A window on the Drake equation

Frank Drake's famous equation for the number of detectable civilizations is based on one seriously flawed idea. That a civilization wants to be detected.

This is not a given and there may be all sorts of reasons for this. A planet populated by a prey species may have a serious problem with advertizing their presence, for example.
Thre may also be another factor, that of the digital revolution. We have discovered that analogue signal transmission is horribly wasteful of overcrowded electromagnetic radiation bandwidth. As a result, we have moved relatively swiftly towards low power, digital transmissions. Our massive radio and television transmission arials are becoming rarer as we switch to digital signals. The off planet transmission of high power signals are slowly being phased out, not because we want to hide but because analogue signals are too expensive to transmit and totally unneccessary.
In this case, the case of Earth, the high power transmission phase will last for about a hundred years. We began pumping the airwaves full of high power signals in the 1930's and it will have stopped well before 2030. Other civilizations may have made the digital leap earlier on and so will not need a high power analogue transmission phase.
This means that civilizations which have surpassed the analogue transmission phase that bleeds vast amounts of signal into space, will have to take a positive decision to transmit something visible over great distance.
Ten thousand detectable civilizations may be reduced to a half dozen who are stupid enough to advertise their positions through the use of low frequency, high power analogue signals.

Utterly brilliant use of phone data (and a little scary)

Not often that I do nothing but post a link but here goes...

http://senseable.mit.edu/network/network&society2.html

Metadataattribute???

The person who came up with this idea obviously hadn't had his or her coffee that morning.

The death of the post-script

One has to laugh these days at people who still insist on using the post script form in electronic communication.
When you read over letters of old, usually penned in ink with a pen dipped in an inkwell, it is easy to understand the value of being able to add a thought to the end of a laboriously constructed letter without redoing the whole thing again. Today however, the P.S form should be dead and gone because it's nothing more than an admission that the author was too lazy to use the arrow keys and put the completed tought into the context of the unfinished ones above.
Often in a movie, you will see the "deleted scenes" but no one would be idiot enough to run all the credits, sign off with the producers logo and then come back with "oh bye the way, here are two scenes that we thought would clarify scene 27 and 31a"

Breaking out of an iframe.

On CiteYa I wanted to provide a link from the rating wiget to the main site so that people could go see what it was all about.

I tried the usual javascript parent.document.location.href setting but that caused an error because the contents of the iframe doesn't have the rights to access the stuff int he parent page.

In the end I found that top.location.href worked a treat.

CiteYa

I am an avid science junkie and I read loads of scientific posts, papers and books that use citations as a way to validate the paper. If a work cites another then it is an acknowledgement of the original work by the author of the new work.

We live in a world where trust cannot be taken for granted. Trust must be earned and the best way to earn it is to have other people say how good your work is. When we use a hyperlink however, that trust is implied. I will go to your site and see what you have to say.

This is the moment when the popup box tells you that your computer is infected with a Trojan virus and, oh, we can scan your computer for you. It's free.....

Wouldn't it be nice to have a measure of trust for a hyperlink? One measure of course would simply be to know how many people link to that page. If loads of people have created a link, then we can assume that the content is good and follow the link.

Google of course do this. They use billions of watts of power to crawl the web, searching for links and noting where each and every one goes. This is proprietary information though and using it comes at a price. We either pay for advertising or we pay by giving away information about ourselves when we use Google.

I awoke at 2:30 in the morning, a couple of weeks ago, and thought that it would be great to have a system that gave you a measure of trust in a page before you click the link. My solution is CiteYa.com

CiteYa enables you to create a link that tells you how many others link to that same page. It can also tell you how users rate the site before you go there. It works with some simple ASP.Net and javascript and is in need of users.

The site is simple, free, easy to use and does nothing but enable you to build trust for your pages. Try it out...

http://www.citeya.com/

Cross domain scripting is a pain

I'm working on a project that has both inspired me to learn new stuff and frustrated me immensely.

The system is akin to a page rating database which enables users to give an opinion on the quality of a page. The wiget is delivered as an iframe and uses a little bit of javascript to perform the mouseover and click detection. The wiget is then supposed to send the data back to the server where the database can be updated. All this runs a treat on the local server when debugging but as soon as the code gets a sniff of the live server, the iframe has no access to the parent page so the rating of the iframe source gets updated, not the page that contains it.

