One thing I kinda realised again today is that a website is much like a garden, the care you take with it shows. It applies perfectly to a website, because a website needs constant maintenance. Sure you can use a blog engine like WordPress and get a blog up and running quickly, but it still needs an active person to build the content for the blog. And WordPress is no longer just a Blog CMS alone, it functions as a web 2.0 tool for communicating. A blog is a social media tool because WordPress allows you too seamlessly integrate with social media such as Faceboook and Twitter. The whole point though is that even with all the greatest plugins and add-ons in the world a blog is just a static thing that requires one unique thing – a human. In the hands of any individual a blog becomes your personal fingerprint on the www.

The same logic really applies to any other website whether it be a big corporate or a non-profit organisation. The people that run the website make the website what it is, thats the single biggest truth ever.

So you want to use video on your website? Well there are a few options to consider and they all have their distinct advantages and disadvantages. The first thing that you need to understand is that the majority of people, those regular non-techie ones, use browsers that will need some form of plugin, or a new browser. Thus support for video on the NET can be divided into two broad categories:

• A plugin, usually in the form of Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight
• Browser support, in the form of HTML 5

The first option utilizes some sort of proprietary plugin and both Flash and Silverlight have great development support. Adobe’s Flash is the dominant video-player plugin on the net, with Youtube being a prime example. Silverlight is the less dominant of the two but it also provides a rich set of development tools and is backed by some of the best tools Microsoft has to offer.

The second option you have is to use HTML 5, but the browser support for HTML 5 is limited to Safari, Chrome and Firefox 3.5. None of the Internet Explorer (6,7,8) support HTML 5, thus if you decide on this option you would have to convince your audience to get a better browser.

Earlier today I spoke to some colleagues and none of them knew who Steve Jobs was, well one did, the rest just weren’t informed. Its not a bad thing not to know, its not good either, because I believe you have to know about the people who make visible contributions to technology and lifestyle. Apple, for instance, is not a PC that I work with everyday but I have respect for the brand, and I understand what the Apple brand has done. Just think about the IPhone and the IPod, two outstanding devices that have changed the way we look at cellphones and MP3 players.

In the same conversation I asked the people around me who Eric Schmidt was, and none knew. I wonder if I ask them who Sergei Brin and Larry Page if they would know. Google has come to not only revolutionise internet search but have been pioneering all kinds of development, from browsers to cellphone operating systems. True movers and shakers in every sense, the same goes with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, and the list can go on and on.

Coming back to the question though, are these ‘big names’ bad for us? I don’t think so because its the populace that determine the extent of the influence that these ‘big names’ have.

In the last two weeks or so I have been watching Youtube videos of wrestlers and in particular Bill Goldberg, and the thing that I found the most interesting to read is the Wikipedia entries for these wrestlers. If you read Bill Goldberg’s wiki article you will note that he was an American football star, and its fascinating to note that a lot of these wrestlers come from an American football background. Duane Johnson (the Rock) played American football and so did John Layfield. Other wrestlers that got my interest were Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle. Brock Lesnar was an NCAA champion, tried out for American football and now fights in something called the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I also watched a video of Kurt Angle on Youtube where he spoke about his match against Brock Lesnar and it was great hearing how they seemed to agree on how a match would go, and how some of these wrestlers really get hurt.

The video of Bill Goldberg I like the most is where he wrestles against The Giant, or as he is now known in the WWE, The Big Show. The best part is where he jackhammer’s The Giant, who weighs 220 Kg. Check this out:

With my previous post in mind I starting thinking of things that make me think of the 90′s, i.e. 1990-1999. One of those things would have to include the type of music and the specifically the bands that came to prominence in that time. One such band is Live, who in my opinion, are one of the best bands ever. I bought Secret Samadhi so long ago, think it was around 1997. The second track off that album, Lakini’s Juice, had a very distinct opening sound which almost sounded like a scratch, but it was one of the best CD’s I ever bought. It had a melancholic feel to it. For some reason Lightning Crashes makes me think of the movie Powder. Check it out here.

Other bands that had a nineties feel to them were Bush and Creed. I bought RazorBlade Suitcase way back in 1996, with Greedy Fly and Swallow my favourites. Creed’s song Higher is one of my favourites:

What has really changed?

I’ll be 49, a year before I reach that half-century mark, given of course that I do reach it. What would have changed, and more importantly, who would have changed? The year would be 2029, and my guess is that the world will still have the same problems and issues to deal with. Madonna would be 71, wow! Would she still be a performer? I don’t know. 2029 would also see 90 years since the start of World War II, with the effects thereof probably lasting as long. I mean the effects of World War II is still present today, if you ask me. Eastern Europe has never really recovered.

