The Ever-Expanding Gas!

End of Another Year

2011-12-27T22:04:00.000-05:00

Another year bites it! As you can tell from the sidebar, there wasn't much to say this year; it's been busy at work.

We took out the DLink stuff; their URL finally stopped giving, so it's back to plain old undecorated URLs now.

The new Blogger interface is very nice! It's about time they did something to it.

Happy New Year! Give 'em hell in 2012!

Righthaven More Like DumbF*** Haven

2011-09-28T13:34:00.003-04:00

Righthaven's Losing Streak Continues in Colorado

How stupid can they be, not obtaining anything other than a "bare right to sue"? It doesn't take much reading of the US Copyright Act to figure out that is an idiot's course!

Let me sum it up for you, idiots: If you don't own it, you can sue on it!

Oracle is the New "Central Scrutinizer"

2011-05-31T07:57:00.004-04:00

One of my favorite Albums!

And this is his opening speech:

Central Scrutinizer: This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER...it is my responsibility to enforce all the laws that haven't been passed yet. It is also my responsibility to alert each and every one of you to the potential consequences of various ordinary everyday activities you might be performing which could eventually lead to *The Death Penalty* (or affect your parents' credit rating). Our criminal institutions are full of little creeps like you who do wrong things...and many of them were driven to these crimes by a horrible force called MUSIC! Our studies have shown that this horrible force is so dangerous to society at large that laws are being drawn up at this very moment to stop it forever! Cruel and inhuman punishments are being carefully described in tiny paragraphs so they won't conflict with the Constitution (which, itself, is being modified in order to accommodate THE FUTURE). ...snip...

Ok now read this and come back.

Just take all that, and substitute "Oracle" for "The Government".

Good-bye, JCP, it was nice knowing you....

Obama bin Laden

2011-05-05T06:41:00.004-04:00

Ok, so they aren't releasing any photos of Dead bin Laden, because Obama is still using it for his Screen Saver! How fucking sweet is that!?

Call It A Crap/Wrap!

2010-12-29T12:17:00.004-05:00

Well, another year has come-and-gone! It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....

What can we look forward to for next year? More DMCA Copyright Bullshit and IP Trollery, to be sure. More assaults on Fair Use by uptight douchebags who can't stand to see one word of their precious "content" uttered outside their absolute control.

Will it be a Happy New Year for Free Speech? Stay tuned in 2011!

LVRJ Sucks, EFF Rocks!

2010-12-14T13:52:00.004-05:00

Democratic Underground Responds to Righthaven Copyright Troll Lawsuit

Have a read on that!

Here is some Free Speech for you (that is, if opinion is still protected speech): Righthaven, You Suck! Las Vegas Review-Journal, You Suck Too! Stephens Media, LLC, Suck The Big One! You Suck So Bad, I'm not even linking to you! Maybe you will scan this blog and try to sue, based on 0% excerpt from your crappy publication. Hell, you sue based on 10%, why not "up" the ante?

But wait, what would you negotiate the copyright to? Oh wait, I mentioned the publication's title....

Here is some more Free Speech: EFF, You Rock! Kick the Shit out of the Copyright Trolls!

Fun With Google Translate

2010-12-01T17:09:00.003-05:00

When on the road, my favorite channel to watch is Univision.

I do not speak Spanish. However, that is not a barrier to enjoying another culture.

It's all the Hot Latinas, isn't it?

Well, it helps keep my attention....

Anyway, it just got more interesting, with the help of Our Newest, Bestest Buddy, Google Translate.

Wondering what the title of that show is? No Problem! What does that caption say? Punch It Right In!!

The best part is that you know they all speak English, because every-so-often, they slip in a word; while everything else is flowing with the perfect native accent, words like "Twitter" come out just as effortless, without any native accent. I daresay, with Midwestern American accent.

¡Hasta más tarde!

Protect Your Code From "Joey"

2010-10-29T06:38:00.006-04:00

We all know This Guy: his code is of the lowest quality. He's never really "done-done" until about the third "Done", and even then, you're all just crossing your fingers....

Is this really just a PSA for Input Sanitizing?

Why yes, Yes It Is.

Protect your code from this fucker! You know he's going to call it with all sorts of invalid parameters, because, well, His Code Sucks.