Another problem which I had was to deliver a popup containing the rating information, this was messed up again by the fact that my script was unable to access the web service from which the data was to be delivered. Access denied to the XmlHttp object.

I have solved part of the problem by delivering the popup information as an image, The way to deliver user ratings back from the inside of an iframe however still escapes me.

Any suggestions?

If a job's worth doing...

Years ago, there used to be a saying; "If a job's worth doing it's worth doing well"

A tradesman was judged and employed according to his skill and quality of work. Today however, in the disposable "made in China" world in which we live, quantity at low cost has become the norm and quality that you enjoy because you pay well for a job well done, is a thing of the past.

As I go through my working day I hear the phrase "quick win" more and more. Unfortunately, the idea of a quick win is more about "how can we make it look like we didn't screw up" than it is about improving the code.

Computer programming is not a craft, like blacksmithing is a craft. Programming is an art, like painting or like musical composition. A program must be carefully designed to be pleasing to the user and to use the resources, the C.P.U, memory and network bandwidth in a sympathetic manner.

If you attack the artist's canvas with a paint roller and a hammer you are unlikely to end up with a work of art. If you start the project with an eye to composition and attention to detail and aesthetics you are more likely to have a work of art that has no need of a "quick win"

Fixed the supportsearch page

Conversion to ASPX wasn't a good idea for some pages. My support search page which some of my users kindly use for their google searches was busted.

Its now fixted.

Mac crashes more.

Well, after all these years of listening to Mac users tell me I was an idiot for even thinking of buying or learning to prograam a PC I can say with my hand on my heart that the Mac crashes more than the PC.

I bought a Mac Mini about 18 months ago and, I admit, I like it. It is however not easier to use than the PC, In fact I find it downright pig headed but that may be just because I am so used to Windows. I can say however that the software is uneccesarily expensive, the range of stuff available for it is poor and it certainly crashes more than all of my Windows PC's put together.

Worst of all the thing keeps locking up in Apple software, not even third party apps. It is sat here now next to my PC with its lovely little rainbow cursor running and a totally unresponsive iTunes running.

I don't even know if there is a process killer or if I have to reboot...

Conversations with a doctor

Imagine this situation: A woman goes to her doctor and tells him that her leg hurts. She explains that she's a professional athlete and running and jumping became difficult just after she fell down some stairs.

The doctor gives her a thorough examination and is horrified to find that her leg is badly broken, has been for a few days and is likely to cause her really serious problems if it doesn't get fixed straight away.

The doctor explains that the bone needs to be set, the leg immobilised and a plaster put on the leg for anywhere between six to eight weeks.

In response, the woman gets up, hops around the room, grimacing a bit with pain, but saying all the time that she is fine and that there is no way she could possibly have a plaster as she was so busy with her job and a plaster would really get in the way on the hurdles track. She refuses treatment and in a week, dies of septicaemia brought about by a bone infection.

Of course, this is something that would be very unlikely to happen. A woman in this situation would be physically unable to walk with a broken femur and she would be grateful to the doctor for any help that he might be able to provide. Unfortunately, the relationship between the software architect and the client is often very similar to that of the lady and the doctor in the story you’ve just read.

As an architect, I have seen more than one example of this scenario. After being called in to consult on a job and after having advised the client of serious problems with the state of health of the software, the client decides that hopping around is easier than fixing the problem. One company in Surrey (in the UK) for which I explained that the problems in their architecture would end up costing them more in maintenance than they could afford in development, went bust because they were unable to continue due to maintenance costs and the haemorrhage of unhappy developers who quickly went to look for other jobs when the boss of the company put more and more pressure on them to deliver what was effectively impossible.

Sometimes the patient is simply not qualified to make a good diagnosis of their own illness. A company that has pressure to deliver product may believe that the status quo is more desirable than the risk of change. If you fall down stairs and you can’t walk anymore, go see a doctor and take his advice. If your software isn’t working, is costing you more to maintain than it does to upgrade, go see a good software architect and take his advice.

