January 2010 - Posts
This will be of interest mainly to astronomy enthusiasts…
Competition: Win Visual Studio Professional 2008/2010
Thanks to my friends at Microsoft, I have been allocated one copy of Visual Studio Professional 2008 or 2010 to give away as a prize to the ASCOM community, a current estimated retail value of £700 / $800. I’ve decided to offer it to the person with the highest reputation on ASCOM Answers at the end of 28th February 2010.
Rules
- The person with the highest reputation on ASCOM Answers, as adjudicated by me, at 23.59 UTC 28th February 2010, will be the winner.
- In the event of a tie, the winner will be selected based on the highest number of ‘badges’. If there is still no outright winner, then the winner shall be selected from amongst those tied for first place by random draw.
- If the winner cannot be contacted within 7 days, then their prize shall be forfeit and shall pass to the person with the next highest reputation, and so on.
- The winner will receive an individual not-for-resale license for Visual Studio Professional (or equivalent) Edition.
- The winner may elect to receive Visual Studio 2008 immediately, or wait to receive Visual Studio 2010 after its launch date of April 12th 2010.
- The prize is kindly donated by Microsoft UK and is subject to variation in content and delivery date at their discretion.
- Administrators and moderators of ASCOM Answers (i.e. those with a diamond after their name) shall not be eligible.
How Do I Enter?
Simple. Visit http://answers.ascom-standards.org and create a non-anonymous login (I suggest using your Yahoo ID – simply click the Yahoo button when asked to log in). Start asking and answering questions, commenting and voting.
The normal rules apply on ASCOM Answers. Posts must relate to ASCOM or Astronomy and are subject to moderation and editing by other users.
Strategies for Increasing Your Reputation
Reputation is earned by posting questions, answers and comments and by voting on other people’s content. Your peers, members of the ASCOM community, get to vote on your content, so quality and relevance really counts. Here are some ideas for how to maximize your reputation.
- Think of a problem you’ve recently resolved with your astronomy gear. Create a new question that describes the problem, and then answer your own question by providing the solution that you found.
- Look back in the ASCOM-Talk message archives. Pick a question and enter it into ASCOM Answers. If you can find the answer, then add that, too.
- Same as (2) but find questions from other astronomy related forums and mailing lists.
- Pick an existing question on ASCOM Answers that has multiple answers. Create a new answer that incorporates all of the existing answers, corrects any mistakes, and expands upon the content. Format everything so that it looks really great. Then stand back as your new super-answer gets voted up and becomes the de-facto correct answer.
- Vote on other people’s questions and answers. Best practice when casting a vote is to leave a comment explaining why you voted the way you did.
Dos and Don’ts
Remember, everything on ASCOM Answers is in question-and-answer format. Here are some general dos and don’ts:
- DON’T put answers into the question section. Always split your content into a question (or problem description) and then submit your question. Then answer it (provide the solution) in the separate answer section beneath the original question.
- DO answer your own question – this is OK and specifically allowed.
- DO stay on-topic (Astronomy). If you don’t, your posts may be moderated, voted down or deleted.
- DO answer other people’s questions, even if there is already an answer. Your answer may be better.
- DON’T ask further questions in the answers section. If you need to ask for clarification or further information, add a comment to the original question.
- DO tag your questions with up to 5 tags, so that others can find them more easily.
- DO try to re-use existing tags in preference to creating new ones.
- DO accept a ‘best answer’ to your questions, by clicking the check-mark next to the answer. If you answered your own question, then you can still accept your answer as the ‘best answer’ but only after 48 hours have elapsed (this is to prevent people from ‘gaming’ the system).
- DO format your content carefully. Content that is both accurate a visually appealing is more likely to get voted up. The site uses something called MarkDown, which is a common-sense easy-to-use method of formatting plain text content. You don’t need to know and HTML – but if you do, some basic HTML tags are supported too. There’s a full help page provided on the site.
- DO read the FAQ.
Good luck!
This amazing free report by Imperva presents an analysis of over 32 million compromised user passwords, obtained in the Rockyou.com breach.
The report lists the top 20 passwords used, and here they are:
Is your password in the list? If so, I’d consider changing it PDQ.
So many people buy the very cheapest add-ons for their computer, or just buy the first thing they see on the shelves. Let me tell you, there is a lot of nasty rubbish out there. It all looks good in the box, but when you get it home and plug it in, things don’t go so well. We’ve all been there – devices that don’t work after you resume from standby, blue screens when unplugging USB connectors.
My advice: don’t waste your time and money on cheap rubbish. When buying computer add-ons, first visit the Windows 7 Compatibility web site and see which devices meet the standards recommended by Microsoft. When you buy a device from this list, you might pay slightly more, but you can be highly confident that it will work well and will not cause compatibility problems with your other hardware and software.
Software and hardware bearing the “compatible with Windows 7” logo, shown here, has passed stringent tests at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) and guarantees you:
So please, only buy software and hardware that bears the Compatible with Windows 7 logo. Here’s an example of what you’ll find on the web site:
I’ve always jokingly said that my favourite computer game is Microsoft Office. Well, I think Microsoft must have heard me, because now, you can play Ribbon Hero and have fun while you learn how to become an Office power user.
They say that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work another day in your life. So it has to be worth brightening up those mundane tasks with a bit of fun! Remember when games used to have a ‘boss key’ that you could hit when your boss was approaching, to instantly hide the game? Ribbon Hero really stands all that on its head. Maybe you WANT your boss to see you playing this?
“Hey look boss, on-the-job training for free!”.
“Well done Smithers, have a pay rise”.
Those canny people at Office Labs have produced another winner. But wait… it gets better. By linking Ribbon Hero to your facebook account, you can publish your scores online and compete with your friends.
What a wonderful idea. Oh no! David is beating me in his sleep! Must… earn… more… points… :)
This last week has been a troubled time for me emotionally. Partly through unfortunate circumstance and partly through stupidity, I’ve made some massive blunders in my relationships with several people. Some of the people are close to me, others I have never met and yet I’ve managed to alienate them and just make an ass of myself. Then, something happened to one of those people I’ve alienated that is so life changing that I feel mortified that I’ve been so stupid. It puts everything into perspective. Partly, the series of events is just bad luck and bad timing, but that will be no consolation. To those people, if you are reading this, I’m sorry. Know that I always had the best of intentions, I care about you and I hope you’ll forgive me.
Happy New Year to all my readers, I hope the new year and the new decade bring good times for you.
I love snow. Yesterday and today we’ve had a good covering of lovely fluffy powder snow across South Wales, there’s about 5 inches on my driveway right now, and with the predicted deep freeze tonight, it’ll probably stay awhile. I took the opportunity to break out my snowshoes and go out to play. I got some funny looks from the passers-by, I suppose not many of them have seen snowshoes before. Good times.
One thing I’ve been impressed with during the snow season is Ben Marsh’s UK Snow Map. Its the sort of thing that, once you see it, the idea is blindingly obvious and you wish you;d thought of it yourself. The map is a mashup between Twitter and Google Maps. When it snows, people tweet #uksnow plus the first half of their postcode and a rating out of 10 representing how heavy the snow is. Example:
#uksnow CF45 5/10
Ben’s snow map takes all those tweets and just diplays them on the map. I’ve found myself checking it constantly over the last week or so. Nice work, @benmarsh.