I received the strangest spam comment on this blog a while back and have just gotten around to posting about it. Ever want to take out your competitor’s website? Need some intellectual information stolen from somewhere? Well, now I have the hookups! lol
Anyway, here is a screenshot of the post complete with a price list and an ICQ number where they can be reached. Of course, I have excluded the actual ICQ number and any pertinent identifying information as I do not condone such illegal and destructive activities. I have just never been approached as such and thought it was quite hilarious.
Have you “binged” anything lately? If not, then don’t sweat it. Microsoft just release a new search engine called Bing, which you may or may not have heard about yet. Really? Another search engine? I thought Live.com was their SE of choice. Well, if you go to live.com now it actually points to bing.com.
So how does the new search engine stack up? From my short review of it, it behaves surprisingly similar to Google, the de-facto standard in search engines and close to being a common household term. Once you search you have links at the top to view images and videos of the same search terms and various other options including shopping, news and maps. The interface looks very nice. It looks like they borrowed the home page from ask.com in that there is a boxed image around the search input. The difference is the bing image changes every day, plus you can scroll back through past images.
One nice feature that I like is the video search. It lists an image preview for the results and lists below the preview where the video is hosted (YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe). Then when you click on the preview it plays the video right in the search results in a video player at the top. Very sleek.
So will this be the final, once and for all Google killer? Yeah… I seriously doubt it. It does basically the same thing with maybe a little more pizaz. However it is nice to have company’s out there innovating to push the envelope and make the internet a nicer and more usable place to be.
I was trying to hunt down some information about latest internet provider, Mediacom, for which I have not been extremely excited about. I found this PDF for Broadband Internet Help and figured I’d take a look. It was basically information on hooking up your cable modem… no help. However at the end of the PDF there was a link to what looked like an online help site for Mediacom. Here is a screenshot of the PDF.
Well, you can see it right there. The link points to help.mymediacomonline.com. If you head on over to that link you get none other than a simple text output of… “hello world.” That’s just not very much help at all. It is however very funny.
Field: Experimental Programming IDE
So what will programming look like in the future? Those crazy guys at M.I.T. are taking a stab. See what they are coming up with.
I had the desire to create an enumeration in C# the other day and I wanted to be able to attach a description to each item in the enumeration. I did the searching on the internets and put together examples from several sources that I found. Here is an example that ties it all together in a Windows Console applicaton in C#.
using System;
using System.Reflection;
namespace DescriptiveEnums
{
///
/// Create the custom Attribute named Description
///
public class DescriptionAttribute : Attribute
{
public String StringValue { get; protected set; }
public DescriptionAttribute(String value)
{
this.StringValue = value;
}
}
///
/// Attach a method ToDescriptionString to our enumeration that enables us
/// to get the value of our custom Description attribute.
///
public static class MyCustomEnumerationExtensions
{
public static String ToDescriptionString(this MyCustomEnumeration value)
{
// Get the type
Type type = value.GetType();
// Get fieldinfo for this type
FieldInfo fieldInfo = type.GetField(value.ToString());
// Get the Description attributes
DescriptionAttribute[] attributes =
fieldInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false) as DescriptionAttribute[];
// Return the first if there was a match
return attributes.Length > 0 ? attributes[0].StringValue : String.Empty;
}
}
///
/// Enumeration for demonstration
///
public enum MyCustomEnumeration
{
[Description("Item One Description")]
ITEM_ONE,
[Description("Item Two Description")]
ITEM_TWO,
[Description("Item Three Description")]
ITEM_THREE
}
///
/// Main program to test functionality
///
class Program
{
///
/// Main program - Just prints out the values of the enumeration items
///
///
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// Create an instance of our enumeration and print to the console
MyCustomEnumeration myEnum = MyCustomEnumeration.ITEM_ONE;
Console.WriteLine(myEnum.ToDescriptionString());
// Did you know you could increment an enumeration? Sure you did!
myEnum++;
Console.WriteLine(myEnum.ToDescriptionString());
myEnum++;
Console.WriteLine(myEnum.ToDescriptionString());
}
}
}
This “a ccapella” group called Naturally Seven records music using no musical instruments except what the Lord gave them; their hands, mouths, feet, etc. All of the sounds (drums, synthesizers, etc) are all created by them vocally. Very impressive.
Here is Feel It (In The Air Tonight)
Here is Wall of Sound (Embedding has been disabled so you’ll have to make the trek to YouTube to see that one. It’s worth it!)
* Click through to the site if you cannot see the video above ** Sorry, no lyrics today
The Tweet to Beat: Paying $3 Per Twitter Follower
Want to win a round trip airline ticket to anywhere in the world!? How about a brand-spankin new MacBook Pro? Well Tim Ferris is running a fund raiser / giveaway in which you can win one of these prizes. Head on over to check it out!
Dangerous designs
Vijay Mathew makes some strong arguments against the unnecessary complexity of many modern programming languages and provides examples of some simple and “elegant” alternatives.
I was browsing a website looking at Glock handguns tonight for my father-in-law. I noticed that the site was performing extremely poorly; everything took a long time to load. That’s just about when it happened. I received a site error message. This one made me laugh though so I had to post it. In huge letters the message states, “This site has encoutered an error.” Yes it’s actually misspelled in the error message. Below that it states, “(due to our IT Dept. playing World of Warcraft all day and not getting any work done.)” Then to the left it looks like a newspaper clipping from the classifieds that reads, “Wanted. New Programmer. No experience… No problem! Must be able to ensure everything is working correctly, and keep errors like this one from happening.” Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny. Here is a screenshot.
A friend just sent me a link to this Japanese commercial starring John Travolta. Boy, what those guys will do to pay the bills. Someone has to pay for all that jet fuel!
