The code is 0060.

I went through the codes on this pdf: [download.microsoft.com]

string output;
if (myObj == null) {
    output = "Unknown";
}
else {
    output = myObj.Name;
}

This bit of code was repeated over and over again making my method very long. Bad. And it looked very messy so I made a little helper method:

public static TReturn GetValueOrDefault<TReturn>(object obj, TReturn defaultValue, Func<TReturn> expression) {
    return obj == null ? defaultValue : expression();
}

This also uses the lovely TReturn so you it can handle any type.

Using this helper method is very simple:

return GetValueOrDefault(myObj, "Unknown", () => myObj.Name);

Sometimes it says "K2.HTML.Lockup.Updated" and sometimes it says "K2.HTML.Lockup.Upd..."

I tweeted about it and didn’t get any tweets back but I got a lot of hits on this website when that phrase came up in my twitter feed. Looks like many other people are getting it to.

iOS App store parsing error :) K2.HTML.LOCKUP.UPDATED http://t.co/NSUW5TU4

December 7, 2011 10:26 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@soniiic

Dan Cooper

I’m guessing it’s a parsing error and it’s what Apple use to display that particular app’s last updated date.

It looks great and runs so quickly.  When you visit the site remember you can click the animation to morph between 9 or so animals and move your mouse to change your view of the sphere.

Displayed using lots of little vector pyramids in 3D in real time

On the GLOW website there is the animation in WebGL and the tutorial showing what techniques were used to make it.

I am writing to support the proposal of Jubilee Church’s change of use request. It is my understanding that there has been some opposition to the change of use and I would like to state my own reasons for why it would be good for the community on a local level and for Worthing on a wider level.  I have attended Jubilee Church for ten years and thus have some insight on Jubilee Church’s intentions for the use of this particular site.

Jubilee Church’s positive impact on the local level

According to the latest published figures of the West Sussex Annual Public Health Report 2011, it has been stated that almost 40% of children living in Northbrook and Broadwater live in a low-income environment.  One of Jubilee Church’s main ventures in Worthing is to provide numerous activities for the youth and provide opportunities to learn and develop specific skills.

For now, Jubilee Church hosts many events for the church youth throughout the year.  We have a strong youth leadership team who host regular meetings in rented community buildings.  For this we mainly use the Glynn Owen Centre in South Farm Road and are grateful for the continued use of this facility.  However, with a permanent building to make our own, we can do so much more.  We won’t be limited in time or clashes with other events.

Also with a permanent building we can provide skills training that we could not offer elsewhere.  With my skills in IT and the fact that I am a leader of the 12-16’s youth group, I have been asked if I would like to provide IT training to youngsters in the area.  We would use the IT facilities at the proposed site to host this.  The IT training that would be provided could be quite broad in respect of all IT areas: word processing, spread sheets, staying safe on the internet, writing CVs, and even designing their own web page for themselves.

With the church’s vision and optimism, I am confident that should the church be granted this change of use, we would be able to provide the above to the youth of the surrounding areas and encourage them to use their own skills and merits for the benefit of themselves and of their own community.

The addition of the all-day café and a small food service would be welcomed by the workers in the surrounding area to have a bite to eat and relax from their normal working environment.  They could also use Jubilee Church’s facilities to host business meetings which they themselves don’t have the ability to host on their own.  The presence of a popular, open and relaxing environment in the estate would benefit other businesses in the local vicinity.

Jubilee Church’s involvement in the community of Worthing

Jubilee Church provides the poor and disadvantaged people of Worthing with hand-outs from the Food Bank.  Over 8 tonnes of food has been collected from supermarkets in Worthing by the generous shoppers and this has been shared to hundreds of people who are struck by a short-term crisis of poverty.

“In 2010, the Worthing Food Bank fed 1,034 people a 3 day food supply, that is 9,216 meals.”
- Worthing Food Bank, News and Events

Food Bank is managed by the members of Jubilee Church in partnership with the Salvation Army. With a permanent building, our presence in the community would strengthen and we could provide more to the needy than ever before.

