Recently in website Category

The New York Times reports on a website, ManyEyes.com, that allows users to upload their data for use in online visualization software. Cool.

A website which specializes in photographs of the Earth from above. Also available as a coffee table book.

[CodeFetch] allows developers to search programming books online for code samples in the language of their choice.

Say you wanted to find a C# code sample that implements a priority queue, like I did here. You could get several implementations from CodeFetch with a simple search. Mind you, the implementations I'm seeing are a bit bizarre. Would you really implement a priority queue by maintaining a sorted array?

A great article on using functional CSS layout instead of structural HTML layout. Colorful cartoons, too.

[Why tables for layout is stupid]

I was doing a crossword puzzle this afternoon and needed some Shakespeare quotes to complete the clues. (Sometimes, I can't get the answer from the clue alone. I need help.) So I googled for a specific Shakespeare play, act, and scene, and it came up with Open Source Shakespeare. It's amazing! It has all the plays, all the sonnets, and a concordance. What more could you ask for?

Scraped from selfinvestors.com:

• Investment Postcards
• Seeking Alpha
• Capital Chronicle
• C++ Trader
• Bull Trader
• Tim Knight (Prophet.net)
• Deal Breaker
• ETF Trends
• Short Squeezes
• Money Turtle
• Market Talk with Piranha
• Bill Rempel
• Swing Trading Stocks
• In the Money
• Kirk Report
• Market Matador
• Club Ino
• Madd Money
• Howard Lindzon
• Financial Armageddon
• Random Roger's Big Picture
• Contra Hour
• Chartology
• Bob's Advice for Stocks
• Ugly Chart
• Zach Stocks
• BioHealth Investor
• Big Ben's Investing Blog
• StockBee
• Trade Radar
• Trader Mike
• Crowder Investments
• Davis Freeberg
• Stock Market Beat

Wow, I had no idea the trackback spam situation was so bad. I decided to check the comments on my site today: no comments. I checked my trackbacks: 555 trackbacks, 554 of them automatically marked as spam. And the other one was spam, too.

In checking the sources, I found one stand out website for sourcing spam links to my site: weebly.com. The site purports to be an easy-to-use blog provider for the non-technical person, but that's not even the start of the story. Weebly.com appears to be the favored starting point of porn spammers. Here are the blogs at weebly that deal with only a specialized porn topic: seven sites all using this specific phrase. Most other blog sites have no hits on this phrase. Looks to me as if this is the preferred location for trackback spammers.

I came across this website the other day. It has a fair amount of interesting programming information, mostly about C# and .NET development.

There are a couple of links on Firefox plugins ([Five more FireFox plugins...], [Five FireFox plugins...]) that I liked:

1. [GreaseMonkey]
   Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

2. [ColorZilla]
   Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies

3. [Poster]
   A developer tool for interacting with web services and other web resources that lets you make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type. This allows you to interact with web services and inspect the results.

4. [JavaScript Debugger]
   Venkman is the code name for Mozilla's JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers.

5. [X-Ray]
   See the tags on a page without viewing the sourcecode.

6. [CSSMate]
   Inline CSS Editing Evolved.

7. [FireShot]
   FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations.

8. [Web Developer]
   Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

9. [ViewSourceWith]
   Open page source, CSS and JS files, modify content, view server side pages, etc.

10. [FireBug]
    Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

I can't admit to having used them all, partly because I upgraded to FireFox 3.0 this week and very few of these plugins are compatible -- only FireShot and ViewSourceWIth are. I am most excited to add FireShot and FireBug. I'll have to wait for the FF 3.0 version of the latter.

[2008-06-15: Firebug for Firefox 3.0 has finally been released.]

I also really liked a couple of other short articles:

• Implicit and explicit interface implementation
• .NET memory leak
  To sum things up, the safest way to ensure that an object will be collected by the GC is to make it inherit IDisposable and in the Dispose method unsubscribe from all the events you were subscribed to.
• How to expose your collections safely
  
  

  class TreeNode
  {
    private List<TreeNode> children = new List<TreeNode>();
  
    public IList<TreeNode> Children
    {
      get { return children.AsReadOnly(); }
    }
  }

RefDesk is a phenomenal collection of links to every imaginable sort of reference work:

• google front-ends
• dictionaries
• encyclopedias
• news sources
• news photos
• news videos
• business and people searches
• everything else

It is an improbably large page of links categorized to be useful. Via [ aldaily ]

I came across this website a long time ago. If you are going to watch House, you have to read PoliteDissent to hear a medical opinion of the show. It's the best of a number of sites that rate House.