Mike-Ward.Net

Friday Links #54

Science and the Environment

Breakthrough In Quantum Control Of Light: Implications For Banking, Drug Design, And More – Scientists use a superconducting electronic circuit known as a Josephson phase qubit to prepare highly unusual quantum states using microwave-frequency photons.

Programming Computers

Adventures in MVVM – Commanding with List Boxes – Continuing his series of “Adventures in MVVM”, Brian talks about a few different approaches to working with List Boxes with the MVVM pattern.

Tip#66: Did you know… how to insert quotes values automatically while typing the attrib values? - It’s a nice time saver if you would like the HTML editor to automatically add quotes for the attribute values while you are typing.

David Hill’s WebLog : Prism Quick Start Kit - Prism is a library of design patterns that work together to provide a solid architectural foundation on which you can build real-world Silverlight and WPF applications that are flexible and maintainable. Some of the patterns that Prism contains are fairly simple while others are more complex, but they are designed to work together to solve some of the challenges you face when building these real-world applications.

WCF Service References Generating Empty Proxy – If you have worked in WCF for anytime, you’ve likely found that the service reference update mechanism in WCF can be a bit flaky and often generates empty proxy classes. Here’s a few tips on how remedy the situation.

CThru and SilverUnit – Home – Great idea. Unfortunately, it requires Type Mock Isolator to run. Sure wish Microsoft would solve this problem.

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit – Demos - Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web.

On the Web

Google throws down the gauntlet, announces plans to sell e-Books - In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device.

25 Best Programmer WebComic Strips – Interestingly (or sadly depending on your perspective) I’ve seen all but two of these before. Good for a smile or two.

Lifehacker - Notify Mee Sends an Email When a Downed Site Is Working Again - Just enter the afflicted web site’s URL or any other link you’re trying to reach and include your email so that Notify Mee can inform you when the site is up and running again. If the problem is on your end, Notify Mee will skip the email and let you know that the site is working fine.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Page Speed - Page Speed is a tool we’ve been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages – it’s a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug.

Google LatLong: Introducing smart navigation in Street View: double-click to go (anywhere!) - You can now use Street View’s smart navigation to travel to a new place just by double clicking on the place or object you would like to see. We have been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas using laser point clouds and differences between consecutive pictures.

Official Google Blog: Square your search results with Google Squared - Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet.

Stuff I just Dig

Pick of the Week

JkDefrag - This guy should be given a metal in my opinion. Fast, complete and free, it does as good or better than the commercial disk defraggers and without all the useless graphics.