Silverlight and Mr. Muglia

I have spoken to several friends who work for MS and they all said that it was all news to them too,
I have been reassured by one friend, who is in a good position to know, that all is cool and there is nothing to worry about.
I guess the moral of the story is that some people should never give an interview without someone first approving the script.

Muglia back-pedals on Silverlight. Too late?

There are sometimes when I loathe ZDNet's approach as they seem to be very anti Microsoft but there are others when I think that they are the only people who can really find out what's going on.

In an inteview with Mary Jo Foley, Bob Muglia reduced Silverlight to the development system for Windows Phone 7, angering developers, myself amongst them, who have listened to the hype over the Silverlight, browser, desktop, cross-platform for several years now and have comitted to following the line laid out by Microsoft by investing in that technology.

Many years ago, after speaking to top level program managers within Microsoft, I believed that the only reason virtual machine technologies existed, particularly those that enabled delivery of Windows CE applications to hand-held machines that ran a variety of processors, was specifically for enabling standardised Windows programming across all devices. I waited in vain for this to come to fruition because I truly believe that to have a virtual machine system capable of running the same p-code on all devices would be a fantastic solidifier for an industry that has too many diverse standards.

Recently, with Silverlight I had begun to believe again in the possibility of a unified developer platform that could adapt seamlessley to many, or any, form factors and devices. Now, with this latest development I can see another period of wandering in the wilderness looking for some sign of sanity from what seems to be an insane guide.

Microsoft pulled a similar stunt on the Windows CE developer community back then, virtually dropping Windows CE, reducing it to a minor player and now they're back to the same old tricks.

People at high level, Like Muglia and Ballmer don't say this stuff off the tops of their heads and retract it because it was an unfortunate mistake. You can bet that this has been on the table for a long time inside Redmond and that talking about it in this way has become so second nature that Bob Muglia never even thought it would be a problem when he spoke about it.

I know of front line silverlight applications that companies have, and still are investing millions of Euros in which will be in some doubt after this statement. It's one thing for a company to change strategy on an immature product and, despite Silverlight's relative youth in the marketplace, it is after all a version 4 product with a large amount of promises and "trust us, this is the future, believe in it" messages having come from Microsoft.

This is a problem that destroys trust and causes immense turmoil that Microsoft doesn't seem to care about. As an architect I feel a responsibility to guide my clients down a road that is beneficial to them. I need to be able to trust Microsoft to deliver on promises. In the case of Silverlight I had been reticent to push clients towards it until version 3. Recently however I have been looking at the possibilities of using it for some seriously important applications but now, I predict another struggle trying to persuade conservative IT departments in two or three companies to even allow a sniff of Silverlight code into their applications.

Way to go Bob!

Silverlight Slideshow control

The full source code for the Silverlight slideshow control and the explanation of how to pass parameters from an ASP.Net site to a silverlight control enbedded on the page is explained in this article You can download from the bottom of the page.
Enjoy!

Silverlight slide show control.

I wanted to provide something akin to a powerpoint presentation on a page today so I thought of a simple Silverlight control that takes an XML file and provides images and captions. I'll post the code on my site.
Take a look...

Page of shame

I had a great thought... For spammers who insist on contacting me via my contacts pages and offering me one time only 50% money off extra special deals on paid directed traffic etc. etc. I will put their e-mail address on a page that robots can harvest. Muhaahaahaahaa...

The best quote ever?

Of Keith Richards: He's got a face like a prune's wallet.

Creating properties for list objects? Don't use a setter.

Browsing code today I noticed a potential problem that can cause horrible consequenses if not fixed.

An object exposes a list like so:

public List<Wimwam>Wimwams{get;set;}

which may seem to be quite normal until you look again a the the implications of the property. Here, it is the content of the property being set, namely the collection object itself! This means that it is perfectly possible for a class to fill this list carefully and then have some outside actor change the list under it's nose. This clearly breaks the rules of encapsulation and is a potentially serious bug.

That collection property should in fact be read-only. That is to say that the list itself is not read only but the property to obtain that list should only provide a getter.

The correct way to create the class and the list would be as follows:

public class Doodaa
{
    private List<Wimwam> _wimwams = new List<Wimwam>();

    public List<Wimwam> Wimwams{get{return _wimwams;}}
}

In this way, the class encapsulates the list in such a way that the reference to the list object cannot be changed. The contents of the list therefore remain under the ownership of the class.

Arduino Visual Micro addin for Visual Studio

Visual Micro has done some great work helping to integrate Arduino development into the Visual Studio IDE with a really cool addin. I must say that I absolutely love this kind of tool that brings an esoteric and quirky programming system to a mainstream audience.

There is one little problem with the addin inasmuch as it was built for a thirty two bit OS. I have Windows 7 64 bit installed so my directory layout is a bit different. I modified the addin such that it loads the DLL from the standard install directory on my 64 bit system.

The updated addin code can be downloaded from my site. I will of course send it to Visual Micro too who can keep up that fantastic work!!!

More on the awfulness of Safari

I posted earlier (yesterday? it all seems so far away) about what a useless result Safari gave when used to view an ASP.Net web site. Just as an experiment I went over to my site stats and looked at the browser and operating system stats for the various sites I manage. I was more than a little surprised, although I can't imagine why I suppose, to see that whereas Apple operating systems constitute a small percentage of users who view the sites, of those fewer than fifty percent of those people actually use the Safari browser!

That is truly an inditement of that miserable excuse for a browser. What makes me laugh too is the way Apple have tried to push it along with iTunes to PC systems all over the place. I guess that quality really does matter eh?

On Mac systems it seems that Firefox, Chrome and Opera do quite well. I haven't tried Chrome on ASP.Net yet. Hmmmm... Despite the motto of "Don't be evil" I still hear a faint Muhaahaahaa in the background whenever I think of Google so I haven't had the courage to install Chrome yet.

Architecture Matters blog

This blog has been an adjunct to my web site I suppose. The reason it exists is because I was too lazy to write a blog engine of my own, a task that I started but never finished due to pressures of the day job, and the fact that this all integrates so nicely with my mobile lifestyle.

As you know, Even though I do an amount of technical stuff here and it is after-all an MVP blog, I sometimes get sidetracked by personal interests and so, the content here is mixed.

My day job is taking on a new significance these days. I am still working, at least part time, in the banking and finance sector doing work for a big bank in France but I have seen a resurgence in other requests from clients around the world through my company, Daraize Technologies, where I am C.T.O.

As a result of this and the desire to create a technology only blog I have asked our webmaster to add a link to a new blog I will be working on, The Architecture Matters Blog.

The idea is to create a regular series of articles dedicated to the diverse subjects of software architecture as a big picture subject.

You may be interested to look at it yourself.

A little late...

Looking back at Ray Ozzie's tenure as Chief Architect at Microsoft one wonders just what it was all about. Bill Gates, although being the definition of the word nerd and the worlds uber geek was outspoken, opinionated, interesting and a great ambassador for his company. Something that I cannot say about Mr Ozzie. His blog has just been updated with it's second post in five years. Admittedly, he says some interesting things but really, how in the heck can someone in such a position be so quiet?

Live person verification

I just added a quick article on doing capcha style live person verification.

Google really needs a meta hint tag...

I find Google ad placement increasingly annoying as the advertisement delivery seems not to be at-all in keeping with the site content on my pages or on the blogs.
More often than not I have technical articles and posts which would benefit from ad placement pertaining to the subject. For example someone reading a technical blog might actually be more interested in buying software components online than ordering a pretty Fillipina girlfriend. (well, you're supposed to be at work after-all)
Google would therefore benefit a great deal by enabling subject hinting on the sites that would allow a webmaster to target a proportion of the ads for a certein genre and which they could then "pad out" with the other inconsequential and ridiculous bla bla that they seem to be serving these days.

Spam really can be controlled!

