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Blurry Text with Small Fonts in WPF
Introduction The difficulties with text rendering in WPF have been well documented elsewhere. However, every time I get a blurry button I can’t remember how to fix it. This brief post shows the usual...
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Why Some Password Security is a Waste of Time
Introduction This is very off-topic, but a recent MSDN article and a paper it referenced got me thinking about password security in our organization. If my maths is right, the costs of the way we do...
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Delegate Syntax in C# for Beginners
Introduction I have been programming with C# since it came out but I still find the delegate syntax confusing. This is at least partially because Microsoft have changed the recommended syntax...
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Creating Code Listings in WordPress using Visual Studio
In WordPress it has historically been quite hard to paste code listings into the editors and get them to look good. There are some plugins that try to do it, but none of them seem to work very well...
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Floating Point Arithmetic
We had a discussion about floating point arithmetic on 32-bit processors in our team this morning: here’s a brief note I made on the subject a long time ago. double a = 95.0; double b = 94.0001; double...
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15-Minute Beginner’s Guide to Windows 8
Introduction Windows 8 has been released to manufacturing, and is available to developers on MSDN. It’s quite disorientating for people who’ve worked with Windows for a while. I’ve been playing with...
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Credit Default Swap Index Trading: Bid/Offer, Rolls, Roll Conventions
Introduction I apologize in advance for the rather esoteric subject here, but I have in the past done some work with our CDS index trading desk. The roll dates for the US indexes are once again...
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Beginner’s Guide to Techniques for Refreshing Web Pages: Ajax, Comet, HTML5
Introduction This article briefly discusses the technologies used in modern browsers to display web pages, and goes into a little more detail about the user experience on those web pages, in particular...
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CPDOs for Beginners
Introduction CPDOs (constant proportion debt obligations) are in the news currently. In spite of a judge describing a CPDO issued by ABN Amro as ‘grotesquely complicated’ the basic concept behind the...
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Why Starting a New Task in the Task Parallel Library (TPL) Doesn’t Always...
The Task Parallel Library in .Net is a wonderful resource. However, one thing that is a little confusing is that it is actually possible to start a task that runs on the same thread as the current...
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Asynchronous Programming in .Net: Async and Await for Beginners
Introduction There are several ways of doing asynchronous programming in .Net. Visual Studio 2012 introduces a new approach using the ‘await’ and ‘async’ keywords. These tell the compiler to...
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Connecting to Tibco EMS from a C# Client
Introduction This is a slightly esoteric post, but hopefully it will be of use somewhere. Below is some reasonably simple code that shows the basic use cases for connecting to a Tibco EMS Server topic...
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 8): Mining
Previous Article – Next Article – Table of Contents Recap At the start of this article I said that none of the ideas in Bitcoin were that difficult. However, there are a lot of things going on...
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 9): Anonymity
Previous Article – Next Article – Table of Contents Bitcoin Doesn’t Know Who You Are As I’ve already discussed one of the features of Bitcoin is anonymity. When you make a payment through a...
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 10): Technical Description – Summary
Previous Article – Next Article – Table of Contents It’s taken a while, but we have now covered all the basics of how Bitcoin works. There’s a lot here. If you’re still confused then below...
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 11): Bitcoin Problems – Speed
Previous Article – Next Article – Table of Contents Introduction The next couple of articles will look in some more detail at some of the flaws in Bitcoin mentioned previously. In this article...
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 12): Bitcoin Problems – Electricity,...
Previous Article – Next Article – Table of Contents Electricity Paying People To Run The Network At the start of this series of articles I mentioned that Bitcoin uses as much electricity as a...
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 13): Beyond Bitcoin
Previous Article – Next Article – Table of Contents Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers Introduction This final section of this lengthy series of articles isn’t about Bitcoin at all. It’s...
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 14): Conclusion
Previous Article – Table of Contents I’m hoping that if you’ve read all of these articles you’ll have a much better idea of how Bitcoin works technically. This was my original aim for the series....
View ArticleA Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 1): Introduction
I recently had a series of conversations with different friends of mine who said they’d tried to understand Bitcoin from what was on the internet and failed. Almost all of them said they couldn’t...
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