It's been a very long time since I've posted anything here. But it's almost Christmas, so I figure I should get something up before the new year is upon us. It's been a very warm December, and up until Wednesday when the freezing rain hit I had been biking to work. All except 2 days in November when there was also snow. It was a really great year for cycling, and I don't think I missed a day at all, save for those two in November. I wish I would have got more longer rides in though. I think next year that will be my plan. To do more recreational riding, and not just the commuting. Or to take the long way around more often when commuting. My ride is only 7 KM and sometimes it feels like it's over before it starts.

I've been keeping myself pretty busy, working on some interesting programming projects. At least stuff I find interesting. Not saying much about what it is, as I may or may not release anything out of it, but just having some fun writing C#. Being mostly a VB.Net programmer, it's not too hard to write C#, since they both have the same .Net framework, and I find that I'm able to switch between the syntaxes easily enough. Also being a web programmer, I find that switching between syntaxes is pretty much mandatory, as I do it many times a day anyway with VB.Net, Javascript and SQL.

Also finished a book lately. Speaker for the Dead. I had read Ender's Game previously, and enjoyed it immensely, although I think I found the ending a little too predictable, but I think it was supposed to be not so predictable, but I find that I have a knack for guessing how books are going to turn out. Anyway, Speaker for the Dead was completely different from Ender's game, even though it was the sequel. Because of that, I found it quite hard to get into, but once I was about halfway though I was hooked, and read the second half in about a week. Which is pretty good for me since I don't have a whole lot of time on my hands. I think I'll look into reading the rest of the series.

I guess that's about it for now. Can't wait for Christmas. The kids are extremely excited, except that Ramona and George aren't feeling so well. Winter always brings with it some kind of illness. Just a flu, so I hope they both feel better by Christmas morning, and that the rest of us are spared.

So, I finally got an invite to Google+ today. After a first cursory glance, I have to say, I like it better than Facebook. Definitely pluses are no advertisements and no game updates filling my message list. However, I really don't have much at all filling up my list of messages, as it's currently invite only. I've invited a few people, plus there's the guy who invited me, so hopefully that will clear up quite quickly. I have to wonder how long no advertisements will stick around. If they can keep it as clean as their search engine, I'm definitely dropping Facebook. Games aren't really that much of a problem, and are probably a necessary evil to get people to spend copious amounts of time on the site. Which is the primary objective of any of these social networking sites it seems.

I thought the circles things was going to be a lot more trouble, like having to select circles every time I post something. However, it seems to retain the last group of circles I selected so I don't have to continually select family and friends every time I post something. I also like the fact that I can create my own circles. Having an "Arch Enemies" circle is going to come in useful in the future. Even if that circle is currently represented by the empty set. I am also intrigued by the "following" circle, which seems to hint at a Twitter like feature. Although I can't quite see how to get a list of all posts by people I'm following, which would give me a Twitter-esque view, but I think it's there somewhere.

The photos feature seems to work really nice. I can just drop a bunch of photos on the browser and they are uploaded. Plain dumb simple. This is good. Even creates a new "album" with the date. This is also plain dumb simple. I really don't care about organizing photos into albums, which is why I use Dropshots. Just organize all the photos by date and be done with it.

Other than that, there doesn't seem to be anything really great about Google+. It lets you update your status. Lets you post photos. It lets you read the statuses and see the photos of other people. The circles thing is nice. Because I can easily share some things with some people, and not others. I'll have to see if enough people end up switching or getting a Google+ account at all to make it worth while. I feel like Facebook has a little bit too much momentum going to make enough people want to switch. And being on two social networking sites just seems like it would be doubly or even triply time consuming. Then again, it seems like most people despite using Facebook all the time seem to complain about it all the time. So maybe it does have a shot. Plus it could be a big time saver if it combined all the features of Twitter and Facebook under one roof. Anyway, this is all based on clicking around Google+ for about 10 minutes. I really need to look into this some more before I draw some real conclusions.

So, I read on Slashdot that Google has implemented domain blocking on search. Which is a pretty cool feature. There's a lot of sites that pop up in search results that usually aren't what you're looking for, but usually game the searching algorithm to get more hits on their site. Of course the first recommendation for a block was Experts-Exchange. But some people brought up a good point. Sometimes the almighty hyphen has some good answers, and it's not much work to scroll down to the bottom of the page to get them. So I thought, there must be a way to resolve this conflict. The answer? Greasemonkey. In case you aren't familiar with it, Greasemonkey is a plugin for Firefox that allows you to run javascript after the page has loaded. I wrote a script that removed all the unpleasant bits of the Experts-Exchange site. Anyway, the following is the code. Let me know if you have any suggestions, problems or improvements.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Fix The Hyphen Site
// @namespace      Kibbee
// @description    Fixes the evil hyphen site
// @include        http://www.experts-exchange.com/*
// ==/UserScript==


function HideByXPath(XPathToHide)
{
	var allDivs, thisDiv;
	allDivs = document.evaluate(
		XPathToHide,
		document,
		null,
		XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
		null);
	for (var i = 0; i < allDivs.snapshotLength; i++) {
		thisDiv = allDivs.snapshotItem(i);
		thisDiv.style.display = 'none';
	}
}

