A few quick updates:
My company, Semingo, changed its name and from now on we're called Delver.

We'll be officially launching our product at the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA next week (January 28-30).
If you're there, make sure to drop by our booth (say Pasha sent you), and don't miss the demo. I promise we're one of the coolest products there.
If you want to be notified when our beta is open, sign up at delver.com.

Like written so many times before, HttpUtility.UrlEncode is extremely outdated and buggy.
It doesn't encode the single quote ('), there's an open bug marked "Closed (Won't Fix)". So don't wait for a patch.
It doesn't encode the plus sign (+) either.

So please use the AntiXss library whenever it's remotely important to get it right.
Needless to say, same goes for the other encoding methods of HttpUtility, like HtmlEncode.

This is not bad:
Live Search: How Many Calories In Pizza
It's good to see Live doing something besides catching up with Google.
Google and Yahoo don't have anything. Ask has something.

I'm starting to think they should have licenses for owning a keyboard. Because people have too much time lately. And fast internet.
Amazon now has a "Customer Discussions (beta)" section on the product page.
Here's a snapshot of something I stumbled upon just now:




Lets try to help the lost souls, shall we:
Q: I'm a lesbian but I believe in God what should I do?
Don't tell Him.
And don't tell your girlfriend.
Q: How many sins did you commit today?
Who, me? about six or seven. Wait, last night was already today too? Hmm. Maybe like ten. I didn't know she was married, man.
Q: Why are there so many Atheists on a Religion forum?
We like it here. It's quiet and sunny. The girls are cute.
But enough with us, why are You Capitalizing Any Word That Has To Do With religion, yo??
Q: Only religion leads us to Truth!
Oh, I see now. Good answer.
Q: What is the meaning of a "pure heart" especially in today's society?
"She told him she only likes him for the car".
And Google doesn't know either so that's the best you're going to get.
Q: Is George Bush the Anti-Christ?
Anti-Christ? I thought he was just "anti exis of evil". Is Christ there too? Is he with that North Korean dude with the expensive booze?

1. "1 dollar in shekels"

2. "ly 8850"

Cheers.

1. People without a picture are lazy or ugly or both. Trust me, no one looks like a question mark.
2. I don’t want your fucking slayers invitations. Nobody wants them. So pretty please, stop this crap.
3. Girls look much better on facebook than “on” uniform.
4. What’s up with girls that don’t list relationship status? Or “interested in”. Or birth year. It’s hard enough to pick your signals anyway, so what am I supposed to think when all you say is “Born: May 15th”???
5. How come there are so many incredibly hot, Jewish chicks from USA who are friends of my friends? I know my friends - that makes no sense at all! Are you playing with me, Mark?
6. Oh, and I’ve been to the other side now: you see a hot Jewish chick from USA who’s a friend of your friend – it’s a bot. Fucking geeks, make it look so real.
7. Ever thought “I just want to get a list of all the girls where I live, ordered by their hotness in descending order”?? It’s there, and it’s called the “hot or not” application. Install it, go to “my scoreboards” and pick your network from the dropdown list. Filter by preferred gender.
8. You know you’re getting old when it takes you an extra second to recognize the girl from high-school because she got married and changed her last name.
9. Don’t recycle status-humor. You think I can’t go to “see all” and realize that 7 of you bastards wrote “updating his/her status”??


p.s. I'm not a sexist. Just replace "girl" with "boy" where you want.

I'm proud to announce the newest addition to the bitz family of quality web products - khjgf.

Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is this a result of a "weekend-experiment"?
A: Somewhat.
Q: Is this a result of mind-altering substances?
A: Likely.
Q: Is this a part of some secret-society-taking-over-the-world kind of thing?
A: Maybe.
Q: Are you mad, mate?
A: I'm affraid so.


More on Madness at pashabitz.com:
Scrum Lovers

The MySQL query optimizer has trouble with queries that contain a join to a union.
Lets take a look at the following example:

Now, suppose we have an index on column f2 in t2. If you look at the explain plan, you will see that MySQL does not use it.
So, the solution is to move the where constraint into the parts of the union itself:


This time, the index on f2 will be used and the query should perform much better.

More on MySQL at pashabitz.com:
MySQL .Net Connector Bug

1. Work on something really big. I mean so big, it's a hubris to even think about it.
2. Our product is related to social networks, so if your boss catches you staring at good-looking girls (or boys) in Facebook, you can say "It's for work" and he will beleive it.
3. Pool table at work. (May be taken away from us any day now, so hurry up!!)
4. Work with really smart people. But not annoying, self important, square-type smart. Smart and fun-to-get-drunk-with type.
5. Our offices are ideally situated on the 10th floor in the Hertzlya-Pituach hi-tech district.
Perfect for BASE jumping, if you can squeeze out. The windows don't open that much.
View of the sea (if CEO).
6. Solve really complicated problems on a daily basis, such as: How to effectively store and access a graph that is many terabytes in size? How to extract meaning from unstructured text? Where to go for lunch??
7. Cutting edge technology and methods: .Net, Java, WCF, JLO, search engines, MySQL, TFS, Scrum, just to mention a few.
You know JLO is a fake one, right?
8. Free Bitzwear t-shirt as signing bonus.

Semingo is hiring:
Expert in search engines
Expert in text retrieval
Top notch .NET developer
QA expert

Drop me a line at "pasha at semingo dot com" if interested.

With ASP.NET Forms Authentication it's easy to setup a login page.
What if you want to make the login functionality more seamless? That's quiet easy too.
Remember that Forms Authentication uses a cookie to distinguish an authentication user from an unauthenticated user.
Here's a recipe for setting up an AJAX-style login:
1. Collect the user/password and send them to the server using AJAX.
2. On the server-side handler, verify that the user/password combination is correct and add the authentication cookie using the FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie method.

Now, the authentication cookie will be appended to subsequent requests to urls within your application.

More on Forms Authentication at pashabitz.com:
Security Issue with FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage