Cost of Slashdot

While browsing over slashdot this morning, I stumbled across a new study claiming that Microsoft's monopoly costs an estimated $10 billion per year.

This got me thinking.. How much does slashdot cost the industry, world wide per year..

So, I decided to just run a few quick figures (most of which are well under real figures..)

3 Million pages served per day (from the FAQ), and assuming it takes an average of 10 minutes to read each of those pages (including the linked pages on other sites and comments). Straight off, that accounts for 3,000,000 pages * (10 minute * 365 days per year) / 60 Hours * $50 an hour (a very low rate)... This equates to $9.12 Billion in lost productivity...

In addition to this, add in a similar amount for TheRegister and you have more than made up for the same so called cost of of Microsoft's Monopoly...

*Yes, I am aware that this study is floored, as I used Win XP and MS Calc for doing the sums.
**Yes, I am also aware that this is not a real loss to industry, as most of the /. people don't actually have jobs...

Google Moon

With tomorrow being the anniversary of the first moon landing, Google have released a special tribute.

Google Moon

Have a play...

p.s. Make sure you zoom into each of the landing sites...

System.Windows.Forms.TreeView

How often have you been sitting at your computer, working away, when somebody walks up to you and asks you to fix a bug (not that their are ever bugs in your own work). The bug seems fairly trivial, yet it's in code that has been working fine for a long time.

This is exactly what happened to me, and it's only taken myself and another developer 3 days to track down. In the process, I actually found out that I have been "abusing" the treeview control for some time.

Here is a cut down sample of the code which demonstrates the behavior.







Sure, looks good doesn't it... First time the code is ran, it works a treat. Actually, this code has worked really well for several months. That is, until somebody changed a single property on the TreeView control. That's right, just one property... Scrollable = false;

This one small change resulted in the treenodes not displaying at all, but still allowed the nodes to be selected.

Anyway, I have since found a fix for this, which is to wrap the offending Clear and Add(s) with BeginUpdate() and EndUpdate(), problem fixed.

As it turns out, BeginUpdate() and EndUpdate() stop the treeview from redrawing every time the nodes are changed, which from a resources perspective is a good thing. It also fixed my problem (the one with the code, not the one in my head...)

Anyway, I thought I'd share this with you all, and hopefully it will save you a few hours/days of pulling out your hair..

Searching for Yourself

Now, I have always been fairly careful when dealing with email addresses on the internet. I have both hotmail and gmail accounts which I use when signing up for anything where I am likely to end up with spam. Only when I trust people do I actually hand out my home or work accounts. This has served me well for a long time, until recently that is. Suddenly I started getting spam at my home account. Strange, because I have only given 5-6 people my home account, and all of these people can be trusted.

Now, Every so often, I find myself wondering how many people read my blog. I find the easiest way to check is just to do a search in google, and see how many hits I get. This has proven to be quite fun. Funnily enough, this has never shown up any links to my mail accounts other than hotmail or gmail.

After reading this article on SMH I decided to try MSN to see how it has come along. So I entered my name, as I always do with google "Eddie de Bear" (With the quotes) and hit search. You can imagine my horror when I discovered the first site returned was infact a list of contacts that someone had carelessly entered into a public sharepoint site. I have not linked to the list, as I think it's probably wise that the person responsible removes the WHOLE list, before anybody else gets upset...

It looks like I have not infact been as careful as I should have been.

Anyway, the person responsible has been emailed, and asked to remove my details, and possibly even secure the site, not that it's gonna make much difference, as the account listed has now been replaced...