Stanley's Blog

Cheating Google?

webmaster@glass-images.com — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 03:27:00 GMT

In the recent issue of Maximum PC magazine they have an article, “Google Inside Out”. In this article there is a small section titled, “How To Search Better” and within this section is the question “How can I find out who is linking to my site, since PageRank uses that info to rank my web site?”. The answer is to go to Google.com or use your Google Toolbar and type in LINK:WWW.YOURURLHERE.COM. So in typing in my site link:www.glass-images.com I found that there were very few links to my site. Not a surprise considering I have done nothing with it in so long. There is no real content to speak of. A few posts but nothing more. It has come to be used more as a holder for my email address and a place to store apps that I build for clients. Anyway, I noticed that the links that were there were from a couple of blogs that I have commented on. So now it has me wondering if it is possible to boost your site on Google.com searches with just posting replies on blogs. And what about forums? I know that most forums are dynamic so that can be an issue but there are still ones that just keep appending to text files or HTML files. Will your signature with your URL get caught by the Google bots? Is this a flaw in googles thinking or is there something in their software's logic to catch this?

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To Page or Not To Page

webmaster@glass-images.com — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 19:45:00 GMT

Yesterday I got a request from the higher ups, that we not show any paging links in our datagrid when there was only one(1) page to view. So I looked around at the datagrid for the best way to do this. My answer came when I remembered you can get the PageCount and you can set a boolean as to weather or not you want to allow paging. Now by default paging is set to True on the datagrid and it is set to page at 10 rows. With every page I build that incorporates a datagrid I always have a BindData method. Within this BindData method I have my sorting, filtering and any other data manipulation that is part of the regular process for displaying data in the datagrid. A sample of my BindData method is here:

Dim dv as Dataview
dv = ds.Tables(0).DefaultView
If viewstate("filter") <> "" then
        dv.RowFilter = viewstate("filter")
End If
If viewstate("filter") <> "" then
dv.Sort = viewstate("filter")
End If
grdPharmacy.DataSource = dv
If grdPharmacy.PageCount < 1 Then
        grdPharmacy.AllowPaging = False
Else
        grdPharmacy.AllowPaging = True
End If
grdPharmacy.DataBind()

This is a basic design and in many cases there is much more going on in my DataBind method but that is beyond the scope of this post. What I wanted to point out (and yes this is for those newbs, not the experience datagrid geeks) is that it is extremely easy to turn paging on and off with just a few lines of code. You could of course take the "Crafty-Coder" approach and put it on one line but that just really kills the readability factor if you ask me.

Hope this at least helps someone.

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Dev Days Speakers

webmaster@glass-images.com — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 19:45:00 GMT

I saw an entry on Patrick Santry's blog talking about the speakers for the Pittsburgh event. So I thought I would check out my area and yes they are there. The speakers for the Tampa, FL event are up and look to be a good bunch to learn from. Some of them are Jon Goodyear, J. Ambrose Little, Joe Healy, Russ Fustino, Andrew Duthie and there are still more. Looks to be a very good event.
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Dev Days 2004

webmaster@glass-images.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 00:35:00 GMT

Well it is just over a month to go till Dev Days 2004 hits Tampa, FL. I can't wait because we are currently working on an app that is entirely Smart Client. This couldn't have come at a better time for me. I'm hoping to see some others from this area there, but at the moment the only one I know that will be there is J. Ambrose Little. I believe he is even presenting at this one. At any rate I hope to meet some new people and if your going to the Tampa Dev Days 2004, hope to see you there.
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Is there anyone out there?

webmaster@glass-images.com — Wed, 04 Feb 2004 01:21:00 GMT

Well it has been a very frustrating day as far as emails go. I am not sure why but my spam count has gone up by at least 100% as of late. Due to security issues where I work I have to use a web based mail system to work with my personal email. Now I know some of you might say why are you checking personal emails at work and it is because I belong to many programming and development mail lists.

If it's not the spammers then someone script kiddie has written yet another .EXE file to send out to the masses. You would think by now that everyone would get a clue and stop opening these attachments. My personal opinion is that anyone caught opening one should be publicly humiliated on national T.V. Talk about reality T.V. Well maybe that is a bit of an extreme but come on people, get a clue.

Here is a little one I pulled from VNUNET that show just how bad some of this has gotten. Nearly all are email based.

The top 10 viruses in January 2004, according to Sophos, were as follows:

1. W32/MyDoom.A - 25.1 per cent (New entry)

2. W32/Bagle.A - 16.3 per cent (New entry)

3. W32/Sober.C - 9.9 per cent

4. W32/Dumaru.A - 5.3 per cent

5. W32/Mimail.J - 3.1 per cent

6. W32/Mimail.A - 2.7 per cent

7. W32/Mimail.K - 2.6 per cent

8. W32/Mimail.C - 2.2 per cent

9. W32/Mimail.I - 1.0 per cent

10.W32/Klez.H - 0.8 per cent (24 months in chart)

But the virus' are not the worst of the bunch in my opinion. Personally I think that the Viagra and other drug spam have just gotten absolutely out of hand. And my interest rate is still lower than most advertised in the other types of spam messages. This whole email issue has gotten really out of hand if you ask me. I have to sort through 100 or more emails just to find some emails from list groups I have subscribed to and actual emails I want to read from family and friends.