I have been an active participant online for twenty years now and interestingly I receive little or no spam mail despite having a reasonably high profile inasmuch as bots that harvest e-mail addresses have plenty of access to my posts and blogs.
I think that a major contributing factor to my low spam count is that I use my own domain name and refuse to use Hotmail, Google or Yahoo etc for mail.
I run my mail server on Godaddy's secureserver which itself has a spam filter that catches 90% of Nigerian 411 spans and Viagra adverts and the remaining immunity I can only attribute to my use of an obfuscated mail address for forum posts in which I use @_spamtrap_bobpowell.net which a live person could easily fix and which robots seem too stupid for still.
Finally, the contact page on my site has a simple "capcha" system that I created to do live person verification. The result is that I probably get 3 spam e-mails per day.
I would kindly ask that you wags out there like my pal Ricky etc do not go subscribing me to every list available. :-)

Windows Phone 7

Will kick Apples butt if Steve Jobs doesn't recover from his severe recto-cranial inversion and allow Flash and Silverlight onto iPhone and iPad.

Surprisingly, Safari on the iPhone handles the site I mentioned in an earlier post much better, although it still had a problem with font sizes and pagination, but without active content the effect is lost.

I'd love to see Microsoft hire the quick pwn boys to create a jailbreak install for Phone 7 that ran on the Apple hardware.

Opera does it right too!

Just tested the same site in the Opera browser. It works a treat, Even ran the Silverlight without a hitch.
What use is Safari??

BlogEngine

Going nuts today trying to integrate BlogEngine.Net into a site.
A nice drop-in blog component would be great.
Life is never easy it seems.

ASP.Net and Safari. Not good bedfellows.

I've been working on an ASP.Net website this weekend. It's just a simple site with a few pages but it uses ASP.Net menu components to provide the page navigation. I tested it on a PC with both IE and Firefox. The site looks as good as I expected it to.
Just as an afterthought I tried the site from my Mac using Safari. The result was not at all optimal.
Menus and breadcrumb trails lost their colour mouseover elements and the font sizes were not at all respected.
Apple... could do better it seems.

So, gravity is stronger than a vacuum.

The results from LCROSS are in and... The moon is not a useless lump of uninteresting regolith after all.
The moon is smothered in resources from Ammonia to Xenon all frozen or chemically bound in compounds found on the surface. There is water too, in quantities that make living on the moon and wanting for little a very tantalizing prospect.
Elon Musk has the right idea by investing in space. Governments are too concerned with elections to take risks or make mistakes. Private enterprise is the only way for space to be exploited properly. If anyone has a job for an old programmer on the moon, let me know ASAP.

Tiny what?

Ha ha. My tinyurl is longer than my real one.

Is Sarkozy the new Thatcher?

I don't often talk politics but the situation in France is really getting to me so here goes.
In the 1980's and early 1990's I lived in England under the reign of Margaret Thatcher and her right wing government. Over the space of my youth until adulthood, the right wing managed to turn a proud country into a nation of downtrodden sychophants who accept that the poor should be made poorer and the rich made richer and that public opinion should be squashed by force.
Thatchers utter destruction of unions followed by the putting in place of safeguards to enable many forms of public assembly to be tightly controlled -even brutally put down- and the consequent construction of a CCTV surveillance system that communist China would be proud of has served to keep the populace in line, even through the supposedly socialist government that followed it.
In 1993 I voted with my feet after the British people voted conservative again and elected John Major to deal out more punishment and to ride roughshod over ordinary folk, of whom I was one. One reason I came to France was because I loved the way ordinary people were still able to express displeasure at the government and how, if elected officials didn't make some compromise, a good demonstration, followed by a bit of civil disobedience and maybe a lorry load of cow crap in the local council office lobby soon put things right.
Today however, Sarkozy is behaving in a more and more right wing manner. The virtual pogrom against Romany people was something one might expect to hear of from middle european countries, not France. Now, quashing unarmed public demonstrations and blockades of fuel with what are effectively SWAT teams makes the appearance of a "conservative" government look more and more like a fascist state.
The social security and pension system in France takes vast chunks of money from wage earners. With employers contributions, the cost of a wage is almost twice the takehome pay and that doesn't include any eventual income taxes that might be paid. French people live for and plan for their "Retraite" and to raise the pension limit will cause problems.
I will be honest and say that I hope the French people can hold out against Sarkozy's brand of Thatcherism and remain a free and proud people who are able to give their elected officials the finger from time to time. Vive La France!

