Along with the Lange Nacht der Museen in Stuttgart, we visited the Mercedes Benz Museum. The new building is only a few miles from our home, yet so far we never had time to go there. Having visited museums all over the world, I can only say “Wow!”. The museum itself has an astonishing architecture, which is not an end in itself but harmonises with the museum’s general concept really well. Everything looks nice and modern, as expected from a brand like Daimler, but the museum does not purely display the company’s achievements. It displays a time-line from the beginnings of cars to the modern day and puts it into the context of different general events in world history. Altogether it is quite an experience - a definite must see when visiting Stuttgart.

Beautiful picture from Freiburg, where we were visiting Linda for her birthday :)

1. Create a Windows Forms application.
2. Drag a RichTextBox onto the form.
3. Remove all text from the RichTextBox
4. Register the KeyPress event of the RichTextBox
5. Put this line in the event function:
   

   richTextBox1.Text = richTextBox1.Text;

6. Compile and type away in your RichTextBox.

I think this is really weirdish yet a little bit fascinating :) I figure presenting a teacher at school with this might cause some confusion. I am sure it would have if my C# class where writing an application that reverses the users input was one of the first simple exercises. Usually one would use a loop or similar.

If you were not able to follow the instructions above, see the full source code below.

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace ReverseString
{
  public class Form1 : System.Windows.Forms.Form
   {
      private System.Windows.Forms.RichTextBox richTextBox1;
      private System.ComponentModel.Container components = null;

      public Form1()
      {
         InitializeComponent();
      }

      private void richTextBox1_KeyPress(object sender, KeyPressEventArgs e)
      {
         richTextBox1.Text = richTextBox1.Text;
      }

      protected override void Dispose( bool disposing )
      {
         if( disposing )
         {
            if (components != null)
            {
               components.Dispose();
            }
         }
         base.Dispose( disposing );
      }

      #region Vom Windows Form-Designer generierter Code
      /// 

      /// Erforderliche Methode für die Designerunterstützung.
      /// Der Inhalt der Methode darf nicht mit dem Code-Editor geändert werden.
      /// 
      private void InitializeComponent()
      {
         this.richTextBox1 = new System.Windows.Forms.RichTextBox();
         this.SuspendLayout();
         //
         // richTextBox1
         //
         this.richTextBox1.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(8, 8);
         this.richTextBox1.Name = “richTextBox1″;
         this.richTextBox1.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(280, 264);
         this.richTextBox1.TabIndex = 0;
         this.richTextBox1.Text = “”;
         this.richTextBox1.KeyPress += new System.Windows.Forms.KeyPressEventHandler(this.richTextBox1_KeyPress);
         //
         // Form1
         //
         this.AutoScaleBaseSize = new System.Drawing.Size(5, 13);
         this.ClientSize = new System.Drawing.Size(292, 273);
         this.Controls.Add(this.richTextBox1);
         this.Name = “Form1″;
         this.Text = “Form1″;
         this.ResumeLayout(false);
      }
      #endregion

      [STAThread]
      static void Main()
      {
          Application.Run(new Form1());
      }
   }
}

The sign says: “Testicles of the mule and the grandfather”. That is some weird salame ;-)

For those who want to know how to do something like this, read on…

The photos are put on the blog via the “Blog this” functionality that can be found on the single photo pages of flickr. In order to use this you need to be a registered member at flickr and the photo you want to post to your blog needs to be marked public. Now, create a new user in your Wordpress blog. I called mine “Ralph via flickr”. Then set up your blog with the newly created user in your flickr account settings. Et voila, everything basically works as planned.

Now the naughty details:

• If you do not like the default way flickr puts its information into your blog posts and want to tweak with the CSS manually, make sure that the user you created has Administrator rights since regular authors are not allowed to add too much style information to their blog posts in Wordpress.
• To offer the visitors the ability to display either, text posts or flickr photo posts, select the displayed posts on your blog by the user who wrote them by setting the ?author_name variable in a link to your front page. In my case the text only link goes here: http://ralphunden.net/?author_name=Ralph

Hopefully that is all. ;-)

I was shopping in Stuttgart with Julia a couple of days back. We went to Strauss and I picked up a couple of bottles of wine. In order to prepare for our trip to Italy, I went for “Primitivo della Puglia 2005″ which was really delicious.

Julia is growing tomato plants in buckets behind our house. They have grown nicely since they have had similar quality sunlight exposure as the vineyards around our house have. They tasted deliciously but the season is coming to an end slowly. With more and more rain, those little guys fall down while being really ripe and slash open their skin. To me the look like casualties amongst the killer tomatoes.

Type type;
PropertyInfo propertyInfo;
string propertyToSet = "NameOfProperty";
foreach (object c in Controls)
{
	type = c.GetType();
	propertyInfo = type.GetProperty(propertyToSet);
	if (propertyInfo == null) continue;
	propertyInfo.SetValue(c, "newvalue", null);
}

As far as I can tell, there is no performance issue here. The number of objects in the Controls collection usually should not be huge. I have heard assignment via Reflection takes about 3-4 longer than accessing a property directly, as accessing a property takes next to nothing in time, 4 times next to nothing is still bearable, so long there are not thousands of controls.