Bob Powell's External Monologue

I'll give anyone and everyone a fair hearing. I try to be even handed in most matters so, today, while driving home I decided to depart from my usual diet of science and news podcasts and listen to some Apple technology stuff instead. You see I have recently become motivated again to get my iPhone app and website finished so, after intalling visual Studo 2010 and setting too on the silverlight web site, I thought I would get up to speed on the apple side of things, as I seem to have a foot in both camps.
I listened to the unofficial apple weblog. Blimey what a mistake that was! Three idiots who couldn't even decide on what technology they should use to run their voice chat session. Apparently they were so useless that they couldn't even make Skype work for them and there were literally minutes of awkward silence and blabbering about how they sounded like chipmunks to one another. They also ranted on about the evils of Microsoft in their best scary evil empire tones.
Well, I'm sorry guys but even though I like my little Mac I have no possible intention of joining the one sided techno bigot society that so many Mac users seem to inhabit. Damn it people. Get a life! it's a computer. The most stupid chunk of logic going. They even use the same CPU now so the arguments over the merits of one instruction set over another are moot.

In the past, Microsoft have been almost too careful about licensing for beta versions of tools and frameworks, stating clearly that beta test versions should not be used for production code. The Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 however has a "Go Live" license which enables us to legally use the beta version of the system to develop line-of-business applications and even to get support for the beta version tools and frameworks.

As someone who is very concerned with code quality and application reliability in my daily job I see this move as a testament to Microsoft's testing and quality regime. In the past, the traditional view of Microsoft software has been to wait for the service pack or version 2.0 before adopting for front-line applications. However, with the emphasis that Microsoft and indeed other software providers place on testing and quality these days, we can be more confident that the first release of a product will be useable and indeed reliable.

I have used Visual Studio 2010 in both pre-beta and beta versions for a while now and I can say that the new features in Visual Studio show a marked emphasis on enabling the developer to understand their code and increase quality by systematic testing and reliability checking. I also know from sources within Microsoft that the Team System improvements, some features of which have been included as standard in Visual Studio 2010, are based on Microsoft's use of their own product; eating thier own dogfood. This gives me even more confidence in the tools. Rest assured that you too can be confident in the new reliability and usability of Visual Studio.

I guess I have been priveliged to have lived in the countries which claim to be the bastions of freedom and equality. I was born in England, lived in America and have adopted France as my home. I am also a technology freak who has WiFi networks at my house and children who enjoy music.

Recently in the news, there have been numerous stories, notably the new laws in France and now the Mandleson copycat crimes in the UK, in which big government has interceeded on behalf of the all-powerful music and film industry to both demonise and punish illegal downloaders by providing sweeping powers to "disconnect" repeat offenders who are caught downloading copyright material from the internet by revoking their right to an online account.

In the case of the laws in France and now it seems in the UK too, the burden of proof of guilt seems to have been removed and the only requirements to having ones internet rights revoked are to have been named in a complaint by a copyright holder. In some cases, the laws which have been proposed are so one-sided that even an unfounded accusation of guilt by a third party can be enough to cause this disconnnection.

While some may say that this is all very ethereal and not something which will affect a great majority of people and that the no-smoke-without-fire rule can happily apply to those no-good teenage hackers anyway, I see this as a very dangerous trend which serves to eat away even more at the right of someone to face their accuser and to require reasonable proof of a crime having been committed before arbitrary punishment is meted out. When this attitude is allowed even for what may seem to be the smallest crime, due process for all other matters is eroded and the foot of despotism placed firmly in the door of civilisation.

We have recently seen cases for exactly similar "crimes" which have wildly differing outcomes depending on the faces in the dock. In the case of Pirate Bay, the defense of being nothing more than a provider of links to materiel hosted elsewhere failed because the defendents were young, hip and openly defiant. In other cases, ISP's who have been accused of facillitating copyright theft have successfully defended their cases by claiming to be nothing more than "conduits of content" This clearly shows that the law for big business is different to the law for the common man.

More and more today, we are seeing the prase "human right" associated with The Internet. The european courts are currently considering whether online access is indeed a human right. One could argue that as access to legal materials in written form is a right of all accused who may wish to instruct their lawyers or to better defend themselves is considered as a human right in western civilisation, then access to the internet should fall into the same category.

I have a reasonably secure wireless network. I use a good secure twenty plus character passphrase scheme on my networks with WPA-enterprise 2 encryption, a firewall and MAC address permissions on my DHCP server so that passing hackers cannot piggy back on and steal my network bandwidth. I wonder however if this is enough to protect me.

Returning finally to my original point, which is that I have a wireless network and teenage children I face two immediate problems. The first is that my kids have already downloaded copyright materials even though I told them not to. They are however children who, had they committed some terrible crime, would be treated as minors, unable to be made responsible for their actions. The second is that even though I have done the best I can, restricting access at my router to filter out sites which host torrents or links to torrents, but with the plethora of file sharing methods available, I cannot be certain that an enterprising teenager or drive-by hacker cannot get the latest film or music bootleg online.

Where would this leave me in the case of being accused of having downloaded copyright materiel? I live my life on the internet. I work as a provider of software and need the information on the internet to do my daily work. If I lost my right to have a DSL account, I would lose my livelyhood as surely as if you were to cut off my hands and put out my eyes. Would this matter to a pencil pusher lawyer in a music or film company? I rather think not. They would be quite happy to infringe my human right to an income I'm sure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8305379.stm

Huh? I have EIGHT children!
Can you possibly be serious?

