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The rarely updated blog of Joel Dixon

Viewing blogs posted in February, 2009

Thursday, February 05, 2009

"I need to harvest my crops"

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 05/02/2009 22:36:42

My mum moved house recently, which meant she has to go 3 weeks without internet access. Two years ago this would have only affected my music sharing brothers. But as a sign of the times, Mum called me yesterday asking what kind of options were available for "short term" internet until they wire up the new place. Like "Can you get pre-paid internet like you can for mobiles?" etc. I asked what she'd mainly be using it for - to better offer suggestions - to which she replied:

Quoting Mum:
I need to harvest my crops!
Turns out Mum is pretty entrenched in some crop harvesting facebook application - and if she doesn't log on for three weeks her crops will die. Oh - but that's not the only reason - she needs to check emails and use internet banking as well




Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Rafael Nadal is a shaved monkey

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 04/02/2009 20:18:23

Bell and I were watching the final of the Australian Open the other night, between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. I was hoping that Federer would win to tie Pete Sampras' record, but Bell was barracking for Nadal because "he looks cute". Cute? Sure, as much as Abu looks pretty cute. Is it only me that thinks Nadal shares many physical traits with a monkey?

Compare the Pair
(Rafa is the one on the left)

So for the rest of the match I was explaining how the events on TV further prove that a monkey named "Rafa" was stolen from the zoo, shaved, and given a tennis racquet. How his shoes aren't two sizes too small to make him quicker on the court - it's just a sneaky way to hide his small monkey feet. How he didn't understand what the trophy was, so he decided to bite it. And how his constant wedgie picking is easily explained - monkeys just aren't used to wearing pants.

My personal favourite part of the game was during the third or fourth set, when "Nadal" had a quick snack between ends to conserve energy. Was it a coincidence that that snack happened to be a banana? I think not.

Banana 01
He gets really serious when the bananas take too long to arrive

Banana here
"Banana go down here!"

Today I was wondering whether anyone else has stumbled upon the monkey tennis champion conspiracy as I have. Turns out they have. I don't know why the mainstream media haven't noticed already. Will be an interesting news day when it happens!

Monkeying Around
Just messing around




Sunday, February 01, 2009

Enum Members and the .NET Compact Framework

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 01/02/2009 16:37:16

When working on my latest weekend coding project, I am occasionally limited by the methods offered (and not offered) by the .NET Compact Framework (XNA projects are compiled against the compact framework). Usually these limitations are pretty minor (i.e. as TryParse is not available, I need to put a try-catch block around a regular Parse call).

Today I stumbled over another unavailable method - Enum.GetNames(). The GetNames method is called when using Reflection to determine, at runtime, the elements in an enumeration. It took a bit of hunting and experimenting - but here's a Compact Framework-friendly method of achieving the same thing:

C# Code:

enum ShakeFlavour
{
Chocolate,
Strawberry,
Vanilla
}

Type type = typeof(ShakeFlavour);

// Print the list of enum elements - Public and Static BindingFlags required
// to skip internal "value__" field
FieldInfo[] fields = type.GetFields(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static);
foreach (FieldInfo info in fields)
{
Console.WriteLine(info.Name);
}

// Parse an enum element from a string
string myFlavour = "Strawberry";
try
{
ShakeFlavour enumObject = (ShakeFlavour)Enum.Parse(type, myFlavour, true);
Console.WriteLine("Shake Flavour: {0}", enumObject);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("enum element not recognised");
}

It's pretty good that Reflection is included in the compact framework - but it's slightly surprising that they couldn't fit in the Enum.GetNames() method as well.





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