Check all parameters. Make sure the error messages that go into the exceptions explain it to Joey clearly enough that he can get it.

Don't be cryptic!

If a parameter can't be null, Say So! Use its name in the message! If the string is too short, Say So, don't leave an IndexOutOfBoundsException time-bomb just because you're lazy and it will only be called by such-and-such or everyone knows to pass zot for the blah parameter.

Joey will! You will get all sorts thrown at your code.

On the converse, when you are calling Joey's code, Be Vewy Vewy Careful....

Don't expect null-checking, or any kind of checking, because quite frankly, Joey doesn't have time or inclination for that kind of stuff; it just gets in the way of the Real Work, or he's Just Ignorant.

Either way, your strategy remains the same. Don't expect his code to tell what's wrong. Be prepared to spend tons of time in the debugger hunting down copious amounts of NullReferenceException. What Fun! Just what I want to be doing: spending most of my time in someone else's code!

But what about Tests!?

Oh, Joey either doesn't write tests, or writes completely deficient tests, e.g. only testing "success" cases and not testing any failure modes, since you know, his code doesn't throw any exceptions on purpose!

What A Fuck-Job!

Huh-huh, yeah....

PS: No Offense Personally to anyone named "Joey", unless, you know....

Backwater

2010-10-26T07:03:00.004-04:00

This blog is a total backwater, not to be confused with Backwater.

The "Stats" are abysmal:

Blogged.com followers: 4
Blogger.com followers: 2
Diggs: 0
Comments: 0
Motivation: 0

Yet the posting must continue....keep....typing....must....rant....

Epic Win, Epic Fail

2010-10-14T06:53:00.003-04:00

Epic Win: Android. Who cares how much Oracle sues them!

Epic Fail: JavaM-what? Oh yes, E. No wonder Oracle is pissed....

PTO Also Filled With Dumb-Fucks!

2010-08-18T13:26:00.006-04:00

Now that Oracle has "taken off the gloves", we can all have another good laugh at what the US Patent and Trademark Office thinks are "new and novel" uses worthy of patent protection.

You can find a version of the complaint here.

Anyone with even a rudimentary education in Computer Science can see that these "patents" are really not specific-enough to be granted. Based on this, anyone who "gets there first" can patent such industry-stopping concepts as: data compression, use of fork() to make copy a process, etc. I'm no genius, but isn't that what fork() was designed to do?

Good thing no one thought to patent these gems:

Method and System for Logarithmically Partitioning and Ordering Data aka Quick Sort or Heap Sort,
Method and System for Constant-time Data Storage and Access aka Hash Table.

Ninth Circuit Court Bench Seats Dumb-Fucks

2010-07-15T13:20:00.006-04:00

Boy are they in the pockets of Big-Business. Everyone on the bench must have gotten a watch!

We are talking about the case of Costco Wholesale Corp. v Omega, S.A., where the watch manufacturer is basically pissed off that the wholesale retailer found a way to get the watches cheaper, by buying them overseas and bringing them into the US to sell.

The recourse? Simply throw away the First Sale Doctrine of our Copyright Law! Their loophole? The fact that the watches bear a copyrighted logo (the Omega logo) on them! Apparently they believe that transforms the entire watch into Copyrighted Work!

The gist of the Ninth Circuit's ruling: if it was made abroad, no First Sale, until it gets sold within the United States! This entitles the "copyright holder" to very strict control over (re)sale of the copyrighted "work". Remember, the watch is not copyrighted, only the logo appearing on it!

Now apply this contorted bullshit ruling to everything (copyrighted) with a secondary market: books, movies, video games, etc. All things we rent/borrow on a constant basis.

If this ruling stands, you can expect all that to dry up, as merchants will be loathe to touch anything that cannot be proven to originate here, or have been initially sold within our borders.

If this ruling stands, you can expect to see even more jobs sail overseas, as manufacturers arbitrarily add "copyrighted works" to packaging or labeling, and have them made abroad.

My Phone VR'ed "Shit"

2010-07-14T13:20:00.006-04:00

I was doing some GTalk, and taking advantage of the Voice Recognition input feature of Android, when I incidentally uttered and shit at the end.

