Rudolf Henning

Ever wished you can change the stylesheet of a page on the fly or have a JavaScript console that can interact with a page that is currently loaded?
If you use Firefox (and in some case other browsers) you can create some 'shortcuts' that execute some scripts that do some useful things.
Have a look at some samples from Bookmarklets
Web development might actually become fun again...

I came across a very nifty little JavaScript debuggger that is an extention to Firefox. It could be useful for all those 'badly' scripted pages you come across (that was only coded for IE - buggers). At least with it you can trace the problem more easily.
Check out Venkman Development.

Ok, so this is not really 'technical' stuff but just for the humor (for us geeks).

Who all remembers the good old audio tapes? Now you can get a drive for your PC to play those lovely tapes that carry so many memories with it. (I'm giving away my age here...)
Have a look at PlusDeck.
At least you can rip mp3's from those tapes if you want...ok, wonder if that is also illegal? :p

I've been having some very frustrating experiences using VS2005 Beta 2 inside a virtual machine. It seems every time I press CRTL+S to save some work (I just have the habit to do it every few lines of code...) the keyboard input just dies. The arrow buttons does not respond anymore. The only thing that works to 'release' this 'hold' is to open a class diagram of my classes and then press the up/down arrows. Then magically they seem to work inside the IDE until the next ctrl+s.
I must also mention that after every save I get a dialog box that states something (external) has changes the source code and would I like to 'reload it?'. Initially I thought this could be the Class designer but I closed that and it still happens on every save.
I'm not sure if this is an IDE bug or something to do with the Virtual PC it works in. The keyboard/mouse are plain wired old stuff not causing the same problem anywhere else (its work stuff so there are no fancies).
Has anyone else had problems like this where the keyboard input just dies inside the IDE?
The other troubling thing is it does not happen every time I close and reopen the IDE. Just sometime. So far I could not figure out what sequence of events cause it.

Thanks to Peter McMahon who made available the book Introduction to ASP .NET e-book. I'm sure it will be very useful for my .Net Juniors sessions where a number of people are interested in ASP.Net training.
The language covered is VB.Net but that should not matter for the C# guys as its the ASP.Net contex that is important. Perhaps we can convince Peter to do a C# 'version' as well some time... ;)

Just thought this might be of interest to other developers that also happen to use Firefox as their web browser.
Some bright guy developed a search toolbar for FF that can search Code Project to find articles and other stuff. For anyone looking for samples or references for source code this might be really useful.

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/FirefoxCPSearchBar.asp

Well, outside of sending a hitman after them.. hehe
I have thinked a little about this and the one thing that these spammers depends on - the reason the do what they do is to post hyperlinks that will help their ratings.
Can we not perhaps disable hyperlinks in comments or have it replaced say by some javascript function with a messagebox that must be clicked first before you can navigate to the relavant URL? This way the URL embedded in the page does not point to them directly.
Another idea is to have a special sequence of characters for those URL's you want to allow.
Or, have some 'option' that you must approve a post for displaying URL's or not. This would mean some changes to the admin pages as well - unfortunately.
I'm still convinced we need some way of deleting multiple comment entries as the current one by one just does'nt work.

Die you spamming bastards!

[Update: the IP addresses for most of this crap are
148.244.150.52, 193.95.90.52, 200.196.101.98, 202.105.138.114, 202.175.234.163, 202.28.204.124, 205.155.212.20, 207.248.240.118, 207.248.240.119, 211.78.176.252, 216.130.157.51, 219.94.45.37, 61.178.185.56, 80.231.147.8, 81.8.110.33
If anyone wants to send them some nasty surprises please do! F#@k them good]
[Update2: A tracert reveals both IP's to come from the same place:
Tracing route to host-207-248-240-119.block.alestra.net.mx [207.248.240.119]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
...
Tracing route to host-148-244-150-52.block.alestra.net.mx [148.244.150.52]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
...]

Ok, so we have some ideas how to stop new spam but what about the existing entries?
I would like to be able to select multiple entries of comments and delete them. This slow way of one by one is really painful. Surely it cannot be that difficult to have a tic box next to each entry (on the admin pages) and have a 'delete all' option? Better still, have a view with only the ''subject' or name so we can see a much bigger list and select them all.
As for the spammers, I say again: may they burn in the hot place!!

ps: who the hell cares about poker? hehe

At finally last Google maps seems to be covering parts of South Africa (sattelite images only for now). You can see things like the Tydervalley centre and more.

http://maps.google.com/

Let the browsing begins...

I created a new build of my customized browser for the Dark throne online game.
It can be found here
I've had reports that some people had trouble with the auto banker function but I could not yet trace the problem. If there are more people having trouble with it let me know.

Happy hunting

Well, it seems MS has finally made a proper white paper on the topic and as what could be guessed they remain neutral.
Go and read this to see what they say.
In short, they say the languages are the same in terms of what you can do with it - calling both of them (VB.Net and C#) first class languages. In the end its more about who uses what language and why rather than just the syntax of a language that matters. People that just care to get the job done no matter what performance they get will probably choose VB.Net while those that care to code more raw power coding probably C#.
Anyway VB.Net 1 vs C# 1 (both win or loose)

This was not intended as a rant but it could probably be seen as one. In the last while ever since the company I work for (not naming names here) decided to block MSN messenger it has been quiet, giving the feeling of being a bit isolated. Not that MSN messenger is the Holy Grail of communications but since so many other sadev'ers uses it as instant communication being cut off from it means I'm effectively cut off from the 'outside' world.
Perhaps other developers feel comfortable being isolated and don't need to communicate with other developers - actually I know many of them that are happy by themselves.
So, I'm wondering. Are there other acceptable ways developers communicate? I've tried Yahoo messenger and it works great but only two other people I know use it - meaning it has little to no value at the moment. Are there ways to motivate to 'my company' that MSN messenger could be considered a valuable enough tool to allow it being used again? If I as an individual go to our network admins I already know what answer they will give me. It is not considered importantly enough to allow it being use or it’s up to me to 'proof' it could be valuable. Either way, its not gona happen.
Is communication between developers important? Does it add any value to be able to just chat or ask help from others concerning some development issue you are having? On more than one occasion I was able to ask a friend something over msn and it saved me probable hours of researching the web. Hey Google is cool but it still lacks the personal touch of a fellow developer that has experience of some issue you are having or at least know someone else that can help you. Thus, for me personally I think msn could be considered a valuable tool for developers. What do other developers think?

Ok it was bound to happen that some lazy developer also wanted the "My" lazy shortcut VB.Net thingy. Apparently (MS) has introduced the "That" keyword in C# t do just that.
Why can't some developers just learn the namespaces properly? Oh, yeh, too lazy I guess :p

This can be a good thing for newbies I guess but I would suggest that they think of automatically 'replacing' the shortcut using intellisense or during compilation to reflect the 'real' namespace thus teaching the new developer where the 'actual' code is located.
More details here

Seems like Google is on a roll. Well, at least if you look at their acquisition list it seems so.
Have a look at this list here
One of the better applications they bought was Picasa, an image viewer/manager that kicks anything else's butt (hence the buyout)

Yesterday eve's .Net juniors session was a success again (at least I think so). We managed to draw 12 people this time and the interest seems to be growing. More than half the faces were new.

Thanks again for everyone involved that helped. (Hilton, Ilo and the rest)

SA Dev rocks! (in a nice way)