First of all I’d like to say that there’s of course not a winning concept for everyone.

There are many technical books that become thicker and thicker and the pressure from the technical society is more and more to read them and remember many concepts described in them. But it’s so hard to do it.

How do you remember all that stuff? Lots of people use some cards with basic info so that they can remember the details when they look at it.

Sometimes I read a chapter, wait a while, and go back through the chapter with a highlighter. Then, if I ever have to go back in the book, I can just read the highlighted nuggets. But that’s just something you can do with your own books…

Generally, technical books come with lots of little example snippets of code or exercises. I always try (if there’s sufficient time) to do them. But after you’ve done them, think about where you can apply those concepts in code you’ve already written. Go back and refactor with those ideas in mind. Once you see how it can work in a real live project, it will be burned into your brain.

A really good coder once told me…If you read something in a technical book you don’t understand, do something with that concept 5 times in code.
Make 5 separate, little, non-related one-off projects. By the second time around you will probably understand it, and the other 3 are just to get your fingers used to typing it. Don’t proceed further in the book until you do.

If you do not practice it you will not learn it except you’re rain man but nobody is rain man except for rain man.

The learning by doing principle is good but my experience tells me that it is not enough. Moreover, remembering is no longer mandatory. Accessibility of resources is such that finding them is more important than learning them.

I was recently talking about linq features with a friend. Now I saw somebody wanted to break a loop after 50 iterations. Trivial but also for that there’s a precious solution using linq.

int processed = 0;
foreach(ListViewItem lvi in listView.Items)
{
   //do stuff
   ++processed;
   if (processed == 50) break;
}

use linq

foreach(ListViewItem lvi in listView.Items.Take(50))
{
    //do stuff
}

or, you’re right “old” style would be

for(int i=0; i < listView.Items.Count && i <= 50; i++)
{
   ListViewItem lvi = listView.Items[i];
  //do stuff
}

Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harversting harder conseal them via obfuscation - @ is replaced with “at” and . is replaces with “dot”, so

bill.gates@microsoft.com

now becomes

bil dot gates at microsoft dot com

I’m not an expert in regular expressions and I’m really curious - does such obfuscation really make automatic harvesting harder? Is it really much harder to automatically identify such obfuscated addresses?

For example, if every email address on a large community site is reversed in the markup and rendered properly with CSS, or token-replaced (@ becomes ‘at’), or any other predictable method, the harvesters will just write a thin adapter for your site.

Think of it this way: if it only takes you one line of code to “scramble” them sitewide, it will only take the harvester one line of code to “unscramble” them for your site. Roughly speaking.

What concept is the right? Do more complex obfuscation or consider about new ways?

Obfuscation techniques fall in the same category than captchas. They are not reliable and tend to hurt regular users more than bots.

Javascript obfuscation seems to be praised, but is no silver bullet: it is not that hard today to automate a browser for email sniffing. If it can be displayed in a browser, it can be harvested. You could even imagine a bot that’s taking screenshots of a browser window and using OCR to extract addresses to beat your million-dollar-obfuscation-technique.

Depending on where and why you want to obfuscate emails, those techniques could be useful:

• Restrict email visibility: you may hide emails on your website/forum to anonymous users, to new users (with little to no activity or posts to date) or even hide them completely and replace email contact between members with a built-in private messaging feature.
• Use a dedicated spam-filtered email: you will get spammed, but it will be limited to this particular address. This is a good trade-off when you need to expose the email address to any user.
• Use a contact form: while bots are pretty good at filling forms, it turns out that they are too good at filling forms. Hidden field techniques can filter most of the spam coming through your contact form.

One common way of hiding email from bots and spammers is to create an image containing the email address. Facebook does this, for instance. Now, using images for email is inherently bad for accessibility, because text readers will not be able to read it. But even otherwise, there are several free character recognition programs that do a pretty good of decoding such email-images.

At least you have always to keep in brain that if it’s difficult for the spammers it’s as well your users to identify the email address. A nice article from wikipedia on Email obfuscation or address munging you’d pay regard to.

The real question is whether the extra effort will be put in by harvesters and if the (major? minor?) barrier to the harvesters is worth the possible problems for your users.

—

Finally this article is as so many about fighting spam - In my opinion, spam has become such a problem and so many databases have been turned over that we’re beyond hiding our addresses. Instead, consider of more efficient ways of classifying and blocking spam.