Weekend Fun: Plot the Mandlebrot Set by Hand

Another critically useful diversion from Wikihow...
How to Plot the Mandelbrot Set By Hand


http://www.wikihow.com/Plot-the-Mandelbrot-Set-By-Hand

How to convert a photo into an icon or favicon

Did you know that you can save icons from Photoshop with the free ICOFormat plugin from Telegraphics? I didn't. There's a nice little writeup on the Telling Machine: Convert photos into icons using Photoshop.

Are you LinkedIn?

Everybody seems to be doing this, which is usually a bad, bad sign... but anyway:

New SourceForge Project Released

This just in: A new LGPL project that I'm maintaining has just been added to SourceForge.net. The project is called StormFactory, which stands for Simplified, Tiered, Object-Relational Modeler. We were going to call it Fast Enterprise Entity Tiers, but the acronym didn't invoke quite the right mental image. ;-)

Here's the executive summary: StormFactory is a stored procedure-oriented code generator which targets the C# language and Microsoft SQL Server. It's implemented as a Visual Studio 2005 Windows Forms solution that can simply be downloaded & run to start generating code (i.e. there are no schemas to create or templates to fill out). Given a suitable SELECT procedure, the tool generates an entity class (to expose the result columns as properties), a data-access class which both encapsulates a generic collection of the entity and acts as a provider/factory for itself. Finally, the tool generates a stored procedure to save entity instances and/or entity collections back to the database. Each data-access class is entity-specific, and can serialize/deserialize itself to/from XML. Advanced options let you create collection filters, make certain properties read-only, control serialization attributes, and more.

The project has its own site at StormFactory.net, and documentation is in-progress on the project wiki on SourceForge.

Anyway, I'd love to take credit for and/or ownership of all of this, and I could have if it weren't for those meddling open-source licenses. ;-) The project includes 100% open-source (GPL and/or LGPL) contributions from a variety of contributors, and it uses a few open-source libraries itself (FireballCodeEditor, and in v2.0 onwards, weifenluo 's DockPanel suite).

Check it out and let me know what you think!