Using the new free Microsoft Security Essentials a trojan downloader that was not seen by AVG (which I pay for!) was caught and removed.

Swings and roundabouts?

As I grow older I become more and more suspicious of things that proclaim themselves to be "easy" One may say that this is just because I am older and therefore more mentally enfeebled than I may have been. However, the evidence has shown that things which try to be easy to use can become a downright pain in the butt when the algorithms used to make decisions are just plain stupid.

I have recently upgraded my PC in the manner to which so many of us are accustomed to a more recent, four core processor with a good amount of memory. Of course I used Windows 7 as the operating system and very good i is too, with nice graphics and sixty four bit goodness running all the little cores as it should. My old machine, which I have had for a few years now, has a couple of hard discs and a ton of data that I don't want to loose. So, what did I do? I thought "I'll use Windows Easy Transfer to get my data onto my new machine!"

This is where the whole "easy" premise fell flat. I bought a Belkin Easy Transfer cable for the princely sum of thirty eight euros and inserted the disk for the install. The installer told me that because my machine was running vista there was no need to install software and that the dongle on the Belkin cable held the plug 'n' play application. Ok, I plugged in the cable and the software immediately assumed that my old computer was my new computer and that I wanted to transfer too it. Wrong!

I started easy transfer on the new machine and it told me that i had to install the latest and greatest software on the old one. A process I had earlier been told was uneccesary - ho hum.

So, after copying the software, installing it on the old machine and starting the proccess I had to wait for about half an hour while the system decided what I should transfer. Ok, I want my account but not my wifes, the old admin or the guest account. Moreover, I want some documents but not settings for my ATI graphics card because the new machine has an NVidia card. All this means selecting from the several hundred tickable boxes and an hour or so of triage I get what I want reduced to a couple of hundreg gigabytes and... The blasted easy transfer client on my old machine crashes with a data execution exception. AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!!

So much for "easy"

Dear friend,
My name is Bob Powell, Until recently I was manager of a large goat farm in the southed part of England. Unfortunately the kind man who owned the farm and the eleven thousand goats of which I was so proud to look after on a daily basis has died of an overdose of cheeseburger and left me and my poor goats in a very poorly and destitute state.
I am writing to you in great confidence because I know you are a good person and you love goats as much as I do. My situation is delicate as you realise that goats are prized in England and the UK border is controlled very strictly to prevent our livestocks being whiffled out of the country by any old Toms Dicks and Harrys.
I am preparing to send all eleven thousand one hundred fifty nine good goats to a cruel goat farm in the hills of Iceland so you see all papers are done for export but my lovely goats will alls be roasted in some awful volcano powered Icelandic factory who has no more cods to render.
At great risk to myself I am prepared to sends these goats to you instead. Please dear friend. If you are a good lover of goats and can think of a use for these poor unfortunate beasts just send me your address and they are yours. To verify the exact address for uk customs please include your bank address, account number, sort code and any PIN codes that you may have in your possetion.
Yours truly, in faith and peace,
Mr Bob.

For many years now I have believed in the principle of "Publish and be damned" which I learned from my days in software engineering working with Stingray Software. I had never experienced having to write code that someone else would code review or criticise in any way. When I actually had a team of people to tell me what was wrong with the code I had slaved over in my darkened home-office, I grew both professionally and personally.

Code review nowadays can be automated. Systems such as FX Cop and Style Cop will mercilessly tear your code apart and dispassionately explain how much of an idiot you are several times a day, if your software factory is running correctly that is.

How much of this automated code review is really useful though? Microsoft cite the need for uniformity in the code. Because they have such a huge code generating body of workers, the way code is laid out needs to be standardised, homogenised and sanitised for reasons of continuity within teams. but honestly, the rules can seem to be arbitrary on the one hand and just plain stupid on the other.

Mobile work forces can mean many diverse styles, where each coder is conscientiously doing what they think is best and still generating a confusing mish-mash of coding styles for the poor sod who comes after. This is why MS have produced these Machiavellian code checkers.

Working, as I do, in a company that has a large body of legacy code in many different technologies, coupled with a developer workforce who are just ordinary programmers with few aspirations to being the next Don Box, I see a huge amount of code that can only be characterised as absolutely bloody horrible! Given such standard of quality and quality of coder, how can I, as an architect, hope to bring this code into line with even the minimum of compliance to what would be considered as acceptable for the crew in Building 42, Microsoft Way, Redmond?

My conclusion is that sadly, the people that "manage" said body of code have a vested interest in defending the stuff because many of them wrote it. Secondly, the will to change must be coupled with the acceptance that something needs fixing and so, if externally, your architecture doesn't seem to be teetering on the brink of the omni-flush toilet, then the budget is rarely available to re-write the stuff. Budgets are always available however to maintain the awful rubbish for as long as it functions even partially.

So. What's the conclusion you may ask yourself? Well, software is politics because its about egos. People believe that their solutions, however nasty are the right way and elegant and good. Politics is a human condition and someone has to point a finger somewhere.

On the other hand, computers are next to gods in our society. They are always right and they know everything worth knowing, or at least have access to it, so, I have come to the conclusion that if you want code that is readable or maintains the minimum standards, then you should get FX Cop and Style Cop tied securely into your TFS build process and spam everyone who checks in code with all 23,000 warnings a day.

This way, you can sit smugly by in the knowlege that the rules these programs apply are despotic, uneccesary and often idiotic but, when the manager who wrote said crap moans about the time it takes to add a simple function to the code you can put your hand on your heart and say; "Sorry, it's not me, it's the software factory rules. We can't check in till the warnings are fixed."