I just added a new sidebar to the main page of my blog called "What I'm Reading". This section is the first visible result of my new system for keeping track of the books I read. It's pretty basic so far and just shows the cover of the book I'm currently reading with a link to the book on Amazon, but more features are on the way!
Brad Abrams just posted some of the internal .NET Framework coding style guidelines on his blog. Overall the guidelines are very reasonable and I wouldn't be surprised if these standards help resolve some internal disputes at other companies. I do have a few points of contention, however.
Using tabs instead of spaces saves three presses of the backspace key. That's literally tens of thousands of key presses a year that RSI-afflicted developers could easily avoid.
I also prefer not putting open braces on their own line. If you've ever spent time coding on a laptop with a 1024x768 screen, you know how valuable that vertical real estate is.
No matter what coding style you prefer to use, Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) has all sorts of code formatting options that can be used to bring your code up to a common standard. You can even save your options to a shared file to make sure everyone on your team is applying the same formatting.
Paul Graham's latest essay, The Word "Hacker", is perhaps one of the best essays he's written -- and that's saying a lot. I dream of someday being able to write as well as he does.
I'm days away from being a quarter century old. Lucky for me, turning 25 without dying means my life expectancy will actually increase by a full 3.6 months. 76.4 years old, here I come!
Life expectancy isn't the only benefit of being 25, either. As a 25-34 year old, I'll be 1.98 times safer in motor vehicles and 6.7% less likely to die from a gunshot wound!
Ah, life will be so wonderful now that I'll be practically invincible -- and I can rent cars without a surcharge!
There's email spam, IM spam, cell phone spam, blog comment spam, wiki spam, and yes, now I'm getting referer spam. For the non-HTTP gurus out there, the referer is a URL that web browsers send to let web sites know where a user came from. Putting together a list of referers can show a webmaster which sites are linking to his/her site.
Recently, my server log files have been filled with referers like www + some variation of easy money, play poker, refinance, or buy condos + .com. I can guarantee that those sites have no legitimate link to JoshChristie.com.
The only upshot to this new form of spam is that it shows the increasingly desperate measures spammers have been forced to go to. After all, how many people ever view a list of all the referers to a site? Referer spam is generally only going to reach the webmaster and webmasters, of all people, aren't naive enough to fall for spam tricks.
What could the next form of spam be? I honestly can't think of any medium that doesn't already suffer from it.
On a related note, MT-Blacklist is pretty reliably keeping hundreds of comment spams from being published on my site each day. What a waste of bandwidth, though.