I vote...

For Scott Guthrie!

Hiker killed by mountain goat

While the ignominy of such a death may be shocking to the poor victim and his family, for whom I have the utmost sympathy, one wonders why a magnificent wild beast should be killed because it poses a risk to hikers who have the temerity to infringe upon it's domain.
Hiking is, after all, a way to get closer to nature and, despite the childrens picture book view of real life that we seem to adhere to these days, nature is wild, rugged and often savage.
If someone strays into the domain of a Lion or Tiger and is eaten for his stupidity people are not surprised but, when the agressor is a lowly goat people are horrified. Herbivores are quite capable of defending themselves and their territory. They are used to dealng with savage tooth and claw predators to survive. They should not be underestimated.

Downtime

So, My site has been inoperative for the longest time in ten years, due to Visual Studio 2010's apparent inability to publish to an FTP site without crashing.
I am currently uploading via FTP using a direct client but effectively, since Tuesday night, BobPowell.Net has been dead in the water.
Note to MS. Could do better!

Website broke

Oops. Thanks to all of you who mailed me so quickly to tell me the site is broken. I am working on it and will upload again ASAP.

I think this problem stems from my upload being interrupted.

A tool to convert .HTM files to ASPX

Well, it may be a little late but if you read my latest article in my ASP.Net section of my site you'll see why a certain reluctance to make this change came about.
It has always been a laborious task to make such a change, especially if you want to apply some sort of master page strategy to the HTML pages on the site.
Being a lazy person at heart, rather than do the job with repetitive and boring hands-on editing I have created a little utility program that can convert all the .htm pages on a site to ASPX while applying a master page if required.
I ran this on my own site and it seems to be OK, at least for my purposes. I still need to tidy some pages but the bulk of the work was done automatically. Just right for a lazy old duffer like me.

Windows Phone 7 SDK

I reported last week that the Windows Phone 7 SDK includes Visual Studio 2010 express. This is true, the downloader will get those components from the server when you run the web-based download. It is also true however that if one already has Visual Studio 2010 installed, as I have with the Ultimate edition, the installer does not setup the VS2010 part.

This is reassuring but, for people who still have limited bandwidth this may be a problem. Last week I was downloading via my tethered iPhone so I cancelled quickly.

I just installed the SDK on my desktop machine over the DSL line so it was less painful.

Hungarian Sludge.

I used to have a calculator that used reverse Hungarian notation. I loaned it to a pretty girl once and she never spoke to me again. The idea of Hungarian sludge has impinges upon my consciousness and may be as hard to remove as the real thing.

Splash.. the saga continues

Well, I wonder if the scientists who published the idea that Saturn's rings were created by a moon or large asteroid falling into saturn were inspired by my blog post?
Hey, remember you saw it here first. The'yre handing out Nobel prizes at the moment, perhaps I can pick up the astro-physics prize ;-))

Windows phone 7 developer tools...AARRGGHH

Just checking out Scottgu's blog and noticed the link for Windows phone 7 dev tools.
They immediately try to download Visual Studio 2010 express.
This is obviously a no no if one already has 2010 ultimate installed.

New life for an old laptop

Some years ago I bought myself a lightweight laptop that I thought would be good when commuting or travelling on business. As it turned out, the Phillips machine was actually pretty useless with a short battery life and a bit slow.
Recently, I took up the commuting lifestyle again but I took the plunge and wiped the laptop, installing a 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate OS on it. It's a diferent machine! it's fast, shuts down quickl, boots up quickly, resumes from hibernation reliably and is generally usable after years of me complaining about it.
(The battery life is still useless but I may buy a new battery because this one is obviously tired)

Congratulations to Microsoft for getting Windows 7 right!

Software technology patents are BOGUS

Patents are a great thing when they cover some innovative mechanical process that is not obvious in nature. They can also be a great thing for certain algorithmic processes if that algorithm took a lot of thought and work to come up with. Patents that cover the positions of pixels on a screen however are totally bogus. Todays news about Apple being liable to pay 600 million dollars for the infringement of patents that describe Cover Flow etc are ridiculous!
In the same way that patents which might cover a certain sequence of my D.N.A, patents which ultimately concern the colour of certain pixels on a screen are totally frivolous. Compettition to greate great UI is a great goal for designers of good software but to patent the positioning of a button or the method of a user interface is too much.