Al Pacino and Robert De Niro would probably not be alive anymore, but I’m sure their movies would still be as relevant as they were at their time of release, as they are today. I’m thinking of think of Taxi Driver particularly, which was a great movie back 1976, and still remains one of the best movies ever.

The nineties (1990 and later) would have happened 39 years back, and it is my feeling that the 90′s shaped a totally different generation to ones before it. The internet came to prominence, big time. Yahoo, if they survive, will be 35 years old! Microsoft will be 54 years old, OMG! What version of Windows will be available? Where will Google Chrome OS feature? Insane! Bill Gates will be 74. Will there be a new IP protocol that can handle enough capacity?

I have recently started using Youtube again and I amazed at how much content is available through this service. I have found the majority of Armin van Buuren’s tracks as well as some or all of Tiesto’s. I even listened some Johnny Cash, John Lennon and Simon and Grafunkel on there. And over the weekend I watched some top gear clips as well. Tonight I also watched a few trailers, and I am amazed at how much content there is.

But my favourite video to watch at the moment is this one from Ronaldo, the Brazilian, not the Portuguese one that plays for Manchester United:

I love it because first of all the music is perfect and secondly because the guy has magic skills that I never knew about. The way he manages to evade or sidestep defenders is amazing. Everytime he faces a defender you have a feeling he will beat them, easily. On 0:21 he plays a ball between a defender’s legs, which causes another defender to fall over the other defender. On 0:33 he simply plays a ball inside and beats a defender and scores, amazing. At 1:10 he steps inside another defender, it looks unreal how the ball sticks to his feet. Its so motivating watching this video.

On my way to work this morning I thought about some code I used yesterday for object serialization and object deserialization, and I must admit that I got the code through a Google search, and that I did not really take much time to understand what the code is doing. So in a way, if asked to reproduce the code, I would not be able. I say in a way, because maybe I could reproduce it (but only if I understood it). Serializing objects means taking an instance of an object and transforming it into a format such as XML or JSON. Once the object has been serialized you can deserialize it again and have an instance of a class available. So in essence the XML representation is an object that has been instantiated. It seems I do understand the concept at least, but the implementation is a bit more tricky.

My point though is that some percentage of code that I use comes from code searched for on Google. Are we really developers then if we just regurgitate other people’s code? The other day I also used an IMAP class library to check an IMAP email account, specifically GMail. I just tweaked the code a bit here and there. The fact that I am just using the library does not mean that I understand where IMAP fits into the Internet Protocol Suite, because POP also forms a part of it, and items such as TCP/IP. It also doesn’t mean I understand that HTTP is a stateless protocol! Or maybe it does I’m not sure.

I often find myself going to MSDN and referencing some piece of code, because I do not know it. For instance I find myself checking out implementations for things like the StreamReader/Writer class or how to implement IEnumerable for a class. Do you ever find yourself doing this?

I downloaded the beta version of the new Google Chrome browser today and am I impressed. Google uses the V8 engine, which is a JavaScript engine written in C++, which means that the JavaScript code is compiled to bytecode, which means that in some cases it executes JavaScript up to 50 times faster than Internet Explorer. I must be honest I didn’t like the first version, or rather I didn’t use it that much. But I am hooked, and I like its lightweight nature and its nice themes. I must be honest Firefox has become a little bloated, and I often find that the Firefox process is still running even though I closed it, and the Firebug add-on is great, but its a 600kb+ download these days, seems its getting bigger and bigger.

I also recently installed Windows 7 RC and I don’t think I can switch back to XP, I just love the interface too much.

This article aims to discuss some of the web-based user login systems that are available to .NET developers, and aims to provide some clarity. In my view there are three approaches that can be followed to developing a web-based user login system for .NET:

1. Write a custom solution
2. Use existing ASP.NET Membership and Roles
3. Use OpenID

Writing a custom solution

I think its easy thinking I can write my own custom login system, right? I mean what are the things I must consider for writing my own custom login system. I must consider that users will each have an unique login and that users will be grouped into roles. Thats as far as basic structure goes. But how do you maintain a user’s login session for example, or when do you consider the session over? I have also seen systems that store user passwords in clear text, which means your system MUST use some sort of hashing or encrypting of passwords. There is a lot involved in writing a custom user login system, a lot more than meets the eye.

Use existing ASP.NET Membership and Roles

The ASP.NET Membership and Roles ships with .NET 2.0, and is implemented as an API in code.

Use OpenID

Stackoverflow uses it!