Month: January 2004

As I’ve mentioned, I’m getting more and more familiar with ASP.NET as I drag this application kicking and screaming (usually it’s me that’s doing the kicking and screaming, actually) toward completion. Still don’t like visual studio much, or being forced to work on Windows at all, and I keep trying to articulate why not?

One recurring theme, it seems to me, is the operating system putting its needs paramount to the user’s needs, and in some cases treating the user as if they were an annoyance as opposed to a raison d’etre. This isn’t just something you can “friendly up” – it’s more of an underlying way of thinking about the machine that leads to better coding, design, etc. And it’s unfortunately a legacy thing, too, where the more years you treat your users like crap, the more likely the users are to expect that’s the way they ought to be treated.

Here’s the example that brings this to mind: when editing web pages, Visual Studio can display as either HTML code view, or as “design view”, a pseudo-WYSIWYG where you can type text, select “bold”, etc. But when you switch from code view to design view, it’ll often lose the spacing I’ve added to make the html more readable. The actual code editor does the same thing – it wants to automatically align my code, but won’t let me easily override its sense of order. In both cases, the software is putting its needs (to align the code, to autoformat text to keep it pretty) ahead of mine (to rearrange text as I want, even if it isn’t as neat). For example – I like to put “test” code out to the right, rather than lined up with the hierarchy. VS won’t let me do it.

Another example, from HTML itself. Comments are really kludgey as compared to “real” programming languages. There are two main reasons to use comments: to make human-readable information about the technical details of a program (“Must verify credit card format before asking for dollar amount”), and to “comment out” code that you don’t want to run. The first is possible with the

My ever-waning faith in the survival of the species takes another plunge.

Another virus has hit the Windows world. They’re calling this one “one of the fastest-spreading email worm yet!”. It arrives in email with a subject of “hello” or “test”, and a garbage message, along with an attachment that’s an executable (or better – a zip that must be expanded then executed). It doesn’t set itself off – instead the user has to execute it. So – millions of computer users are just blindly clicking the attachment to run it! Granted, it may be addressed from someone they know (I suppose it uses Outlook address books once again) – but come on, people! Don’t run attached .exe programs – especially if they look suspicious!

Need I mention it doesn’t affect the Mac or Linux? I mean, it could – they could write an application on the Mac and mail it out – perhaps so-called “security through obsurity” would keep it from propogating as quickly. But I like to think that Mac and Linux users are smarter (and less enslaved/victimized by their computers) than to just open every attachment that shows up in their inbox.

I continue to predict a massive virus that (after replicating itself and perhaps waiting for idle) wipes the user’s hard drive (or home directory). Of course the same bozo atomaton (l)users will run that program. Massive amounts of data will vanish at the speed of light.

Got backups?

(later) Oh, and get this: Bill Gates says virus attacks make Windows more secure! “A high volume system like [Windows] that has been thoroughly tested will be by far the most secure,” Now I’m really ROTFL. Or perhaps just COMOV. (No, you won’t find that one on the net, it’s one of my own, you’ll have to guess.)

In other news, Our Leader announces that we have always been at war with Australasia (or was that Oceania?).

“Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.”

The classic here is Edsger W. Dijkstra’s Go To Statement Considered Harmful “…the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce…”

And now, an important message from the grammar police.

--- In sdburningman@yahoogroups.com, "business_buddha"  wrote:
And this brings up a very good point.  Where the fuck is Magnus.
Magnus, Magnus, where fort art thou???

“Wherefore” is not a fancy way of saying “where”. Wherefore means “why”.

The most recognizable example of this comes from Romeo and Juliet.
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

Juliet is asking “Why must you be named Romeo?” or more broadly, “why does your name matter?” Or in the vernacular, “What’s yo name, got to do wit’ me?”

She continues,

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Speaking of which, and despite the presence of Leonardo DiCraprio, I recommend the 1996 incarnation ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117509/ ). I especially liked the performance of Petruchio, tho I don’t believe the Bard imagined him to be quite so flamboyant. And like Titanic, you get to see Leonardo killed off, so at least there’s that.

