DevTopics

CodePaste.NET is a new public code pasting site that allows you to paste and link code from social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, or chat and IM applications like Skype or Messenger.  The idea is that these social networks or chat clients work well for interactive discussion, but they don’t allow enough space to post even the shortest snippets of code for all participants to see. 

A lot of Twitter traffic deals with discussions about code or code concepts, so a place to share and view code is very useful.  So rather than squeezing code snippets into these clients, you can post it on the the CodePaste.NET site and then link to the snippet.  As opposed to other code pasting sites, CodePaste.NET is more specific to .NET developers, providing syntax highlighting and the ability to apply comments on snippets.

CodePaste.NET
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Your tax dollars at work:  Our U.S. government has no problem spending a trillion dollars on an optional war in Iraq.  Or spending many trillions bailing out rich Wall Street bankers to reward their greed and avarice.  But when it comes to deploying a FREE, open-source Web browser on government computers?  Now you’ve really gone too far, man!

The U.S. State Department currently uses Microsoft Internet Explorer as its one and only Web browser.  At a town hall meeting led by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, a new State Department employee asked Clinton to “please let the staff use” the Mozilla Firefox browser.  The employee pointed out that Firefox had been “approved for the entire intelligence community,” and that it’s a “much safer program.”  The rookie’s question was met with a chorus of applause from the audience.

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I have a friend who announces when she’s going to bed every night on Facebook.  It’s the 21st century equivalent of “Good night, John Boy.”  But does anyone really care?

Facebook, MySpace and especially Twitter provide a global platform to the narcissist in each of us.  We tweet the minutia of detail in our normally normal lives, hoping that somebody in cyberspace actually cares.

I’m not throwing stones in a glass house; I’m actually throwing them at the mirror.  I, too, am guilty of sharing my life ad nauseum on Facebook.  Even this blog is an electronic indictment of my narcissism, as if anyone truly cares about my rants.

But like many things in life, you may occasionally find a diamond in the rough, or a pony in this seemingly endless pile of poo.

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Microsoft Popfly is a set of online visual tools for novice programmers and end-users to build Web pages, applications and games.  This was Microsoft’s attempt to bring programming to the masses, similar to Hypercard on the Macintosh, or the original Visual Basic on Windows before it became a real (complicated) object-oriented language under .NET.

But this fly lived for only two years.  Microsoft has just announced that on August 24, 2009, the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down.  At that time, access to your Popfly account, including any games and mashups that you have created, will be discontinued.

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Many Visa prepaid cardholders were stunned when they opened their bill Monday to discover a $23,148,855,308,184,500 charge.  That’s $23 quadrillion, which exceeds the combined GDP of every country on the planet.

Josh Muszynski, 22, of Manchester, New Hampshire, was one of the unlucky Visa customers.  Adding insult to injury, he was also charged a $15 overdraft fee.  According to his statement, he spent all that money in one transaction at a nearby Mobil gas station where he often stops for Camel cigarettes.

He checked with the gas station, but they had no record of the charge.  Next he called his card issuer Bank of America, which put him on hold for two hours.  Eventually a bank rep told him the charge and overdraft fee would be removed from his account.

In a statement, Visa said the bad charges affected “fewer than 13,000 prepaid transactions” and resulted from a “temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services … [which] caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts.”

Story at CNN
Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Silverlight is a Web application development framework similar to Adobe Flash.  Microsoft has just released Silverlight 3, a major update that delivers many new features including:

• Hardware graphics acceleration, which lowers CPU usage and enables 1080p HD video over the Web.
• Support for H.264 video, AAC audio and MPEG-4 content.
• Smooth media streaming over HTTP.
• 3D-perspective support that can be used with graphic elements, videos and controls. 
• New bitmap and pixel APIs, and custom effects.
• Out-of-Browser support.  Users can safely install Web applications on their computers, create desktop and Start Menu shortcuts.
• New network detection support to switch between online and offline modes.
• Automatic update mechanism for applications.
• Over 100 UI controls with full styling and template customization support.
• Richer data binding features
• A new DataForm control enables better master/detail scenarios.
• SaveFileDialog support.
• New navigation framework that enables deep-linking and forward/back button integration within the browser. 
• Search engine optimization (SEO) support so that content within a Silverlight application can be indexed by search engines.
• Better text rendering and font support (a common complaint that resulted in the loss of a major customer).
• Better accessibility support.
• Major updates to Expression Blend and Sketchflow.

Download Silverlight 3
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Microsoft Silverlight Home Page

Computer programmers love whiteboards.  We can sketch out our ideas, plans and designs.  We can draw use cases, flowcharts and class diagrams.  When we’re done, all it takes is a swipe with an eraser or shirt sleeve, and the whiteboard is good as new.  A whiteboard gives developers an opportunity to drop the mouse, get up from our chair and stretch our legs.  We also enjoy the innate childhood pleasure of drawing on the walls.

So then why limit our ideas to just a 3×4-foot patch on the wall?  When we’re confined to the space of a typical whiteboard, our movements are constrained, and so our ideas may be limited as well.  If whiteboards are the snowy goodness of developer minds, then perhaps we should have whiteboards everywhere.

IdeaPaint turns virtually anything you can paint into a high-performance dry-erase surface, giving you the space you need to collaborate, interact and fully explore your creativity.  No matter where you use IdeaPaint, big ideas are sure to follow.

IdeaPaint is a flexible, durable and cost-effective dry-erase solution.  It can be applied to any smooth surface, outperforms and outlasts the leading dry-erase options, and works with all brands of dry-erase markers.

Here is one of those math tricks that has been floating around the Internet.  Don’t cheat by scrolling down!  It takes less than a minute.  At the end, I will provide an explanation of how this trick is done.

Follow these instructions, and I will guess your age by chocolate:

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Microsoft has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the PC desktop for two decades.  Though the Apple operating system is superior to Windows in many ways — especially for simplicity and usability — Apple’s closed-system approach has ensured that Apple OS will never be more than a strong niche player.  Open-source Linux has made significant inroads in the server market, but the lack of singular vision and decent user-interface has kept it as a hobbyist toy on the desktop.

This has allowed Microsoft to continue to own the PC desktop, in spite of major missteps, such as Windows ME and the disaster that was Vista in its first year, with significant incompatibilities, endless security warnings, and user-defections back to Windows XP.  Microsoft’s new operating system — Windows 7, which is expected to ship later this year — has been receiving mostly positive reviews.  And not a moment too soon, because along comes Microsoft’s greatest threat to its stranglehold on the desktop in twenty years.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially target netbooks.  Later this year, Google will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

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Microsoft is applying its Community Promise to the C# programming language and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).  This means that anyone can freely build, sell, distribute or use programs with C# and the CLI without signing a license agreement or otherwise communicating to Microsoft.  This applies to all distribution models including open source and GPL.  Under the Community Promise, Microsoft will not assert its Necessary Claims.

In other words, build all you want with C# and .NET, Microsoft won’t sue you for copyright or patent infringement.

Specifically, this announcement applies to the ECMA 334 (C#) and ECMA 335 (CLI) specifications.

“The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and flexibility for developers,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President for the .NET Developer Platform.