At Christmas it is traditional that local Worthing churches host their own Christmas services that are very popular among the population of Worthing.  With a permanent building, we could invite the community of East Worthing to come celebrate with us more intimately than ever before.  What is stopping us from hosting our own Christmas meal for those in the community?  To a lot of people, Christmas is their only opportunity to experience church and I feel that if we give them the best experience we can, we can change their outlook on church as a whole and breakdown misconceptions that a church is a lonely place to visit.  I hope you agree that the surrounding areas would greatly benefit from a giving, loving church that first and foremost wants to care for our community, not only at Christmas but all throughout the year.

The loss of a potential space for industrial use

After writing about what benefits this change of use will bring, it would be narrow-minded to not comment on the apparent loss of working industrial space in the estate.  I can imagine that you might think that changing the use of this building in the middle of a business estate would make it stick out like a sore thumb; the only building in the neighbourhood that doesn’t have industrial status.  However I would like to voice that it is only half of the building that will be used for the above activities.  The rest of the building is still used as an industrial business and will continue to function as such even should this change of use be granted.

It also shouldn’t be expected that the building would be void of people throughout the week.  Church is not just a Sunday event; we are a body of people that will use this building on a daily basis and it will provide to us so much value.  With the addition of the café I expect the new building to be busy and bustling throughout the week by local business men and women.

This building has been empty for years before Jubilee Church made the purchase.  Many other industrial buildings are available in the immediate area too.  If the change of use is granted, it would show to other businesses that this area is desirable and there is the opportunity for development.  Hopefully because of this, it would encourage other businesses that buying or renting on this estate is a good idea.  Buildings that are empty and unused reduce the desirability of the surrounding area.

My own personal involvement

I personally have agreed that I would be involved in interacting with the youth in the surrounding area and hosting youth events. I would also be happy to teach IT skills, including writing CVs, to the local people or youth in close proximity to the new building.

Thanks very much for your time reading this.  I hope this has encouraged you to grant the change of use for Jubilee Church’s new building and I look forward to hearing your decision.

Thus when they submit more posts to buy absolutely real genuine rolexs for rock bottom prices, they’re more likely to get their post past the filters. Still unlikely, but never-the-less more likely.

Don’t regard comments as “Not Spam” until you see their comment history, and determine for yourself whether this is Spam or Ham.

Some are quite funny and I would have loved to have found them when they were up!

• Trampstation
• Flamestation
• Moustachestation
• Grannystation
• Pigstation
• Tutustation
• Bikinistation
• Artificialinseminationstation
• Tentingstation
• Chavstation
• Legstation
• Bongstation
• Moiststation
• Stripstation
• Massdebatestation

The competition page

Confirmed websites such as grannystation.co.uk and chavstation.co.uk were found and posted on the gamestation’s competition page.

Screenshot as of 7th November 2011 of the competition page on the gamestation website

As soon as I figured out that all the fake websites adhered to a simple naming pattern, (plus with me being a bit geeky and excited about writing something new) I wrote a powershell script that attempted to visit every site.  The script took in the English dictionary of words between 2 and 8 characters long and appended “station.co.uk”.  If it found a link to the gamestation.co.uk website, it would log it and move on to the next.

The script, it ran…

Lo-and-behold it found two more that had not been posted on the gamestation site.  I didn’t really care if I won the grand prize, I just did it for the fun and wanted to investigate all the work that the designers went to to create these sister sites.

I found www.tutustation.co.uk and www.bongstation.co.uk

I contacted customer services…

I entered the competition and checked back daily to see if my new findings were detailed on the site. Nope. Long after the competition ended, I emailed customer services and these are the responses I received:

Sorry but this competition does not run anymore . I no longer have access to any information regarding this.

Regards,

Syd W

I responded by saying “I know it doesn’t run anymore, that’s why I’m asking. How come you have no information regarding the competition? I would just like a list of the websites that were involved. Some information is available at [link to competition page] but it’s old and that information was available before the end of the competition.”

I would [...] like to apologise for any confusion. A list of the ‘fake’ websites and winners can be found by following the link below:

http://www.gamestation.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/HubArticleView?hubId=148280&articleId=148287&catalogId=10202&langId=45&storeId=10651

I apologise for any confusion this may have caused, and please do not hesitate to contact us with any further queries you may have.

