Friday Links #51
16 May 2009Top 10 improvements for a future Kindle - MobileRead Forums – I really like my Kindle but it’s not without it faults.
Carve your own wooden Kindling device - MobileRead Forums – I have no good reason to want one of these but I want it anyways. I love the name (I’m amused easily). The ebay auction question and answer is hilarious.
New York Times launches Adobe AIR-based TimesReader 2.0 – The times ditches their highly touted WPF reader in favor of a version that works on other platforms like Mac and Linux.
John Robbins’ Blog : PDB Files: What Every Developer Must Know – Read this if you care even the slightest for your code. Really good advice that I plan to implement at work the first chance I get.
Tip/Trick: Enabling SSL on IIS 7.0 Using Self-Signed Certificates - ScottGu’s Blog – IIS 6.0 had a little hidden gem called SelfSSL.exe that made testing SSL configurations a snap. In IIS 7.0, it’s now part of the netmgr.exe interface.
Coding Horror: The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line – One of the reasons I use Chrome is because of the address bar/search bar. The other is speed. However, there’s more here than meets the eye. Check out some of the goofy tricks one can do.
Axum – Introduction and Ping Pong Example - Matthew Podwysocki - Axum, a .NET Domain Specific Language around safe, scalable parallel programming through the actor model and message passing was released to the world as a CTP.
Just How Much Sugar is Present in your Favorite Foods? – Then again, maybe you don’t want to know. Check out Sugar Stacks - it’s an interesting site that will help you visualize just how much sugar is present is you favorite foods. For instance, a soda can has some 40g of sugar and that’s equivalent to 10 sugar cubes of 4g each.
| [The Latest Model | Popular Science](http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-05/latest-model) – Video of a human like robot. Another 10 years and we’ll have fembots. This stuff is getting like creepy real. |
xkcd - A Webcomic – CNR – I busted a gut reading this one. Wanted to post it outside my cube but I thought it might offend some.
| [12 ways to track traffic for your blog | Webware – CNET](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10239540-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5) – Nice collection of services, a few were new to me. |
Coding Horror: Why Do Computers Suck at Math? – “Squeezing infinitely many real numbers into a finite number of bits requires an approximate representation.” I’ve been looking for years for a short, concise way to tell my Dad why some calculations get botched on computers.
How to Publish your Blog or RSS Feed to Amazon Kindle – I find it interesting that Amazon is thinking someone is going to pay $1.99/month to read a blog. There’s even a revenue incentive for publishers.
Lifehacker - Device Remover is an Absurdly Powerful Device Manager – With great power comes great responsibility.
CodeProject: From Lambda Dependencies to Lambda Bindings - Provides you with a generic binding framework that can be used wherever you want to synchronize objects. Awesome idea.
Fabulous Adventures In Coding : Null Is Not Empty – In defense of nullable types in .NET. Well written.
| [Nanobots in the Bloodstream | h+ Magazine](http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/nano/nanobots-bloodstream) – I just finished up Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near”. He talks about how nanobots will eventually cure all our ills and make us smarter. Then an article like this surfaces. I could use some “Fat eating” nanobots myself. |
| [Pixel Lab | Design & Development](http://pixellab.cc/#Home) - This is one of the better Silverlight showcase sites I’ve seen. Clean, restrained and yet entertaining. |
Pick of the Week
Paint.NET - A paint program I can actually use and understand. It’s not Photoshop but for the rest of us it’s likely good enough. (and it’s free!)