Author Archives

EXIF Quick Reference

By Nicholas Armstrong | Published: February 19, 2010
Over the past few years, I've used the EXIF data stored by modern digital cameras in a couple of programs I've worked on. Having access to the date the photo was taken - or which way the camera was rotated when it was - is useful information to have. Even though it's relatively easy to do, finding the right identifier for the information you want is much harder than it should be. This page fills that niche - the most useful/popular EXIF properties in an easy-to-find format.
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Better Printed Photos: Naming with Date Taken

By Nicholas Armstrong | Published: January 5, 2010
Whenever I’ve needed to print digital photos, I’ve found that Photolab – the photo processing arm of the Canadian grocery chain Loblaws – has always done a great job.  Photos are typically printed in a day or less, are easy to pick up – just stop by your local supermarket! – and have always turned [...]
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Sending Email with PowerShell: Implicit and Explicit SSL

By Nicholas Armstrong | Published: December 13, 2009
I never quite understood the attraction of scripting; sure, not having to set up the scaffolding code of a more formal language is nice, but the limitations of the environment just seemed too great.  The Unix community has it far better than the Windows community in this regard; shell scripting can accomplish amazing feats – [...]
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Technical Protectionism

By Nicholas Armstrong | Published: October 18, 2009
There’s a well known concept in economics known as comparative advantage.  A formal definition has many nuances, but the basic principle can be summed up as each party undertaking the work that they are most productive at, such that the overall production of the system is higher than it would be if each party performed [...]
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ECE 150 Programming Samples

By Nicholas Armstrong | Published: September 21, 2009
This term, I’ve been given a position as a teaching assistant for ECE 150: Introduction to Programming at the University of Waterloo. In the spirit of learning, I’ve decided to put together a handful of applications over the course of the term in order to demonstrate various features of the C# language for programming beginners.
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