Imagine my satisfaction to see it properly transcribed!

I felt like I was in an episode of Beavis and Butthead:

Beavis: Heh, Heh, your phone said "shit"!

Butthead: *grunt* Yeah, cool....

Note: you must explicitly enable this in the Settings.

All Yr iPhone R Belong 2 Us!

2010-04-22T08:40:00.003-04:00

I just love that line...

Just one more reason to love Android!

Android Handsets Sabotaged by Apple Fanboys

2010-03-22T14:07:00.003-04:00

From CNET that bastion of informed journalism:

I'm officially spreading The Rumour that Apple has somehow made this happen, via their network of mindless fanboys willing to do the evil bidding of One S. Jobs (not the Fake One).

I have no proof, that's why it's a rumour. Don't bother with lawyers, I am admitting right here, this story is total bullshit.

So this is a pure SEO-juju ploy?

Why yes, yes it is....

How many "other" places can we point The Finger:

Android
HTC
SD Card provider
Vodafone
Windows

Of course, let's not forget to chastise the dumb-fuck(s) that had their AutoRun turned on, making this even possible.

Blame it on Windows? Blame it on stupid idiotic fucks!

How did these SD cards even get into someone's insecurely configured Windows Workstation, before being installed into the phones? Why didn't they go directly from shrink-wrap to cellphone?

QA stands for Quality Assurance, not Quality Assination!

This link is for you....

Dude I Just Pwned Your this...

2010-02-22T07:37:00.005-05:00

... with a really nifty finalizer attack!

Sweet Creamy Goodness!

I've been reading on this set of pages and wahoo!

If you are coming into contact with threading, and more-often than not, that's the case, you better become really really educated about stuff like defensive copying, TOCTOU, and other delicious topics that if ignored, you eventually end up with data races or even deadlock.

There's still a ton to learn, and the topics are only going to get more-advanced.

Always prefer designs that only share immutable state, if that's even necessary. Using Futures facilitates this, because the input to it can be immutable, and creation of the result is totally private to the future, and "returned" in a controlled way to the caller. The only synchronization point is on obtaining the result.

More From "Are You Effin' Kidding Me!?"

2010-01-22T13:29:00.003-05:00

Military Software Sucks

Just add it to the pile of incompetence.

Are You Effin Kidding Me!!? btw happynewyear...

2010-01-18T07:23:00.004-05:00

Oh My Fucking Deity!!!!!!

Watching the Border: The Virtual Fence - 60 Minutes - CBS News

Since this is a blog, I'll wait for you to get back....

Now, repeat it with me:

Are You Fucking Kidding Me!!!?

Here is the paragraph that really got me ranting (emphasis mine):

But the biggest problem - and you may find this hard to fathom - was that no one at the Department of Homeland Security or the engineers at Boeing bothered to ask the people who would actually be using the surveillance system what they wanted or how they wanted the system to work.

Jesus Christ, is this still the 1970s?

Of course, there's lots to be disappointed about regarding Virtual Fence, after reading the article. Boeing played that one pretty fucking stupid, but sucked in the cash nonetheless. Maybe not so stupid....

Short

2009-12-21T13:40:00.003-05:00

I am looking at the total posts for 2009 and finding myself behind, compared to last year. I really expected to meet-or-exceed last-year's count.

Let's blame it on Employment and Other Outside Forces cutting into quality blogging time.

Here are some other Real Life Adventures that stole time and/or money (All True) in relative order:

Crashed replacement car on the day-of-purchase (it was a nasty blizzard).
Severe weather felled huge tree, which crushed part of the house (it was an even-nastier thunderstorm).
Lost 6% of base pay due to Our Glorious Economy (thanks sub-prime assfucks)!
Coffeemaker failed (cheap and inconvenient; thanks Mr. Crappy).
Refrigerator failed (not cheap and more inconvenient).
The Cat died (he was 18).
The Sump Pump failed (again).
Hard drive on my main development workstation failed (thank you Ghost).
Upstairs toilet failed (soooo not cheap, see next item).
Water damage due to failed toilet.

That covers the highlights and lowlights for 2009.

It won't be missed....

Tales From the Lambda

2009-11-16T07:45:00.007-05:00

Head spinning, eyes rolling into back of the head...

