Image credits: http://xkcd.com/221/

I believe it is very funny and it actually happened, a few days ago, to me. Here is my ”random” code that was caught in a code review by the eager eye of a colleague:

//Pass random language. It doesn't really matter
string assemblyPath = ProxyHelper.GenerateAssembly(ProxyLanguage.CS);

And the code review comment: “Although it is hard coded to CS.  :)”

If you are from Europe (as I am), you probably know that youtube has ads in the form of AdSense delivered as small popups at the bottom of the player. Here, in US, there are video ads delivered before the actual content. So, before being able to watch a video, one has to enjoy a 10-15 seconds commercial (luckily, longer ones get a Skip button after about 15 seconds).

Southpark Studios (the official site) delivers about 3 sessions of commercials/episode. Well… they need someone to sponsor the free videos but the same ad is delivered twice or even trice in a row. It might be a bug in their player but still this is no excuse. I know the IE9 and  Jack in a Box commercials so well now that I can predict the next frame… oh, and there is a new one with a guy that gets hit by a frisbee – very annoying.

I was very surprised when I received a call, on my cell phone, which turned out to be an ad. Basically, it was a recorded message trying to sell me something. This is unbelievable because the number was 1 day old, only the phone company had it and I am pretty sure that I unchecked any “I want to be spammed box”. I was even called once by a real person who was trying to sell something.

Television used to be made of TV show with some ads… Here is ads with some TV show. Approx. every 15 minutes, the movie gets interrupted by 5 minutes of commercials. Also, my provider has an interactive TV guide from where I can pick the show that I want to see. The guide is full of ads and today something happened, something that made me write this post: during a movie I got an interactive (!) ad at the bottom of the screen. The commercial was asking me to press some button on the remote control if I want more details. WTF?? This is hilarious, I am being flooded with commercials…

The last example of ads-world is Amazon’s Kindle. They offer a $30 discount for Kindle, but there is a catch: “You’ll receive special offers and sponsored screensavers directly on your Kindle, including AmazonLocal deals in select cities. Your offers display on your Kindle’s screensaver and on the bottom of the home screen—they don’t interrupt reading”. So, what is this actually? It means that they will give you the Kindle cheaper but it will display ads forever.

The American society has many positive and negative aspects but the quantity of delivered ads is not the former class.

I started a new job at Microsoft in the United States. I am now working with the X++ compiler team. In case you haven’t heard of X++, you should know that X++ is the programming language that allows developers to extend Dynamics AX so that it matches their needs and business.

Also, I now live in the Seattle area. One of the most famous attraction in the area is the Space Needle, therefore I included a picture of the top platform of the tower. I took the picture on Saturday when the weather was sunny – it was one of the two sunny days that we had in the last three since I arrived here.

The biggest achievements come first, so as I already mentioned in the first paragraph, I managed to successfully complete a master in Computer Science at the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands. It was definitely harder than I expected but I managed to do it (see my project here). I learned a lot and I would like to share some of the things that I will remember from TUDelft (random thoughts that barely worth 2 cents):

• Research requires a lot of time and a lot of study. Until getting there (in NL) I never did academic research in the true sense
• Spending more than two years for a two years master programme is fine and students are not always supposed to be young. However, spending too much time should raise an alarm.
• Academic research can bring real value to the world (see TUDelft’s Incubators and research)
• Sleeping 5-6 hours/day and working the rest is not sustainable and one can only do it for a limited amount of time. Is more productive to sleep more.
• Wikipedia is not a valid reference

Next is the Microsoft experience. Getting in Microsoft was a big dream that I wasn’t able to complete about four years ago when I tried to get an internship. However, last winter I tried again and it worked. I spent one year as a Tester or, the official title, Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) working on Dynamics AX2012. Before Microsoft I only worked in a small company (with ~50 employees) and the MS experience was something completely different. I believe that now I can tell the difference between working in different size companies and I know which are the (dis)advantages of each. I think the biggest gain from Microsoft is not the programming/testing experience but the understanding of the process and how big projects are developed.

Moving from one place to another is not one of my favorite activities – what I hate is the process of moving, not being in a new place. However, there is an advantage when getting to new places: you meet people and make connections. I met many great individuals both in Holland and Denmark and I will miss them. However, because of different social networks, I believe that it will be quite easy to stay in touch and, at least, exchange some words from time to time.

The people that I met Denmark and in the Netherlands were great and crazy (in a positive way). We had a lot of fun, went to a lot of parties (unfortunately not so many in Holland because of the study load) and spent memorable moments – I just checked and I have 2000+ pictures just from Denmark and I know that there are many others that I haven’t got because of various reasons. Did you know that people in Microsoft love parties? Being a geek doesn’t mean only going to LAN parties :-)

The last two years were amazing but, in the same time, extremely exhausting. For the first time in the last 4-5 years, I have nothing to do. There are no school assignments, no projects, no meetings, nothing. Even though is a weird feeling, I guess I should enjoy it and take advantage of the situation. Therefore, I hereby declare the beginning of my extended vacation.

• “MySuperS“,
• “MySuperSXX”,
• “MySuperSUselsessCharacters”

because only the bold part gets validated making 8+ characters passwords as strong as those with 8 characters.

Immediately, I sent a message to customer service:

Dear sir/madam,

[...]If I set a password with more than 8 characters then only the first 8 are validated at SVN login, making possible to access the repository by just using the first 8 characters of my password.

[... the rest of the message with details and repro steps]

They have a good (but useless, as will be seen soon) customer services. I got the response after 3 hours:

Hi Victor,

This is not so much an issue with our Subversion servers its more a feature of apache bassed systems.

I’m interested to understand why you think this is a security issue though.

Please let me know if you need any further assistance?

Cheers,[...]

Do I need to add any more comments? WTF? I explained the guy why I think that’s a big issue and he closed the thread without any extra comments.

The sad part is that a few hundred companies pick them, every week, for hosting projects (that’s what their website says)…

The video includes (quote from the press release):

• Fast launching of apps from a tile-based Start screen, which replaces the Windows Start menu with a customizable, scalable full-screen view of apps.
• Live tiles with notifications, showing always up-to-date information from your apps.
• Fluid, natural switching between running apps.
• Convenient ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen, so you can really multitask using the capabilities of Windows.
• Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.
• Fully touch-optimized browsing, with all the power of hardware-accelerated Internet Explorer 10.

I don’t think any more details are necessary. Just enjoy the video:

The read the press release.

1. Generate a report for today
2. Check if the date printed on the report is today's date

The question is: how can this test case fail?

The obvious answers may include:

• The report is not generated
• The date is in the wrong format
• The date filed contains an incorrect date

Let’s focus on the last situation. What does it mean if the date is incorrect? The answer is not always “there is a product bug that prints an incorrect date on the report”. It can also mean that there is a test issue… Below an example of execution (with timestamps) that triggers a test bug:

[23:59:46 May 1] 1. Generate a report for today
[00:00:04 May 2] 2. Check if the date printed on the report is today's date

The report was generated on May 1^st but the date check against “today”‘s date happened on May 2^nd. The test fails though the report is correct => test bug.

How do you mitigate this?

PS: That’s a test case that I wrote for one of the features in AX2012. It has been executed almost daily and it failed, for the first time, after 3 months.

“Well… That’s not a big issue. I use that PIN everyday and shouldn’t be hard to type the correct one on the second attempt”, I told to myself. The second attempt ended with another “Invalid PIN code”. So did the third and my card got blocked.

The PIN code just vanished from my head. I tried to recall it, I know that it must be somewhere there, but I can’t.There are a lot of numbers in my head, some are of other cards and some I don’t know what they are. I even unblocked my card, tried 3 more codes that I thought might work and got the card blocked again.

