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Dear EarthLink Customer Support,

This blog entry may seem like an unusual way to get in touch with you, but I've run out of options. You don't accept postal mail or phone calls, and your Support Center Feedback page generates an email to external_feedback@lists.corp.earthlink.net, which your email system bounces! I've considered visiting your office in Atlanta and demanding to see a corporate representative, but I suspect I'll only find myself in a crowd of many thousands of other crazed dissatisfied customers wailing in agony in your lobby.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was perhaps the most politically explosive piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act ostensibly did little more than strengthen a concept that was imbedded in the Constitution: that a "Person held to Service or Labour in one State" upon "escaping into another, shall ... be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." (Article IV, Section 2)

Yesterday I was working on a Silverlight application that adjusted its size within the browser page when I began encountering erratic behavior. Turns out I hadn't taken account of the zooming feature implemented in recent versions of Internet Explorer (and other browsers), and now I'm not sure I should need to.

Commonly, blog entries that discuss Silverlight programming contain a link to a separate HTML or ASPX file that contains the actual Silverlight application. I want to start embedding Silverlight applications right in my blog entries. Since I wrote my own blogging software — it's a Windows Forms application called BlogHack and it's as sloppy as the name suggests — I figured it wouldn't be too difficult.

Castration is not a pleasant topic. Even manly men — those who courageously run into burning buildings or jump out of airplanes — are known to whimper and cringe at the very thought of a sharpened knife hovering somewhat below belt level.

Two weeks ago, at the second-day keynote at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Windows and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky told us that Microsoft would be giving everyone there a new Acer notebook computer. He got a big round of applause. Nothing quite excites a roomful of programmers more than free hardware.

In previous blog entries I showed how to use a WPF program (called TextOutlineGenerator and available from here) to generate text outlines that you can then use in Silverlight programs for some interesting effects. This morning I woke up with an idea to deform a whole character string based on two Bézier curves.

It had long been observed that animals and other living things are particularly well-adapted to the environments in which they live. Prior to November 24, 1859 — 150 years ago today — the best explanation for this amazing phenomenon was that they had been designed specifically for that purpose.

How do plants get from one land mass to another? Here's one plausible answer from a man who actually performed the necessary experiments:

In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) when the very proper and stuffy Lady Bracknell learns that Jack was found as a baby in a hand-bag in the cloak-room at Victoria Station, she is understandably shocked: “I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

I'm not quite sure how to describe this Silverlight program. It contains two text strings of approximately equal linegth for which I've generated flattened PathGeometry objects using a WPF program I've described in a previous blog entry. The character outlines of each text string thus consist of a series of tiny lines. By animating these little lines back and forth between the two outlines, the text strings seem to morph into each other, but in a rather unusual way.

I'm not sure if this TV trend is for real, or whether I'm just noticing it more, but I think there's been an increase in the past year or so of text displayed with perspective effects — not necessarily 3D text had has depth and body, but regular flat 2D text that appears to occupy a 3D space. One example is the titles on Fringe that seem to be attached to the sides of buildings, but I've also seen text in TV commercials where the words seem to meet at angles.

After I posted a blog entry on writing a random-rectangle program for Silverlight, I added a comment with links to Win16 and Win32 random-rectangle programs. It's really amazing to see how fast those old programs run on modern machines!

I remember going to COMDEX in Las Vegas sometime in the early 90s when Microsoft Windows had just reached some kind of tipping point (at least among manufacturers if not users) and the floor of the Convention Center was ablaze with Windows machines, most of them running random-rectangle programs.

Like many authors, I had to be briefly hospitalized upon learning that Sarah Palin was paid a $1.25 million advance for her memoir "Going Rogue." But what really puzzled me was the description in the press of this amount as a "retainer."

The photograph on the book's cover shows an elegant Grace Hopper in a black dress rather than a Navy uniform, with a sleek flip to her hair, stylish earrings, and — Yikes! Is that a cigarette???

Richard Heene has been featured on two Reality TV programs. The first was called Wife Swap. The second was Runaway Weather Balloon. Wife Swap is what we might call "real" Reality TV, in that it was created by a production company and purchased by a television network, and the world was alerted to its broadcast. Runaway Weather Balloon, however, was "fake" Reality TV, in that it wasn't unauthorized by anyone actually connected with TV. Richard Heene thought it up all by himself, and then it was sprung on us suddenly and without warning.

It was raining lightly on the evening of Sunday, October 16, 1859 — 150 years ago today — when 19 men (including five African-Americans) left a small Maryland farmhouse armed with carbines and pikes, and headed towards a railroad bridge that crossed the Potomac into Virginia. Their leader was John Brown, 59 years old but looking much older, with a stark lined face, fierce blazing eyes, a white beard, and a countenance and aura like that of an Old Testament prophet.

I grew up in an area of New Jersey where it was simply unacceptable to listen to classical music. There were no concert opportunities, of course, and anyone caught buying a classical LP was subjected to ridicule and ostracism. Fortunately, we were within range of three radio stations in New York City that played classical music — WNCN, WQXR, and WNYC-FM — plus college stations that frequently indulged, such as WKCR ("King's Crown Radio"), the radio station of Columbia University.

In the blog entry Using Text Outlines in Silverlight I described a WPF program called TextOutlineGenerator that converts the outlines of a particular text string in a particular font to XAML, which can then be copied into a Silverlight program. I have a new version of TextOutlineGenerator with a few more features: It can now separate the text into letters, format the XAML, and strip the XAML of references to the IsStroked and IsSmoothJoin properties, which aren't supported in Silverlight. In addition, the program displays the size of the FormattedText object (or objects, if letters are separated).

In 1957, a group of mathematicians programmed a "Logic Theory Machine" to prove theorems from Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's massive Principia Mathematica, published over 40 years earlier. On learning of this feat, Bertrand Russell reputedly wrote "I am delighted to know that 'Principia Mathematica' can now be done by machinery. I wish Whitehead and I had known of this possibility before we wasted 10 years doing it by hand."

I always like getting email describing a programming problem that (1) is generalized enough to be of interest to others, (2) I can figure out in a few hours and, (3) I can then describe in a blog entry. Meeting those requirements exactly was an email I received this morning asking if I knew how to include week numbers in the standard WPF Calendar control from the WPF Toolkit, so it looks something like this:

Yesterday's blog entry presented a Silverlight program that made animated dots run around the outlines of text characters. The program itself was fairly simple — everything was done in XAML — but it also has a flaw in the form of an annoying visual flicker. If you look closely, you can see extra dots popping into and out of existence. My goal today: Get rid of that flicker.

Check this out: It's a little Silverlight app that displays some text (in this case the word "Silverlight") in a 144-point font, but the text characters are outlined, which is not something you normally see in a Silverlight app. Moreover, the characters are outlined with a dotted line, and not only that, but the dots are animated so they move around the outlines of the letters.