As to the question of “wherefore is Magnus, Magnus”, I believe it has something to do with the blacksmithing; I’m sure you can get the entire story (which no doubt includes a bit of mayhem).

P.S. Bonus reminder: “Penultimate” is not a more emphatic way to say “ultimate”. Penulitmate means next-to-last. November is the penultimate month of the year, for example.

My response to a question about what we were planning for Burning Man this year.

I’m planning on creating a hivemind (using a new, supersecret mind-altering electronic device I’ll be subcontracting to Dr. Random) to multiply channel the spirit of R. Buckminister Fuller, and create the world’s largest geodesic dome, covering the entire playa. All recycled materials, providing full protection from wind, dust and rain, bringing the ambient temperature to around 77 degrees night and day but still allowing full or shaded sun as desired. Should go up in a day or two before the event, so leave your tents – and all your warm clothes at home! Of course you’ll be able to climb to the apex, in fact you may be able to see Reno from there!

When it burns at the end, it should be visible from the cameras on the Spirit rover on Mars.

I crossed the supermarket picket lines tonight to get some groceries. I feel a little strange having to walk by the picketers, but not strange enough to stop me. I’ve shopped at TJ’s, and the nearby organic granola market, more often in the past few months that I would have otherwise, and I now tend to buy more groceries less often. But otherwise it hasn’t radically altered my shopping habits. I do feel bad for the workers – but mainly because I understand if they decide to break the picket and go to work instead of standing around intimidating shoppers, they run the risk of physical retribution from the other unionists – not that they had a choice to join the union in the first place. Yeah, I’m not a big fan of unions.

I know there are all sorts of issues here, beyond health care copayments and top CEO salaries. But it seems to me that the big villian here is escaping unscathed. The picketers should be setting up shop in front of the local Wal-Mart; a new one is going in at the moment, just down the street from my usual supermarket. They’re non-union, which doesn’t really bother me all that much, but it means that they can pay their employees whatever low, low wages they can get away with – plenty of unemployed folx waiting to take their crappy jobs. To compete with the “always low prices” supermarkets have to start cutting their costs, but the high fixed cost of union labor has them up against a wall (-mart).

Of course that isn’t what really bothers me about Wal-Mart. More so than the mediocre products they sell, their abuse of employees and vendors, their neglect of local communities or outright hostility to local businesses – what really troubles me is the homoginization of America (not to mention the rest of the world!) Others who deserve the blame for this – McDonalds, Starbucks, Home Depot, Blockbuster. Everyplace is starting to look the same – the personalities of neighborhoods are vanishing, to be replaced by a generally mundane and flavorless average.

Not that all franchises are bad. Back when I used to eat donuts, I thought Krispy Kremes were pretty tasty. I eat at Outback now and then, they make a decent seared prime rib (notwithstanding the cheezy decor and goofy-dumb radio ads). In n Out, Rubio’s, Nordstroms, the Apple Store, Pollo Loco – seems as if they all offer better-than-average products – indeed, most have higher-than-average prices. It doesn’t bother me to patronize these places – even instead of local alternatives. I guess mainly it bothers me when marketing of cheap junk takes over. (You knew I’d bring Micosoft in here somehow, right?)

…they probably wouldn’t think computers were such a big mystery. The network guy has been at it all day trying to get a wireless card to work in the accountant’s laptop. The laptop’s about four years old, so of course it doesn’t come with a regular ethernet port (I’m trying to remember how far you’d have to go back to find a Mac without an ethernet port…back before the G3 powerbooks, I think). And on the Mac, I just expect the Airport card to work flawlessly – no, even better than that, I expect to be able to use strange networks flawlessly.

