This Must be an Impeachable Offense

The Obama regime killed four Americans by refusing to send backup, by ordering units who were ready to go to stand down. This has got to be an impeachable offense.

Via Fox News

Public Debt - Where are We Going?

Public Debt Outstanding

The US Treasury has a nifty online application that tracks the Debt to the Penny since 1993. Despite the fact that the data presented is rather disheartening, I graphed the numbers to look for trends.

From first glance it would appear that the a linear fit is a pretty reasonable prediction of the trend per President. If this is the case we are rocketing toward $22 trillion at the end of a second Obama term. The slopes of the best fit lines are:

President	Slope
Clinton	$539,396,929.90 / Day approximately $2.01 per person per day
Bush	$1,568,359,722.35 / Day approximately $5.31 per person per day
Obama	$4,045,430,463.22 / Day approximately $13.10 per person per day

A friend of mine suggested I plot the Y-axis on a log scale to see how the trends from President to President track.

Clinton doesn't fit the 21st century trends, but from Bush to Obama the trend does seem to go exponential. Bush added quite a bit at the end of his term.

Clinton's second term is interesting, public debt seemed to be plateauing. The best fit for this is a second order polynomial, but I just can't imagine that the slope would have gone negative if he had stayed in office. I suspect having a combative Congress contributed to that trend.

Bush and Obama's curves are both pretty much exponential.  If this is the case we should expect Obama's second term (if he has one) to close with the total public debt near $27 Trillion, or roughly $81,800 per person.

With this small sample size it seems that the rate of increase of the public debt increases three-fold when a new President is elected. However since the sample size is so small this cannot be reliably predicted.

Senate

After adding in the party control of the Senate there is an interesting trend.

While few Republican controlled Senates have much success in reducing the rate of the debt increase, the rate of the debt increase has increased only under a Democrat controlled Senate.

Raw Data

The raw data is available at the US Treasury's site: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np. I've separated the data per President in this Google Spreadsheet..

PDFCAT

I've looked around for a solution to concatenate PDFs in the past and never found one. It appears to be a niche need, but I've got a number of schematic PDFs that were created sheet by sheet which need to be combined into single sets of schematics. I can use PDF Creator which works really well for printing PDFs, but I've still got to open each PDF and print it.

So I created a simple script that probably makes some poor PDFs but it works.

#!/bin/sh

# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
# 
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
# 
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <=http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

OUTPUT=-
VERBOSE=false
PDFTOPS=/usr/bin/pdftops
PS2PDF=/usr/bin/ps2pdf

usage() {
 echo Usage: `basename $0` [-v] [-o output file] files
 echo pdfcat concatenats PDF files in argument order into a
 echo single PDF file or to stdout. Beware when specifying
 echo wildcard arguments as the pages will come in the order
 echo your shell picks them up.
 echo
 echo Arguments:
 echo "     -h            Show this help screen"
 echo "     -l            Show the GPL license"
 echo "     -v            Use verbose mode...not very verbose"
 echo "     -o OUTPUT     Send the output PDF to the specified"
 echo "                   file. If missing output is generated"
 echo "                   to stdout"
}

license() {
 echo "This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify"
 echo "it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by"
 echo "the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or"
 echo "(at your option) any later version."
 echo 
 echo "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,"
 echo "but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of"
 echo "MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the"
 echo "GNU General Public License for more details."
 echo 
 echo "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License"
 echo "along with this program.  If not, see <=http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>."
}

while getopts "vhlo:" OPTION
do
 case $OPTION in
  h)
   usage
   exit 1
   ;;
  l)
   license
   exit 1
   ;;
  v)
   VERBOSE=true
   ;;
  o)
   OUTPUT=$OPTARG
   ;;
  ?)
   usage
   exit1
   ;;
 esac
done

shift $(( OPTIND-1 ))

(
for pdf in $*
do
 if $VERBOSE
 then
  echo -n Processing `basename $pdf` >&2
 fi
 $PDFTOPS $pdf -
 if $VERBOSE
 then
  echo " DONE" >&2
 fi
done
) | $PS2PDF - $OUTPUT

Constructor Parameters in C#

I might be the only person coding in C# on a regular basis who doesn't know this, but constructors can have a : this(param1, param2,...) as well as a : base... This means no more creating a private Init method that all the constructors call.

This is what I used to do:

public class Server
{
   private int m_port;
   private IPAddress m_address;

   public Server()
   {
      Init(IPAddress.Any, 8181);
   }

   public Server(int port)
   {
      Init(IPAddress.Any, port);
   }

   public Server(IPAddress address, int port)
   {
      Init(address, port);
   }
   
   private void Init(IPAddress address, int port)
   {
      m_port = port;
      m_address = address;
   }
}

But this is what I can do now:

public class Server
{
   private int m_port;
   private IPAddress m_address;

   public Server()
   : this(8181) { }

   public Server(int port)
   : this(IPAddress.Any, port) { }

   public Server(IPAddress address, int port)
   {
      m_port = port;
      m_address = address;
   }
}

Extensions Methods with .NET 2.0

I've often wished I could have my extension methods on .NET 2.0 since that's what I build with most of the time. Now with some help from Nate Kohari and Scott Hanselman I can. Just add the following to your .NET 2.0 project.

namespace System.Runtime.CompilerServices

{

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false,

Inherited = false)]

public class ExtensionAttribute : Attribute

{

}

}

Since the project is still compiled with the 3.x or 4.x compiler the extensions are properly added.

How to Get a Parent Form from a Component

I found much of this at Code Project, but I think my implementation is cleaner.

Since a component doesn’t have a Parent property like a control does it is often difficult to Invoke in a component which is a pity since a component is more likely to need it. This solution creates an abstract class that adds the Parent property to the component class. If you merely derive your class from the AdvancedComponent class instead of from the Component class you will get the Parent property as well as the FindForm() method.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using System.ComponentModel;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using System.ComponentModel.Design;

namespace MyComponents

{

public class AdvancedComponent : Component

{

private Form m_parent_form;

public AdvancedComponent()

: base() { }

/// <summary>
/// Overrides the ISite property
/// so that it is set when the
/// component is placed on a form.
/// </summary>

public override ISite Site

{

get

{

return base.Site;

}

set

{

base.Site = value;

GetFormInstance();

}

}

private void GetFormInstance()

{

IDesignerHost host = null;

if (base.Site != null)

{

host = base.Site.GetService(typeof(IDesignerHost)) as IDesignerHost;

if (host != null)

{

m_parent_form = host.RootComponent as Form;

}

}

}

/// <summary>
/// Creates a Parent property
/// that can be used to find the
/// parent form.
/// </summary>

public Form Parent

{

get { return m_parent_form; }

set

{

m_parent_form = value;

}

}

/// <summary>
/// Implements a FindForm method
/// similar to Control.FindForm
/// </summary>
/// <returns>The contents of the Parent property</returns>

public Form FindForm()

{

return Parent;

}

}

}

Overriding the Text Property of a WinForms UserControl

From Rockford Lhotka:

“Every time I go to override the Text property in a Windows Forms UserControl I have to go find this one little attribute that I can never remember...

It is easy enough to remember to make the property Browsable(true), but it is that other attribute that's hard to remember: DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Visible).

This web page not only answers the question, but includes a nice summary of all the System.ComponentModel attributes.

At least next time I know I can search my own blog to find the answer :)”