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Welcome the ctrl-D blog. ctrl-D blog is a simple blogging engine created with ASP.Net and XML. It lists entries to favorites stories with occasional blogger comments.
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Programming .Net VB.NET and C# Comparison

Great quick reference for VB.Net and C#. Useful for "dual language" environments, where multiple developers have their favorite language and no rules are enforced.
8/21/2008 11:30:50 AM
Web Development 15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages

Response times, availability, and stability are vital factors to bear in mind when creating and maintaining a web application. If you’re concerned about your web pages’ speed or want to make sure you’re in tip-top shape before starting or launching a project, here’s a few useful, free tools to help you create and sustain high-performance web applications.
8/20/2008 12:09:43 PM
Tech 6 New Must-Know IT Trends

A series of new IT trends, when linked with more recent ones, will significantly change the way corporations adopt and use technology.

The new trends, as identified in a new Forrester Research report, include technology populism, the information workplace, dynamic business applications, digital business architecture, IT ecosystems and enterprise master data management.
8/19/2008 10:27:05 AM
Programming The Pragmatic Programmer Quick Reference Guide

This link summarizes the tips and checklists found in The Pragmatic Programmer.
8/15/2008 11:21:56 PM
Tech 6 Habits of Top I.T. Groups: A Consultant's List

Ovum Summit interviewed 300 technology managers and identified six things that the most effective technology departments do, starting with making sure their I.T. projects are aligned with business needs.

  • Use consolidation and virtualization technologies to become more flexible
  • Invest in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications to promote software reuse
  • Adopt recommendations from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, which is a set of best practices in corporate technology
  • Invest in automated technology management tools
  • Align business and I.T. in terms of governance and monitoring service levels
  • Take on new challenges ranging from development of end-of-life and recycling strategies for old hardware to experimentation with emerging social software tools, such as wikis, to improve productivity.
    8/15/2008 11:15:07 PM
    • Career 9 Reasons Your Salary Isn't Higher

    Forget working hard for the money. Some factors that influence salary are beyond your control.
    1. Height
    2. Left-handed premium
    3. Social Drinkers
    4. Married
    5. Women in ministry
    6. College major
    7. Metro women
    8. Lesbian
    9. Extra hours
    8/15/2008 11:12:03 PM
    Programming .Net Easy Background Tasks in ASP.NET

    More background tasks in ASP.Net. Who needs installutil ?
    8/15/2008 11:59:44 AM
    Programming .Net Simulate a Windows Service using ASP.NET to run scheduled jobs

    ASP.NET developers who host their website on shared hosting environments which do not offer a Windows Service feature can benefit from this code. Also for those who do not have their own dedicated server to install Windows Services.
    8/15/2008 11:55:20 AM
    Career Steer well clear of all meetings ...

    Guy Browning offers 20 top tips for surviving life in the workplace. I like the section about consultants: someone in business with an ego so large it takes more than one company to support it. Classic.
    8/15/2008 10:12:08 AM
    JavaScript Object Oriented Programming with JavaScript : Timer Class

    Let's start object oriented programming in JavaScript by making an example of a Timer class, similar to the Timer control in windows application. I love the build-on-the-fly quality of JavaScript.
    8/13/2008 4:25:05 PM
    Tech How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression

    How-to overview on setting up gzip compression for web servers, on Apache. Streamlines the communication part between web server and client, and adds additional processing on the browser -- really not a bad idea.
    8/13/2008 2:39:22 PM
    Programming 5 reasons you don’t really want a jack-of-all-trades developer

    FTA: "if I were building a house, I wouldn't want an architect doing the work of a carpenter, or the foundation guy doing the work of an electrician. But ads like the one above are suggesting that a single person can actually do all of these things, and the simple fact is that these are fundamentally different skills."
    8/12/2008 12:54:00 PM
    Career My Awesome IT Job

    Testimonials from people who love their IT job. I liked the mention of Metallica and Dragonforce.
    8/11/2008 1:51:02 PM
    Design Getting started with Flex

    A fellow developer that I know asked me for a list of Flex/AS3 books to get him started with Flex so I figured I'd post them here for others as well.
    8/7/2008 6:01:41 PM
    Programming .Net Difference between passing reference types by ref and by value

    Most concise explanation I have been able to find. When passing a reference type by value or by reference, the changes to the reference type hold. The difference: by value is a copy of the reference, by reference is the reference itself. Setting the copy to null doesn't have any effect, but setting the reference to null does.
    8/4/2008 12:31:37 PM
    Programming Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep

    In this presentation made during QCon 2007, Dave Thomas talks about expanding people's expertise in their domains of interest by not treating them uniformly as they had the same amount of knowledge and level of experience.
    7/31/2008 6:37:05 PM
    Sports Waiting for Manny

    Great story from the start of the 2007 baseball season about Manny Ramirez.
    7/31/2008 3:48:08 PM
    Programming SQL Commands

    SQL Commands is a website demonstrating how to use the most frequently used SQL clauses. Good reference for universal commands.
    7/16/2008 5:29:17 PM
    Tech What Is Windows Communication Foundation?

