to stay current.

I’m particularly fond of the "Windows developers seem to be made of money" part.  It expresses surprise that somehow, people who develop on Windows have a lot of money to spend on tools.  The viewpoint of astonishment implies that, as a non-Windows developer, the writer does not have very much money and is curious why people who develop for Windows have more money than he does.  Hmmm…

I’m not implying there’s more money to be made on either side of the war, just that I wish people weren’t stupid about their jabs at the other side.  There’s tons of free FTP utilities for Windows; one was mentioned in the very post this user commented on.  I haven’t used Winzip for at least 5 years because the zip support built into Windows is adequate for me, and 7-zip is useful for when I encounter a file that’s not a zip file for whatever reason.  Visual Studio is a nicety but SharpDevelop is just fine and free; a decent coder should be able to get by with Notepad in emergencies anyway.  The poster’s main points are:

1. All Windows development tools cost money.
2. Windows developers can afford the tools because they have a lot of money compared to non-Windows developers.

The first one is false.  The second depends on your definition of "a lot" and "Windows developer", but doesn’t do much to encourage me to hug a Penguin in the near future.

I don’t think it’s the disc anymore because after letting everything sit for a few hours I’m not having any problems with the game.  I’m thinking my Wii’s on the fritz and maybe it needs a cleaning.  I wonder if there’s even a cleaning kit for the Wii?

The game itself is pretty cool.  The reviews seem to complain that it doesn’t bring very much new to the GH series, but that leads me to ask what exactly new we need.  I bought it to play a rhythm and timing game that plays rock music, and this is what the game delivers.  I fail to see how you could be disappointed.