Last night I tore the new iBook apart to replace the hard drive (when it bought it it came with 10GB in, and a spare 20GB). The CD is broken – didn’t find a way to fix that. Taking it apart wasn’t that easy – maybe two dozen little tiny screws – but nothing really impossible. Inside is a strange marvel of engineering – not sure why it has to be built the way it is but it’s beautiful in a mysterious technical sort of way. The drive is a standard IDE laptop hard drive – part of the reason I wanted to try this is to see how hard it’ll be to change the drive on my main machine. Installing the new OS was as easy as plugging it into a firewire cable from my other Mac (hold down the T key on reboot); did that this afternoon so we could test the wireless connection, and it works fine.

Here’s another example. I just loaded one of the automatic Microsoft updates. The description of the update goes something like this:

This update addresses an issue in which anyone with access to your IP address could gain control of your computer and remotely launch attacks on the world’s financial infrastructure, possibly affecting the value of Microsoft stock. We won’t tell you exactly what we’re patching, ’cause either we don’t know and we’re just taking a shot in the dark at it, or it’s so obvious it would be embarassing to us to admit it. Sure, we could have created an operating system that didn’t have massive holes like this, but we felt you would be more beholden to us if you had to come back for updates constantly to hold off this sort of thing. Oh, and by the way, this update may affect all sorts of other seemingly unrelated aspects of your computer, like adding Digital Rights Management to your MP3s and sending copies of your emails to the NSA. And no doubt you’ll have to restart your computer to complete installation of this update, perhaps several times. Would you like to sell what little remains of your soul to the devil for the marginal peace of mind you’ll get from this update?

…where an OSX update message tends to be more like this…

This update patches errors in the FTP portion of the TCP/IP stack which could, under extremely rare and mostly hypothetical circumstances, allow an intruder to gain root access to your computer. Since this stack is open source, as soon as someone discovered the vulnerability it was fixed, and within a day or two we verified that and incorporated it into our system. This use of standard UNIX components means less work for us, and a more secure system for you. Another benefit, is that we can’t sneak any software modifications you wouldn’t want in there, because someone could look at our code and notice. If this is an update to proprietary Apple software like the user interface or our cool iTools, you probably trust us to handle it even more carefully than we would open source patches – and it probably adds cool new features! And since we know that uptime is important to you, we’ll only make you restart the computer if it’s absolutely necessary. If you decide not to install this update now, that’s okay with us, too – your computer, your choice, it’ll probably be fine either way.

By the way, the network tech gave up on the Windows laptop, didn’t ever get it to find the network.

You may have noticed that I have a mania for organizing. In fact that’s probably why I enjoy working with computers and databases.

I also read – a lot. I may have mentioned that I have my books organized in Library of Congress classification order – PS for fiction, G151 for travel, RA64 for viruses and epidemiology, QA76 and TK5105 for computers, etc. (Though at the moment most of them are in boxes in an unrelated organizational frenzy – the ones that aren’t in my giant next-to-the-bed bookshelf of current reads.)

I used to keep a list of books in Excel (in fact I used to keep a lot of lists in Excel, but I’m trying to get that monkey off my back – that’s another story). Then for a while I had a php/mysql web database, but that didn’t really work out so well because I still had to look up and manually enter all the information any time I got a new book, and I had to write all the input/output – good practice for me, but less good for keeping up-to-data.

But recently I started using Booxter – an OSX application that keeps a database of my books. The really cool thing about Booxter, is that it’ll take the ISBN (which is shown on the barcode or inside title page of most recent books) and look up all the book information. I don’t even know where it looks it up; but it comes back with title, author, and even my beloved LOCIS listing. Not only that, but it often brings back a picture of the books’ cover!

So far I’ve got about 300 books listed – the ones that had ISBNs in my excel spreadsheet, and the ones that were lying around the house not in boxes (as well as those for a box of books I gave away – now marked number of copies 0!). I imagine I have about 200 more books that either I didn’t note the ISBN the first time, or didn’t add them to the Excel sheet at all; when I break them back out I’ll probably address that, and find the labelmaker and add LOC stickers to the new books, and I’ll be ready to file them. Still a little puzzled how to file books that don’t have a LOC class; do I just guess or do I order them by name or arbitrarily? These are the issues that drive an order freak like me, mad. At least I hope that’s what’s driving me mad.