I completely agree with Brad’s assessment of the Facebook problem. 

The Problem: As of today, Facebook is deriving massive benefit in all the application development that they?ve enabled.  They?ve brilliantly created an open community that allows developers to quickly create applications that can rapidly acquire hundreds of thousands of users.  This dramatically extends the functionality of Facebook by offloading the R&D and feature development to the apps developers.  (How about all of them there adverbs ? I sound like a press release.) However, as far as I can tell, none of these Facebook apps developers are deriving any real benefits (if you are a Facebook apps developer and ARE deriving a tangible benefit, other than customer acquisition within the Facebook infrastructure, please weigh in.)  In addition, Facebook has shifted all of the infrastructure costs to these apps developers, creating the “I have 250,000 users, now what?? problem.

I think it’s great that developers of these apps will create them for the good of the community.  This happens often, but I think the quality of apps created for use within the Facebook platform will be that much better if developers of these apps were compensated economically, especially within the current Facebook environment that requires developers of these apps to host them on their own.

Feld Thoughts - The Facebook Problem

Silverlight looks really cool and interesting.  I’ll have to give it a better look over in some free time. 

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Silverlight on Linux - Miguel de Icaza’s moonlight project

We’ll have spotlights on excellent tech and tutorial posts from the forum, columns like ?Gamers? Gamut? and ?Girl Tech, Girl Talk? that users can submit articles to, contests for serious EggXpert swag, and more!  

EggXpert.com: The Key to a Smarter Community

Thanks to Joe for forwarding along the link.

Coding Horror has published a great, detailed post on how to clean spyware off of your machine if it ever gets infested. 

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000888.html

The directions he outlines are probably a little overwhelming for the average computer user at home.  For average computer users that I know, when they ask about protecting against adware/spyware, I usually point them to Ad-Aware and Spybot.  Installing and running those on a regular basis should keep adware/spyware at bay.

In Oracle, when order by descending is used, null values are returned to the top.  To work around this, you just use NULLS LAST in your ORDER BY statement inside of your stored procedure.

Example:

SELECT name FROM customer ORDER BY name DESC NULLS LAST;

where “name” is a column in the “customer” table and ”DESC” is used to set a descending order

This post is long overdue.  It’s been too long since I have posted last, but I figured this was just the post to break the hiatus.

I want to give a shout out to the Live Writer team at Microsoft for shipping Beta 2. 

You can download the installer for Writer Beta 2 at http://writer.live.com.

JJ, Charles, Spike, Bonnie, Joe, Rebecca, Sophy, Pooja, Ron, & Flora, CONGRATULATIONS!

If you’re reading this, have your own blog that you post to, and don’t use Writer, try it out.  That team knows how to ship kick ass software!