More Hardware Notes

Two additional ideas for Bluetooth hardware:

1. Digital cameras need to start speaking Bluetooth or 802.11b. Then my camera can send the new pictures to my computer automatically, as soon as I put the camera near it. (This would have to involve some public/private key authentication and crypto scheme, as I don’t want pictures me and my wife took last night to end up on somebody else’s computer.)
2. If Bluetooth chips become small enough and cheap enough, wristwatches equipped with these chips could be used to tell my house where I am inside it. Then my house can smartly turn on/off the lights, lock/unlock the front door, arm/disarm the alarm, turn off the stove if I forgot to do so, etc. None of these is earth-shattering, but all add an added layer of comfort and security.

.NET Font Bug

My colleague Miki Dukic has been doing some font manipulation and was unpleasantly surprised that the GdiCharSet property of the Font class is hard-coded to 1. As always, Anakrino and Reflector proved invaluable while researching this one.

The workaround is to call GetObject on the font handle in order to fill in the LOGFONT structure, then read the lfCharSet byte.

Bug caused by: programmer laziness.

Also GdiCharSet being a byte and not an enum is really lame.