Regards,

Sam F

Haha, this is the same link that I had just emailed to them! I ask again: “I’m afraid that is not the case. I found http://tutustation.co.uk/ but that is not listed. Why can’t you provide the full information?”

The competition regrettably is now over. If you have submitted your answer to the competition providers they will contact us direct if you are winner.

If you have any further queries please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

Charlotte H

Their excuse of the competition being over implies that I should have asked while the competition was running! What a joke.  At least now though I have learned from this email that the competition providers are a separate company to gamestation, yet at the bottom of the competition page it clearly states: “The promoter of the competition is Gameplay (GB) Ltd. trading as Gamestation”.

For now I don’t think I will ever find out what the other fake gamestation sites were. Maybe I did find them all? My curiosity is not yet satisfied.

Now though I rarely report users that follow me. Even if they are truly spammy and not just some start-up company wanting friends. And do you know why? One reason and one reason alone; my follower count increases by one.

On Twitter it seems that if you have plenty of followers, you are recognised as more interesting and real people are more likely to follow you. So in reality for each follow spam I receive, I secretly want them to not be reported as spam accounts and to bump up my follower count for as long as possible.

Twitter couldn’t really change my behaviour unless it actually proved useful to me to actually report these accounts.  At the moment, reporting a spammer reduces my follower count so it’s actually detrimental to do so. Even if they didn’t increase my follower count in the first place until that spam user had passed some process to officiate themselves, it would still be useless to report because “oh, someone else will do that”.

On the other hand, Eli Dourado has had a great idea to incentivise the process of reporting spammers. He puts forward the notion of increasing the likelihood of you showing up in the recommended users list when you correctly identify spam accounts on a regular basis. This I think would greatly increase the reporting of spam accounts, at least for me anyway, and thus have a great impact on the spam that fills Twitter on a day-to-day basis.

In my opinion, it is a great idea but yet it still requires some user interaction (the process of reporting spam accounts). If we look at another medium which battles with spam on an even greater level, email, we find that emails are filtered by our own chosen provider. Gmail have their own algorithms for filtering spam, as do Windows Live Mail and Yahoo!, as do many thousands of other providers. Spam protection for email inboxes is not a new ingenious idea; it’s an absolute requirement.

Could this then be a way of dealing with Twitter spam? Could Twitter become its own protocol with different providers providing different degrees of spam protection, privacy, security, analytics, or premium services? Could Twitter providers of the future trim our timeline for us by allowing us to view only interesting tweets based on the context? Gmail has introduced a Priority Inbox for your email which, based on the context of the email, categorises the email to varying degrees of importance. If the email is directed solely at you, it has a greater importance than a newsletter that is sent to thousands of other people.  Could a new Twitter provider highlight the most important or interesting tweets to you?

Allowing third-party clients to communicate with Twitter has been one of Twitter’s compelling features, by allowing users to choose any client that they wish. Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Hootsuite and many more allow users to plug-in and use Twitter in their own way, however they are severely limited to Twitter’s own API which offers no extra benefits such as context analysis or analytics. Implementing a Twitter feed provider would be a huge cost to Twitter and would effectively outsource their own ad revenue to other companies.

For many years Twitter’s fail whale has shown to millions of users when the service is overloaded or breaks for some reason. Or in fact even worse when Twitter is blocked to an entire country when tweeting the truth is deemed a huge security risk. These things would surely be rectified by implementing a Twitter protocol and allowing third-party providers to display, analyse, post to Twitter in their own way. It would also encourage competition in the market place where other micro-blog services would have the opportunity to offer more than the behemoth of Twitter.

This has all been simply written up over my lunch break and I’ve hardly had time to really contemplate what I’m suggesting so the idea may seem terse and undeniably infeasible but from what I can see, I can draw some similarities between Twitter and good ol’ email and can see some future in providing Twitter in a way which is more open and diverse. Perhaps this could call for a new micro-blogging format akin to diaspora* that uses collections of server nodes to share information.

Either way, I think that Twitter will eventually have to combat their spam problems or become so overridden with spam that users will at some point give up and leave the site completely. Nah, actually what am I even talking about? How else is anyone going to know how much the world just ♥’s Justin Bieber?