Tobi + C# = T#

… Ego Surfing does not work!

That’s all. No need to add anything further – I predict it to fail, because it does not return any meaningful results when I enter my name.

What about your name?

I have to do some automated exchange maintenance using C#. And I am totally new to that particular problem set. So I was rooting around the internet and stumbled across this blog post by “PoSH Fan”:
Why PowerShell? Why not C#?

There are some very valid arguments there in favour of PowerShell – but why is case insensitivity a good thing? To quote:

C# is case sensitive complex language with hundreds of assembly and thousands of classes (whereas PoSH is case insensitive with only 128 cmdlets). Now don’t tell me that I can write code in Notepad and compile using CSC.

Why did the case sensitivity thing sneak in there? Is that really something that makes writing scripts harder? Any thoughts?

I am serious, it might be the only way to stop global warming. In the spirit of the statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature I present you the proof that we need to get more German citizens on the internet since that actually decreases the carbon dioxide emission per capita. See for yourself:

I am not kidding! I found that out while I watched the video over at Gapminder and toying with their statistics. Awesome stuff! Very cool way to present statistics.

Of course I had to test my mean value calculator. So I did some minor modifications and made it parse last month’s apache logfiles. And for the first time I had more than 1GB of data served solely by this blog. This blog served 92000 requests (all kinds of http requests) to 9500 individual IPs (sadly only about 2500 show no sign of being a spammer). There were about 12800 requests for the feed of the blog from 750 individual IPs.

So trying to filter out spammers this boils down to 3000 real blog pages served to 2200 unique (human) visitors from 93 different countries in May. With about 20 real subscribers to the feeds. Most visitors are from the US (30%), then Great Britain (7%), Germany (6%) and India (6%). There even was a visitor from exotic places like Vatican City and Ghana.

The largest amount of hits come from Google with the keyword combination “google toolbar iceweasel” followed by queries related to hbm2net and nhibernate. By far the weirdest search was “what is meant by website in asp.net”, I’m not even kidding. Pretty vague was “codes to look at stuff” and the ones that made me literally laugh out loud was “scifi operating system” and “tobi march”, the first one for obvious reasons, the second one, because the context of the search was probably sooo different from what the surfer found on my blog. The sadest one was “tobi smells”. No I don’t. Because I am (or at least my site is) “way too hot”. The one search that got me a little scared was “pro and con of using fear, uncertainty and doubt”. Who is searching for pros on that topic?

Other than that:
The largest traffic magnets on this server are by the way SiKoRe a German site about improving your skills in mental arithmetic and latex2html the main repository of the LaTeX to HTML converter. Great jobs guys, but watch out. With the kind of increase my blog is showing over the last couple of months, I’ll get you soon.

I have to thank you, my dear reader, for that. I am surprised that you like my blog (google analytics even reveals that some of you do even come back! ). I hope you keep enjoying it in the future as well.

Wow, that’s what I call sleezy! What a fraud and what a missleading letter. I just got some snail-mail claiming that one of my domains is about to expire. Which is so not true. But seriously, even me got a bit edgy, but I just wonder what it does to people that are not too familiar with domain registration and/or are in a hurry reading through this letter. But be aware that I believe any notice from Domain Registry of America (DROA) (and of Europe, Canada, etc.) and/or namejuice is a fraud and a ripoff. As far as I am concerned they are intentionally being misleading. By using fear, uncertainty and doubt they persuade the recipient that they must pay DROA, or lose their domain registration.

Read about it here:
ArtVerif
and
DomainRegistrationTips

… and yet here I am blogging about it. Kind of an oxymoron. But today is shirtless Thursday at work. Good thing I’ve got my own office.

For all of you needing a little recreation – check out Fingerskilz. Coooooool. Hang in there!

Nonono, not me personally did upgrade from 800×600 to 1024×768 – but my blog did. I guess it was time, since about 2000 the new standard resolution is 1024×768, but I guess by now even those rotation their TFTs to a vertical position have upgraded to 1024×1280 so it was really time to get rid of the 800x design. Especially since posting code in this design is really quite cumbersome. But here is the neat trick: the new design is still 800×600 compatible – if you loose the left navigation while reading: Voila, the content box fits exactly into your browser. Hope you like the improvement.

I personally think that it’s not the fact that they post on my site. That’s what the Akismet Spam plugin is for. By the way, great work guys! Your plugin already caught 830 spam messages, in 7 weeks. But that’s not the point. I am just always upset by the horrible, horrible English they use. Seriously – aweful! Even those one-liners are full of mistakes and bad grammar. But I guess it is not worth putting more thoughts into those messages – since I delete them anyway.

Hahaha, why is that such a big deal? Well, I have been using Debian for more than 10 years now and I thought I was well read, when it comes to the dpkg and apt commands. But today I actually learned not one, but two new things related to apt. Aaaaand the winners are: apt-build and volatile.

Well, as far as I am concerned there is no need for Gentoo anymore. Let there be apt-build. Nice work on making recompiling performance critical packages as easy as directly installing them using apt-get. Nonono, please don’t start a flame on Debian vs. Gentoo, or Gentoo vs. rest of the world. I was just joking.

Second cool thing is Debain Volatile, a project aimed at getting more recent software like AV-scanners into the stable branch. So now there is less need to do some apt-pinning and/or upgrading to testing on your production servers. Nice.

Sorry about the downtime of my blog. The university that is hosting this site had some weird dns trouble. first we thought that it was our local ldap that was acting up, but fortunatelly I discovered that the dns entry for our ldap server had simply vanished. But now everything is back online.