Neo: Whoa! I know Script-fu....

Morpheus (played by GIMP): Show me....

Operator: I think he likes it....

Well, not quite as good as the scene from the movie, but that was exactly what I was thinking, when I realized I needed to script some image exporting.

I've been assimilating GIMP for a while, and I knew that Script-Fu was the scripting language, but I didn't know, until I looked, is that Script-Fu is Scheme!

Well how ironically wonderful!

Yes! I have been embracing the FP mojo more-and-more, and what better dialect than one of the original FP dinosaurs!?

Looking around for examples (they are plentiful) was quite an education, mostly in how not to do it. No Offense to anyone personally, but if you are using begin and while and set! all over the place, that is just fighting the language! Leave that shoehorn-procedural-crap-into-FP nonsense where it belongs!

I was ready. I know how to use for-each and lambda and let*, and that's pretty much all anyone needs to get-R-done, and I did-do.

But not without some scars er, learning. Here are my main take-aways from the whole thing.

It's all about lists. You are either building a list to traverse later, or traversing a list you built earlier.
I hate S-expressions!
Scheme is powerful, if you embrace it!
I wanted to use commas, but it wouldn't let me. It produces wonderfully vague syntax error messages instead.
Closures (lambda plus let*) make Scheme powerful.
Error messages in GIMP are way vague. Does that suck, or should we just be grateful we get any kind of message? How 1970s!
Debugging in GIMP is way painful! Can you say printf? Again, how 1970s!
Did I mention: I hate S-expressions! Simple tasks like arithmetic become a prefix adventure in parentheses!
It kicks ass anyway!

Functional argv

2009-11-02T11:05:00.006-05:00

I've been mostly chatter lately, so I figure it's time to poot forth some code!

I've been increasingly trying to incorporate Functional Programming into my everyday coding, and with .NET Framework that means anonymous delegates.

My current project produced a command-line tool as part of the infrastructure. As usual, command-line tools require command-line arguments with the associated parsing. How many times does that get re-written? Pretty much every time.

I've coded this task many times before. I wanted something simple, but reusable. My disadvantage from previous implementations was lack of closures to bridge the scopes between my tool's option parsing, and the argument-traversal algorithm.

Here is what I ended up with:

static void processArgs(
  string[] args,
  Converter<String, int> argcount,
  Action<String[]> argproc
)
{
  int ix = 0;
  while (ix < args.Length) {
    String argx = args[ix];
    ix++;
    if (argx.StartsWith("-")) {
      int ac = argcount(argx);
      List<String> collect = new List<String>();
      collect.Add(argx);
      while (ac > 0 && ix < args.Length) {
        collect.Add(args[ix]);
        ix++;
        ac--;
      }
      argproc(collect.ToArray());
    }
  }
}

So argcount takes a string (starting with -) and returns how many additional "arguments" should follow it, for stuff like -dir directory.

The argproc takes the collected items and processes them.

Let's take a look at the call-site to get a better picture:

bool wait = false;
String outputf = null;
String template = null;
List comppath = new List();
processArgs(args,
  (parg) => {
    if (String.Equals(parg, "-dir", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) ||
      String.Equals(parg, "-out", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) ||
      String.Equals(parg, "-template", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)) {
      return 1;
    }
    return 0;
  },
  (pargs) => {
    if (String.Equals(pargs[0], "-dir", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)) {
      if (pargs.Length < 2)
        throw new NotSupportedException(pargs[0] + ": missing argument");
      comppath.Add(pargs[1]);
    }
    else if (String.Equals(pargs[0], "-out", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)) {
      if (pargs.Length < 2)
        throw new NotSupportedException(pargs[0] + ": missing argument");
      outputf = pargs[1];
    }
    else if (String.Equals(pargs[0], "-template", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)) {
      if (pargs.Length < 2)
        throw new NotSupportedException(pargs[0] + ": missing argument");
      template = pargs[1];
    }
    else if (String.Equals(pargs[0], "-defdir", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)) {
      comppath.Add(Settings.Default.ComponentsPath);
    }
    else if (String.Equals(pargs[0], "-wait", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)) {
      wait = true;
    }
    else {
      throw new NotSupportedException("Unrecognized option: " + pargs[0]);
    }
  }
);

Without mixing of contexts or storing the results of all the processing, it becomes easy to tweak the command-line option handling from the point in the source code that makes the most sense.

Now if you're not down with if/else chains, you could refactor (hint: use Dictionarys), but the good news is, that doesn't affect the core algorithm, only your call-site.

qed.

(Don't Go Back To) Zzzzzzzsville

2009-10-21T10:46:00.004-04:00

Not much interesting going on, hence nothing bloggable.

Until now.

I love it when an author is so pissed off they don't hold anything back. Imagine my surprise to find this gem:

The HTML5 drag and drop disaster

Due to my high number of blogs followed, I regularly keep updated on the saga that is HTML5. But I won't digress here; there are plenty of authors for that.

When you see fuck in the headings, now it's got to be good....

Go have a read, and share the pain! That will be us soon enough.

Get Yer 9ers Together

2009-09-01T07:11:00.004-04:00

With the approachment of September 9, 2009, this would be a good time to post something remotely relevant.

As you know, this date translates into 09.09.09 or if you like, 09/09/09. Since it's symmetric, we en-USers cannot fuck it up for the rest of you!

Anyway, the story revolves around the English word "nine" (9) and the German word "nein" (no), which are obviously homophones.

We were using "nein" a bunch, and confusing people, since they couldn't figure out why were were nine-ing, when we were actually nein-ing! We even found ourselves 9-ball ("nein" ball) key chains, What Luck!!

To add to the fun, I constructed a command line application that checked for unread mail, and played the indicated audio file if there was any. I had this on a scheduled task, at the bottom of the hour, mostly because I hated having Outlook running all-the-time (this was the 1990s).

I didn't have a microphone, but my lab-mate "Al" did, and he recorded one of our favorite phrases at-the-time:

Nein! Nein! Nein!

That was the punchline, wasn't it....

Huh-huh, yea...

The Final Countdown

2009-08-20T14:26:00.004-04:00

Here are a couple links to read-up on:

Some interesting points all around, but I was very concerned with the condescending dismissal of using the final keyword, especially on local variables, making lame arguments about readability and clutter. If you want to talk about some actual clutter problems, start using more anonymous inner classes in functional style; now that is clutter.

Well, their (bloated) opinions (of themselves) are incorrect (after all this is a rant and My Opinion), because final is telling you important things about your code, namely that you believe in immutability, and don't just pay lip service to it. Just because Cedric

can't even remember last time I was bitten by a bug involving the reassignment of a variable to a different value within a code block.

doesn't mean Dick to us, but I'm sure it's good for his Ego! I guess we should all be so effin perfect as that, and final is the dirty little secret to take us there!

Thankfully, the comments sections bear this out, as I was delighted to see others extolling the virtues of final for the same reasons I endorse:

Method parameters and previously-assigned local variables are not scratch-buffers to play reuse/optimization games with.
Your code/dataflow are moving forward (literally down-the-page) and there's no need to look back and see if anything is getting re-used, or determining whether variables "magically" change meaning 10 lines into the method.
The perceived noise claim is actually a Grail-shaped Beacon illuminating the locked-down nature of the data, which means visual scanning is rapid. If I see final I don't bother reading the rest of the line, because I know it's an immutable assignment guaranteed by the compiler.
The converse of this is that missing final is now a Bad Code Smell, and warrants closer examination.

The only part where it weighs down for me, is the conditional assignment initialization scenario, where you start down the jumping through hoops path to maintain finality:


final Blah theThing =
  big-fat-conditional ?
  value1 :
  value2;

Depending on how hard you feel like working, and the complexity of the three terms, and any number of other (emotional) factors, you may punt on this scenario at some threshold; I've been there. Eventually the urge to rectify things takes over, typically after stopping at the code enough times triggered by the non-final "Smell".

Pledge Drive II

2009-08-13T09:46:00.004-04:00

It's that time again! We are asking for Your Support as a TEEG Follower!

The last Pledge Drive was 9 Months ago, and it basically blew. So, rather than torment you like the Public Radio Stations do, I will simply link to the previous Pledge Drive.

Now, wasn't that painless? See, it's already over!