I am happy to announce that Apple iTunes 7.2 has been released and this is the first release since Windows Vista was released 6 months ago that worked through Apples normal install process with out any problems. I just wanted to keep everybody updated since I have talked about the problems of installing iTunes on Windows Vista x64 in the past.

If you want any more information about this release, please view Mac Rumors.

Tags: Apple, iTunes, Microsoft, Windows Vista

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You’ll see many posts out on the web talking about what a great thing it is that Dell is offering a Free OS on their hardware. And many stories talking about the Windows Tax. I was very disappointed to see the superficial overview that Jeff Atwood on his website, he has always done very in depth reviews in the past, however he slipped this time:

Whether you’re a fan of the latest open source operating systems, or just a fan of plain old-fashioned consumer choice, the end of the Microsoft tax is a win for customers. I was a little worried that Dell would charge extra for the privilege, but it looks like they played fair and square:

	Dell Dimension E520	Dell Dimension E520N
CPU	Core 2 Duo E4300 1.86 GHz	Core 2 Duo E4300 1.86 GHz
RAM	1 GB DDR2	1 GB DDR2
Hard Drive	250 GB	250 GB
Media	CD-RW/DVD	CD-RW/DVD
Video	Integrated Intel GMA X3000	Integrated Intel GMA 950
OS	Windows Vista Home Premium	Ubuntu Desktop Edition 7.04
	$679	$599

Because if you are just looking at the table above it looks like you are getting a real bargain, from any consumers point of view. You may think that you can save $80.00 by getting a PC with Linux on it and then using pirated software, free Microsoft Windows software from your university, or just taking your friends CD for a night. In all cases you will be screwed out of the Windows support that comes at a premium with Linux. I am not saying this is for everybody, because I imagine most of the readers of this website only call the support lines when they have already figured out they need their hardware replaced.

However there are a good 95% (totally made up number) that still use support for basic things such as printer installs, troubleshooting mouse problems, and other common tasks that we can do in our sleep.

So the price is no where near equal when you start looking at support options. In fact if I was to up my support plan to 3 years, I could still only get 1 year of support for $275.00, however if I was to up my support plan in for Windows I would get 3 years of support for Windows at no cost.

I know many of you are still rolling your eyes at the idea that you would need support for Windows, but you have to step back and look at a computer through a total novices eyes, and realize they still see a computer as performing, as my grandmother-in-law says, “magic”. That “magic” as she put it was just because she could chat in real time over GTalk to her grand-children through the computer.

As much as I love Ubuntu, and Linux in general, I have never liked the whining or group think mentality that comes with being an OSS zealot. I am sure they say the same about me and Windows, but at least I consciously choose Windows because I am more productive on it. I didn’t choose my operating system in order to “stick it to the man”, as one of my friends put it. I really think selling Ubuntu was a big PR move from Dell, had nothing to do with promoting free Open Source Software. Basically they just wanted some street creds, because their sales have been tumbling, and HP, has taken Dell’s place, and become the largest supplier of computers in the world. Getting a small group of users on their side, may help them meet Wall Street Estimates this new fiscal year.

I make these observation because you could always buy a PC from Dell with out an operating system, by going through the Small Business site and choosing FreeDOS as your operating system. This goes for all the major manufactures, including Dell, HP, and Lenovo to name a few. It is just that some very vocal Linux activist conveniently forget this when they are arrogantly talking about the “Microsoft Tax” and the strangle hold Microsoft has over these manufactures.

Tags: Dell, HP, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows Vista

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Recently I read a post by Alex over at The Daily WTF… err… I mean Worse Than Failure. The article explained many of the tactics that the industry now uses to weed out candidates by giving them brain teasers during an interview. Alex explained in only a way that Alex can that, having a candidate that builds a water displacement scale for a Boeing 747 to measure its weight instead of just calling Boeing is probably not the guy that you want working on your project. The programmer that solved the riddle of how to find out the weight of a Boeing 747 probably fits in to the category of “A Complicator”. A complicator is basically a person that takes the most simplest problem and turns it in to an engineering disaster.

The job interview that Alex posted as an example was:

During a screening interview, I was asked how I would design a bike fit for someone visually impaired. I responded something to the effect of, “What, like, for blind people?”, and she answered yes.

I thought for a moment and then I responded, “Well.. a blind person riding a bike doesn’t sound like a very safe idea, so I would make the bike stationary, maybe with a fan blowing in the person’s face. He probably wouldn’t even know the difference.”

She was speechless.

The reason why I am blogging about this is because I had a similar experience, in my Senior year at Penn State, to the one that Alex posted about. I like all other students was looking to find my first job and I was going on interview after interview with big and small companies a like. The one interview that I remember the most was an interview with Microsoft, mostly because at the time I thought somebody was playing a horrible joke on me.

I met with a representative from Microsoft that had a very think Indian accent, so it was very hard enought to understand the questions he was asking me. So I needed to ask him to repeat the question 3 or 4 times each and every time. For the life of me I don’t understand why Microsoft would send a representative, of the company, out to interview candidates, that obviously had trouble communicating to the majority of the population in the United States. That wasn’t the issue I was blogging about, but I thought I would explain the full interview. After a few basic questions about my resume he got in to the brainteaser question.

If you could design a better gas pump, what would you do?

Before I start with the explanation I gave him. The Fall semester of my Senior year my professor gave the class the exact same question verbatim, as a design project for the class. After much thought about how you would design a better gas pump the whole class didn’t have any ideas. You could only redesign the actual gas pump, none of the back room features or anything like that. So it is obviously a tough question, and even my professor that asked the question really didn’t have a good answer, and the question was pretty much scrapped and we were given a much smaller assignment that could be completed with the month we had left in the class.