    This is the latest things that I am learning. Distributed computing, but more mature.
    7/11/2008 6:09:43 PM
    Programming T-SQL Language Enhancements

    SQL Server 2005 includes a plethora of new features and tools that can help developers more efficiently and effectively manage data. This article provides a preview of the new features and their use.
    5/19/2008 7:53:53 AM
    Design How we became web developers…

    "So first you realize you want to do something that you think will make you rich and famous, and you realize that millions of people go in Internet everyday, so you believe that if you learn how to design a website you will have those millions of visits. Come on, all of us once believed that was true." I liked this a lot because of the graphic of caveman to computer user.
    5/16/2008 5:13:38 PM
    Programming The Next Programming Skill You Should Learn

    I used to work with a programmer who we jokingly referred to as a walking MSDN. He knew all the Win32 APIs, he could tell you the int values of const definitions and could enumerate the parameter lists to functions overloaded 30 times over. As a programmer, when given an assignment, he would go into his cave, hammer out a solution and would re-emerge from his cave with something that worked. I mean that in the most serious way… he would hammer his code into submission until it worked. There was no such thing as elegant code to him; it worked or it didn’t. Programmers loved and feared him because he was incredibly knowledgeable and could answer any question about how this or that API worked. But whenever someone had to get inside his code, it was a pure mystery. There was no documentation, no models, no code comments… nothing but the raw code itself. For mister MSDN, this was no problem, because it was all in his head. For everyone else, it was like being lost in a big city with no map.
    4/23/2008 4:01:07 PM
    Security Protect Your Privacy When Downloading

    Whether you're downloading copyrighted material or not, no one likes to have their activities online monitored. Let's take a look at ways you can protect your downloading and file sharing privacy, and prevent the big media companies and other anti-P2P organizations from spying on your file sharing habits.
    3/28/2008 10:06:24 AM
    Advice 20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life

    What follows isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s one that I hope proves useful to at least a few people.
    2/20/2008 4:42:09 PM
    Health Caffeine: A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired

    Caffeine is the most widely used stimulant in the world, but few use it to maximal advantage. Get optimally wired with these 5 tips.
    2/12/2008 2:27:11 PM
    Career Are You a Pyromaniac?

    Pyromaniacs -- leaders with impulse-control issues who start the fires that waste so much precious time and energy in their organizations. For them, every day is a new crisis to be managed... and they want you to come along for the ride.
    2/11/2008 11:57:52 AM
    JavaScript Curvy Corners JavaScript

    curvyCorners is a free JavaScript program that will create on-the-fly rounded corners for any HTML DIV element, that look as good as any graphically created corners.
    2/6/2008 3:37:00 PM
    Programming Why Ruby on Rails Succeeded

    Rails was not the original goal. The goal was a Web application called Basecamp. As Hansson and others worked on the application, they found out—for the hundredth time—that Web development is painful, time-consuming, repetitive and detail-oriented. This made it a good candidate for coding in Ruby.
    1/24/2008 3:28:53 PM
    Programming Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language

    Brian Kernighan, the documenter of the C programming language, wrote a rant entitled Why Pascal is Not My Favourite Programming Language. I can picture him thinking to himself smugly as he repeatedly strikes facetiously at Pascal by describing a few of its small flaws over and over again. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to Kernighan's tract. Pascal has matured and grown in leaps and bounds, becoming a premier commercial language. Meanwhile, C has continued to stagnate over the last 35 years with few fundamental improvements made. It's time to redress the balance; here's why C is now owned by Pascal.
    1/10/2008 11:05:42 AM
    Programming Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...

    Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion describes the state of Perl, the language and the community. In his 11th address, he discussed the past, present, and future of scripting languages, including the several dimensions of design decisions important to the development of Perl 6.
    12/11/2007 10:04:11 AM
    Health Cognitive Fitness: 10 Debunked Myths

    We have only scratched the surface of what science-based structured cognitive (i.e., mental) exercise can do for brain health and productivity. We are now witnessing the birth of a new industry that crosses traditional sector boundaries and that may help us understand, assess and train our brains, harnessing the growing research about neurogenesis ..., neuroplasticity ..., cognitive training and emotional regulation.
    10/31/2007 11:28:02 AM
    Deals Become an Online Power-Shopper

    In the past 10 years, the internet has completely revolutionized the way we shop—so much so that there's rarely a compelling reason to make purchases offline anymore. But the rise of online shopping has also given rise to an ocean of choice, and you want to make sure you're getting the best deals available to you. If you're a die-hard bargain shopper, you can spend tons of time looking for deals on the internet—and you can be very successful. But if you don't have an abundance of time to dedicate to bargain hunting, you can still save buckets of cash by following just a few simple tips.
    9/26/2007 10:11:35 AM
    Sports FASTBALL REACTION TIME

    Test whether you could react in time to hit a baseball. Really tests if you're awake or not.
    9/13/2007 4:48:39 PM
    Tech Your browser is a tcp/ip relay

    The technique originates in the browser security model, based on same-origin policy. This allows a web browser, either using JavaScript or Flash, to connect back to the same host that the content came from. If the attacker changes where the hostname is pointing to, the browser can connect there. For example, the next time you connect to attacker.com, the DNS server actually serves you a 192.168.1.1 address, allowing the webapp to connect to your internal IP.
    8/2/2007 2:00:36 PM
    Advice 10 tips to being a better IT manager

