Manning Publications is giving away 2 free ebooks a day through April (April 17 to April 30). They will choose two winners randomly everyday. Winners are allowed to chose any ebook available on Manning.com.
All you need to do is that go to this link http://www.manning.com/free/ and give your first name and email address. That’s all. Good Luck!
I found this awesome opensource image to ASCII converter from lifthacker blog. This project is hosted in SourceForge <link> and is completely written in C#. This project is released under GPL license and you can download the executable and sourcecode from SourceForge with free of charges. Here is the technique used in this tool.
Original Image
Generated Image
The image above is generated by uisng Ascgen2. If you want to take a look the generated HTML version, you can check this link. (Demo : http://michaelsync.net/demo/ASCII-tifa.html )
Credit : I got Tifa Lockhart’s photo from Google Image Search. Full credits go to the original creator.
BTW, this girl is animated but I think she is hot. Wat ya say?
Related ~
I started collecting the list of strangest websites on the net since last year. Now, I have quite a few links in my bookmark and decided to share them with you all today. Of course, those are not something that you should visit everyday but you know, if you were like me, you might want to visit once. Some of them are really crazy and I can’t think of any reason why they created like that. maybe, web hosting and domain registration is extremely cheap for them. Okay. let’s take a look what I got.
Contents
URL : http://anotherdayanotherword.com/
I found this site from Dreamhost (DHSOTM). It has only one word at the middle of the page. That word is changing everyday. That’s why that site is called another day, another word. Strange, hum? If you turn on the speaker, you will hear the voice too.
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URL : http://worlds-highest-website.com/
This website is the World’s Highest Website. Currently, it’s 18.939 kilometers high (that’s about 11.77 miles). The following is the some fine print and technical details.
For the rest of the crew, here’s some fine print. This website is a CSS experiment. Due to its nature, there are some accessibility limitations, but anybody just slightly experienced will understand. The technical and design principles of this site are simple:
* One HTML container;
* pure CSS styling;
* no workarounds, filters, or hacks.Known, yet interesting issues:
* For the record – Gecko-based browsers like Firefox show an interesting behavior when you want to make the site any higher (than precisely 18.939583 kilometers, that is), namely by “shrinking” or “collapsing” its main container;
* Internet Explorer doesn’t accept internal references behind the real action, and it’s unclear if the container’s height really is 18.939 kilometers (though it’s damn high – or long – nonetheless).If you can come up with fixes or an even higher element, the formatting of which is broadly supported, email info at worlds-highest-website.com. Most likely, there’s some reward. And otherwise, if it’s found, it’ll be used
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URL : <link>
Can you guess who own the longest domain on the net? Google! of course. There are 63 characters in that domain. Why don’t you visit by clicking the link above? 
URL : <link>
This is another site that has very very long domain. AFAIK, the max length of domain (without subdomain and surffix) is 6 but this domain name is 64 numbers. So, I’m really confused about that. maybe. it might be cuz of number. If it’s characters only then the max length might be 63. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Note: Subdomains and domain suffixes are not included in consideration.
More ~
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URL : http://www.wwwdotcom.com/
Did you know that there is the last of Internet? Some of you might already know about that since I posted about this in my blog last year. I wonder why the owner of that site keep on paying the domain registration charges and hosting fees for that page. I got one thought when I saw this. There is a number of people who are making money online. At the same time, there are a lot of people who are willing to spend money online.
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URL : http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/
I found this site in Dreamhost (DHSOTM). There is a question in title and an answer at the middle of page. So simple but strange!
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I think that there are a lot of people who really hate the Microsoft Internet Explorer. They spent their money to show their hates.
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URL : http://www.deletedimages.com/
This site collected unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures from people. So, you can upload your photos that you are about to delete from your camera.
UPDATED on Jan 06, 2008
URL : http://www.fuckinggoogleit.com/
Don’t forget to google before asking something in forum.
That’s all for now. I will add more if I found some more sites. Yes, yes! You can also share me if you know some strange websites like above. Thanks. (Actually, there are three more sites in my list but when I check today, those sites are down.)
Do you want to be informed the best stuffs of Codeproject every months? I have one good news for you. I’m gonna launch one new program called “Codeproject Highlight” started from this month in my blog. In this program, there will be there parts such as news, the best articles and the best posts in CP forum (mostly are from ASP.NET, Web development and C#. ).
The main reason why I start this program is that it saves your time for reading all of latest articles from CP’s feed and tracking all questions and answers from Codeproject forum.
