My public notebook is being hosted by Google, as they provide a really clean and easy to access interface for doing this kind of thing.
You’ll find stuff here, I’ve also added a redirect from http://ra66i.co.uk/notebook. Enjoy.
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | N Korea raises threat of new test
Too fucking right. I might not personally agree with building new nuclear weapons, however, this is garunteed to be the next ‘target’ of US internal-revenue laundering. They’re well within their rights as a country to say this and to take action. I can only hope that I will be able to escape the stupidity of politicians in western countries and come out of this war unharmed. I’m not willing to see my life being turned to shit over some arrogant politicians view of ‘a safe world’. If you’re not certain of your culture, or you are to represent many cultures (as with a western government) then you should have a more forgiving view of ‘a safe world’ and let other cultures or countries do as they please, providing it doesn’t directly impact on you. This is the attitude North Korea seem to give western countries, are we really too rude and arrogant to show the same respect?
Tags, on the left. Nice.
Oh and related links from post pages.
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:
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.
I’m being spammed again, so once again I’ve disabled comments on this blog.
Fair enough, I’m running an archaic version of Wordpress, but it has to be said, this kind of spam is not really very directed. The commonality and consistency of the content produced by these spamming applications is far from advanced or clever, and to be honest it is this side of the situation I find most upsetting. I know I could write some awesome blog spamming softwre, if I were so inclined, however I think my involvement in marketing is ALREADY too strong, and I certainly don’t want to increase it, especially in unsolicited form.
Anyway, as above, comments disabled for now, pending a wordpress upgrade, as always I’ll probably be neglecting the site anyway. Expect a change of address soon too (although don’t worry, I’ll add redirects for the relevant articles (the ones that people actually read)).
I was trying to talk to someone on MSN again the other day, and I used one of the emoticons I know by heart (there aren’t many). Now generally I have a strong hatred for these little technical blunders of communications technology, as you can see in my last article on the things: Goddamn Smileys! .
The damn things keep becoming necessary though:
[14:51] raggi: hehe, i’ve turned on emoticons for all your and my conversations
[14:51] raggi: finally found i can set it for individuals now \o/
[14:51] Megs: u hate emoticons from peeps then?
[14:51] raggi: no, i hate what emoticons do to text i paste in
[14:51] raggi: :)
[14:52] Megs: ah i see
[14:52] Megs: right. get cuppa tea
[14:52] Megs: and get cracking
[14:52] raggi: like, here’s a quick bit of java: public static void main(string[] args);
[14:52] raggi: oh, that one worked
[14:52] Megs: LMAO
-lol
I’ve been running without smileys for nearly a year - maybe even nearly two years, it’s hard to remember. Essentially I removed smiley support from my chosen IM application due to the intense damage that these things would do to source-code sent over IM apps. Now it is of course considered practical to use files / scratch-pads / cvs servers etc in team code management. In general small groups rarely provide themselves with access to such tools, and the result is simple code maintenance and refactoring over IM. No real problem, to all intensive purposes the development cycle is quicker that way - provided we don’t need a full parser for the insane crap that comes out of some Unicode IM apps when they get lamped with some emoticon parenthesis.
Today I found that my current IM app now has the option to turn them on or off selectively for each user on my over 150 strong list of MSN contacts, not to mention AOL/ICQ/Yahoo/Jabber/IRC. Life is looking up even more for this little app, longevity is something which it seems to be displaying on my desktop. Finally now, we have a return to some kind of practical normality. Whilst I would ideally like a system which makes a judgement about whether or not a smiley should be escaped (surely you can I’d English over code pretty easily, hell I don’t use []{}”"() in my speech that regularly, not to mention this;) >- n.b. this would have broken! Or even more ideally, for the choice of parenthesis to be changed to say ` and ~ which are very unlikely to be used in way that could be mistaken for parenthesis. Hell, anyone with 1/4 of a degree could tell you that this is a design time issue and there are some far more graceful ways of encoding these extensions.
Smileys piss me off.
Yes, thats profanity, and justified in my opinion. Smileys are an awful idea.
No, I’m not talking about the ASCII art derivatives like :-) and it’s various facial expressions; I am talking about (1),(2),(3)…(6)….(a)….(z)…(@)…
Whats the problem with them? Well the problem is several things, and whats worst is that no one seems to put a morsel of brain power into fixing the monstrosity.
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This was written some time ago in a plain text document, so it’s not well formatted, but I will come back to it and clean it up one day. Please enjoy it though.
I am fully aware that there are things that are not encountered for in this article, however I should remind you of the significance of Orders of Magnitude.