Noise from the Basement

Well, it’s that time of year in the SaturdayMP basement… The tax deadline for filing 2009 personal taxes in Canada is April 30. 

We’re slowly gathering dusty papers to send to our accountants, the fine folks at Every Bean Counts (great name!)

Before SaturdayMP and the olden days of High C consulting, we did our own taxes using personal tax software and NETFILEd the paperwork then headed to the bank. If we were prepared, we’d have the correct crumbled up piece of paper with the (correct) amount we owed scribbled on it. There, the teller would stamp it several times, emphatically, then withdraw the money from our accounts in no time.

• Laundry
• Payroll
• Payroll
• Create Secret Project
• Laundry
• Enjoy summer
• Laundry
• Test Secret Project
• Payroll
• Update News/blog re: Secret Project
• Start Super-secret project
• Oil change
• Laundry
• Payroll
• Finish Super-secret project
• Change Furnace Filter
• Laundry
• Yearend Tax stuff
• Enjoy first snow fall
• More payroll
• More laundry
• Start Really super secret project

The basement-based fun never ends…

The main problem I encountered was creating a function to accept any function pointer along with an unknown number of arguments.  I got around this problem using the ThreadStart and delegate() features in C# (.NET 3.5).  First off create your method to take any method as so:

public static Thread StartMethodInNewThread(ThreadStart methodToStart)
{
    // Do common some stuff before starting the thread, such as logging.

    // Start the task in a new thread
    Thread t = new Thread(methodToStart);
    t.Start();

    // Do some stuff after starting the thread, such as more logging.

    // If the caller cares you can return the thread.
    return t;
}

Now anywhere in your code where you need to start a new method in a thread write the following:

Next time your entering data for a software demo try spicing it up and sneak some your famous real or fictional addresses.  Often you can’t use the fictional state/province but the street addresses are easy to sneak into a demo, or even better, into your product documentation.  Some ideas to get you thinking:

#101 1984 Miniluv Building London, Oceania

1428 Elm Street Madstop, New England United States

123 Sesame Street

211b Baker Street London, England

Hi,

I should introduce myself. I’m Ada, co-founder of Saturday MP. By co-founder, it basically means Chris asked me if he could start a company and I (finally) said yes.

Chris has given me permission to post to the blog. This may be a mistake because I seem innocent but I can also have a perverse sense of humour. While I’m no stranger to computers, the internet nor the blog-world, the circles I run in tend to revolve around knit blogs and ravelry. There, I’ve shown my true colours. You want more? I. Am. Canadian. I spell “Canadian” so you’ll see a lot of “u’s” in my posts. Chris doesn’t care as much - he’s Canadian too, but let’s face it, he doesn’t worry too much about spelling.