Site Upgrading
The whole Codeproject site has been upgraded from Classic ASP to ASP.NET version with a lot of improvements . This is really big changes which is done during 8 years of running. As this site has really huge amount of traffic, it’s very hard for them to upgrade this site with new version. However, the CP development team has done the great job to upgrade the whole site successfully. Congratulation! CP team
Chris shared a few interesting things here ~
For those interested here are some whacky and amusing things we found:
- SQL Server, IIS and the ASP.NET framework are possessed.
- Using development settings instead of production settings is a Bad Thing.
- Storing session state in a SQL database can be a performance killer. Especially when the database is an old P4 test harness machine 40 km away from the webserver. That was an interesting experience in scream therapy.
- Always check your indexes. Especially the ones that absolutely positively are not and cannot be fragmented. They will be the ones most in need of attention.
- 20,000 users hitting your application is wonderful load testing. We did load test but our testing machines did not generate the load you guys can generate
- no matter how many ways you check code there’s always an angle that you haven’t looked at. We’re finding errors in 10 mins of being on that we couldn’t find from 3 months of beta testing. This is just nature.
Sourcecode : Download Source
Note: This is an award-winning article of Visual Studio 2008 Competition.
A fun Silverlight implementation of the game Sokoban. Contrasting Silverlight 1.1 and WPF, while showcasing some new features of C# 3.0, Expression Design, Expression Blend, and Visual Studio 2008.
Sourcecode : Download Source
Build a start page similar to Google IG in 7 nights using ASP.Net Ajax, .NET 3.0, Linq, DLinq and XLinq.
Sourcecode : Download Source
Demo : Ajax Web Portal
How to create a peer-to-peer chat application using Windows Communication Foundation
Sourcecode : Download Source
Highly customizable JavaScript popup control for web page wrapped in ASP.NET custom control.
Sourcecode : Download Source
Links
This is a discussion about storing the password in database. As the user authentication used to be a part of almost every software system, the developers should have good understanding about how to store the password in database. We have discussed about encrypting vs hashing, adding salt or adding the user name after the password and etc.
Summary
You can read about it in the link below.
Read More ~ guidelines on password encryption
I have been asked this question regarding ClickOnce deployment in CP forum. As I’m using ClickOnce APIs on SCSF (Smart Client Software Factory) project, I found a few missing things in System.Deployment namespace. The following are the things that ClickOnce can’t handle.
Summary
Read More ~ An application that will get the updates from server automatically
One people who are using ADODB in .NET asked the question below in our CP forum.
The identity field of one of my SQL DB tables is a bigint, using ADODB to query the DB based on this bigint works fine in my XP machine, but gives me a “Bad variable type” error when I use my app in a W2000 machine.
The W2000 machine has every service pack issued by MS, what could be the problem?
Something works fine on XP doesn’t work on Windows 200 is very strange issue. As I never use ADODB (something that we used for VB6 projects in old days ) in .NET, I don’t have that experiences. The possibilities that I think of at that time did solve his problem.
The trick is that casting the original datatype (long datatype in his case) to double datatype. Honestly, I’m not so sure why we need to do this but it did solve the problem.
Cmd.Parameters.Append(Cmd.CreateParameter("TransId", ADODB.DataTypeEnum.adBigInt, 1, , CType(iTransId, Double)))
Read More ~ In XP works fine, W2000: Bad variable type!
Okay. That’s all for now. This is just a taste of new thing in my blog. What do you think? Is it interesting? As this program is just started, your feedback is highly appreciated. I think that there are a few area that I can’t add in this post. Based on the feedback from all of you, I will make this program better and interesting.. If you like it, don’t forget to subscribe my feed ( http://michaelsync.net/feed ).
Thanks.
A woman wakes up during the night to find that her husband was not in bed. She puts on her robe and goes downstairs to look for him.
She finds him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He appears to be in deep thought, just staring at the wall. She watches as he wipes a tear from his eye and takes a sip of his coffee.
“What’s the matter dear?” she whispers as she steps into the room. “Why are you down here at this time of night?”
The husband looks up from his coffee, “Do you remember 20 years ago when we were dating, and you were only 16?” he asks solemnly.
“Yes I do” she replies.
The husband pauses - the words were not coming easily. “Do you remember when your father caught us in the back seat of my car making love?”
“Yes, I remember” said the wife, lowering herself into a chair beside him.
The husband continued. “Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said, ‘Either you marry my daughter, or I’ll send you to jail for 20 years?”
“I remember that too” she replied softly. He wiped another tear from his cheek and said, “I would have been released today.”
Keep smiling…
Note: Thanks to Rahul Singh for forwarding this mail.
Other Jokes that I’d like to share with you all
Have Fun! Have a nice weekend!