While at work I do not have much of a choice for dealing with spam because of my hosting company using IMail web based mail program. However, at home I use SpamBayes. I found that if I saved about 100 spam messages and then put them in a folder called spam that I could get SpamBayes to learn from those messages. Now at home I just press the send and recieve button and come back in a few minutes knowing that I may have only a few spam messages that were not caught. There are other systems out there but SpamBayes has proven its worth to me many times.

It would really be nice to see that something legal is actually being done about spamming, but since the law went into affect I have not heard one bit about anything being done. Plus how are we supposed to report spammers? I have never seen anything from our government on how to go about reporting spammer. The only ways I know are not ones that the average user can go about reporting spammers and those only work for people who actually subscribe to the blacklists and use them in their mail servers. I am quite surprised that Microsoft has not yet built anything into Outlook or Outlook express to deal with this issue. Anytime there is a huge virus routed via email they seem to want to put a bounty on the head of the person who developed the virus (or worm). Maybe some day they will catch on and actually build something into their own software for reporting. At least maybe keep a blacklist of their own that people can subscribe to if they have the right version of Outlook.

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ASP.NET Intellisense Generator

webmaster@glass-images.com — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 00:20:00 GMT

While building my cutom controls I have always found that not being able have Intellisense in the designer was a bit frustrating due to the fact that in VS.NET 2003 has a very annoying habit of re-writing the HTML. More times than not it has made things so confusing that I just deleted the code and started over. So after some investigation I found out how to add HTML Intellisense to my controls. It's really kind of odd how it works and I am not sure why Microsoft would do it this way instead of using an embeded resource, but they did.

The basic idea is to create an XSD file that is used as the schema to tell .NET what attributes you have. However, creating this file is not the easiest thing to do. It's actually quite confusing. Until I found “ASP.NET Intellisense Generator“ by BlueVision. This program will read in your assembly and create your XSD file. One issue I found with this program was a lack of error handling. But the good thing is that you get the source code for it so you can add your own. After you have created the XSD file you have to put it in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\Packages\schemas\xml\ . In this directory is where you will find the asp.xsd. Asp.xsd is the schema used for the intellisense of .NET. You can actually open this file but I recommend you do not alter it. Altering this file will mess up your ability to use Intellisense for other controls. You could put your attributes inside the asp.xsd but when you update the framework you would lose your changes.

Also to note is that you have to put some text in your body tag so that is looks like so:

Once you have this done you should have your Intellisense. Below you will find a couple of articles that will help explain more about this subject.

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Blog Readers

webmaster@glass-images.com — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 00:20:00 GMT

Up until today when I wanted to read some blogs I would go to the users blog I wanted to read and scan the front page for any headlines that interested me. Of course on many blogs the authors would go a month or two or even more without a post so sometimes it felt like wasting my time. So I finally broke down and downloaded 2 Windows based blog readers. The first one was RSS Bandit. Nice interface but I could not get any information downloaded using it. Not sure why either. There were no error messages or warnings.

So after toying with that one for a while I decieded to try FeedReader. Once this one was installed I put my own blog RSS url in and poof, I had my posts listed. The interface on FeedReader is not as nice as RSS Bandit but so far the functionality seems better. The only thing I don't like about news readers like these is that they don't integrate into something like Outlook. Both of these are free though so I guess they are good enough.

There are of course other readers out there, but these were the 2 that were FREE and talked about in other developers posts. Those are 2 points I usually follow when looking for software.

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The Interview Quiz

webmaster@glass-images.com — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 23:48:00 GMT

Does it ever seem weird to you that employers are now doing technical interviews on the phone? I just got done with one for a potential .NET job. Instead of asking me actual technical questions I heard the same questions that I heard on my last phone interview.

For some reason they want you to spew out definitions to things like: “

What is a delegate?”
“Define an interface.”

Then you are told to come in for a 3-4 hour test which is basically you writing a program. I am not sure about you but when I am told to sit down and in 3-4 hours to write an entire program I have a bit of trouble. Not because I freeze up or that I cannot do it, but instead it is because the usual documentation they give is nothing compared to that of which I create for any project I do during my regular working process.

Don't get me wrong I totally understand the reasons behind doing this process but it seems like there is some company or someone out there that is giving them the same exact set of questions and the same program to develop. Now testing everyone does help weed out the ones that just know some key terms and acronyms, but I have found that when I was helping interview potential developers that the test only gets you so far. Most of the time I needed to only talk to the person to see if they were blowing smoke or actually knew what they were talking about, and I have also seen some that were like me and draw blanks sometimes when asked to spew out a definition of some word or phrase.

I certainly believe the tests should be given. I just think that people are putting way to much faith in a test. Guess that is the growing trend though. Now in my state (Florida) they have mandatory testing just to pass a grade. And they start that at 3rd grade. If your in 3rd grade and you do not pass the FCAT test you do not get to go to 4th grade even if you have perfect grades. You of course can contest this but by the time all of that happens it is already the next year and if you do win you are now starting 4th grade behind the others. I believe that this type of testing just doesn't work, either in schools or work places.

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