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There is a new article up on Kuro5hin called Code Humor Challenge.

Overall, it talks about some of the weirdo code that people do write and those which do end up in production systems …

The author starts of with a few examples and one of them which stood out was an IntWrapper method that wraps the Integer type. Oh yeah … This is how it goes …

public class IntWrapper{  private final String value;

Read on …

Anti-virus researchers at Symantec yesterday spotted the first virus capable of infecting 64-bit Windows systems.

Rugrat was created to prove a point rather than to be released into the wild. The proof-of-concept virus poses no immediate risk to Itanic users, but as the population of IA64 systems grows that risk of 64-bit worms will also increase. The virus is also capable of infecting 32-bit computers running 64-bit emulation software.

via The Register

This post is a tribute to my favorite blog reader’s creator Luke Hutteman ! I’ve tried FeedDemon, FeedReader, Abilon, Syndirella, SauceReader, RSSBandit and Bloglines but nothing has yet been able to convince me other wise from using #Reader. This product is just plainly fantastic … Now thinking about the comparison of all these readers and things i’ve seen in GMail also have influenced some of the way i work regularly and so i cooked up couple of points of improvement that can be applied to #Reader to make it a Ultra-Cool product. Luke, you are under no hurry to do any of this or to even try it. Its just one frustrated man’s plea to his favorite reader’s creator to improve the product. Read on.

Some things that can be improved and cleaned …

1. Please please please … I beg you. Reduce the memory consumed by #Reader for Gods sake … It literally hogs the memory and in effect leaves other apps to beg for the resources on a 512MB RAM machine … I understand that it is necessary to have all the feeds in-memory to generate the backlinks and all that, but probably you could choose an optimised lazy load pattern or use a change in the algorithm order. For eg., you could derive the backlinks for a particular post as and when the particular feed is refreshed and updated. And from further on, you could just show the data as such from the XML ! Well all this is based on my assumption after some research with reflector on #Reader … If it doesn’t work this way, then Luke, i would be glad to hear how it works ..
2. If i read a particular author, then all the same instances written by same author ( something like mainfeed and author feed ) should update and reflect the same status .. Now why do i have to go to the backlinks and then update the status or delete the duplicate feed ? I know that doing it this way is trivial but you know, hmm i’m lazy. Also more importantly, the whole list of duplicates shows up in the Unread post when all i have is essentially much lesser than that ! And just in case, if i delete a particular entry or a post, then if it is repeated in many places, then you could remove all instances of it too … Eg., Say if i am subscribed to Brad Adams directly and i subscribe to MSDN blogs mainfeed and Weblogs.asp.net mainfeed directly, then for every post by Brad, i ineffect have 3 unread items in my #Reader ! What the ….
3. There is a bug in the subscription front. If i enter a particular feed #url and keep hitting enter, then eventhough i could be subscribed once, every one of those requests ( the number of times i pressed enter) comes back with a vengeance and shows up as one of the trackback thingies for each post. Now why is that ?

I’ve got a couple of feature requests too. See if something is feasible.

1. Need a facility to sort according to the lock value for posts in a particular feed. Also if the label functionality is included, then a sort or a filter based on particular label value will be cool too !
2. For the subscribing part, don’t allow the user to hit enter more than once for a particular feed. Even if he hits, you could check it from a queue and if it already is in the async request queue or something then don’t process further. Also a messagebox or someother kind of notification to inform the user that the feed has been fetched when subscribing for hte first time would be nice too. Right now, the user has no clue when #reader is going to get the feed and has to wait till it fetches. Now that is frustrating if the site i’m subscribing is under heavy load already or very slow. It takes quite a while and all i can do is stare !
3. If not for a feature to copy a blog entry, let us atleast have something similar to how GMail works. Give us labels !!! Now let me explain this to the uninitiated. Labels are like flags that you can attach to a certain post or an entry and accordingly it can be searched too. These labels could be dynamically created and can be associated with any of the entries. If you delete the label, then that does not delete the entries associated with the label but instead removes the association 🙂 Straightforward huh !
4. Deleting something from the Referrers list ( the backlinks ) which is shown as an entry’s child node in the top view, does not really seem to delete the actual item physically. hmm may be a option to choose this feature would be great because i love and use a lot of the threaded post feature that sharpreader provides and so it would be great to mark other entries related as Read, Unread, Locked, Deleted or mark labels over it too right at the threaded juncture 🙂
5. It would be mondo cool and classical from a Cool Factor perspective if the local search can support boolean operators to perform the search. So someone can essentially query the local cache with a string like “Bill | Microsoft & Sun & !Scoble” which means search for entries containing Bill or Microsoft and Sun but not Scoble. Now ain’t that cool ?! And of course that would also mean the inclusion of parenthesis to categorize the && and || together … I can’t explain in words how i’ll freeze with the cool factor so high if this thing does make it into #Reader … Whoa !
6. A feature to mark a post as that which was commented previously would be mega cool too ! One of the main things about blogs is that, we don’t know exactly which post we comment on amongst the plethora of blogs that we read in a day. So if there is some kind of label that can be applied ( my #2 point ) then probably you could retrieve all the new comments after the comment was typed in by the user. This shouldn’t be that hard if i can understand this right …

