ragged blog

Need to clean up my desktop, so dumping a bunch of links here, some of which I wanted to talk about, but it’s a waste of time at present, so here’s a ‘dump’ instead.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4797521.stm – This is a pathetic state of the world. These ‘Holy Wars’ are doing direct damage to the world. Now where you can interpret these religions however you like, and this may direct you to an interpretation of lack of respect for the lives of ‘Heathens’ or/and etc. None of these religions as far as I know condone the irresponsible destruction of the environment. This is simply fuel for my belief that these ‘Religious Wars’ or ‘Retribution Wars’ are being driven by unclear thought with certainly no genuine consideration on the surrounding environment, human, natural or otherwise, at any level of granularity. To ‘not care due to the height of emotion from historical events’ is simply hipocrytical given the outstandingly commonly stated paradigms against the rest of the world. Not to say the rest of the world is any better, but this point still stands.

http://digg.com/offbeat_news/eBay_Kid_Auctions_Off_2_of_His_Income_for_the_Rest_of_His_Working_Life – Whilst this guy had left an appallingly presented auction for himself, it got me thinking that the idea is not a bad one in general principle (I think his price points were a bit wrong too), mind you, that’s why so many large corporations offer sponsorship, whereby they actually stand a good chance of making the money back from their investment. One good point wrt this kid is that he shouldn’t really be searching for investors on eBay, and a truly driven individual should know where to look, successful results being another ballpark entirely.

http://www.csharp-architect.com/csa06082006.aspx – Why I’m not even going to bother considering obfuscation in my current developments, this was written by a good guy I’ve spoken to recently. The point is as it has always been, if content is to be delivered to the processing unit in plain form at some time, then it must be possible to make it plain using libraries that already exist. One can take the approach of doing something like “Assembly.GetCallingAssembly()” and/or “Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()” to aid in security, but all these things are slow and unreliable, furthermore the approach taken in this entry is by looking at the IL decompiled. If you recorded the decompilation, one could simply strip out such calls. Attempts to obfuscate the calls through invokers could also be done, but fundamentally you will end up in a fight between optimisation and obfuscation. There are several more important approaches to prevent actual ‘casual’ usage of your libraries:

• protect your bindings.
• scope your variables and functions properly, use internal where appropriate instead of public.
• package important code in ‘optimised’ executables, as these are not as easy to read.
• do not publish debugging information with your assemblies.

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/tracetool.asp?df=100&forumid=28124&exp=0&select=1589506 – Useful trace tool. Not good enough for a logged and stateful invoker based command prompt, but it will do. On a side note I still haven’t had time to create any nice binding logic for my invoker prompt. If anyones interested in helping create a top notch ‘live’ debugging environment for C# please give me a shout and I’ll help you get started on the design front and point you at some code and a few APIs to learn.

http://technobabylon.typepad.com/tb/2006/08/who_runs_micros.html – Interesting article, I think by the head of eEye although I’m uncertain, the point that’s interesting is the focus on Microsofts efforts to really make up ground in security, and the fact that they are now seen to generally be acting very sensibly. Hopefully this kind of understanding is going to slowly spread to the harrassing common-news reporters who get it all wrong simply because they don’t speak to the right people or understand. A perfect example are the reports pertaining to ’3rd party fixes’ when Microsoft delays a critical patch. The point is, people who do not understand this clearly don’t understand software engineering principles. Sure there are many ‘Just do it’ IT Projects which are very successfull, but I’d like to point out the obvious, but commonly missed fact; Windows is a VERY complex codebase with a significant number of race case conditions, the maintenance of which I wouldn’t wish on any programmer, although I understand it’s getting alot better nowadays with many refactors and now it’s version 5, it’s starting to be resemble a real mature product. (Please don’t mistake this for a gripe, writing good software from version 1 can be difficult for even simple products, Windows is not a simple product).

http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?topic=&subtopic=&subm1=GO&keyword=nebula – Lamper pointed me at the ESA Gallery, some lovely photos on here, aswell as some artists impressions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwZD59Ic9T8 - I’m not sure which university this is from, or even if it was at a university, but this is quite an interesting experiment involving extending animals senses using mechanical devices. The point of the study is that small neural networks (brains) don’t really know the difference, they think about the world in too abstract a way to know that they are not interacting with it directly.

http://www.breaksblog.biz/ – Lamper pointed me here too, a good site for tracking new DnB mixes and news.

http://www.beautifulagony.com/ - From the cesspit of b3ta i think, although it may also have come from DSI, eitherway, this was pretty random. It’s almost porn, but without the imagery, for the mind, or imagination, or I don’t know, empathy? That’s it, empathics porn. Lol. To be honest, it’s just amusing.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20060625/2222255.shtml - Christ I’m glad I’m not involved with any projects like this anymore, and certainly not on that scale, although some have been not far off, scary scary world.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5914999402901911766&q=genre%3Acomedy – So this guy can fly a chopper, although I wouldn’t sit in one as he does. Some very impressive RC chopper skills.

A quick quote as I don’t have an appropriate other place for it yet:

14:08 raggi: DB2: bind into the object to see it’s private members
14:08 * raggi feels dirty

I was on IRC asking for some help looking for a couple of bits in the .NET API which I knew must exist but are so drastically differently named than in many other languages. A conversation sprung up about binding into objects using the Reflection framework, and that sentence just popped out.

Desktop clean again.

Peace.