I try to keep up on several blogs, one of which is Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror. Recently, he chose the topic of W3 Validation and its necessity, or lack thereof. I also seem to have made a few statements on a similar topic, so perhaps my view is nothing short of expected. What is strange, however, is Jeff’s point of view, considering he and I are kindred spirits in the world of .NET and C#. Read more

This semester I’m taking several electives to finish up my degree. One of the courses I’m taking is Object Oriented Programming Systems, formerly Object Oriented Analysis and Design. I have yet to find a suitable explanation as to why OOaD was cut and reformed at the graduate level, but I’m assuming it was because it was a bit too advanced for some many of the people I find in my major. In its stead, we now have a much more aptly abbreviated course.

In any case, my professor is a big proponent of Java, the Waterfall SDLC (which he dubs “the generic SDLC.” I wasn’t aware wet sand was considered “the generic foundation”) and, of course, all the misery that comes with it. Read more

Since I’ve decided to get this blog rolling, one of my primary objectives was to ensure a consistent, high quality experience for any platform visitors come from. Obviously, it’s impossible to test the myriad of browsers out there, but I think it’s useful to at least test on the top three engines, namely Trident (Internet Explorer), Gecko (Firefox), and WebKit (Safari / Chrome). I also test on Opera, even though it has little market share. Hopefully I’ll get my traffic statistics going again soon, so  I can prove more definitively that sixty something percent of the ten people who come here use Firefox anyway.

So that leave three or so of you guys using IE. Well, I hate to break it to you, but your browser sucks. It really does. Web developers everywhere have been rejecting Microsoft’s browser for some time now, which has given rise to the healthy market share Firefox has had.

How does this affect you and me, you may be wondering. Well, let’s do a case study on the site you’re looking at right now, since I’m fixing it up anyway. Read more

Wow. So it definitely took me long enough to get this blog going. A lot has happened since I got this site up and running, so hopefully there will be no shortage of thoughts to write about.

This semester I’ve finally qualified to take the CS Senior Design Project, which, this semester, is to design a Chord client. At the heart of the system is the identifier, which is essentially a glorified hash. We decided to go with SHA-256, partially because the instructor mentioned it was in the class of his favorite hashes. It didn’t really matter to me, since C# supports it just as easily as anything else.

Identifiers have two essential purposes, comparison and addition, from which every method can be derived. I wasn’t particularly intrigued by either of these topics, since almost without exception, you can rely on existing structures in the FCL to do whatever you need to do, and it’s always better to do so. Now, I said “almost without exception,” namely because I stumbled upon the fact that these identifiers unequivocally are exceptions. The thing about using a SHA-256 hash – or any hash for that matter – is that it’s an enormous value – 256 bits to be precise. There aren’t any real 32 or even 64 bit hashes available (I doubt they’d be useful), so relying on the good ol’ FCL goes out the window. Read more