Well guess these are some of the things that i wanted to put through for quite some time but never got enough of it at hand to write such a lengthy rant ! Luke ! You rock dude … And #Reader definitely rocks. No matter what anyone says, i’ve found it the most simple interface with no gizmo graphics or anything and is straightforward in doing it’s job efficiently ! And Luke, in case you need some help in doing any of the above said stuff, feel free to contact me. I’d be more than glad to help you out !!!

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  There is one more&#8230; About ideas. A daily journal of thoughts that i pour out. Aha !
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WARNING : This post has nothing related to .NET or any of the current technologies. I got this as a forwarded mail from a friend. It details about a programming contest once held in CMU and the results of it. Not sure whether it is true, but sure is a very interesting read. If you are still interested, then read on !…(read more)

There has been a lot of talk about how expensive our favorite IDE, VS.NET is right now. Charles assured in one of the replies to the post that the issue is being discussed internally and will be addressed soon. Cool ! Actually, i don’t know what stand to take on this issue. Is your productivity important or the one time benefit of buying VS.NET professional edition ? It really is very confusing …

Anyway, as our quest for a free .NET IDE continues, here’s one to quench that ! Check out Eclipse for .NET ! Infact, i think i picked up this link from one of the replies, but not sure though… Eclipse as most of you would have heard is an awesome product which was developed by IBM and then later opensourced. I have heard quite a lot from fellow Java devs that the IDE is powerful compared to IntelliJ‘s IDE. Well i’m not the judge in either case but i definitely think that the plugin will help all those cribbing for a good IDE with C# support.

Again, #develop as many of you already know, is a very flexible IDE completely written in C# which is opensource and freely available. There is rarely something extra needed apart from #develop and ASP.NET Webmatrix for developing WinForm and WebForm code in .NET. What more do you want ?

And apart from all that, for the most hardcore developer who doesn’t care for IDE features, there is one really cool app to write code in C#. Ofcourse it will not work at all for enterprise level apps but for smaller projects, definitely useful. Check out Textpad. FYI, its got syntax highlighting functionality for C# too .. Download the file here.

Code on …

I guess, this is a pretty decent list of free IDEs to work on .NET right now. I might have missed a lot of other ones here but these are the ones that stand out quite prominently, i should say 🙂

Update : Just found out that the Notepad2 free utility provided at Flo’s freeware site also supports syntax highlighting for C# ! And the best part is that the whole thing is customizable, just like Textpad’s syntax highlight feature 🙂 Cool.

Gmail Gems – Yeah you guessed it right. It is related to Google’s new email service. What better way to teach people about GMail than to open up a weblog and evangelize it !

Read more on Gmail Gems or Secrets of the Gmail Wizards …

Bright as it is, glowing incessantly energy so pureThe young sun rises, to enlighten the worldAll earth’s living heat derived from his rays cureThe natural balance he provides is another complex mathematical surd.

The news of the day : My favourite book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is going to be made into a movie ! And they have a blog too … Too bad they don’t have an RSS subscription yet … Ok, back to business.

• A KB Article that provides a fix for a very common error in ASP.NET. Fix for “Server Application Unavailable” error message if a DLL is loaded in the 0x33A20000 address space and you request an ASP.NET page.
• A very detailed article on Code Access Security (CAS) and Design Patterns.
• Latest Channel 9 Video with Ward Cunningham – How did you come up with the idea for the Wiki ?
• Read about the review of the new book : Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham.
• There is a free online course on security at the microsoft E-learning center. Check out Clinic 2806: Microsoft® Security Guidance Training for Developers. This online clinic provides students with knowledge and skills essential for the creation of applications with enhanced security. Students will learn about the need for implementing security at every stage of the development process and best practices for applying security principles. Students will also learn how to use established threat modeling methodologies and tools with other best practices to minimize vulnerabilities and limit damage from attacks. Finally, students will learn how to implement security features to enhance security for Web applications and Web services that are built by using Microsoft ASP.NET. via Sudhakar Sadasivuni
• IronPython: A fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono. A pretty neat article with lots of benchmarks and some real advice on how to improve the performance in the managed world.
• Design Guidelines Update: Enum Design via BradA
• A nice article on Document-Centric .NET which stresses on the principle “program to an interface, not an implementation”.
• Clemens gives an acronym to SOA. Guess it before you click 😉