Gadgetopia

Migrating from ColdFusion to ASP.NET: An exhaustive comparison of ColdFusion and ASP.net.

Phalanger - the PHP Language Compiler for .NET Framework: The idea of working with this is enough to make your head explode. [...] the object model in Phalanger enables to combine PHP objects with the .NET ones. It is possible to use a class written in PHP from a .NET ...

.NET Rocks! hosted by MSDN: .Net is the only programming language with its own radio show. It's like Letterman for dorks, and I mean that in the best possible way. Carl Franklin and Mark Dunn interview .NET experts and other industry movers and shakers, and answer your .NET questions on ...

Where are all the cool startups that run on ASP.NET?: This is a post that asks a solid question: Where are all the cool startups that run on ASP.NET? It s a good question. Where are they? Why do all the rock star start-ups use CakePHP or Rails or anything but ...

Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry?: This is an awfully good post that examines just why we all hat e.Net developers. The same segment of the software industry that dislikes Microsoft also views developers who use Microsoft tools and languages as inherently less skilled and less ...

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries: Something got in the water out in Redmond, I think. First the Zune thing from earlier today, now this. One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse ...

Using MySQL 4.0 with .NET: An article you don't see much of these days: using MySQL in a .Net environment. Aside from Oracle, I've never heard of a non-Microsoft product being used with .Net, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.

.NET Will Rock Your World: Don Park is a smart guy, and I tend to take his predictions seriously. "People will get the clue when .NET 2.0 is released and they will be rocked when .NET 3.0 is unleashed. People talk about IE standing still and emergence of rich clients ...

Actor Morgan Freeman embraces Net: When I think "Net-saavy Hollywood star," Morgan Freeman doesn't come to mind. This is an interesting development, however. Actor Morgan Freeman's production company says that next year, it will release a movie on the Net at the same time it film debuts in theaters, a ...

Migrating from PHP to ASP.NET: Not biased, I'm sure. "This paper discusses the migration of PHP (PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor 4) to ASP.NET. It compares and contrasts the basic underlying syntax of PHP with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, as well as the underlying functionality and architecture of the two systems."

Visual Basic Use Eroding, APAC Devs Gaining: The level of decline for VB.Net here surprises me a little. I'm not surprised to see VB6 go down, but there seems to be a marked shift to C# over VB.Net. This years' results show a "dramatic erosion" of support for Visual Basic ...

Netdisaster: Utterly pointless, but very fun to play with.

Back in the 1980s, when I was in high school, the reigning Chevy performance cars were the Camaro and the Corvette. They were almost the same, but worlds apart at the same time. Back then, you could get the Corvette and Camaro with near identical powertrains -- the 350 cid ...

BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net turns 300: It's kind of serendipitous that I found this posting, because I signed up for Tribe.net a few days ago. I don't know why, but it's kind of growing on me. "A few weeks back, BoingBoing reader Pauly M. and friends created a 'BoingBoing tribe' ...

GotDotNet Workspaces: This is Microsoft's version of SourceForge: "GotDotNet Workspaces is an online collaborative development environment where .NET developers can create, host and manage projects throughout the project lifecycle."

Is DHTML Dead?: While being unabashedly pro-Microsoft, this article makes a good case that .Net apps can squeeze out DHTML, Flash, and Java applets for client-side interactivity.

I got to thinking about this -- what is the most requested URL on the Net? My vote: the Google logo image. Yours? (I originally called this "The Most Requested File on the Net." But then I thought that the Google image probably resides on hundreds of caching servers, so ...

PHP: URL Howto: This is a little known but great feature of the PHP Web site. If you write in a PHP.net URL, like http://www.php.net/links, first this URL is matched against the PHP.net pages. If there is a page named links.php, then you'll get that page immediately. This type of ...

Home / Mono: Joe pointed this out in a comment to an earlier entry, but just in case you don't monitor comments, I wanted to make sure everyone sees this. It's .Net for Linux. The Mono project is an open source effort sponsored by Novell to create a free implementation ...

I was looking through the MonoRail project today, and I found this little nugget: [...] Developers that were introduced to Web development using pure WebForms also lack the basics http protocol concepts required to use MonoRail (or any other web framework for that matter). I've been working with ASP.Net a ...

My loathing for ASP.Net has been well-known in these pages, but part of me has made peace with it. There are some things about ASP.Net that I very much like, and I promise I ll post about them one day. Today ain t that day. I will never accept the stupidity of ...

The Web On Film: Here's a great collection of movie clips showing depictions of the Internet on film from 1983 to 2005. Some notes: Wargames Great movie, and probably the most realistic clip of them all, except for the bit when the computer talks. Sneakers Another good one from a ...

Gadgetopia readers, I come to you for your help. I am looking for a 11 x 17 movie poster of The Net the 1995 movie starring Sandra Bullock. I have looked, and been unable to find it (please don t ask why I need it all will be revealed ) ...

So it's 2000, and you're happily writing your web apps in ColdFusion. Then Allaire is bought out by Macromedia, the Sun sales rep drops by and takes your IT director to lunch, and now things are migrating to Java, your IT director has a snazzy leather jacket, and you're stuck ...

Amazon.com e-Books & Docs: Programming: Here's an interesting trend in programming books: cheap little PDFs that show you how to do one very specific thing. Consider some of the titles on this page: Creating a DataGrid and Updating Its Records on the Fly Accessing a MySQL Database with a VB.NET ...

House votes for permanent Net tax ban: Good news for everyone. "The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to make a ban on Internet use taxes permanent and require nine states to repeal existing taxes on access fees. Lawmakers passed a bill by voice vote that would cement a ...

Bill Gates Net Worth Page: A good page on how much Bill Gates is worth -- $28-some-odd billion right now. There are a bunch of stats to try and explain how much $28 billion is, but here's the most important one: Microsoft claims to have sold approximately 120 Million copies ...

Blogging: Design Your Own Weblog Application from Scratch Using ASP.NET, JavaScript, and OLE DB: "It seems like everyone wants a blog these daysâ I know I did. But I couldn't find any pre-built ASP.NET blog code with the features I wanted, so I built my own." I found this ...

I'm working on an ASP.Net project and I'm desparately trying to avoid buying Visual Studio -- it's about $600 at the cheapest, and I have nothing else I would use it for. The problem is that there's no formal documentation of the API I'm working with, so I really need ...

Crooks slither into Net's shady nooks and crannies: This is comforting. In other news, the sky will fall today. Organized crime rings and petty thieves are flocking to the Internet like start-ups in the go-go '90s, federal authorities say establishing a multibillion-dollar underground economy in just a few years. ...

For all my issues with .Net -- and there are many -- it does have a great caching system. With one line at the top of a page (the "OutputCache" directive), you can store a page in memory for X number of seconds. It's brutally simple, and just as effective. ...

Spending too much time reading weblogs and RSS feeds? Go to All Consuming to see what books are being talked about on the net, then go check something out from the library and take a break from your monitor. All Consuming is a website that visits recently updated weblogs every ...

Is There A Future for VB6 Developers After .NET ?: Interesting post and conversation coming from a "24-year VB programmer" struggling with the forced upgrade path to VB.Net. If I could simply whizz through coding with VB6, I found myself stumbling like an infant child with VB.NET plus the lack ...

GotDotNet.com is an official Microsoft site (check the copyright at the bottom). It's a "community site" related to all things .Net. What's interesting is the number of blogs that Microsoft hosts there blogs from its own employees: Andrew Conrad, Korby Parnell, etc. In fact, "blogs" is the first option ...

Forrester: Windows Platform Bests Linux For Application Development: Don't go jumping to conclusions Microsoft did commission this study. "On Tuesday, Forrester Research's Giga Information Group unit is expected to release the results of a study commissioned by Microsoft finding that applications developed and deployed on Windows are cheaper to ...

Shakedown of gambling sites before Super Bowl: Remember the good old days, when they just broke your thmbs if you didn't pay? Now mobsters hack your server. Organized crime gangs are shaking down Internet betting sites on the eve of American football's Super Bowl, threatening to unleash a crippling data ...

I believe in presentation logic, I really do. Call me a hack, but formatting logic mixed into your presentation code isn t necessarily a bad thing. I started Web development in traditional ASP. And I sucked at it, believe me. I wrote some of the most ridiculously convoluted apps that were ...

U.S. Interior Dept. unplugged from Internet for a third time: Wide swaths of the Interior Department were taken off the Internet again Tuesday after a federal judge concluded that the agency still has not fixed security holes that threaten payments owed to American Indians. It was the third such shutdown ...

Java is the SUV of programming tools: You may not be able to get to this link because Harvard is getting hammered by people trying to read this. "After researching how to do bind variables in Java, which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old ...

Here come the Net taxes: Apparently 19 states are adding a line to their tax returns asking people how much stuff they bought on the Internet this year, and asking them to pay sales tax on it. And, according to this article, that's only the beginning. Don't snicker at the ...

Resolving Everything: VeriSign Adds Wildcards: It's true, try www.deanebarkerr.net. "As of a little while ago, VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .COM and .NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain ...

Netcraft reports that a hosting provider in San Diego got busted for sniffing for the Google spider and feeding it phony links to their own web site whenever it indexed any of the sites they hosted. Aplus.Net admitted Friday that it had manipulated customer web sites to try and improve ...

A friend and I were talking tonight about the perils of setting up a Web community to compliment a real-world community. For instance, a community Web site for your church, or for your neighborhood -- so a group people that would interact with each other both online and off. (And ...

How Microsoft Lost the API War: This is an incredibly long, but very interesting, article from Joel Spolsky in which he explains why the venerable Windows API is dying. He spends 6,252 fascinating words and a couple of dozen tangents getting to this point at the end: [...] Microsoft's API ...

All Consuming: This site trolls through RSS feeds looking for ISBN's and uses them to calculate what books are being discussed in the blogosphere. Here's our page. We've mentioned books on this site before, but the only ones that show up here are the ones we've linked to with our ...

Writing For Packt: Packt Publishing has done a nice job here of shedding some light on how much you'd make if you wrote the ultimate tech book that I just know you've been contemplating. This focused business model translates into higher royalty rates for you as an author: 15% of ...

JetBlue wins air-ground wireless license: JetBlue is my new favorite airline. JetBlue Airways Corp. won a government auction Friday for wireless spectrum that could be used to provide in-flight telephone, Internet, or entertainment services. On a related note, I used an airline phone a couple of weeks ago, for the ...

Eolas files motion to enjoin IE: They want Microsoft to stop distribute any version of IE prior to the new one with the changes. Eolas, the sole licensee and sublicensor of a browser plug-in patent owned by the University of California, on Monday asked the U.S. District Court in Chicago ...

The Wife was having e-mail troubles a while back, so I dove into Entourage one night to see what the problem was. After a simple fix, incoming mail started flowing again. Flowing to the tune of 80 new messages! I thought for sure that it was all spam, and her ...

Gates still the richest, but Google guys moving up: Once again, I am not on the list. But, once again, it's dominated by geeks. Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chairman, was the nation's wealthiest person for the 11th straight year with a net worth of $51 billion [...] Perhaps more ...

Gay Marriage Poll Gets Annulled: Here's a example of why Web polls are silly. The American Family Association put a poll on their Web site asking people if they were opposed to or in favor of gay marriage with ultimate plans to take the results to Congress. Of course, they ...

Internet agency considers freeing up single-letter domains: Here's some interesting information about single letter domain names. I didn't know that they weren't all in circulation. Single-letter names under ".com," ".net" and ".org" were set aside in 1993 as engineers grew concerned about their ability to meet the expected explosion in ...

20Q: This is a cool little toy I played with over at a friend's house. It's shaped like a tennis ball with a little LCD screen and two buttons. You think of something (anything), and it asks you 20 questions to which you answer "yes" or "no." Most of the ...

Donating $5,000 to .NET Open Source: Last year, Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror promised to done some money from his advertising to open-source projects. He followed through on that today with a $5,000 check to the ScrewTurn Wiki project. This is like one of those giant promotional checks you see ...

On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach: This is an interesting -- albeit horrifying -- article about the burgeoning pedophile communities on the Web. The combination of anonymity and remote congregation make it possible for shunned corners of society to operate "in the open." Today, pedophiles go online to seek ...

Whichbook.net is an ingenious way to search for a book based upon the reader's mood. "Instead of starting from the overwhelming choice of books available, whichbook.net starts from the reader, and enables each individual to build the elements of that elusive 'good read' we are all looking for but don't ...

This weekend, I was struggling with a .Net / XML / XSLT problem. I'm not a big .Net guy, but I've been working with it for the last few months on a big project for Blend. Brian, from MyHomepoint has been a huge help as I've gotten my feet wet ...

ASP.Net on a Roll: O'Reilly indicates that ASP 2.0 is the hot technology these days. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%. Of ...

Hey folks, if any of your are subscribed to the RSS feed under the old deanebarker.net domain name, you need to get that changed to gadgetopia.com right quick. DNS on deanebarker.net is changing as we speak, as that site is going to become my personal blog sometime in the future. ...

Example Web Page: Did anyone else know about this? "You have reached this web page by typing 'example.com', 'example.net', or 'example.org' into your web browser. These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3." It's right there in the ...

Borders founder to open Net newsstand: Seems like a good way for magazines to generate some revenue of their archives essentially stuff that's just sitting around anyway. "Borders' newest venture, KeepMedia, which launches Monday, is an online portal that provides access to archives of 140 magazines for a monthly ...

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn t Matter: Jeff Atwood essentially closes the PHP sucks argument by agreeing with it, then explaining why it doesn t matter. The TIOBE community index I linked above? It s written in PHP. Wikipedia, which is likely to be on the first page of anything you search for ...

The Great Library of Amazonia: Here's a fantastic article about multiple efforts to catalog all of humankind's published knowledge, from Amazon's Search Inside the Book to Project Gutenberg to the Internet Archive. This stuff gives me goosebumps. The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I've ...

OK, so I've been off the grid for three days now, soaking my feet in the ocean, and having a great vacation. But I've started to realize how much I take net access for granted. So far I've realized that I can't: Send pictures Check ferry schedules Check flight information ...

Why does "reading" get confused with "surfing the Net" so much? I'm struggling lately with the concept of a hobby, and why I don't have one. It seems that everything I do is in some way connected with my company. I have no balance. I got to wondering the other ...

Found on the Net with no explanation. Can someone please tell me what this machine is? I'm dying to know.

Microsoft MVPs revolt: I wish them luck, but there ain't a chance Microsoft is ever going to do anything that backs away or compromises .Net in any way. Over 100 Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) have signed an online petition that demands Redmond resume development and support of "classic" Visual ...

Allstate launches identity theft coverage in Tennessee: Allstate insurance has started offering identity-theft insurance as a rider to homeowners' policies. Allstate's new identity theft expenses coverage is available for Allstate homeowners and renters in Tennessee for approximately $30 a year. It provides customers access to professional identity restoration assistance. If ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...

Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world: It s official-ish Bill Gates is no longer the world s richest man. Although they haven t released an official list (that comes in April), Fortune is running an article this week that confirms what everyone has suspected. By our calculations, the 67-year-old Slim ...

weblogs.java.net: Following on the heels of Microsoft's GotDotNet.com blogs, Sun has created their own developer blogging community.

PHP vs. ASP.NET: Oracle published this article on the Oracle Technology Network. In it, they compare PHP and ASP.NET for use with Oracle. Their verdict was pretty simple: "Use PHP." ...we must consider not simply the price tag of the initial investment, which, in the case of PHP, is obviously ...

C# 3.0 new language features; Maybe I'm just sheltered, but some of the new features of C# 3.0 look insanely cool. Especially this one: Extension methods (adding methods to classes by including the this keyword in the first parameter of a method on another static class). Here's the example; public ...

Interesting article about the proliferation of advertising on the net, and the apparent move by software developers to place ads in standard applications.

Apple Computer posted it's fourth quarter earnings results today, and it was chock full of good news: For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $106 million, or $.26 per diluted share. These results compare to a net profit of $44 million, or $.12 per diluted share, in ...

We ve started using Continuous Integration testing on a project I m working on. Had you asked me yesterday, when I was setting the #@$! thing up for my project, I wouldn t have had much nice to say about it. But now, whenever I merge my code up to the integration branch, ...

David Heinemeier Hansson (of Rails) fame put an interesting post up on his blog the other day regarding Rails as a 'disruptive technology', but I think that his point also applies to a lot of other "fringe" development frameworks as well. The industry is being massively over-served by J2EE/.NET in ...

Cats Can Has Grammar: This is a great examination of one of the current Net memes -- annotating cat pictures -- and why it has ended up the way it has. If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you'll have been unable to miss the recent ...

Do you put more value on information you pay for? Do you pay more attention to something you paid, say $5 for, than something you read for free on the Net? A friend and I were having this conversation the other day, partly related to my post from a couple ...

I don't mean to go on another rant about comment spam, but I'm suffering under another deluge on my personal site. While the Texas Holdem spammer was a blitzkreig, another spammer has deanebarker.net under slow siege. Someone out there is posting a spam comment to my site twice per hour, ...

Developing Your Own Technical Talent: David Gammel has some comments how to make sure you keep up the technical talent on your team. The key to success is to design your positions and professional development program to enable you to develop an entry level person and then promote them in ...

Is comprehensive-ness a point for, or a point against, a technical book? I used it think it was an advantage the bigger, the better but as I get busier and my company accelerates, it s increasingly a liability. I ve started to be greatly attracted to smaller books or ...

Microsoft Java Language Conversion Assistant 2.0 Beta "The Java Language Conversion Assistant is a tool that automatically converts existing Java-language code into Microsoft Visual C# for developers who want to move existing applications to the .NET Framework."

I m not a big music guy, and this isn t a music blog, but I ve finally come to acknowledge that YouTube is a fantastic repository of music. It took me a while, I know, but my 13-year-old son has a habit of playing DJ on weeknights for about an hour ...

How to find confidential reports with Google: Amazing. Sometimes I waste time on the Net by putting in interesting searches into Google. Today's was quite interesting -- Google this: Confidential "do not distribute." Here's the search.

We've talked about Dice's cool ads before, but in this one, I found two syntax errors (assuming this is classic ASP and not ASP.Net -- is that a fair assumption?). Anyone else see them? [See the comments. I was totally wrong.]

'Baywatch' star wins control of Net name: And there was finally peace all over the world... Former "Baywatch" star Carmen Electra has won control of the Internet name www.carmenelectra.com in a ruling by a United Nations panel, a U.N. spokeswoman said Thursday.

Don't Copy That Floppy: I remember this from years ago. Good to see someone got it out on the Net. Back in 1992, piracy was rampant. What could possibly stop it? An ad that you would swear was from the 80s? A horrible rap song?

I've been using a new free RSS aggregator for a couple of days and, on the whole, I'm very impressed. RssReader does lack a few features of some of the other players, but is very responsive and easy to use. It needs the .NET framework to run.

I have a friend who programs in .Net (I referred to him in a prior post). We'll call him "Trevor." Trevor and I have epic arguments about the superiority of our chosen platforms. I use open-source, "scripting" languages -- PHP and Ruby, mainly -- while Trevor develops in .Net. Trevor ...

Six Apart to buy Live Journal: This is all over the Net this morning, so I'll jump on the "Holy Cow!" bandwagon. I have learnt exclusively that Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad, and Moveable Type is about to acquire Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount.

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset: Apparently Microsoft posted this source over at SourceForge. The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to ...

IDevelopers show their independent streak, favoring Web-based apps: Big frameworks and multi-layered architectures seem great in theory, but I've yet to see them work really well in practice. This seems to be the feeling coming out of this programming survey as well. "Web applications rule the enterprise. That's the indisputable ...

U.S. Music Firms Sue 261 Net Users for Song Copying: That round of subpoenas results in this round of lawsuits. "A recording-industry trade group said on Monday it had sued 261 individuals who it believes have distributed hundreds of songs over the Internet without permission, and said more such lawsuits ...

Cold Fusion: Enterprise ready?: We tend to dump on ColdFusion around here a bit, but I ve been interested in this discussion over at LinkedIn Answers. It started off with someone asking if ColdFusion was enterprise ready. I m surprised by some spirited and well-reasoned answers in ColdFusion s favor. CF has been ...

Iraq seeks '.IQ' domain to make its mark on Net: I want to get the name "ihaveareallyhigh.iq". Iraq is making its first claim for an internationally recognized presence on the Internet. Iraq's media commission and the U.S.-led administration in Iraq want to set up Web addresses using the domain code ...

This handy little site joins sites like php.net and A9 in offering "functionality by URL." Enter "whois.sc/" and any domain name in your address bar, and you get the whois data like this. Eliminates a step from the normal pattern: enter the domain, wait for the page to load, ...

MyDoom Net Worm Scores Hit, Knocks Out SCO Site The MyDoom Internet worm claimed its first scalp Sunday, paralyzing the Web site of American software firm SCO Group with a massive data blitz. [...] The speed and severity of the attack surprised security officials. "It was spectacularly successful," said Mikko ...

101 Ways to Save the Internet: Some great ideas here. Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages they should all go into a single app. [...] Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move? [...] Release ...

Teaching my kids to program: If you had to teach your kids to program, what language would you pick? There are some conspicuous absences from this list. I don't care if any of my three kids ever grok the difference between an abstract class and an interface or between a ...

Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study: I just knew I wasn't a dork. Awesome. ...the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much ...

