Many of you probably have heard of OpenID, but have never had a chance to use it. However, I predict that most of you reading this blog will have used it by the end of the year. I can make this prediction with an almost 100% certainty because there is a growing movement behind it that has many big players actively buying developing and integrating their platforms with the OpenID protocol. Some of the biggest players are: ...
Whenever I am tasked with looking over a fellow developers code I always keep the following in mind, in order to ground myself: your program (n): a maze of non-sequiturs littered with clever-clever tricks and irrelevant comments. Compare MY PROGRAM. my program (n): a gem of algorithmic precision, offering the most sublime balance between compact, efficient coding on the one hand, and fully commented legibility for posterity on the other. Compare YOUR PROGRAM. ...
When we first came up with the idea for IdeaPipe (no pun intended), we saw a need to fill a void in the social networking landscape. There are countless sites dedicated to connecting friends, classmates and business associates, sites that provide opinions and commentary around a specific topic and even sites that simply point to other sites, but there were few if any that enabled individuals or groups to share their ideas for the purposes of gathering feedback, collaborating or simply being heard. ...
Today I was reading Engadget like I normally do in the morning to check out all the latest gadgets that they scour the internet for. And I happened across this new keyboard design that Dell is releasing with their Vostro models in the UK. I don’t know about you, but I specifically stay clear of keyboards where the backspace key is crunched down to add the backslash key on the top row. (This is my personal preference, apparently I have to point this out to some of the commentors, because it is not clear by saying “I specifically”) But I have never seen this keyboard layout before, where the backslash key is on the bottom left of the keyboard where the “Z” key is suppose to be. I think the usability engineer that designed this keyboard should be fired, that is assuming that Dell didn’t randomly toss keys at the keyboard and let them stay where they fell. ...
I have been working on this new social networking website that is based around the collaboration and sharing of ideas. I have talked about this project in the past, in very vague details, but today I have decided to open the curtains and give everybody a look. http://www.ideapipe.com Currently there are a couple websites out there that are doing the same thing, but in a more focused way for their specific business. One of the examples of these focused websites for sharing of ideas is Dell Idea Storm. In the case of Dell each of the users go to their website and submit ideas on how they can improve Dell’s products. The platform has worked really well for Dell, they seem to be getting a positive response from their community of users. It has led to them introducing a couple of products that they probably wouldn’t have, such as Ubuntu as an alternate to Microsoft Windows, if there wasn’t such an overwhelming support for this install option. ...
Slashdot has been around for over a decade now and many tech nerds first cut their teeth on Slashdot as an information source for everything tech related, because it predated the blogging revolution by almost a half decade. I can say with an almost certainty that every person who visits my blog each day, has at one point in their life read Slashdot. I know this because, many of you like myself, for many years Slashdot was the first place you visited in the morning to checkout the latest nerd-news, and it was such an honor if one of your stories actually made it the front page. Everything was bliss because the editors of Slashdot really tried to get good content to the viewers of the site, the editors were a little slanted towards the LAMP stack, but at least the content that made it to the front page was accurate. ...
Today I came across an interesting extension pattern that I didn’t know how the runtime would react. Normally when you do something like the following: string s = null; Console.WriteLine(s.Trim()); // throws NullReferenceException You get a NullReferenceException meaning that you didn’t first check to see if the object was null before trying to call one of its methods. This is pretty common and results in patterns that usually look like this: ...
Apple “Windows Developers” continue to not impress me. Check out the latest in “I decided to release something too early”-product from Steve Jobs and Apple. I haven’t yet decided if Steve Jobs is trying to take down the Windows Empire with crappy Apple Software, or if Apple is just inept at creating anything but software for Apple. I prefer to think Steve Jobs just forces Mac Developers to begrudgingly work on Windows Software, instead of actually hiring developers that are passionate about Windows Development. ...
So today I saw this Google Flash Ad, for John McCain for President, appear on a site that I am developing. I thought I would let everybody know to watch out for Google Flash Ad’s that have access to modify your browser. This isn’t a big deal, in my case, but Flash has the ability to also modify, other things such as: Browser’s Footer Browser’s URL Back Button Forward Button etc. Basically Flash is allowed to have more access because it actually runs as an application on top of the browser instead of through the browser. It is just disturbing that Google doesn’t police the advertisements better. It is conceivable that Google could potentially be providing malware via their ad network. ...
The ASP.NET MVC Team has released an refresh of MVC. To all those that are interested the new Interim Release is posted at: http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=12640 The new release seems to rely on a non-CodePlex open source project. Is this the first sign of Microsoft’s commitment to open source? http://code.google.com/p/moq/ The Release Notes have a lot of good information about new features and bug fixed included in this release: This CodePlex refresh of the ASP.NET MVC source code includes a number of key changes and refactorings. To see a full list of API changes, take a look at the attached zip file produced using Framework Design Studio. ...