Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzoldis an American programmer and technical author on Microsoft Windows applications. He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and was named one of Microsoft's seven Windows Pioneers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth2 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
Charles Petzold quotes about
designers great publish
Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it.
messages midi musical natural saved timing transition
MIDI made a natural transition to the PC. The MIDI messages that make up a musical composition can be saved as MIDI files, which are collections of MIDI messages with timing information.
contain midi musical percussion supports time
Many MIDI files contain entire musical compositions. Because MIDI supports only 16 channels, however, no more than 16 different instruments can play at any time, and one of those is the key-based percussion instrument.
kitchen computer microwaves
Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven
operating-systems programmers defined
To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.
space causes filling
NOP stands for (and is pronounced) no op, as in no operation. The NOP causes the processor to do absolutely nothing. What's it good for? Filling space. The 8080 can usually execute a bunch of NOP instructions without anything bad happening
book technology color
Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.
memories microsoft corporations
In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation
design lazy aversion
The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday
choices
You probably don't have much of a choice.
color decision pixels
Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always.
machines language assembly
I started out with machine code and assembly language.
lunch free-lunch
Free lunches don't come cheap.
machines eating programming
Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick