Evil
One of my recent posts attracted a comment that I can only interpret as attempt at stealth spam. The text of the comment was sufficiently vague that it could be considered on topic (if not well reasoned or insightful). What indicated the comment was spam instead of badly argued partisan hackery was the comment subject and URL. A cursory glance through the comments may not have identified this. I can only assume this is an attempt to game search engines (although I doubt Google and friends consider my blog to be particularly influential). The element I find interesting is...
I’ve just purchased a licence for NDepend (note to self: In future respond promptly to emails offering free licences, don’t lose them). Using it to examine one of my personal projects has suggested a number of classes which could potentially be made internal. This would require adding the InternalsVisibleToAttribute to the assembly in order to allow the test assembly to access the classes. This leads to the question: Is this valid behaviour? This is not a question to which I currently have a good answer. Some general thoughts on the matter: Making implementations internal ensures...
My bank has decided to start making decisions for me. They've sent me a cheerful letter telling me that they're going to swap my credit card of type X with one of type Y with a brand new number. For my benefit, honest. This will all happen unless I call them and get the marketing spiel on why this is the greatest change ever to happen to me. Er... No. I have a number of things set up to do automatic billing from my credit card. If I'm going to have to change all those, I'm going to...
Apparently this evening SBS will be broadcasting Olympic archery in the slot that should be occupied by Top Gear. This is wrong on so many levels. Not least of which is use of medieval weapons being considered an Olympic sport. If you really want to get me to watch, combine medieval weapons and cars. Bring back jousting. With cars. Until then can we please stop pretending that any of the Olympic events are interesting to any but the terminally dull? Hopefully one day as a species we'll get over the idiotic nationalism that drives this overly expensive stupidity. I'm...
Note to evil, evil telemarketer scum. The phrase "courtesy call" will cause me to hang up immediately. It's not a courtesy to tell me about your seminar. It's just intrusive and irritating. Also, if you have to advertise your investment opportunity via telemarketing I'm going to assume that's because it's of sufficiently low quality that no one but gullible fools who buy stuff advertised via telemarketing would ever invest in it. Time to sign up for the Do Not Call register.
Walking through the CBD it's difficult to miss the large number of people attempting to attract attention. They're a diverse group, including buskers, survey takers, various partisans attempting to extract donations and advertisers spruiking the pointless and inane. My approach to all of these is the same: I don't acknowledge their existence. This behaviour strikes many as rude, which is precisely what these people leech off. They're attempting to make you believe you have an obligation where no such obligation exists and take some of your time and generally some of your money as well. As your time and money...
Some software has an unfortunate tendency to assume that it's the most important thing ever to be executed on your computer. Programs of this type will add links to themselves in multiple menus and on your desktop, set themselves up as the handler for any file type vaguely related to their function and have themselves set to run at startup. This may be done for malicious reasons, but for software that's at least technically non-malicious it's done because the developers overestimate the utility of their software or just don't care that you're incurring an unnecessary overhead due to their software....
How many times do I have to hang up on telemarketers before they realise I'm never going to listen to their spiel, let alone fall for it. Surely they track these things. It's wasting your money and time (which I approve of) but also mine (which I don't). Just stop it, you evil, evil scum.End of rant.
Telling a co-worker that a good way to ensure he keeps his MVP status is to start his own cult is probably reckless...especially when there's a non-zero chance he will. I might as well be handing out the Kool-Aid myself.Also, recommending he uses the word "Lo" more may not endear me to the people he sits near.
There are many things I like about the .NET Framework Base Class Library, but of these things DataSet is most definitely not one of them. Every time I see it used I know I'm about to enter an untestable world of bad code pain. And I blame the people who write example code.
The web is littered with examples of grabbing data from a database, dropping it into a DataSet then binding that to a control to display to an end user. Some of the more advanced abominations will include editing and paging code. Junior developers take inspiration from this code...