June 26th, 2009
I have to admit, reading Valleywag was a bit of a guilty pleasure. The online publication, which was part of Gawker Media, is akin to the tech world’s Perez Hilton. Gossip about silicon’s celebrities is dished up daily and served to geeks’ RSS feeds everywhere.
Valleywag was folded in 2008 and became a column in the overall Gawker site. Too bad… it was fun to see people get so upset over its (essentially tabloid) articles.
The main criticism people had of Valleywag was its willingness to publish unverified gossip in order to be the first to break developing stories. In Valleywag’s defense, the stories weren’t presented as fact, the magazine disclosed that it was operating on unverified rumour, and it was quick to update as new information became available.
That said, the wider issue is that a publication of Valleywag’s size and reach has a responsibility to get its information right the first time because the majority of its readers do not come back to check the updated status of new items – they expect to have already received the full story. The irony here is that the very thing that made Valleywag popular – the speed at which it spread its gossip – is what is was most criticized for.
Posted in Friendly Friday | No Comments »
June 19th, 2009
LimitlessUnits.com is an interesting little blog that shares many of my own morals. I wish Tony updated more but the posts he puts up are always thoughtful and fleshed out. Design-wise the site is simple in an elegant and usable way. If programming and video games are up your alley, go on over and subscribe.
Posted in Friendly Friday | No Comments »
June 12th, 2009
I’ve decided to start using Fridays to reflect on the state of my RSS reader. Starting on Friday of next week I plan to showcase blogs that I think are well written, technically marvelous, or just plain cool.
Please feel welcome to contact me if you’d like to share your own site, or one that you think is worth checking out. The genre is unimportant – I’m looking to fill my feed with as much great content as I possibly can.
Posted in Friendly Friday | No Comments »
May 26th, 2009
Tags: games, humour
Posted in games | No Comments »
May 20th, 2009
Did you get an MSN message that looks like this?
YourFriend@hotmail.com says (2:26 PM):
http://PictureFreakz.com/?user=yourmsnname&image=DSC00567.JPG ?!?
… HAHAHA!!
Be careful – this is a scam site that invites you to enter your login information and password – then uses it to rope in your contacts with similar messages sent from your account.
Tags: msn, scams, security
Posted in internet | No Comments »
May 14th, 2009
One of my absolute favourite statements in C# is the using statement (not to be confused with the using directive, which is what we use to import libraries like System.Web into our projects).
using forces us as programmers to be honest about releasing memory to the CLR. Whenever we use an unmanaged resource like an SQL connection or file IO handler, the garbage collector will eventually eliminate any open streams or connections associated with that resource. However, “eventually” doesn’t cut it when we’re dealing with SQL connections on a production server – we need to make sure the connections are released no later than when we’re done with them.
If you come from the C++ world, you’re probably (hopefully) used to calling delete to deallocate any memory you reserved. You also know that forgetting the delete (or delete [] on arrays) results in a memory leak. You might think of Dispose() as C#’s implementation of the delete statement.
using ( SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand( sqlStatement, sqlConnection ) )
{
// Do something
}
using acts as a try…catch…finally block, so if your code fails your object will still be disposed. The using statement keeps everything wrapped into a neat little package so you don’t forget to keep your local variables in scope.
Like I said, this is one of my favourite features in .NET (lock { } is similarly beautiful). You can use the same construct in VB as well.
Tags: C#, memory management
Posted in C# | No Comments »
May 3rd, 2009
Link rot occurs when a page linked to from within your web site becomes invalid. Visitors to your site who click on that link will receive a 404 “Not Found” message rather than the quality content they were expecting to find. This matters to you as a web site operator because:
- The value of your content is diminished because your well-selected links no longer provide value to your readers
- Search engines indexing your site treat the broken links as a sign that your page is out-dated and therefore needs to be relegated to the bottom of their indexes
Fortunately, it’s very easy to deal with link rot. Essentially it boils down to arming yourself with a link validation tool – I recommend Xenu as the best free tool for this purpose – and run it periodically (once a month should suffice for smaller sites). Xenu will point out which links on your site are no longer working and on which pages they can be found so you can take action. The only problem Xenu has is that Wikipedia blocks this application so any links you make to Wikipedia will have to be manually checked (but, you really shouldn’t be linking to Wikipedia anyway, it is not good reference material).
When you find a broken link, you have a few options available:
Fix It
Sometimes website owners change their site’s structure without regard for incoming links. When you operate your own site, try to take all possible steps to prevent this from happening. If you are the victim of this kind of foolishness, you may be able to go to the offending site and find your link’s new path.
Change It
If you have referenced a news article or other topical content, try searching for it on the host site as above. This kind of content is the worst for being removed by its owners when it is no longer current, but often the same content can be found on another news organization’s site. If that’s the case, make the change. The original site won’t benefit from your link, but they don’t deserve to anyway.
Remove It
If your content can be re-written so removing the link doesn’t reduce its usefulness, this can be an option.
Remove the Article
If your post is written in response to content that no longer exists, just delete your post since it isn’t useful anymore. Be sure to protect the validity of any incoming links by checking your site for any internal references to the post. In order to maintain incoming links from other web sites, you may consider writing a brief explanation as to why the content is no longer available and poitning toward some of your newer work.
Credit where credit is due: I thought to write this post because of a prompting from Problogger who featured an article dealing with link checking on blogs this weekend. I found a good number of broken links on my various sites and ended up re-discovering and updating content I hadn’t thought about for some time.
Posted in General Programming | No Comments »
