Banned Books Week

Did you even know there was a banned books week?

I think this is a brilliant idea.

It's the last week of every September.

For more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_Books_Week

More on Oracle and MySql

Good point on that Oracle would improve MySQL towards Sql Server to steal its market share, rather than killing it. Altough I'm not sure implementing an oracle storage engine for the mysql front end would make technical sense.

http://andigutmans.blogspot.com/2009/05/mysql-can-be-great-for-oracle.html

Downfall of Agile Hitler

Hilarious :D

http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/artem/downfall-agile-hitler

Thanks to Sam from work :]

latest news

'buys' operator being defined as: $;

sun $ mysql
oracle $ sun

at the moment, in a parallel universe:

apple $ oracle

bum! that specific universe collapses on itself.

but hey, we're safe.

c# enum and IEquatable

Say you have a generic class like this:

class MyClass<T> where T : IEquatable<T> { }

and an enum:

enum MyEnum { MyOption1, MyOption2, MyOption3 }

would you be able to do this?

MyClass<MyEnum> MyMember;

Nope:

The type 'MyEnum' cannot be used as type parameter 'T' in the generic type or method 'MyClass<T>'. There is no boxing conversion from 'MyEnum' to 'System.IEquatable
What would you do?

Use EqualityComparer<T>.Default. By definition, behaviour is:

The Default property checks whether type T implements the System.IEquatable<T> generic interface and if so returns an EqualityComparer<T> that uses that implementation. Otherwise it returns an EqualityComparer<T> that uses the overrides of Object.Equals and Object.GetHashCode provided by T.

Nice.

My "can't live without" firefox extensions

Tree Style Tab:
For tab-freaks like me, it doubles up the number of tabs you can concurrently manage. Shows your tabs on the left side of the browser as a tree (each new link having its referrer as parent). Especially if you have a wide screen monitor, you won't care the horizontal space you lose.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

StumbleUpon:
At the beginning brings random web pages when you hit "Stumble!" button. As you go, you rate these pages with "I like" or "No more like this" buttons and it learns the pages you like. You can easily forward pages to friends with a single-line message.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138

FlashBlock:
Blocks all the flash content in every page, unless you click on them. Extremely beneficial since flash content sucks up all the cpu you have.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433

DownThemAll:
With a right-click, downloads every link on the page you're on, filtered by extension or a regex. It is also nice to download a single link, because it spawns multiple sockets (4 by default, I think) to download the file.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201

From the times I was actively doing web development:
Web Developer:
Edits css in-place, browses/modifies HTML DOM, hides/shows images or their places, and a bunch of very nice features for a web developer.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

How far the web has gone

Two signs of how far the web has gone. The second is pretty cool, though.

1. Google Native Client, runs native binary code inside the browser, deploying the necessary binaries just in time of browsing the page.
http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

2. VisualWebGUI, implements Windows.Forms in web context using AJAX, so after replacing System.Windows.Forms references to Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms and moving the source to a new project, your forms work on the web.
http://www.visualwebgui.com/Community/Resources/QuickStarts/tabid/365/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/392/How-to-Migrate-a-WinForms-application-to-the-Web-using-Visual-WebGui.aspx

Earlier than this, we were trying to run web applications on offline machines, mostly using installation packs containing middleware like apache/php/mysql. I guess the basic drive behind this was to make offline machines run the same application. They weren't rare at that moment, but now offline machines are barely considered as proper computers.

We're trying to run web applications locally, and local applications on the web. We're desperate.

Java was right to the spot, and 7 years before .net was there. I don't know, maybe it was too early for the concept, or Sun couldn't make a good job on keeping Java up to date. But I'm sad to see Java is dying. How do I know? Because Java programmers are paid well these days.