Today is the first birthday of my personal website. Remember the launch? In the past year I no-blogged on many different topics which undoubtedly are important to millions of people.  Statistics:

   90 posts (including this one). This means an average of 0.246 posts per day or one post every 4.07 days.

   Over 700 comments. This means an average of about 2 comments per day or about 8 comments per article.

   About 100 unique (unique IP addresses) visits per day.

   I still do not understand how millions of readers can make just 100 unique visits per day but my guess is that most if not all ISPs in the world are caching the Sietch’s content locally so they can save bandwidth. It is a well known fact that Google Reader does that but a bug with the cache causes it to display every post twice. Or probably the guys at Google think that my website is so important that every article should be presented to the reader twice. In this case I will have to agree.

   In the past year the software that supports the Sietch received many important features. In my opinion the most important feature is the RSS feed but there are also the Pseudorandom quotes, the latest comments section (now with anchors), the HTML posts (thanks to TinyMCE which became project of the Month on Sourceforge), links in non-HTML posts (thanks to regular expressions),  comment policy and many more. Of course the thing that our team (which up to now consists of me only but you can expect new members soon) is most proud of is the "Works on My Machine" certificate. Does it work on yours?

P.S. Of course it is Open Sauce!

   Открихме сезон 2009 с концерта на Samael. Ако съдим по откриването се очертава доста стабилна година и много вратобол. Та Samael е един архангел, който според някои източници бил паднал и станал демон, та той беше дошъл да ни попее...

   I have not published any programming articles recently and I know that a throng of readers eagerly await them so I decided to share an interesting task that was brought up by a guy on IRC. You have an enumerable sequence and you are required to write a method that selects a random element from the sequence with just one iteration over the sequence. This means that you are not allowed to call methods like Count because it will iterate through the sequence. You are not allowed to save the elements in another collection. Of course an even distribution of the results is required (i.e. every element should have equal chance to be selected). When you are ready look at the full text to see my solution...

   Гледам си филма Троя и се възмущавам какви са ги забъркали в Холивуд. Възмущението ми е толкова силно, че реших, че трябва да го умножа многократно като го споделя с многомилионната ми читателска аудитория...

   Here is the latest upgrade to my personal website (which should be your homepage). This release contains only bugfixes. I believe that from now on there should be just one XHTML validation error. This error will not be removed for several reasons. First of all I will have to code for a week to recreate the wonderful ASP.NET pager control which renders it. Second it is absolutely harmless - a "disabled" attribute for a link that is ignored with no effect in every browser but IE. And finally it is a sign of defiance of W3C, web "standards" and all of that bullshit. Some issues with cache invalidatin were also fixed. The most important fix is that the Sietch now works in IE8 or at least I hope so.

   As always you can download the source code at Codeplex and even get involved in the development of this software masterpiece.