A good book about GDI+ in C#

Because of all msdn and "code at a thumb" stuff one could easily give up an idea of trying to read a good book with explanations. After looking through a dozen books like User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls by Matthew MacDonald I've started to think that it would be hard to find a more horrible one.. :-(

Anyway I was lucky to find this wonderful article Graphics with GDI+ from Professional C# by Ollie Cornes, Jay Glynn, Burton Harvey, Craig McQueen, Jerod Moemeka, Christian Nagel, Simon Robinson, Morgan Skinner, Karli Watson. So if you will ever try to write any book about programming, please do at least as good as this last one.

Compression in "faces"

An absolutely spectacular link to follow the data compression theory's genealogy in photos of inventors:

Compression in "faces".

recursive lambda factorial in lisp

Following a "stupid" question I've asked my students: "how to write a recursive lambda function in common lisp without using any assignment statement?", I've written the following example of such lambda function:

(funcall (lambda (lfact n) (funcall lfact n lfact)) (lambda (n lfact) (cond ((> n 0) (* n (funcall lfact (- n 1) lfact))) (t 1) ) ) 4)


Apparently, to do the trick in pure functional style one needs to use two lambda functions, and symbol assignment operation is replaced with a function call, that receives another lambda as an argument which will be already evaluated inside the first lambda as a functional. The next step to do is just to call it and to send itself, again, as an argument.

I must admit, that I'm very surprised that Common Lisp has such a "poor" support for lambda, because it would be better to perform the same trick in a more shorter code sequence.

"Stories" by V.I. Arnold and math link http://ega-math.narod.ru/

V. I. Arnold is one of the interesting mathematicians of our time. I like to read his talks when I'm looking for inspiration.

Recently, following the link http://ega-math.narod.ru/ that was given to me by one of my students and a friend Vlad Yanum, I have immediately discovered a book by V.I. called "Old and recent stories" ("Истории давние и недавние" ). While much of statements and thoughts in this reading should be proved and analyzed from original sources (as always by careful reading), reading of the book brings a lot of fun and positive ideas to work on.

PS the link itself is a collection of references worth of review and devouring.

And by the way, I was surprised to know that V.I. has a "chat" with pope in 1998
http://nauka.relis.ru/01/0012/01012002.htm (of course, on the conference of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences)