In 2012, my goal was to read 1 book/quarter. I am happy to say that I managed to read three times as much.

I was taken on a fantastic journey of mysteries and discoveries through the streets of London by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. After that, my mind has ventured through Wonderland with the help of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. With today’s knowledge, it is easy to imagine what would be required to go to the center of the Earth. But, can you believe that Jules Verne imagined that with the knowledge of 1864? Just like most of his books, A Journey to the Center of the Earth is one fascinating reading. From the center of the Earth I went back back in 1943 to the story of a Norwegian hunted by Nazi troops. David Howarth and Stephen E. Ambrose describe the incredible story about survivorship and human spirit in We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance. Finally, I was taken closer to the present day and financial topics by David Lender’s Bull Street which is a pretty good mixture of reality and fiction about the life on Wall Street.

People can do amazing things. Warren Buffet built his fortune from scratch and enjoys life in his own particular way; the way Alice Schroder narrates Mr. Buffet’s biography is capturing, amusing and inspiring; The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life is a must read in my opinion. Creating a Fortune 500 company is a goal that only few manage to meet, creating two Fortune 500 companies might sound impossible, however Eli Broad was the first to do it. In The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking Eli Broad describes his unusual way of dealing with every situation and explains his life decisions.

I tried to expand my financial knowledge throughout the year. It is interesting to see that most personal finance books share the same ideas in a different form. Everything resumes to a few simple (obvious?) principles: (1) spend less than you make, (2) delay gratification, (3) think twice cut once, (4) do your homework before any commitment, (5) don’t act on impulse. On the topic I read Get A Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties by Beth Kobliner, I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand by Judith Orloff and Darell Mullis. The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley is an interesting reading about what he calls the real millionaires in the US and about their habits. However, after reading Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and Markets, I started to ask myself how much of the results in the previous financial books are biased. I closed the 2012 financial topic with Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor.

What am I reading now? (1) One Up On Wall Street : How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild and (2) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.

* I wrote this post from a Surface RT device and I encountered no issues.

There are a few reasons behind this decision: (1) Windows 8 is out and it does not have support for gadgets. (2) Skype4COM, the library that allowed SkypeGadget to talk to Skype, is no longer supported and from what I’ve heard, it does not work with the latest version of Skype. (3) Gadgets are an old technology; the new era of live tiles is here.

Before I end, I give you the SkypeGadget memorabilia:

• SkypeGadget’s first name was SkypeConversation.
• It started as a contest entry. The first prize was an HTC Touch. SkypeGadget got on 6th.
• October 27, 2007 is the date of the oldest SkypeConversation version that I have (see the screenshot). I started developing it 1-2 weeks before that date.
• In July 2009, it reached 100.000 downloads on Gallery Live.
• Last time I checked the Gallery Live website, before Microsoft discontinued it, there were more than 300.000 downloads.
• On top of the numbers above, there are about 40.000 downloads from this website. I think the total number of downloads, from all places, is close to 350.000.
• The SkypeGadget page on this website has 95.000 views.
• SkypeGadget has less than 500 lines of code, including CSS and HTML.
• Believe it or not, people donated REAL money. Four people donated a total of $13 (2x$5, 1x$2, 1x$1).
• SkypeGadget was and will remain free and open-source.
• SkypeGadget was the first ever gadget that allowed interaction with Skype. There were at least 3 other gadgets that copied my code.
• There are people who use outdated versions of Skype just to run SkypeGadget (Thanks guys!).

You can still download SkypeGadget, I’ll keep the page up and running.

abstract class BaseClass
{
    protected abstract void AMethod(BaseClass arg);
}
class Derived : BaseClass
{
    protected override void AMethod(BaseClass arg)
    {
        arg.AMethod();
    }
}

The compiler will issue the following error:

Cannot access protected member ‘ConsoleApplication1.BaseClass.AMethod(ConsoleApplication1.BaseClass)’ via a qualifier of type ‘ConsoleApplication1.BaseClass’; the qualifier must be of type ‘ConsoleApplication1.Derived’ (or derived from it)

It might not be obvious why this isn’t allowed. From the definition of the protected keyword in C#:

The protected keyword is a member access modifier. A protected member is accessible within its class and by derived class instances.

This means that class Derived is allowed to call only protected methods defined inside it or in one of its base classes. But wait? Isn’t that what it is trying to do – access a protected method in one of its base classes? Yes, that’s right. However, that method is abstract, which means that any class deriving from BaseClass can provide its own implementation. Look at the following snippet:

abstract class BaseClass
{
    protected abstract void AMethod(BaseClass arg);
}
class Derived : BaseClass
{
    protected override void AMethod(BaseClass arg)
    {
        arg.AMethod();
    }
}
class Derived2: BaseClass
{
    protected override void AMethod(BaseClass arg)
    {
    }
}

If the call would be allowed, one might pass an instance of Derived2 as argument to AMethod in Derived, thus allowing Derived to call protected methods in Derived2. This would violate the definition of the protected keyword because Derived is not derived from Derived2.

Note: The compiler triggers the error only when the method in the base class is abstract or virtual.

Stay tuned for the next technical post on Wednesday (Sept. 9, 2012) morning. Until then, here’s a picture taken from the 73rd floor of the tallest building in Seattle:

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.