It’s been a few months since I began reviewing ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 based on day-to-day use, and it’s time to wrap the process up with a third and final post. The original plan for this series of reviews was that I’d write three posts about the Zenbook, finishing with one that summarized my experience using it regularly for a few months.

Unfortunately, the trouble I had with its keyboard sabotaged that plan. If you haven’t been following along, a month with the Zenbook’s keyboard was all I could endure. However, almost every other aspect of the UX31 put it solidly in the running as a successor to my MacBook Air.

Rather than ending on that sour note about the keyboard, this last post in the series will cover a few things that the Zenbook did well. So well, I’ll be looking for these features in whichever Ultrabook™ ultimately does replace my MacBook Air.

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The IE team published an in-depth post over the weekend, raising a few concerns about StatCounter’s methodology (or lack thereof) for reporting browser market share. Their points were interesting to consider, but one of them stood out to me:

You’ll notice some pretty big differences in the weighting of StatCounter versus Net Applications. First and foremost, the most populous country in the world, China, doesn’t make the top 20 for StatCounter, when in fact it represents the world’s largest internet population.

[...]

To further explore this problem, we re-ran the StatCounter numbers and weighted their publicly reported individual country browser share numbers by the CIA internet population data. This calculation would then represent a true country or geo-weighted view of worldwide browser data based on the actual world’s internet population.

It’s true that we should be wary of methodology issues that can creep into data extracted from analytics services that weren’t designed with aggregate statistics in mind. StatCounter’s data is often accepted at face value, without any detailed scrutiny. However, I believe this geo-weighting approach they’ve explored may be as flawed as the raw, unadjusted data itself.

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Note: If you haven’t read my initial impressions of the Zenbook, you might want to head over and read that first: The ASUS Zenbook UX31: Initial impressions

I’ve been using my ASUS Zenbook for just over a month at this point, and it’s time for a second review now that I’ve used it for a while on a day-to-day basis. I’ve heard from many of you about being eager to read the next installment in this process, so I’m glad to know that you’re finding this experiment useful too.

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I took part in The Code Project’s A Coder Interview series recently, and the result was published there yesterday. Terrence happened to send the questions at a rare moment when I wasn’t running in five directions at once, which led to me accidentally writing quite a bit.

Part of it touches on something important to me that I plan to write more about eventually:

What advice would you offer to an up-and-coming programmer?

Write about programming. Start a blog, answer questions on The Code Project or Stack Overflow, or whatever else suits you, but find some way to write about programming.

I can’t count how many times I began writing about something I thought I knew thoroughly, only to find that I had to fill in several important gaps in my knowledge to write about it competently. Just as important, you have to learn topics more comprehensively to distill and teach them in simple terms. The combination of writing about programming and making that writing as clear and simple as you can is a powerful exercise.

[…]

The interview also exposes my shameful stance on tabs vs. spaces, but you’ll have to go there to read that part…

Click here to read the full interview at The Code Project

For over a year now, I’ve been using a 13” MacBook Air as my only laptop. Though it’s a bit underpowered and I prefer Windows to OS X, I was ultimately unable to resist Apple’s build quality compared to the Dell I had used previously.

However, I never fully resigned myself to accepting a dichotomy between quality construction and operating system. Thankfully, the recent proliferation of Windows-based Ultrabook™ machines seems to be rapidly bridging that divide.

Given my already-growing desire to find an alternative, when I was contacted about reviewing the ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 Ultrabook™, I decided to give it a go. I know I’m not alone in having been frustrated with a choice between machines that run Windows well and quality hardware, so I hope that you’ll find my experience of trying to move back from the MacBook hardware useful.

Disclaimer: Up front, I want you to know that I’m receiving a complementary UX31 in return for evaluating it and writing a few posts about that experience. I’ll give you my honest assessment of it and only recommend it if it meets my own standards, but I also think it’s important to be transparent and not potentially abuse your trust.

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As I ponder the title of this post, I’m conflicted.

I clearly remember writing last year’s post and thinking that it didn’t seem like four years could have possibly passed since I started publishing here. As I write this one, I find myself feeling like it’s surely been much longer than five years.

