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The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology
In the ancient time of 2008, people were still using Lotus Notes. Rumor has it that some still do, even today. Danny worked for an IBM partner which was a “full service” provider. It was the kind of company that you’d leas your entire IT infrastructure from, from servers to desktops and soup to nuts. Their newest client was the state Nursing Board, the government agency responsible for keeping track of every nurse in the state- when they became a nurse, when they last paid to renew their license, any complaints or reports. From the IT side, this involved tracking payments, physical documents, and navigating custom Lotus Notes applications developed by the Board’s own development team.

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CodeSOD The First Rule of Enterprise Software is: don't talk about enterprise software. The Second Rule of Enterprise Software is: when you do talk about enterprise software, make references to stylish dramas from the '90s starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton to make it seem more exciting. However, the most important rule of enterprise software by far is Rule Number Three: Even the simplest little things can't be simple.

Home We’ve all heard the “official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over, and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely obliterated that massive technological wonder. Like many, I was fed this story when I was growing up. Spidering Hacks: O'Reilly - Safari Books Online The Internet, with its profusion of information, has made us hungry for ever more, ever better data. Out of necessity, many of us have become pretty adept with search engine queries, but there are times when even the most powerful search engines aren't enough. If you've ever wanted your data in a different form than it's presented, or wanted to collect data from several sites and see it side-by-side without the constraints of a browser, then Spidering Hacks is for you. Spidering Hacks takes you to the next level in Internet data retrieval--beyond search engines--by showing you how to create spiders and bots to retrieve information from your favorite sites and data sources.

Brain Pickings - Part 30 By: Maria Popova A vibrant dance across the global spectrum of the popular imagination. “Legendary lands … have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are an effect of a modern invention, they have created flows of belief,” Umberto Eco wrote in his illustrated meditation on imaginary places. But as much as fictional lands might hold enduring allure, what captivates our shared imagination even more are the fictional and mythic creatures of our cultural folklore, both ancient and modern. That’s precisely what writer Davide Cali and illustrator Gabriela Giandelli explore in Monsters and Legends (public library) — a vibrant and whimsical volume from independent British children’s book press Flying Eye Books, which also gave us the illustrated chronicle of Shackleton’s historic expedition.

Virtual Earth Web Services SDK, Version 1.0 This documentation is no longer available on MSDN. It is available as a CHM or PDF download. For the newest Geocoding, Imagery, Routing and Traffic services, see the Bing Maps REST Services General Web Content: CAPTCHArt [Source: CAPTCHArt] CAPTCHA-related humor began with the widespread use of CAPTCHA (and more recently reCAPTCHA) on popular blogging and forum sites. The technology is intended to stop spam by asking the user to verify a pair of distorted words, thereby proving they are not a bot. In the case of reCAPTCHA these words are pulled somewhat randomly from an archive of textual documents requiring digitization, and that random pairing of words often produces strange and comical combinations. While simple reCAPTCHA screengrabs have appeared on sites such as lamebook, and "draw your CAPTCHA" threads have been around on the Something Awful forums for well over a year, the practice really took off when Moot implemented reCAPTCHA on the 4chan boards. Users took their extensive MS Paint skills and trollface comic generators and produced a wide variety of CAPTCHA related art and images, a sample of which we have included here.

Six basic tenets of Dow Theory 1. The market has three movements (1) The "main movement", primary movement or major trend may last from less than a year to several years. It can be bullish or bearish. (2) The "medium swing", secondary reaction or intermediate reaction may last from ten days to three months and generally retraces from 33% to 66% of the primary price change since the previous medium swing or start of the main movement. (3) The "short swing" or minor movement varies with opinion from hours to a month or more. The three movements may be simultaneous, for instance, a daily minor movement in a bearish secondary reaction in a bullish primary movement. 2.

Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog : Virtual Earth API Release Today we released updates to the Microsoft Virtual Earth AJAX control and a new version of the Virtual Earth 3D map control. We’ve added a couple new methods for adding and removing pins (and DIVs) in the AJAX control; added performance improvements for AJAX and 3D; enhanced geocoding and parsing across the board (AJAX and Virtual Earth Web Service) and fixed a few bugs in the AJAX and 3D controls. There are lots of architectural changes behind the scenes that you won’t appreciate unless you’re inside Microsoft, so I will spare you the details of those. Now, that being said, for the AJAX map control we just upgraded Version 6.2, so you already have access to the new features and can start using them today without changing your link to Virtual Earth.

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Portable Java – Run Java from a Flash Drive Portable Java on USB. An Official Java Portable version has been created and released by Portableapps. By installing Java on your USB Flash Drive, you can bring Java with you to run your .JAR files from the Portable Java installation on your Flash Drive instead of depending on a local JRE install. Extracted Size: 108MB before adding any Java Programs Software Authors Website: License: Open Source 4 Tips for using Log4NET&#039;s ADONetAppender in ASP.NET - Dr. 4 Tips for using Log4NET's ADONetAppender in ASP.NET I'm using Log4NET for almost a year now, and I must say I'm very pleased with it. This logging framework is very easy to learn and extend; same goes for installation and configuration. The most commonly used log4net appender is probably the ADONetAppender (look at Ryan's post for an easy walkthrough to set this up). However, I spent a couple of hours getting the ADONetAppender working the way I want.

Cryptographic Random Numbers Please send comments on this draft to Carl Ellison at cme@acm.org. This document was originally prepared as an appendix for the P1363 standard. The current version of that standard has incorporated some of these ideas in the security considerations section.

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