2010-05-28

Steve Gibson is wrong, wrong, wrong

Steve Gibson claimed in the podcast Security Now, episode 250, that spool used as a verb (as in printer spooling) is not a normal verb, but is an acronym.

Wikipedia starts with the same information, but note "backronym" in the following from Spooling:

"According to Tanenbaum, "Spool" is an acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations on-line[1] (though others may consider this a backronym), or as for printers: simultaneous peripheral output on line."

I asked about this at iRosetta and Donald Remero disagrees with Steve Gibson in his answer.

2010-05-26

News on Stack Exchange 2.0

There is news about Stack Exchange 2.0: Interview with Lead Developer David Fullerton.

They are inviting beta testers.

2010-05-22

Jump the shark

Updated 2014-09-13

Jump the shark is not yet a meme at The Many Memes of Meta, a page on the meta site for the Stack Overflow family of Q&A sites ("Q&A sites" means "question and answer sites", Wikipedia is useless in this instance).

It is based on Jeff Atwood's blog post Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark? on 2006-09-11.

There are many references both inside and outside the Stack Overflow podcast:

1. 2007-04-26. Episode 232 of the .NET Rocks podcast, 25 min 37 sec - 30 min 15 sec. Joel Spolsky explains/defends the choice of writing their own computer language, Wasabi. MP3 download link (the episode is in two parts, this is the second part). 22.2 MB.

2. 2008-04-29. Episode 3 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 18 min 34 sec (indirect reference to Jump the shark, "wasabi". By Jeff Atwood.). And 20 min 14 sec - 32 min 31 sec. MP3 download link. 21.4 MB.

3. 2008-05-13. Episode 5 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 01 min 02 sec - 03 min 18 sec. Jeff Atwood actually calls it a meme and that several times. MP3 download link. 22.3 MB.

4. 2008-05-27. Episode 7 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 58 min 58 sec - 59 min 44 sec. MP3 download link. 21.9 MB.

5. 2008-06-03. Episode 8 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 06 min 53 sec. Indirect reference to jump the shark by Jeff Atwood: "You are a wasabi guy, it is worse!". MP3 download link. 31.3 MB.

6. 2008-06-03. Episode 8 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 47 min 36 sec. Indirect reference to jump the shark by Jeff Atwood (transcription is difficult): ""I have a mental image of Joel Spolsky like pulling the fridge and being unable to do so. Going "I felt Wasabi would totally solve this problem""". MP3 download link. 31.3 MB.

7. 2008-06-03. Episode 8 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 49 min 50 sec. Indirect reference to jump the shark by Jeff Atwood: "What? You are creating a new language, what, you are crazy. You know what that sounds like, right?, Joel ". MP3 download link. 31.3 MB.

8. 2008-07-22. Episode 13 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 25 min 19 sec. Joel Spolsky makes a reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 30.6 MB.

9. 2008-08-12. Episode 19 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 58 min 48 sec. Joel Spolsky makes an indirect reference to Jump the shark ("... had to have our compiler [wasabi]"). MP3 download link. 32.6 MB.

10. 2008-12-02. Episode 32 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 35 min 28 sec. Jeff Atwood makes indirect/unnamed reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. MP3 download link. 32.7 MB.

11. 2009-04-07. Episode 48 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 02 min 23 sec. Joel Spolsky makes a reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 36.0 MB.

12. 2009-04-14. Episode 158 of Hanselminutes. 2 min 03 secs - about 13 minutes. Scott Hanselman interviews Joel Spolsky. Joel Spolsky explains in depth the story behind Wasabi. Some of the reasons are constraints. And later, at 23 min 30 secs - about 27 minutes Jump the shark is directly discussed. Scott Hanselman asks directly whether Joel Spolsky was insulted by Jeff Atwood's blog post.

13. 2009-05-05. Episode 52 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 42 min 30 sec. Joel Spolsky makes a reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 29.6 MB.

14. 2009-05-26. Episode 55 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 17 min 57 sec. Joel Spolsky makes a reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 30.5 MB.

15. 2009-06-02. Episode 56 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 1 hour 14 min 02 sec. The guest makes a reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 34.7 MB.

16. 2009-10-19. Episode 71 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 1 hour 24 min 30 sec. Joel Spolsky makes a reference to Wasabi (origin of Jump the shark). MP3 download link. 30.4 MB.

17. 2009-10-23. Episode XX of Hanselminutes. Hanselminutes on 9 - Spolsky, Atwood, Blyth, Hanselman = Crazy-Delicious || Content-Free?

18. 2009-12-15. Episode 78 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 35 min 25 sec. Jeff Atwood makes a reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 30.4 MB.

19. 2010-01-05. Episode 79 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 56 min 05 sec. Joel Spolsky makes a reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 35.0 MB.

20. 2010-01-26. Episode 81 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 16 min 49 sec. Jeff Atwood makes an indirect reference to Jump the shark. MP3 download link. 32.1 MB.

21. 2010-02-16. Episode 84 of the Stack Overflow podcast, 30 min 34 sec. A member of the Stack Exchange team makes an indirect reference to Jump the shark (Wasabi). MP3 download link. 26.5 MB.


To be continued...

2010-05-18

Top 200 blogs by software developers

Jurgen Appelo published a list of the top 200 blogs by software developers. The ranking is based on a metric developed by him.

Scott Hanselman's blog is number one and Jurgen Appelo's own blog is number 23.

Somewhat surprising the Stack Overflow blog is up at the 15th place despite the infrequent postings and it being used mostly for announcements.

2010-05-16

This week in Venture Capital mentions Stack Overflow

Episode 6 of This week in Venture Capital (TWiVC) mentions Stack Overflow. The occasion is the Series A round of funding of USD$6 Million.

They speculate that the valuation of Stack Overflow is in the range USD$15 Million to USD$18 Million.

MP3 file. 1 h 06 min 26 secs. 39 MB. Published 2010-05-12.

2010-05-12

.NET idiomatic code snippets for regular expressions

Using regular expressions in .NET is far more verbose than in Perl and the examples on MSDN are not very good.

It is also difficult to find idiomatic code for common things on Stack Overflow. Searching will come up with how to make the regular expressions themselves and not how to implement it in terms of C# or VB.NET.

Here is the idomatic code, in C#

1. Simple to match and extract:

string estr = Regex.Match(inputText, @"/(\d+)/").Groups[1].Value;

Where inputText contains the text to be matched and "/(\d+)/" is a sample regular expression. Note that those are forward slashes and are matched literally. What is inside the parenthesis pair is extracted, in this case "\d+" (one or more digits - effectively an integer number). Namespace System.Text.RegularExpressions must be included for this to work ("using System.Text.RegularExpressions;").

2. Replace matched text with some fixed text (empty in this case, effectively removing the matched text):

Regex rgx = new Regex(@"\D");
IDstr = rgx.Replace(inputText, "");

Where inputText contains the text to be matched and "\D" is a sample regular expression (matching everything but digits).




NB: The answers to Stack Overflow question "Regular expression to retrieve everything before first slash" and "Parse filename from full path using regular expressions in C#" does contain some sample code.

2010-05-02

Uncyclopedia

Long live Wikepedia!

However, if you want to relax a bit from all the correctness take a look at Uncyclopedia - a website that parodies Wikipedia. It also exists in other languages than English and with local content. For example Spademanns Leksikon, the Danish version.

Samples:

  • Question mark. "Do some people place a space between the end of their sentence and the question mark? Could the French language have influenced this extra usage? Why do the French always add a space before question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons? Then in English is the insertion of this extra blank space generally considered bad form?"