Over the Christmas break I got a little bored and because of this I have created a new blog.
The blog deals with blogging tips and tutorials. It is aimed at new bloggers who want to improve their blog. I have already started writing a few articles so why not take a look.
It is found at superblogtips.com
Well a new year is almost upon us and that leads me to find a new challenge.
Already I have thought up a new website idea, which can be found at super blog tips. This challenge involves very little physical activity other than clicking the mouse. For this reason I am thinking of accomplishing the UK 3 Mountain challenge.
What does this involve?
Well the challenge is kind of simple. All I need to do is climb 3 mountains, (Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Scafell Pike) within 3 days.
This involves an 800 mile round trip, and climbing a combined 3416 meters to the peaks. I will keep you informed as to how it goes.
There has been an early reported issue with the install of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It seems that when you first try and install the game steam forces you to download from their servers. WHAT? Why do they try and make you download instead of install from CD… I sure don’t know why. They give you two CD’s in the pack.
Anyway,
The solution is simple.
Dell have today released details of there thinnest ever laptop.
The Adamo XPS measures just 9.7mm at its thinnest part and weights only 1.4Kgs.
Macbook air fans will be jealous of its removable battery and 128Gb Solid State drive. It also packs a good punch with its 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo ULV processor and 4Gb of memory. It also makes use of the 802.11n standard in wireless, and integrated Bluetooth.
The machine has 2 USB slots, but like many laptops of this type does not have an optical drive or Ethernet port.
The only down point i can see at the moment is that priced at $1800 or £1084 it is going to be a little pricey.
5 Traits of the bad programmer:
It is easy to learn a programming language, it is a lot more difficult to master one though.A bad programmer will have an understanding of multiple (5+) languages to a certain level after which they will learn a new language. Failing to learn the more complex structures and important libraries of a particular language.
** It is also important to note that a good programmer should have knowledge of another programming language and SQL
When given a task the bad programmer will drive straight into the problem and develop what they think the end user wants. When the end-user compains he will then start thinking about the specification. Not only does this lead to badily written code but also increased the development time dramatically.
The internet is a great tool especially for the bad programmer. They will browse the internet putting together an application using others code. The code maybe riddled with bug, and will more than likely contain code past the comprehension of the programmer. This makes the development job harder when they need to perform updates in the future to the code.
When faced with a problem the same solution will be used even if it is completely the wrong approach. When an issue arrises they will not ask for help only keep coding. This will eventually mean that a solution may take 2 weeks instead of 2 days if another approach was used.
A bad programmer will program and maybe learn from 9-5. The passion for development is non-existant, and will not touch code outside of work or on the weekends.
Today I had the need to re-install Steam to Windows 7. Previously when I did this it was the simple case of installing Steam and it automatically updating.
Today though it was a different matter! When trying to update Steam the download would either not start (hovering at 0%) or download a section of the update then pause at around 40%. After trying for many hours to try and fix this I finally came up with a solution that I hope will allow others to fix this problem.
Solution
The issue lies within the Windows Firewall, to fix the issue you simply need to add Steam to the out going exceptions list. (more…)
It appears that on OEM versions of Windows 7 the standard Microsoft games are not enabled. Now I know for a fact there are going to be a lot of concerned people out there because of this.
To enable the games Solitaire, Freecell, Hearts, Minesweeper, Chess etc you need to enable them within the control panel. Now this may seem odd I know but it ensures users that the system is as light as it can be.
How do I enable the games in Windows 7?
1. Navigate to the control panel using either My Computer or the Start menu
2. When in Control panel select Uninstall programs (more…)
This article is taken from Matt Cutts blog. The reason I have published this on my blog is that recenlty I have been asked by numerous people which is better. Now, no matter what I say I will be shot down by someone. So I thought I would research and give you the opinion of a professional (And you cannot get much more professional than Matt Cutts).
I often get asked whether I’d recommend dashes or underscores for words in urls. For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes. Why? To find out, let’s take a trip in the Google Time Machine. Set the dial for 1999, the year Matt first discovered Google. Matt was using, I dunno, maybe HotBot at that point? The curtain rises:
Matt: Hmm, this search for [FTP_BINARY] didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I got a couple scuzzy looking urls, and the other documents just have the words “FTP” and “BINARY” but the term “FTP_BINARY” doesn’t actually appear. (Note: Matt was a bit of a nerd, as you can tell.)
Some Random Person That I Don’t Remember: Have you tried Google?
Matt: What’s that?
SROTIDR: It’s a search engine written by nerds for nerds! They index numbers! Sometimes they even index punctuation, like “C++”. Try your underscore search there.
Matt: Okay, here goes. Whoa! They actually return pages with the literal string “FTP_BINARY”! That’s wicked cool! (Did I mention Matt was a nerd? Big-time nerd.)
SROTIDR: Yeah. The wild thing is that they wrote a paper about how they crawl the web and rank pages.
Matt: Well, now that’s just silly. I wonder why they didn’t keep it a secret? I bet those papers will make great reading for my information retrieval class.
I’ve stylized the conversation quite a bit, but I remember how impressed I was that Google indexed numbers and some punctuation (come to think of it, search engines have come a long way in five years). With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2?.
That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.
Well as the world knows Windows 7 was released yesterday. There was much hype about the new operating system, what with changes to the interface, and new features.
I personally was very impressed, yeah its not perfect yet but for a program with over a million lines of code its not going to be first time.
The install process was very similar to that of Vista, it went smooth and the hardware support was fantastic. I installed W7 on two machines.
An old Compaq presario which just made the spec and a new gaming PC with the newest graphics card and quad core processor. Both machines loaded W7 straight away with out hassle or driver issues.
An important note to mention was that the boot time is considerably less compared to that of XP and Vista. Being a sad computer enthusiast this was exciting, for too long now Windows users have had to wait for there PC to load up.
Overall, I would say Microsoft have done a good job. I will keep you posted with exciting new things I find out.
For those of you who are subscribers to the MSDN network, you can now be the prowd owners of the Visual Studio 2010 beta with .net 4.0 framework. All you need to do is log in and hit the download link.
There have been a number of small issues reported, but what do you expect for a beta.
It is still well worth a quick look.
