Proiect nou twitfighters

A "new" project from 2011. The principle is simple: fight your friend using social media. How much do you think your debate will count on twitter. It's more a communication project than a development one.

This was written in 2011. It should have been a nice game of twitter vs. Street Fighter. Since then, I "finished" the engine, publish it and failed to advocate for it. This morning sweep of the hard got me remember this project. So here is twitFighter.

Filtering server-side

Here comes the server-side filtering. It translates the JSON model from the previous article in a server-side expression tree. Here's the link:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/json-filtering2.aspx

Filtering client-side

I have a new job, so I have some new projects. The base application coded here is a database administration application with a web interface. A kind of ORM that allows the user to add and edit entities from the web.

Given my background, the first idea that came to my mind is how well it would map the whole thing on NHibernate (http://www.nhforge.org/). With a simple dynamic administration section generated over the NHibernate mappings. Everything would be really easy. This will require setting some filtration in an easy to use web UI.

As this is a great story to publish, I've decided to write it on a public platform. Hope you all enjoy it:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/scripting/json-filtering.aspx

New Visual Studio out, but old one sucks

Sometimes using VS as a development medium is a really bad decision:

Lets say that we have an application like a map, with tons of images in some folder. When you open such an application, the VS will index all the images, and it does it in the nastiest way possible. The pc is trying to cope with that amount of information and it freezes for some tens of seconds. I would have thought that being a developer at Microsoft one would learn about background loading, but NO!

So, good luck Microsoft with the new VS (launched yesterday), because the current one, surely sucks!

Development and estimation

In programming, a good developer is not necessarily a good coder but an organized one. So estimations are really important in this business; a good estimation is the difference between a happy client and an angry one. I usually use a simple rule: the quickest time multiplied by 2; also I know people who multiply it by 1.5 or use the medium time and add some days to it.

And here comes the Murphy's law: no matter how many estimations you give (and how accurate they will be) all the projects will be started on the same day.

... and last week I gave 4 estimations :)

Facebook photo tagging

Photo tagging is this simple! Doing it involves less code that I ever imagined - luckily there is jquery to help - and it really adds complexity and usability to a website.

See more info here and here.

And a sample:

There is a new CAPTCHA in town

Introducing the new CAPTCHA application: AdCaptcher.

Theory: this could be a smart move for your website: now we don't loose users over that nasty CAPTCHA image. Now we can have some beautiful images instead.

Practice: wasn't CAPTCHA meant to be difficult to read? For a bot at least. Isn't it easier to loose the CAPTCHA in first place? Apparently not! Well, I guess if you build a better bot the solution is to get an idiot CAPTCHA. Better than nothing.

Be safe, use CAPTCHA!