Bitcoins are a decentralized, peer-to-peer virtual currency. There are other digital currencies that offer an alternative to government fiat currencies, but the popular ones like e-gold tend to suffer eventual demise from gaining just as much momentum with money launderers and other nefarious characters as they do regular users. And they are all privately controlled, meaning they are subject to the control of a single entity, just like a government currency.
Being peer-to-peer and open-source, Bitcoins is protected from centralized control and centralized manipulation both at once. There is no single entity to shut down, there is no single entity to possibly manipulate the system, and the source code the system is built on is freely available for inspection. The currency is not backed by gold or any other physical resource in finite supply, but the supply of bitcoins themselves is limited – there will only be a maximum of 21 million bitcoins in existence, ever, by design. A limited supply means that this currency, like its gold-backed cousins, is protected from inflation (the effect of rising prices due to an increase in the currency supply).
That's right, you can buy your very own lightsaber for a mere 300 bucks.Some time ago, Google changed their adsense system such that newly created ads are stored in their system and assigned an ad ID. The code they provide you to put on your site references that ad ID, and has none of the inline configuration settings of the old system. To make changes to your ad – such as changing the color, formatting or size of the ad – you have to login to your adsense account and make the changes there. Ostensibly, this is a benefit because you don't have to dive into your website code to change the way your ads look.
For most of us, though, one person is handling the design of all aspects of your online presence. In one-person businesses that one person (you) is handling absolutely everything, from product development to marketing to accounting. You have enough hats to switch out as you go through the day, and this artificial distinction created by the new adsense system is really a waste of time. It makes more sense to edit the configuration of your ads from within the code of your site (especially since it should all have a uniform look anyway). Never fear – you can still do google ads the old way.
Lightbot is a very unique simple flash-based puzzle game -- unique in that it's designed to help you understand some of the most fundamental programming concepts. I've never seen a game like this, and although it only addresses the most basic ideas programmers use while coding, it does an excellent and thorough job of it and turns out to be quite a fun little puzzle game.
Concepts covered include functional programming, conditionals, recursion and, of course, refactoring as you try to accomplish ever more complex goals in a limited number of instructions. Try it out now - Play Light Bot 2 and start learning how programmers think!
I don't know if it's good or bad, but my history as an entrepreneur includes a lot of what I thought were good ideas that never got off the ground. Some of these were projects that were released but never took off (whether from a lack of market or a lack of marketing), some were projects that never got finished, and some never really even got started. Almost all of them are web applications, though, as that is what I really enjoy and happen to be pretty good at. But my road to success consisted of a lot of throwing things against the wall until something stuck.
Herein is preserved a list of my abandoned projects in case I might decide to resurrect them later, or for others to use. If anyone else thinks any of these have potential, feel free to steal my idea (few of them are truly original ideas anyway) and run with it.
One of the most popular and most useful aspects of the agile development methodology is Test-Driven Development (TDD), the idea that you write code that tests planned functionality before you write the code that implements that functionality. The iterative process here is to write a test for a new feature (that fails initially because the feature doesn't exist), then to implement it in the simplest way that makes the test pass, then to refine the test (rinse and repeat).
This is a new approach to programming for me, but I gravitated to it right away and it has proven immensely useful. The benefits include simpler, more efficient implementation (only writing code necessary to pass the specifications) as well as more reliable and more rapid expansion (if new code breaks existing functionality, it's easily and immediately visible). And while it does mean that the amount of code produced is greater, the amount of time required to verify and bug-test new code is much less AND the code tends to be produced in smaller, more self-sufficient, and more easily understood segments.
However, I wasn't able to find a good framework for implementing test-driven development in ASP/VBScript, which is how I develop many of my web applications. So, I wrote one myself.
Try googling this:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "john lennon"Or if you're lazy click here to see the search results.
Pretty cool, huh? Change the artist name or use a song title to have google find you mp3s. Of course, you shouldn't download anything you don't own. But it shows you google is even more powerful than you thought, right? I got this tip and more from this Google Cheat Sheet, written by a guy named Adelaider whose website no longer exists. Since you can't easily find this online anymore I thought I'd post it here for posterity.
You can do this on your desktop or laptop, or if technically minded even on your PDA, blackberry or iphone using WiFi. The cost is zero if you can successfully get everything working, or a minimal cost if you take a shortcut or two. The result is that you get a free telephone number, free incoming calls, free outgoing calls anywhere in the US, free voicemail with voice recognition transcription, free SMS (text messaging), oh and did I mention this all was free?Subscribe
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