Nuno Silva

75% of the World Spam eliminated

Spam is one of the biggest problems we face on the web. Our email is always full of it (i receive about 50 spam emails each day. I’m glad that google catches them all) as out blogs are.

According to Gizmodo, a surgical strike to an ISP, called McColo, erased instantaneously 75% of the world Spam. This is really incredible.

Of course in a week or so that spammers will find another way to start spam all over again. Nevertheless this successful strike is a very good news.

Wordle - Tags with style

I was reading some blogs when i found a reference to Wordle in Vitor’s Blog.

Wordle gives a new dimension to the Tags we commonly use. The tag clouds we usually see are just a bunch of words with different sizes. Wordle tries to give them some style.

So, like Vitor did, i decided to generate the wordle of this blog. And here it is, my Wordle:

It really gives a new aesthetic dimension to tags. It’s art made with words, our words.

The Couple: Content and Marketing

“content is king but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household”.

Today a friend passed me the above quote and i found it excellent.

We can think that we have the best content in the world, but if no one knows about it, that content will not have the expected success. Exactly what exists in certain houses were the man thinks that he is the one in charge but actually is the woman that rules.

Orion’s Belt Development Blog

With the current development of Orion’s Belt 2, we (the team) decided to create a development blog to release some informations about the developments we are making, new alpha releases and concept art of the game.

You can check it at http://blog.orionsbelt.eu. Also subscribe the rss feed of the blog: Orion’s Belt Blog RSS Feed.

Recursive operator == because of a null

I came up with a simple error that can make lose some hours around something has simple has an operator.

imagine that you have the following operator definition:

public static bool operator ==(Player c1, Player c2) {
	if( c1 == null && c2 == null ) {
		return true;
	}
	if ( c1 == null || c2 != null ) {
		return false;
	}
	return c1.Id == c2.Id;
}

The above code should work in a normal situation. But not in a situation where we use the operator inside it’s own definition. The code will enter a recursive state and it will eventually generate a Stack Overflow Exception.

So, in order to avoid the usage of the operator == inside it’s definition, you can use the alternative:

the Equals Type method inherit from object.

The following code demonstrates the correct implementation of the operator ==:

public static bool operator ==(Player c1, Player c2) {
	if( Equals(c1,null) && Equals(c2,null) ) {
		return true;
	}
	if ( Equals(c1, null) || Equals(c2, null) ) {
		return false;
	}
	return c1.Id == c2.Id;
}

My 10 top posts of all time

And here they are:

• Wrapp a div around other div’s with float
• What you need to be a game designer
• Divs instead of tables
• And so, i changed
• I want one of these without reflection, please!
• Shuffle a Collection
• Msdn Event
• Moooo what?
• Only for fans
• Hard Weekend…

My Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress is, since the beginning of 2008, my loyal companion in my blog. I not regret to have change from some ASP.NET platform available in the Portuguese community PontoNetPt to my own domain and my own blog.

Since i started to use wordpress the way i blog changed a lot. And because i have much control over my blog now, here some of the most important plugins i use:

• Theme tester: - Excellent plugin which allows a blog administrator to test a new theme while showing the old theme to regular visitors.
• Google XML Sitemaps - a nice plugin to generate sitemaps for your blog. It helps a lot the search engine crawlers to index your blog.
• Akismet - This already came with wordpress and i think all bloggers that use a wordpress blog have this plugin activated. Akismet is, in a few words, the best plugin to stop all the spam in your blog. Until today, flawless.
• Optimal Title - A very good plugin that let’s you configure the way the title of your post appears. Very good for SEO proposes.
• Share This - Excelent plugin to help your blog readers share the content all over the main networks (Reddit,Digg,Facebookm and many many more). A “Share this” link will also appear on your rss feed.
• Get recent Comments - This plugin actually i don’t use. But is very handy to you bloggers that want to show the last comments of your readers.
• WP Stats - this plugin let’s you see all the stats of your blog. your can see a example of it’s usage here.

And you? Do you have any plugin that you usually use and is not above? Share it with me.

4 Reasons not to use the out keyword

The out keyword causes arguments to be passed by reference. This is like the ref keyword, except that ref requires that the variable be initialized before it is passed

in: MSDN C# Development Center

This post objective is to point out 4 reasons why you shouldn’t use this keyword in your regular C# programming:

1st Reason

It obligates the programmer to make code around it’s usage. Example: if you want to call a method with an out keyword, you must declare a variable first.

2sd Reason

Now imagine you decide that the method should have 5 more parameters? And you think: “If i have one, i can have 5 more”. Now you have to declare 6 variables before the method, insert 6 variables into the method signature, and the obligation to set the variable before the end of the method.

it’s the diference between this:

int var1;
int var2;
int var3;
int var4;
int var5;
int var6;
Something(out var1,out var2,out var3,out var4,out var5,out var6);

and this,

MyObject obj = Something();

3rd Reason

Methods that have outs in the signature are more dificult to use than the ones that don’t use them(see the code above).

One of the things that i hate are signatures of methods that have 5 or 6 out parameters and, from those 5 or 6 i only want to use 2 of them (for example).

In those cases, i am always obligated to declare the 6 variables, because we really need to pass all of them to the method. If a return object/struct is used, this problem doesn’t apply.

4th Reason

It’s Syntax! Ugly until the end… Yes is easy to use, but it makes unreadable code… Especially because most of the programmers use and abuse of it.

“How will i return this values? humm, making a nested struct or class is so dificult!!!!! I’ll just use the out keyword”

In Resume…

There is always a way around. If you have more than one return value consider the usage of a struct or a class. The code will be cleaner, more readable and all of your methods will be easier to use by other programmers.

Firefox 3

It’s public. Almost every blogger made the announcement. A request was made by the mozilla team in order to beat up the world record. 8 million Downloads in 24 hours. In a few days we will no if the world record was beaten up or not.

Firefox 3 is really good. Fast, a lot faster than it’s previous version both in it’s load time and loading the pages.

But it has a huge drawback… Seams like the the mozilla team changed something with the plugin engine. Maybe that was part of the strategy to speed up the load time. One thing is true. The plugins i use most don’t work any more:

• Firebug
• Colorzilla
• Google Browser Sync
• Javascript Debugger

In fact the most important plugin above is, without doubt, Firebug. I hope an update is released soon because if that’s not the case, i must make a downgrade into Firefox 2.

UPDATE: Looks live there are several updates that i didn’t noticed.

For Firebug there is a beta release available. Get it here (Thanks Mário for the reference).

For colorzilla there is also a beta version. as far as i tested it works fine. Get the beta here.

Google sync unfortunately doesn’t have an update. I hope i comes out soon.

Finally Javascript Debugger has already new version updated for Firefox 3. I really don’t know why Firefox didn’t updated this plugin automatically.

Fascinating!

The video below is a hope for all the people who lost an arm (or both). It’s fascinating how they can convert the thoughts of a person into the electrical impulses needed to move the arm (video after the break)