Stack Overflow Spamming

I got almost annoyed with the continuous spamming (still happening at the time of writing) at Stack Overflow. More than anything else, this seems like a limitation with the system itself, which don't seem to have any built in support for preventing spamming.

Well, I know this is very easy to say this, than doing - I also know Jeff and all are not short of ideas, but here are few quick features we need in Stack Overflow asap, so that a lot of us can still continue using that.

The message contained abusive text, but from the behavior,  I infer it is pretty human, it is not an automated bot.

Here are few thoughts

1 - User should not be able to ask more than one question per minute

2 - If user asks more than a limited number of questions in a short time, captcha should be shown

3 - Check for abusive words in the input, and if found a multiple times, suspend that user automatically for some time

4 - If a number of users are getting created from same IP, prevent the activity for some time

Calling @CodingHorror to do something urgently


Update: Seems like SO is working good now, after being down for some ten minutes. The spamming trend lasted for close to 30 minutes, and then Pretty good recovery, but need to think how to prevent this in future.

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Why I love Lambda Expressions

These are the areas I found myself using Lambdas.

To provide inline event handlers like

button.Click += (sender,args) =>
{
};

To find items in a collection

 var dogs= animals.Where(animal => animal.Type == "dog");

For iterating a collection, like

 animals.ForEach(animal=>Console.WriteLine(animal.Name));

Creating a custom object

var myObj= mySource.Select(x => new {Name = x.name, Age= x.age});

Simple one line methods

Func<int, int> add = x => x + x;

For aggregate operations

double charCount = document.Sum(word => word.Length)

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Non Technical Tips for Programmers :)

Based on my answer for this question in Stack Overflow, about handling pressure.

Here are a couple of useful tips

• Enjoy coding, be passionate - Don't be afraid to ask questions
• Drink lot of water to maintain the water level in your body
• Exercise or Practice some yoga and pranayams
• Be smart enough to provide solutions, so that you can control the thought process of stakeholders (so that you won't have that feeling of 'getting forced to work')
• Escalate risks at correct time
• Meditate, feel relaxed - or go for a walk at times. Don't get glued to your seat
• Enjoy some music
• Be aware about your breath pattern.
• Try Ayurveda - I've found Triphala is an excellent way to maintain your body's balance
• Take good, balanced food - Don't skip meals.
• Plan well. Know what you do, and focus on what you want to finish.
• Interact with your family at times - Call your mom, wife or kids. That'll help a lot
• Games - Cycling, Tennis, Cricket - What ever you love

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A handfull of .NET Open Source projects to check out

About Week End Hacks - Most weekends I do some digging around new and emerging technology and geek stuff. I do this by picking the links I bookmarked, or by going through the tweets I Favorited in Twitter. 


This week I'll be listing down my most favorite .NET open source projects.

Iron Python

I really like the interactive programming and ability to host Python in my own apps :)

"IronPython is a new implementation of the Python programming language running on .NET. It supports an interactive console with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the .NET Framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers, while maintaining full compatibility with the Python language."

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Screwturn Wiki


Is an open source wiki written in c#

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Singularity Operating System

Singularity provides Softare Isolation instead of hardware enforced protection domains and heavy context switching. Developed by Microsoft Research, now available at Codeplex as open source.

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Sandcastle Help File Builder


If you love doing code documentation. From the description:

"Sandcastle, created by Microsoft, is a tool used for creating MSDN-style documentation from .NET assemblies and their associated XML comments files. The current version is the May 2008 release. It is command line based and has no GUI front-end, project management features, or an automated build process like those that you can find in NDoc. The Sandcastle Help File Builder was created to fill in the gaps, provide the missing NDoc-like features that are used most often, and provide graphical and command line based tools to build a help file in an automated fashion."

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