Ninjamurai

Nicely done extension to allow posting of text from a page to one’s Wordpress blog. This is a good extension to look at for how to communicate to a server via an extension.

At Splasho blog, an intrepid user decided to see what would happen if one installed 100 Firefox extensions at one time. Whoa!

 Not surprisingly, it worked fine, though apparently there was some slow down when loading pages. Browser appears stable and has not crashed so far. Sweet! Check it out here at Splasho.

This may be the single greatest tool ever made for adding to Internet Explorer’s functionality. Add-In Express allows developers to use a GUI based environment to build test and deploy IE addons. Whoa. Normally it is done with a ton of C++ code and etc. and this tool really helps to cut the “crap” so to speak. You still have to do programming logic in C++ usually but heck more than half the battle is just getting the dang interfaces all lined up and working. This tool ROCKS!

Ok, seriously, STOP using Windows-1252 for the default encoding for web pages. At this late a date, one should be using Unicode and the encoding format UTF8. Word likes this mutant strain of the ISO-8869-1 standard and many other Microsoft utilities do as well. Argh! Stop it!

I just spent the better part of three hours fighting with some issues I would not wish upon my worst enemy–all thanks to Windows-1252.

 One more time in case y’all missed it. Use Unicode for your text. Save the file and mark the text as UTF8 encoded. Use Unicode data types in SQL databases and the nchar, nvarchar and ntext types in SQL Server. Please. I beg you.

Absinthe is a tool for discovering the schema of a database via blind SQL Injection attack. It is quite the tool to have and a good way to show people just how much info people can get from your database even if they don’t work for you.

A group of sharp developers have recently released an add-on for Visual Studio to help with add-ons in World of Warcraft. OMG! WTF!

This seriously rocks and already has support for Ace2, Intellisense completion, Dependencies etc. Wow, pun intended.

 Check it out AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft and Visual Studio

Here are some links for information on ADO.Net, the data access provider system under .Net.

The ADO.Net home page at MSDN

The ADO.Net Team Blog at MSDN

The ADO.Net Core Reference for 2.0 at Amazon

Good description of the new ADO.Net Entity Framework

Another good article on WHY we need the Entity Framework

XML

XHTML

CSS

These are the web pages at the W3C on the technologies listed above. They are the source for what the standards are not necessarily the best tutorial. In a post later, I will put up some good tutorials for you.

Caylee Dak is a Quest Giver in World of Warcraft. One gets a quest from Alicia in Stormwind Keep to deliver Alicia’s poem to her friend Caylee at the Aldor Tier. The poem is lovely.

Caylee was named in honor of Dak Krause, who died of leukemia on August 22, 2007. The poem follows:

“Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am in a thousand winds that blow,
across Northrend’s bright and shining snow.

I am the gentle showers of rain,
on Westfall’s fields of golden grain.

I am in the morning hush,
of Stranglethorn’s jungle, green and lush.

I am in the drums loud and grand,
the thunderous hooves across Nagrand.

I am the stars warmly gleaming,
over Darnassus softly dreaming.

I am the birds that sing.
I am in each lovely thing.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I do not die.”

God Speed Dak. Thank you.

A nice shot of my sweetie and I playing WoW in the most beautiful zone of all, Nagrand. Download the full size photo ( 1723 x 1027 )