Archive for April, 2004

Referer spam

Tuesday, April 27th, 2004

Wow, we opened up http://www.zimoblog.com today at Zim, and within hours I’ve gotten my first Referer spam.  I’m pinging www.weblogs.com whenever someone updates a blog, so it must be someone polling there (perhaps the http://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml file) and just hitting links with a bogus referer, hoping that the site will display links from external sites (many blogs […]

Funky RSS

Saturday, April 24th, 2004

A whole new way for RSS to be funky: Here’s Google trying to show my RSS as HTML.

Wireless network access (hotspot) business model flaw

Saturday, April 24th, 2004

I’ve found myself a couple of times recently wanting network access and wondering where there was a hotspot nearby.  Well, I drove to one place where there was a hotspot advertised and found another wireless network that was simply open and unsecured, so I used that instead. Driving around a bit, it seems like there’s […]

Photo Mosaics

Friday, April 23rd, 2004

Pet peeve: Dave Winer says that this is a “really great mosaic”. A photo mosaic is an image made up of a collection of smaller images. There are two ways to do them: The right way, and the easy way. The right way is to find small images that represent the various pieces of the […]

dottext and w.bloggar

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004

Cool, I just posted my first entry using w.bloggar from from RSS Bandit.. Instructions on setting w.bloggar up to work with dottext are here.

RE: The (OSS) Empire Strikes Back!

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004

“There is a community at www.playstation2-linux.com where there is approx 16,500 members … Does this mean we will soon get Windows on Xbox?” – Not likely, if 16,500 members is any indication of popularity.. Microsoft is managing what sort of stuff you can get for the XBox pretty closely, turning it into a general purpose […]

Strings in C#: == vs .Equals

Monday, April 19th, 2004

I’ve heard a few times that .Equals is better than == for comparing strings in C#.  To test this, I wrote a little C# program that called == a hundred million times, and then compared it with .Equals. Here’s the code:              string a = “hello”;              string b = “hello”;              int count = 0;              DateTime […]

Free C++ Compiler from Microsoft

Friday, April 16th, 2004

Microsoft has released their C++ Compiler as a free standalone toolkit.  I wonder if this enable free software projects to use Microsoft’s compiler to build the Win32 versions of their products.  It’s a great compiler, and just the fact that it generates debugging and symbols that are compatible with other tools on Windows would make […]

ToolBar Bug in the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Windows Forms designer (with workaround)

Tuesday, April 13th, 2004

If you have a toolbar on a form and it’s images show up fine in design mode, but show up blank when you run your program, it’s probably because of this problem. It seems when the designer writes out the code to create the objects on the form, it writes out the code to add […]

The proper way to re-throw an exception.

Sunday, April 11th, 2004

Good post here.  I didn’t know that “throw;” is different than throwing the exception you’re handling, but it is different because when you throw it, the call stack leading to the code that did throw it is lost.