Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Google car in Halifax

I looked out the window today and just happened to see the controversial Google maps "street view" car coming down the road in front of the Metalogix office.

the car records 360 degree images that allow Google map and Google Earth users to virtually drive around and see what things look like from street level instead of from space. the practice has some privacy advocates up in arms because people who happen to be in the camera's lens will be photographed without their permission, and possible without their knowledge.

personally, I don't think taking images like this in public is a problem. but, unfortunately, I was nine stories up, so I had no chance of getting in the shot.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Dalhouise Auto Polo

Dal published this parody in their April fools student paper.


- click for full-size version

Thursday, April 02, 2009

C# ResourceManager path

this is something that would have been nice for them to include on the MSDN page about the ResourceManager class in C#. a ResourceManager is used for localization b/c it allows you to read the right language string from .resx files that you've added to your application.

you may find that you get this error message when trying to read a string out of a resource file:

“Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture. Make sure \"AppName.FileName.resources\" was correctly embedded or linked into assembly \"AppName\" at compile time, or that all the satellite assemblies required are loadable and fully signed.”

the trick here is that you must include the VS project folder in the path when you instantiate the ResourceManager object. So if my assembly is "AppName" and my resource file called "FileName.resx" is under a folder called "FolderName," then the syntax looks like this:

// Declare a Resource Manager for localized string resources
private ResourceManager resManager = new ResourceManager("AppName.FolderName.FileName", System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());

note that you shouldn't include the file extension for the resource file.