The Dark Knight: 6 Things That Bugged Me

Everyone has been talking about how awesome The Dark Knight is - I agree - it’s very awesome. However, it’s not perfect. I was going to write about how awesome this movie is but everyone did that about 3 weeks ago before it was even out. Instead I’m going to address the few nit picky issues that it left me with as I left the theater. While I was very happy with the movie these were the little things that kept eating away at me since I saw it on Saturday. If you haven’t seen the movie yet - first off, what’s wrong with you? - second, do yourself a favor and don’t read this as I’d hate to spoil things for you.

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Heatmaps in WPF using C#: Part 3 Mapping

OK, so if you followed the previous two tutorials, you should have a decent heat map going. Now, that will work just fine if you are using it by itself, but what if the data behind it is geographic and you want to layer your heatmap over a map of say, the US? If that’s the case then we still have a bit of work to do.

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Heatmaps in WPF using C#: Part 2 Adding Color

This is part 2 of my heatmap tutorial for WPF using C#. I’m going to explain how to color the mask that we created in the first part of the tutorial. To do this, we will need to create a gradient and then replace the colors one by one. Surprisingly, (to me at least) this goes really quickly. I mean, who would think iterating through a for loop on a byte[] with a length of 8.7 million would be quick?

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Heatmaps in WPF using C#: Part 1 The Mask

I found myself with a little extra time at work and decided to look into a side project I had been thinking of for a while. It’s not really anything that helps the business but it’s a neat visualization of our data - a heatmap. Heatmaps are one way to visualize 3 dimensional data - in my case, position (two pieces of data) and rate of occurrence. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it in GDI+ or WPF but I figured there would be plenty of examples either way. Boy, was I wrong.

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Bug Labs

When I was a kid I loved playing with Legos. Ok, I still do. I loved being able to create anything I wanted. It was the ultimate toy for me because I could make something new every day. Well, that passion for creating things eventually shifted to software development when my dad sat me down in front of our old Amiga Computer and showed me how to write small programs using Basic. Writing software is fairly cheap and easy hobby to pick up because all you need is an IDE and you can start building applications.

Now imagine being able to combine your passion for software, legos and mobile devices all into one thing! That’s exactly what Bug Labs is all about!

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Viewing Context

When I was working on my most recent social networking project, we introduced an interest construct that we began referring to as the “Viewing Context”. Before explaining what this was used for, I’ll further explain the construct. Continue reading Viewing Context

Getting Graphic

When I was younger I used to really be in to comic books. It started when I found my dad’s old comic books. These were silver age comics - from the 60s. It was a fairly varied collection - Spiderman, Daredevil, Superman as well as non traditional comics like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Archie. I used to read them all the time.

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Distributed Observer Pattern

While I was on the train coming home from work an interesting idea hit me while I was trying to solve a very common problem. In general, the problem is that the web sucks. But, I think I found an interesting solution.

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Spatial Databases

This morning I discovered the concept of Spatial Databases while researching a few things for my GPS tracking side project using a new Utah based service. I’m not sure how I missed this until now because it seems to be a hot topic among those involved with any sort of GIS (geographic information system) application.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion and focus on various location based services such as map API’s and GeoRSS but I never heard much about how people were actually storing their geographical data. I always assumed that their databases had columns for latitude and longitude using some sort of decimal datatype. Well, it seems that might not be the case because things look to be heading in a very different direction.

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