Why can’t I remember the code? Meanwhile I ordered a new PIN…

Basically, f.lux is a free, lightweight application that adjust the temperature the colors on the display in order to match the natural lighting conditions. While the sun is up on the sky, the screen displays normal colors. During sunset, a slow transition to night colors is made. After this, the colors are colder and, for example, white becomes brownish. It might sound strange but it really helps.

f.lux can br download it from the official website and it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. On the same page, is a research on sleep and more details about how f.lux helps.

TestClass is a class that has a property of type List<int>:

class TestClass
{
    public List<int> Value { get; set; }
}

Goal: create an instance of this class, set the property and print the second element in the list. Simple, huh? The code without reflection is:

TestClass c = new TestClass();
c.Value = new List<int>() { 4, 5, 6 };
Console.WriteLine(c.Value[1]);

Seems straight forward to use reflection for this, right? Here is my attempt:

//TestClass c = new TestClass();
object c = new TestClass();
//c.Value = new List<int>() { 4, 5, 6 };
Type t = c.GetType();
PropertyInfo prop = t.GetProperty("Value", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);
prop.SetValue(c, new List<int>() { 4, 5, 6 }, null);
//Console.WriteLine(c.Value[1]);
int valueToOutput = (int)prop.GetValue(c, new object[] { 1 });
Console.WriteLine(valueToOutput);

Can you see the glitch? I can tell you that line 10 throws TargetParameterCountException. You know why?

Looking at the IL disassembled code for the program without reflection gives the answer (I added some comments for clarity and removed unnecessary lines):

//TestClass c = new TestClass();
IL_0001:  newobj     instance void ConsoleApplication1.TestClass::.ctor()
//c.Value = new List<int>() { 4, 5, 6 };
IL_0008:  newobj     instance void class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>::.ctor()
IL_0010:  callvirt   instance void class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>::Add(!0)
IL_0018:  callvirt   instance void class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>::Add(!0)
IL_0020:  callvirt   instance void class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>::Add(!0)
IL_0027:  callvirt   instance void ConsoleApplication1.TestClass::set_Value(class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>)
//Console.WriteLine(c.Value[1]);
IL_002e:  callvirt   instance class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32> ConsoleApplication1.TestClass::get_Value()
IL_0034:  callvirt   instance !0 class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>::get_Item(int32)
IL_0039:  call       void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(int32)

Line 3 in the original program gets translated to a property get in order to obtain the List<nt> object and then, on that object, the get_Item method is called with the same arguments as the indexed property. This is where I was wrong, I was calling the property with the arguments that were supposed to be for method and, of course, not invoking the method. The correct approach is (changed lines are highlighted):

//TestClass c = new TestClass();
object c = new TestClass();
//c.Value = new List<int>() { 4, 5, 6 };
Type t = c.GetType();
PropertyInfo prop = t.GetProperty("Value", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);
prop.SetValue(c, new List<int>() { 4, 5, 6 }, null);
//Console.WriteLine(c.Value[1]);
object listObject = prop.GetValue(c, null);
MethodInfo mtd = listObject.GetType().GetMethod("get_Item", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);
int valueToOutput = (int)mtd.Invoke(listObject, new object[] { 1 });
Console.WriteLine(valueToOutput);

In the end, two observations:

1. A method can’t have a default indexer and a method get_Item with the same argument. The following code will not compile because the method is defined twice.

class TestClass
{
    public int this[int index]
    {
        get
        {
            return 0;
        }
    }
    public int get_Item(int index)
    {
        return 0;
    }
}

2. You can replace indices with calls to get_Item. This method is hidden by the Visual Studio Intellisense but it perfectly legal.

TestClass c = new TestClass();
c.Value = new List<int>() { 4, 5, 6 };
//Equivalent with Console.WriteLine(c.Value[1]);
Console.WriteLine(c.Value.get_Item(1));