I guess you could say 2011 has been a long year?

Relativity aside, this week saw the fifth anniversary of the night that I hastily threw this site together and published my first post. So, I guess it’s that time again.

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One of the longest running themes here has been the compelling intersection between ASP.NET and jQuery. Beginning with my post about using jQuery to circumvent ASP.NET AJAX’s client-side apparatus for calling ASMX services, I’ve been writing about using ASP.NET and jQuery since the Spring of 2008.

As these related posts have accumulated over the years, I’ve made an effort to weave a thread of cross-links between them posts where appropriate. However, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate every possible entry point and subsequent path that someone might find themselves following here.

So, I’ve decided to finally do what I should have done a year or two ago: Create a top-level index to organize and improve the accessibility of my content for ASP.NET developers interested in integrating jQuery into their sites.

You can see my first draft of that here: jQuery for the ASP.NET Developer

Unlike the other content here, I’m publishing this one long before it’s “finished”. My hope is that I can solicit early feedback to help better construct a useful narrative while the document is still in its formative stages. So, if you have any feedback on the current page or what you think should ultimately be there, please leave me a comment on either this post or that page, contact me directly, or even @mention it my way on Twitter.

They aren’t the most glamorous projects, but thousands of developers have integrated my Highslide JS .NET and PostBack Ritalin controls into their sites and applications over the years. PostBack Ritalin was even included in Subtext at one point. It’s definitely a great feeling to see your work put to good use (in fact, this motivator can be even more powerful than monetary gain).

As jQuery has risen in popularity among the ASP.NET community, both controls seem somewhat superfluous to me, yet they have surprisingly remained very much in-demand. As long as people are using them, keeping them working and bug-free(ish) is something that I’ll continue to pursue.

I wouldn’t mind some help though.

Over the years, I didn’t keep the source code for these controls closed due to any illusions of ever turning them into commercial products. Rather, they were the first server controls I had built for general consumption and the quality of their code is not great. For the same sort of reasons that developers “go dark”, I always preferred to keep that code hidden in my junk drawer.

At this point though, keeping their source hidden just to protect my delicate programmer-pride is counterproductive, so I’ve open-sourced both controls on GitHub. Go forth and fork them – pull requests are welcomed.

Fork PostBackRitalin on GitHub

Fork Highslide JS .NET on GitHub

I’ve been considering a change in the permalink structure for my posts for some time now. The /yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/ structure I started with is certainly nicer than what WordPress defaults to, but a problem with those dated URLs has emerged over the past few years: link ageism.

Link ageism is what I’ve begun calling the tendency most of us have to avoid URLs that indicate links to older content. With the year of publication front and center, my old URL structure was particularly susceptible to link ageism. When I began hearing from new readers who almost skipped over my still-relevant content just because the URL looked old, the dated URLs had to go.

Along with the obvious problem of redirecting old URLs to new, I ran into another issue that I hadn’t given much consideration before the change. The new URL scheme caused the counters on my Twitter and Delicious sharing widgets to reset to zero on all my existing posts.

Luckily, I was able to find a solution to the sharing counter problem, and I thought that workaround might be useful to others. What I’ll describe is specific to WordPress and the particular URL change that I made, but the same approach could be applied to save social sharing counters when changing URLs on most any publishing platform.

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Years ago, Joe Stagner was one of the first people at Microsoft that I happened to get in touch with about ASP.NET and the topics I was blogging about here. In fact, he was responsible for the first real bump in traffic my blog received back in 2007. So, when Joe asked me to come on his podcast earlier this year, I was eager.

We talked about a wide variety of topics, including dealing with plagiarism, how to become a Microsoft MVP, and selling new web technology to non-technical decision makers. Fair warning: it was unscripted and less jQuery, ASP.NET, or JavaScript themed than other podcasts you may have heard me on in the past, but I think it turned out pretty well if you’re interested in broader topics surrounding the technology.

You can download or listen to it here on Joe’s site: Podcast – Dave Ward Encosia