So bl3nd.com was taken from me by GoDaddy. It was taken for a really stupid bullshit reason. I wholly blame it on vincentde@wanadoo.fr and some fucktard in China.

So some idiot decides to include the bl3nd.com domain name in one of this spam emails selling watches.

Here is a copy of the offending email message:

Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:50:02 -0800
From: TimeForEveryone
Subject: Browse our huge selection today
To: vincentde@wanadoo.fr

Let me show you what you can get for that someone special this
upcomming holiday season. The EntranceLet me show you what you can get for that
someone special this upcomming holiday season. The Entrance http://bl3nd.com/8z0e.0

Read more after the jump

(more…)

I have decided to build and sell a small quantity of 5.1 audio switches to those who are looking to purchase them. I have had enough requests to make it worth my while, so I will be selling them for about $10 each plus the cost of shipping.

I will be selling 5 units that are being built by the end of October, 2008. If you would like to purchase one, please contact me. I can only accept cashiers check or money orders, as this is a personal project and I have no means of processing credit cards. Also, I am sorry, but Paypal is not an option. The units being built will not be on a PCB, but wired directly to the switch and put into a standard project box from radio shack. It will be as small as possible while still holding the 9 stereo jacks required.

I will post photos of the switch on in this blog post as soon as the first unit is completed.

I was reading a blog post on a programming site about how to confuse coders that take over projects. One of the things they mentioned was to use hard to understand variable names. I decided to see how complicated I could make a simple program become by using stupid variable names. I decided I also wanted to cram it all into one file instead of separating it out into separate files for different classes. Here is my entire application:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace ___ {
static class _ { [STAThread] static void Main() { ____ _ = new ____(); } }
public class ____ { public ____() { __ _ = new __(); _._ = "(o_o)";
MessageBox.Show(_._); } }
public class __ { private string ___; public string _ {
get { return ___; } set { ___ = value; } } } }

This code will compile in stripped down WinForms application. Attached to this post is a zip file containing the entire source to the application. All that the application does is pop up a message box containing the string (o_o), then exits. Download the file ‘_.zip’ now!

You could, in theory, take this to the extreme, making your own classes for things like strings and functions like MessageBox to have nothing but underscores as object types and variable names, although those functions would contain the real C# function names. Anybody ever take this sort of stuff to the extreme?

Have a long URL that you want to shorten? Head on over to bl3nd.com and have at it. Take any long URL and make it short and easy to remember. It’s great for when you need to write a long website address by hand or memorize it to share verbally with someone else.

If you like it, let me know. I am going to slowly improve the service to incorporate new features and make it easier for everyone to use. If you like the service, please consider donating some money, so I can remove the advertisements from the site.

Has anyone wondered why the boot screen in Windows Vista is just a black window with a useless progress bar? I was booting my laptop at work today and I noticed that it has no logo or anything. This blog post made me think about it a little more. What happened to the Windows logo from all the previous versions of Windows? Was Microsoft too ashamed of Vista to give it a logo? Maybe they felt it would be embarrassing for users to be seen booting Vista in public, so they decided to go make it as minimal as possible?

While on this topic, what is with the useless progress bar? It doesn’t calculate anything relative to the system’s progress. The nearest it comes is anecdotal stories such as “My system is so fast when my it has a fresh load of Windows on it. The progress bar only goes by 2 times before it completes its boot!” I have had that conversation many times. It’s not a real benchmark and doesn’t really mean much. Why can’t Windows follow suit like any other OS and show some kind of relevant progress? Most Linux distributions allow you to see what drivers and stuff are loading. Even things with a GUI boot loader let you hit the “Details” button or link and see exactly what is going on.

So, why? What happened Microsoft?