Mac mini case mods have already begun. This guy took a brand new mini, stuffed it inside a PC case, added a 250GB 3.5" hard drive and some cooling hardware, and ended up with a nice little home file server. The linked article gives a decent step-by-step guide to how ...

Internet language runs real, virtual Mars rover: Spirit runs on Java. I wonder if Beagle was running .Net? Java, the software developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990s as a universal platform for Internet applications, gave NASA a low-cost and easy-to-use option for running Spirit, the robotic rover that ...

Creative Showcase: Some neat Web ads here. Click the screencap to see the ad. "Creativity is alive and well, and living on the Net. But too many breaking campaigns have slipped through the cracks without the industry taking notice. Explore with industry consultant Joseph Jaffe an ongoing showcase of the ...

Internet Homebuyers Save Time, Spend More Money: That's a lot of money for Net geeks to spend on a house. It may surprise some that the average priced home bought by an Internet homebuyer is $462,000. It may surprise most Realtors that the Internet homebuyer typically does more research than ...

CMP Media's Software Development Magazine Announces Finalists for the 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards: The Jolt Awards for this year have been announced. Everything from the best in books to the best in databases to the best in frameworks. Rails made the list, so did the .Net ...

There's a new worm that's ramping up quick. It's an email that appears to be from Microsoft with a subject line something like "newest net critical pack" or "Network Patch" or another one of about six variants. It has an executable attached. I'm getting about one of these every five ...

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we hit 2,500 ...

Mamma Mia! Papa John s raking in the dough online: An entire article on CNN about the apparent explosion of ordering pizza on the Net. Dominos Pizza Inc., put its own twist on online ordering early this year by introducing a Pizza Tracker, which lets customers keep tabs on the progress ...

i have some doughts in .net Please clarify me.: Some guy made a weak attempt to get posters on Spolsky s discussion group to answer a homework question for him. Hilarity ensued. Strong typing is hitting the keyboard with your fists. Weak typing is hitting it with so little force that ...

Google Co-op: Google will let you create a search engine that searches a specified set of sites. Harness the power of Google search technology to create a free Custom Search Engine that reflects your knowledge and interests - and make money from the resulting traffic. Example: Portman Wills created the ...

I've started reading RSS feeds in Bloglines (and loving it, but that's another post). Bloglines has a snazzy feature which shows how many other Bloglines users are subscribed to the same feed you're looking at. The winner among my feeds? Slashdot, with 23,001. Second is Boing Boing with 14,767. Gadgetopia ...

Google search engine strands Web surfers: Never once, in all the years I've been on the Net, have I known Google to be down. Google stranded some Web surfers Monday, unable to meet visitors' requests for more than an hour. At around 11:15 a.m. ET, the world's No. 1 search ...

FARK.com Advertising: Fark.com has an interesting ad pricing method: "$100 for 1% of all our pageviews for one month." Based on their current traffic, that's 190,000 impressions for $100. If they sell out, they net $10,000 per month. Not bad on either side for a targeted demographic ("Our demographics are ...

Microsoft kills Net address to foil worm: This explains why I couldn't find this today. "Because the worm is programmed to attack only that address and not the site that it redirects to, the software giant has decided to eliminate the Windowsupdate.com address. The move is one of a series ...

List of User-Agents (Spiders, Robots, Browser): I posted about this site two years ago, and it's been actively maintained all this time. I've been checking it for the last couple days, and there are new additions every day. I assert that this is the largest and most accurate index of ...

Experts anxious over possible Net attack: When the Department of Homeland Security asks you to patch your server, I suggest you patch it. "Experts are advising computer users with renewed urgency to apply a free repairing patch that Microsoft has offered on its Web site since July 16, when it ...

As if one needs more reasons, this one is a standout; according to a USA Today and Avantgarde joint study, it takes only 4 short minutes for a clean Windows XP SP 1 machine connected to the net without a firewall to become part of some spammer's zombie network. A ...

Net Perceptions returns cash to shareholders: Failed dotcoms aren't new, but this one is a little different. They realized they were doomed, and they're actually going to hand some of their money back to the stockholders before they go under. "In a statement, the company said existing shareholders will receive ...

A couple of weeks ago a number of al-Qaeda websites started dropping off the 'Net one by one. A Times online article says that British Intelligence may be behind it all. Apparently there are dozens of sites run by al-Qaeda that go so far as to give technical instructions on ...