HideByXPath("//div[@class='acceptedBlurredSolution']");
HideByXPath("//div[contains(@class,'relatedSolutionsContainer')]");
HideByXPath("//div[contains(@class,'allZonesMain')]");
HideByXPath("//div[@class='theAdvert']");
HideByXPath("//div[@id='navAdBanner']");
HideByXPath("//div[@id='pageRight']");
HideByXPath("//div[@id='topBanner']");
document.getElementById('pageHeader').style.height = '125px';

While at work today, the topic of scripting vs. programming came up, and one person said that javascript wasn't really programming. It's just scripting. The idea was that just from the language used, you could determine if something was a program or not. My reaction was, Javascript is as much a language as any other programming language. You can write anything in any programming language for the most part. The example I gave was one of my favourite examples of crazy programming, DHTML Lemmings. Basically, it's the old Lemmings game, rewritten in JavaScript. And I don't mean fancy new HTML5 with canvas JavaScript, I mean raw JavaScript manipulating the DOM in order to make things look animated. You know, Javascript from the day when we still used the term "DHTML".

This got me thinking of other masochistic progams I've run into over the years. Mostly, it's just a list of projects where people have done things not because they are practical, but just because they can. Just for the challenge. What follows is a list of my favorites. Just go and explore with the links provided and with Google, to really get an idea of what these people are doing.

DHTML Lemmings: All that is needed to be said is said above. Completely awesome.

C64 Emulator in SilverLight: That's right. A Commodore 64 emulator written in Silverlight. Usually stuff like this is programmed in C, because it's the only language that is close enough to the hardware, to actually emulate other hardware. But, just to prove you can do it, somebody wrote a C64 emulator in a high level, only semi-compiled (compiled to MSIL) language. Check out the video of this in action.

Pure CSS Menus: Drop down menus coded entirely in CSS, with absolutely no Javascript. So, this isn't really coding, because CSS isn't Turing Complete, but it's a pretty nifty trick. Personally, I think it goes a little far. You can pretty much depend on users having Javacript enabled, at least a lot more so than you can count on them having a browser with enough CSS ability for the menus to function correctly, and even if they don't have Javacript, you can fail gracefully. If you Google around, you can find quite a few other examples.

The Whitespace Programming Language: This is, to put it simply, a programming language in which all the characters are white space. Basically [Tab],[Space], and [Enter] are the only valid characters. Everything else is ignored. Bascially, the opposite of most other languages, where the white space is mostly just thrown own. While I couldn't find any particularly useful whitespace programs, it's a cool project none the less.

TI-86 games: Big list of games that runs on the TI-86 calculator. I had tons of fun playing these games in university. My favourite was Tetris, which could be played in 2 player mode by linking 2 calculators together with the included link cable. Defintely a lot of fun. And the games were probably a lot harder to program than the equivalent on most other platforms.

So, that's my list. Please include any other links to equally crazy programs that you may have come across. I would appreciate seeing some other ones.

I'm primarily a .Net developer. At work I use only VB.Net, and personally, I really like it. As far as coding at home, in the past year, I've played around with some Python, as well as spending a fair amount of time exploring full text search engines including Sphinx and Solr (Lucene).

I recently started playing around with Ruby on Rails primarily because I hate PHP, and because Ruby is supported by my hosting service. I realize that Rails has been around for quite a while now, but I'm busy, and learning another language wasn't high on my list of priorities. Besides, PHP was getting the job done, even if I didn't like it.

Coming from VB.Net, with it's ultimate background compiling prowess, I find it to be quite a big change to work on something that isn't even compiled at all. Even today I went to type something up in C#, and was surprised how different the experience was, from what I'm used to in VB.Net. I have to say that background compiling is one area where VB.Net takes the cake.

Anyway, on with the Ruby on Rails story. After reading through some initial tutorials, getting a basic project set up, and a little hello world app, I found that I definitely could come to like Ruby a lot more than PHP. But the thing that surprised me most about it was that using the "scaffolding" feature, you could write an entire CRUD application without even typing a single line of code. Now, a CRUD application isn't really much of an application. It doesn't actually do anything. I mean, it lets you enter data, update data, delete data. But it doesn't do anything interesting with the data. However, I still think this is really awesome.

Awesome as it may be, I didn't expect this kind of programming from something that's open source. I would expect something like this from Microsoft to help all the lowly VB.Net developers to develop apps. I've always thought the whole point of the .Net framework, with WinForms, WebForms, and data-binding is that you could pretty much write an entire app without actually writing any code. In reality however, you do have to write quite a bit of code to do this, or at least do quite a lot of clicking and dragging. However, with Rails, you can pretty much just figure out what kind of data you want to collect, and write a few simple commands at the command line to get all the code written for you. Granted, the default HTML that's generated isn't very pretty, but it is functional. I think that with a little extra tooling, it could easily be taken to a point where somebody who had no idea how to program could just fill out a few standard forms, and build themselves a web app.

Now whether or not this is a good thing is still kind of debatable. Being able to create a basic CRUD app doesn't really get you very far. And I'm not sure if I want to see a bunch of apps on the internet developed by people who don't really know how to program. Because if you don't understand what you are doing, you could possibly have some security problems with your app. Anyway, I think it does one thing really well. It automates a lot of the things that are just mechanical. Allowing me to spend more time implementing interesting features, and less time spend doing mechanical typing just to get the basics in place to enter the data that I want to be able to enter.