Spam Spam Spam Spam, Spamidy Spam, Spam Spam Spam!

Spam be gone!

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at D

This is already all over the blogosphere, but I thought it was fairly interesting to watch. Two of the computer industries giants talking to each other and to the interviewer.

Is Akismet less effective than it used to be?

One of the reasons that I moved over to WordPress as a hosting platform was the way that it integrated Akismet into the service. For the most part Akismet has managed to block a great deal of spam and for that I am grateful, however over the past few months I’ve noticed an increasing amount of spam getting through and over the last couple of days it seems to have snowballed. I just spent a good chuck of time emptying out by spam folder trying to filter the garbage out.

Hopefully flagging all those messages as spam will help teach Akismet what is spam and what isn’t. I wonder why it is letting through more than it previously did.

Windows Live Writer BETA 2 ships!

I heard it first on the internal mailing list, and this post by Richard Banks confirms it, Windows Live Writer BETA 2 is now available and I am using it right now. It has a much more polished user interface now as well as a bunch of fixes and new features. You can find out more about it over at the Windows Live Writer Blog.

Cut the Politics

Over the past couple of months Darren Neimke has been running the internal Development Centre at Readify. One of the things that has struck me is that despite variable access to resources and loose requirements they have managed to kick a few goals and build some good internal systems and prepare some products for external delivery.

If I compare this to other projects that I’ve seen, sometimes for our clients who are much better resourced (more developers) and who have developed requirements specifications that can be measured in kilograms there is an amazing disparity between the level of productivity achieved in the two different environments.

I’m sure that Darren would tell you that it is down to his management style, processes and some of the tooling that we use internally, part of it is down to the overall Readify culture where we try as much as possible to eschew internal political games. When you have this as part of your culture its much easier to talk honestly about the state of things and figure out what you need to do to move forward.

The thing that made me think about posting this was this post by Raymond Chen. Maybe there is a Polish influence at Readify?

Second Life Meeting Place: Tree House

The folks at Readify are playing around with using Second Life as an virtual workspace for collaboration. One of the first things that we need to do is find places that would serve as good meeting places. If I find interesting places to meet I thought that I might post them to my blog. The first find I’ve got is this tree house.

The URL will take you to the deck outside, I can’t actually figure out how to get inside at the moment as I am still a bit of a newbie

tdash Music Video (MSFT dash trash).

Ducas has posted up about this cool video by some t-dashes at Microsoft who must be finishing up their internship. At Microsoft, if you aren’t a FTE (Full Time Employee) you get an account that has a dash in it. There are different kinds of accounts, t- (trainee/intern), v- (vendor) and i- (int’l vendor I think).

Anyway - the account naming is a bit like a branding that says your are margarine, not butter Having said that I’ve been an i- and later a v- and it was fun! Go dash trash!

Method Group Coversion Syntax

Sahil Malik has come up with a good post on using ParameterizedThreadStart. One of the things that I wanted to point out whilst reading his post was that other nice thing about delegates that was introduced in C# 2.0 where you can convert method names to delegates automatically where a delgate is expected. The following picture is a simple piece of threading code that declares the parameterized thread start explicitly.

 

The following code instansiates the thread specifying the target without explicitly instansiating the delegate. This is referred to as method group conversion syntax. A nice little language feature.

Welcome to the Blogosphere Ducas and Bibhakar!

Darren has already blogged about Ducas hitting the blogosphere, good to see him blogging. I’ve been working with Ducas and Omar for a few weeks in Sydney and its been fun. But we shouldn’t forget to mention that another Readifian is blogging too – welcome to the blogosphere Bibhakar!

Wikipedia editing policy … again.

Looks like Frank Arrigo got a page created about him on Wikipedia and it has subsequently been deleted. Frank seems to be taking it well but I suspect that quite a few of the Australian Bloggers are a bit peeved about it right now. Frank is the hub of a lot of blog related goodness in this country and he is really a bit of a figure head for the blogging community here.

Some folks have suggested that the editing done on the Wikipedia is heavily skewed towards the US, I’m not so sure, but I’d like to know what percentage of deletes came from which country.

Surely the people in a country should have some extra weight about what is recorded about their community!