Mark recently reinstalled Windows XP on his laptop. He was kind enough to keep a running diary. My Apple bias not withstanding, I find this rather funny. "34. Update driver. 35. 'This driver is not digitally signed.' OK. 36. 'This driver may cause your computer to become unstable.' OK. 37. ...

fabFORCE.net: Here's a really fantastic MySQL administration tool. Open source, even. DBDesigner 4 provides powerful features to create a visual model of any database. Starting from a reverse engineering engine to automatically retrieve a model from existing databases, extensive modeling tools and editors to a syncronisation function which will apply ...

Pay To Play: Fair Price for Good Community: Josh Clark nails another good post today as he discusses a new communal bike rental program in Paris. For 29 euros a year, you can check out a bike for 30 minutes whenever you need one. He discusses why the city of ...

Frequency: This one supports Blogger, Movable Type, Radio, pMachine, GeekLog, and EraBlog.NET. Frequency is a desktop weblog client. If you have a weblog you manage with Blogger, Radio, Movable Type, or other Blogger API or metaWeblog API system, you can use Frequency to add new posts instead of logging into ...

VeriSign to revive redirect service: Verigisn claims they plan to start SiteFinder back up again after giving notice. Wonder how ICANN will react? "Speaking before an unusual gathering of technical experts in Washington, D.C., VeriSign said its own re-evaluation of its Site Finder redirection service found 'no identified security or ...

And here we are folks: in just over a year, we somehow found 1,000 things to talk about. We've come a long way from our first post about The Gutenberg Project (way back when the site was called DeaneBarker.net). Nine-hundred ninety-nine entries later, Gadgetopia seems to be a hit (okay, ...

Wired News: Clark's Run: Net Made Him Do It: They're talking about DraftWesleyClark.com, an example of something that would probably never have happened without the Internet. "Gen. Wesley Clark's decision to enter the Democratic presidential race is another sign of the Internet's growing influence on American politics, political experts and ...

How do I know this person? Through the Web!: Jon makes an interesting point here. There s a whole category of people that you know via the Net only. You may have talked to them on the phone or met them in person, but the Web is where you met them. ...

United is cleared to offer Wi-Fi on domestic flights: Can we never get away from the Net? Airplane trips were always pretty relaxing because nothing could bug you up there. The airline expects to have Wi-Fi up and running in mid- to late 2006, letting passengers check e-mail, send instant ...

Friendster Quickly Gathering Foes: There is apparently trouble in the Friendster world. Though it remains at the top of the online social networking heap, there are increasing rumblings that some of Friendster's earliest core users are unhappy with it. And now that they've found alternatives to the service, many are ...

FBI targets Net phoning: The government wants to start tapping Internet phone calls. "The new rules are necessary, because terrorists could otherwise frustrate legitimate wiretaps by placing phone calls over the Internet, warns a summary of a July 10 meeting with the FCC that the FBI prepared. 'Broadband networks may ...

U.S. court nixes Net music subpoenas: The court nullified all of the RIAA's subpeonas and told them to find another way of identifying downloaders rather than force the ISPs to give them up. The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group, has sought to force Verizon Communications and other ...

Why is CNET's News.com property at "news.com.com" URL/domain?: The first decent answer I've heard to the ".com.com" curiosity that is CNET. Cookies are by design limited to a domain or a subdomain, at the choice of the cookie's creator (the original web site on which it's created for you). Therefore, ...

Nigerian email conmen fall into their targets' net: An in-depth article about people scamming the 419 scammers. It has been described as the internet's first blood sport and is fast becoming one of the web's favourite pastimes. Fed up with having their inboxes clogged with emails from Nigerian fraudsters promising ...

...how about a $4,200 Alienware 4.2GHz gaming machine? An article on C-Net has details about the overclocked and liquid-cooled Pentium 4 Area-51 ALX desktop, which looks like it belongs on Captain Proton's spaceship. It could also be mistaken for a 1950's-era toaster. Somebody ought to fill Alienware in on the ...

OldComputers.net - rare, vintage and obsolete computers: I'm basking in the nostalgia of my little TI-99/4A. "Early personal computers were nothing like present day computers, they had personality! Each was different and more exciting than the previous, with new features and capabilities. Sure, they have limited power, were possibly very ...

Monet Mobile seeks bankruptcy protection, will unplug net: Sadly, we were one of the 3,000 subscribers. Monet Mobile Networks, a provider of high-speed wireless Internet access in eight Midwestern cities, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and plans to turn off the service in early April. The company, which ...