So back to the interview. I gave all the stupid answers that you might think of, Color Display, Robotic Arm, Touch Screen, etc, nothing really mind blowing. Even ventured some good ideas for the back room such as automatic police notification of license plates that were wanted in relation to a crime, however like in my class I could only deal with the actual physical pump. I also asked the interviewer what he would do, but he dodged the question. Or at least I thought he did because I still couldn’t really understand him.

I didn’t get the job and my only regret was that I didn’t tell him that a class full of very intelligent Senior IST students and one professor couldn’t come up with an answer in 2 months.

So my advice to my readers is that if you ever come across a similar situation give the practical approach as Alex describes, because a good coder uses the simplest solution to a problem, not the most complex.

Tags: User Experience

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A major update has been pushed out for Google Analytics, as described in a post on Google Webmaster:

Webmaster tools from Google are indispensable for people who optimize their site for indexing in Google. Eighteen months ago, Google launched another free tool for webmasters - Google Analytics - which tells you about your visitors and the traffic patterns to your site using a JavaScript code snippet to execute tracking and reporting. This past Tuesday, Google Analytics launched a new version, with an easier-to-use interface that has more intuitive navigation and greater visibility for important metrics. We also introduced some collaboration and customization features such as email reports and custom dashboards.

I simply love this tool, and the data it provides is invaluable to my day to day operations of this website.

Tags: Google, Search Engine

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The ?? operator returns the left-hand operand if it is not null, or else it returns the right operand.

int? i = null;
int count = i ?? 0;

The value that count is set to is 0. The ?? operator is short hand for:

int? i = null;
int count = i.HasValue ? i.Value : 0;

Or

int? i = null;
int count = 0;
if (i.HasValue)
	count = i.Value;

The Understanding C# series at Coder Journal will be an on going project to help the readers to better understand the C# programming language that doesn’t get covered except at the more advanced levels.

Tags: .Net, Framework 2.0

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If your goal is to take over the world by pure force of your coding skill and you are tired of all those namby-pamby coding languages and frameworks, you should try Java Evil Edition.

Tags: Java

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Recently I have started seeing this number repeated over and over again on the net. You may be asking what it represents and why it is so important. Well this number is one of the worst kept secrets of the MPAA. This 32 character 16 bit number is the key used to descramble data on HD-DVD disc’s. I have seen it wrote many different ways:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0
09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
{09F91102-9D74-E35B-D841-56C5635688C0}

Many bloggers are afraid to even touch this number or publish the whole number, because of the MPAA and their crack team of lawyers. Coder Journal doesn’t bow to that kind of pressure, because we are here to support our readers and help them better understand the world of programming. More specifically understanding the difference between the almost 100% failure rate of security through obscurity. This encryption key is a failed attempt by the MPAA of security though obscurity, they might as well have just not encrypted the disk, because it only took the crackers days to find this key, and probably months for th MPAA to implement it.

The reason you are seeing this so prominently displayed, not just on my site, is because of the wide scale revolt at the social bookmarking site Digg. The revolt started Tuesday 5/2/2007, when the Digg moderators started deleting posts containing this sequence of numbers. Apparently as explained in this post, Digg is sponsored by the MPAA and HD-DVD, and started bowing to the pressure to keep this 16 bit number a “secret”. The consumerist has posted a time line of events.

1:30, Diggs started to take longer to register . The digg box on one post started showing 11 diggs, when the post really had 56.
1:40 Our post is the top blog post when searching for digg in technorati tags, resulting in our first noticeable traffic ever from technorati. good thing we got reinstated in the directory for the 3rd time or so recently.
1:43 Serious slowdown after digging posts…more than 30 seconds.
1:44 Digg pwns sel: “Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes.”
1:45 Listening to the “Oh Nine, Eff Nine” song.
1:47 Digg still down.
1:48 It is going to take them a really long time to remove all the stories with the code in it. And then there’s all those pesky users to ban.
1:49 Still down.
1:51 They are never going to keep that number out. People will add it as comments just for no reason. Congrats, MPAA, you’ve created a powerful new meme!
1:52 Just noticed that Kevin Rose, Digg founder, posted something two hours ago about how they’re effectively going to tell the MPAA to shove the C&D. It uses the AACS code as a headline so you know he is for reals, or maybe it’s just Digg-bait to increase his AdSense revenue.
1:59 People say it’s up. But they also say it’s timing out and hanging. Still down for us.
2:03 Now everyone sees “We’ll be back shortly.”
2:05 We remember enjoying the headline that said, “BREAKING: DELL DUDE LANDS ON MOOn!” With the subheading “also 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.jpg.” Think it linked to a picture of Kevin Rose, a shovel, one of those terrorist creatures from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and a graphical representation of the deadly number. Not quite the perfect Venn diagram of Digg user interests, but cut ‘em some slack, they’re working on the fly.
2:08 This is a phat rap about the number.
2:09 Fatigue, thoughts of this post’s pointlessness, begin to settle in.
2:12 Posting more screencaps taken shortly before the crash, inside.
2:16 People say it’s up!
2:17 Hasn’t propogated to us yet. Apparently the top story is Rose’s, “I will never take this down.”
2:19 It’s back for us. Looks like the same crazy pile of hex stories. It’s well past the tipping point of where people are just clicking on, and submitting all, the hex code stories they can.
2:20 Wonder if Digg will credit their advertisers for all the page refreshes.
2:21 Again, Rose: “”But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you ‘ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”" Let’s see what kills Digg first, fighting the MPAA suit or no one wanting to read a site full of hex spam.
2:28 Submitted this post to Digg.

And Kevin Rose founder of Digg has the following to say about what happened yesterday, and that he is taking this revolt to heart:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

So there you have it the Web 2.0 version of a million man march.

Tags: ASP.NET, Web 2.0

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