One of my favorite web-comics is xkcd.  I was recently reminded of http://www.xkcd.com/978/.  I’m in the process of putting together a .NET 4.0 Framework based website using VB.  I have a very nice table thank you very much that is bound to a SQL Datasource in the code-behind.  Nice and slick.

Except, I want to make it sortable.  Should be as simple as setting AllowSorting=”True” and marking the columns I want sortable.  However, that doesn’t work when bound to a SQL Datasource.

No problem.  I’ll just Google it.  And there I find about a dozen answers.  And a third of them are just plain wrong (wrong enough even with my limited VB experience I can tell they are wrong), another third quote the wrong answers and the final third simply don’t work (and are so poorly commented in some cases I can’t even figure out what the original author was even attempting.)

And please, before you forward me a bunch of links in an effort to be helpful, don’t.  I’ve seen them.  Probably.

But it does lead to the general question.  How do you know what you read on the Internet is accurate? Even if it quotes a source, how do you know the source is accurate?

For years many people who followed the space program believed that “Goldstone has the bird” was a quote about Explorer 1, the first US satellite being picked up by the Goldstone tracking station, thus proving it had made orbit.  For years this was believed by many.  It is quoted in several reputable places, including the autobiography of someone who should have had first hand knowledge.

However, there is at least one little problem.  Goldstone hadn’t been built at the time.  So even the “original” source appears to have gotten it wrong.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/550/1 for more details.

Just give that a thought the next time you look something up on Wikipedia or another source to confirm your facts.