Curiosity Built the Database: Microsoft's TerraServer the massive GIS and aerial photo archive has been made available as a Web service called TerraService. There's apparently a .Net API for it. In addition to the 1,500 people programming against the TerraService daily, two impressive organizations have taken advantage of ...

MSN shuts down its chatrooms: Microsoft decided to do this out of fear that the chat rooms were being used by pedophiles and other malcontents. "Microsoft's internet service MSN has taken a major step in net safety which could sound the death knell for unsupervised chatrooms. MSN are closing all ...

Time Warner Links Web Prices With Usage: Initially horrifying as it may seem, this was kind of an inevitably, given the revolution of P2P and BitTorrent. Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data ...

The Day Email Died? "I wonder if this is the last straw that will convince people to move in droves to challenge/response or whitelist mechanisms, as I argued last year. And I'd be surprised if these volumes don't overload mail servers at major ISPs. We're seeing the closest thing yet ...

Microsoft Embraces Modeling: "The Redmond, Wash., company is developing its own model-driven architecture for a future release of its Visual Studio .Net development environment. The new architecture will be based on the UML (Unified Modeling Language) standard, sources said." This is great! Microsoft has announced that they're going to improve ...

MSN Sets Licensing Deadline for Third-Party IM: Microsoft is going to force licenses be purchased to access the Messenger network. "Last week, Microsoft began notifying some of the affected third parties about the change last week, but Gurry said the company doesn't know the full extent of other clients and ...

How many emails are sent each day?: From the Useless Trivia That We Love To Speculate On Anyway department. VeriSign (the exclusive registry for .com and .net domains) estimates (PDF) that there are about 2.25 billion email queries per day. However, because of caching, email queries represent only a fraction ...

Parrot virtual machine: I found this in this post about the future of Perl 6. Parrot is something like Java s JVM or .Net s CLR, but for multiple, dynamic, open-source languages. Parrot is a register-based virtual machine being developed using the C programming language and intended to run dynamic languages efficiently. ...

Social Net Site Is Said to Be for Sale: How can they ask $100 million for this? Plaxo, an early social networking site that helps people keep their address books updated, is up for auction, people briefed on the offering said Wednesday night. The company, which has not made a ...

Design Guidelines for Visualizing Links: A lot of really good guidelines for hyperlink usability that really boil down to one point: do links the way HTML was built to handle them and you won't have any problems. Ninety-nine percent of usability problems on the Net are a result of people ...

FDISK.COM fdisk info: I went looking for FDISK (the formatting and partitioning utility) today, and I found this. This server originated somewhere in mid-1994 when I had an argument with Windows 3.1 over the contents of my hard drive. Rather than re-install Windows I put a little freeware OS I ...

International Slashdot Meetup Day: I was browsing MeetUp.com, which I found via the Webby Awards (they won something....) and I found that there's a Slashdotter group meeting right here in Sioux Falls (and in Huron, no less). On a superficial level, cool. On a deeper level, this is just one ...

My son got "Everquest: Planes of Power" as an early Christmas present. I dutifully installed it, only to find that after 45 minutes of copying files (off a 52x CD-ROM, no less), it still needed to download the latest patches and files from the Net. This is all well and ...

As you can see, DeaneBarker.net is running under its new platform. And, besides a couple of knucleheads at my old work sitting around waiting for me to install so they could log in under the default account and change the name of the blog to "DeaneBarker.nizzle" ....everything went pretty well. ...

SQL Server Express: One of the things I don't like about Microsoft development platforms is that they're not free. Um, wait a minute... SQL Server Express is a version of SQL Server 2005 designed for building simple, dynamic applications. SQL Server Express helps developers build robust and reliable applications by ...

Guess what? Microsoft won: A good commentary on the fact that Microsoft is stronger than ever, despite its legal hassles of late and the never-ending predictions of its demise. "To be sure, Microsoft received some unexpected help from the vagaries of the business cycle. A recession came along at just ...

Resizeable Textarea 0.1a: The guys over at Lifehacker are on my "happy list" today for pointing out this Firefox plugin. It lets you hover over the edge of a textarea, grab it, and resize the box. I know a lot of Firefox plugins are just gee-whiz stuff, but this is ...

I was seriously offered $15,000 for the gadgetopia.com domain name today. I mention this because it's the first time anyone has ever offered to buy the name, which I find odd because