    It's easy for IT managers to get bogged down in day-to-day activities and lose sight of the bigger picture of leading their staff. Whether you're a seasoned pro, or new to the game, the following tips will help you effectively manage your team.
    7/17/2007 12:08:19 PM
    Humor Googling "how to crack a safe" nets robbers $12,000

    Google has become so ubiquitous in many people's daily lives that it serves as the all-encompassing information source on how to do nearly anything: jump a car, tie a tie, fold a pocket square, remove ketchup stains. Oh, and crack open a safe to steal $12,000.
    7/11/2007 12:56:37 PM
    Health Forgetfulness is a tool of the brain

    According to a new study, the brain only chooses to remember memories it thinks are most relevant, and actively suppresses those that are similar but less used...
    6/5/2007 10:02:53 AM
    Health 9 Reasons Honey is Truly a Miracle Foo

    It's good stuff, but you knew that already!
    5/18/2007 4:06:53 PM
    Career The Real Story of JPG Magazine

    1. Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: Someones gotta call quittin time.
    2. Communication between partners is mandatory. And you cannot communicate with someone who is not communicating with you.
    3. Decisions arent decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
    4. When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
    5. Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, You dont want that, what they really mean is, I dont want you to have that.
    6. Dont stay where you're not wanted, respected, or happy. Even if it’s your company.
    5/15/2007 1:42:37 PM
    Psychology How to Look Approachable

    Parties and other social functions can really be a drag sometimes. You stand by the punchbowl or sit down on a sofa and watch everybody else mingling, but nobody seems to want to chat with you. You're attractive, witty, and interesting; what's wrong with these people? It could be that you're sending out the wrong signals. No matter how beautiful you are or how good a conversationalist you can be, if you look intimidating or preoccupied, people may be afraid to talk to you. Here's how to use your body language to look more friendly and approachable.
    5/10/2007 5:58:49 PM
    Career How to Lose Your Fear of Being Fired

    I like the guy in the picture with the thumb's up. Way to go!
    4/9/2007 12:48:06 PM
    Psychology How we remember each other

    Researchers identify area of brain where social memories are stored. How efficiently our brains process, store and retrieve social events and relationships is essential to our social adaptation.
    4/4/2007 4:05:01 PM
    Deals 13 Places To Watch TV Online for Free

    If you don’t have cable at home or if you just want to watch TV amd movies while your using your PC, then you should check out the list below which lists the best free online TV services I’ve discovered.
    3/28/2007 12:06:41 PM
    Humor Blue Screen Of Death Through the Ages

    I think MSFT should have kept the RSOD from Longhorn (Vista Beta). I wouldn't mind crashing my desktop to that.
    2/1/2007 10:59:54 AM
    Humor Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart

    I like the endpoint "Wait until you win the lottery."
    1/31/2007 1:11:58 PM
    Legacy How do I decode an encoded URL?

    This page was quite a find. Written in Classic ASP, it wouldn't be too hard to update it to .Net. For those of you who like to extract encoded url parameters from within urls, thus bypassing tracking or other nonsense.
    1/29/2007 3:36:43 PM
    Programming Build a Web spider on Linux

    Web spiders are software agents that traverse the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. Using common scripting languages and their collection of Web modules, you can easily develop Web spiders. This article shows you how to build spiders and scrapers for Linux® to crawl a Web site and gather information, stock data, in this case.
    11/15/2006 5:54:15 PM
    Security Tutorial: Rainbow Tables and RainbowCrack

    [Summary] Rainbow tables reduce the difficulty in brute force cracking a single password by creating a large pre-generated data set of hashes from nearly every possible password. Rainbow Tables and RainbowCrack come from the work and subsequent paper by Philippe Oechslin [1]. The method, known as the Faster Time-Memory Trade-Off Technique, is based on research by Martin Hellman & Ronald Rivest done in the early 1980’s on the performance trade-offs between processing time and the memory needed for cryptanalysis. In his paper published in 2003, Oechslin refined the techniques and showed that the attack could reduce the time to attack 99.9% of Microsoft's LAN Manager passwords (alpha characters only) to 13.6 seconds from 101 seconds. Further algorithm refinements also reduced the number of false positives produced by the system.
    11/13/2006 4:51:19 PM
    Psychology Train your brain to hear your friends at a party

    I'm all for filtering out noise.
    11/10/2006 5:04:00 PM
    Career 10 Tips for Moving From Programmer to Entrepreneur

    Article by Ian Landsman that points out how to make this transition, if one so desires.
    11/8/2006 5:14:23 PM
    Tech DIYWEBSERVER

    This site is a guide to setting up and running a full featured webserver from just about any Internet connection. We cover issues on running a web server, email server, dns server, news server, ftp server, game server and more.
    11/6/2006 11:24 AM
    Tech How To Become A Hacker

    In case you were wondering how. Good article that "truly" explains what it means to be one.
    10/24/2006 3:41 PM

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    webtopus consulting web design