Facebook "Like" button as an ASP.Net control

Fiddling with my site today I decided to create a master page with a Facebook "Like" button on it. This turned out to be harder than I thought because the Facebook developer site spits out a dedicated iFrame for the page URL you enter.
I thought to myself that a simple ASP.Net user control could be the solution so I went ahead and wrote one.
Check it out! http://www.bobpowell.net/likebutton.aspx

Quantum Physics. A hiding to nothing.

Imagine a computer program that wanted to analyse itself to the most fundamental level. By knowing its own source code, then relating that to the instructions created by the compiler, a level of insight might be gained.
A more complex program might be able to deduce the structure of registers and maybe even something about the internal workings of the processor and make a fairly good guess at deeper aspects of the system.
Unfortunately, a quantum analysis of a "bit" within a word cannot reveal the structure of a transistor or the type of substrate upon which the transistor is constructed.
Quarks, Leptons and Bosons all make up the base classes of our universe. However, even though we may be able to analyse them. How can we be aware of the "transistors" upon which they are expressed?

Splash

Odd, how inspiration can come from the most mundane sources. I was looking at the screen savers on a Windows XP box the other day and realised that the screen saver with the OpenGL "tambourine" onto which something drops, causing a splash could be the model for the formation of Saturn's rings.
One could imagine that a liquid body such as a gas giant planet could ring like a bell with shock waves that travelled all around the planet and back to the point of origin such that a splash of planet material might be ejected back into space.
A little angular momentum due to spin and the planet moving on it's course around the sun would spread the ejected material along it's orbit enough to create a ring.
I appeal to Sony for 32 Playstation 3 boxes so I can number crunch the math and write a paper.

Visual Studio tests and punctuation in project paths

A modern file system is a friendly thing. We can use all manner of characters, such as punctuation, in the file and folder names. This makes the path easier to read an provides a nicer experience for those of us that appreciate good grammar on our desktops.

I, for example, often name folders for myself or for clients so a folder named "Bob's stuff" or "Dave's projects" would not be uncommon.

If however you associate unit test suites with these projects an exception will be thrown by the test execution system complaining about illegal characters in the path.

To avoid this, and because I did not want to be forced to rename directories that had other relationships in then, I discovered that the use of the good old DOS subst command could provide a drive letter for the offending folder and allow tests to run.

It should be noted that this problem no longer exists in Visual Studio 2010 but for anyone still running on 2008 this little trick can be a life saver.

Manhattan bar charts

The term "Manhattan" used in reference to 3D bar charts has been around for a number of years. Since 1996 in fact when I coined the title for the 3D charts I wrote for Stingray Software's Objective Chart product. Sadly, Stingray was swallowed up by Rogue Wave and the chart product died shortly after. I know that Rogue Wave still sell it but it's C++ code that is a decade old and thoroughly out of date these days.
Anyway, I'd just like to thank the likes of Nevron and DevExpress for using the title. It brings me good memories.

The Jazz saga continues...

My Honda Jazz (Honda Fit un the U.S.A) has always been frugal with its fuel consumption and I always wondered just how far one could drive when the little "Empty" light on the fuel guage lit up. Well, this weekend I tested it by driving my usual hypermiling style but when the fuel light came on, I just kept on driving.

In the end the Jazz maintained 4.5 litres per 100 kilometers and drove 188 klicks, that's 116 miles in old money, before it spluttered to a halt. Honda-RESPECT!

Still pleased with Brinkster

I have had a web site hosting agreement with Brinkster for many years now. They have continued to improve their systems over the years and I have just finished a couple of days of changes to make my bobpowell.net site a bit more modern and easy to update.
I must say that using the new Brinkster file manager is a joy and it works quickly and reliably while updating the files that need changing.
Even though I use GoDaddy for my various other sites, I will keep Brinkster for my "mission critical" site because they are just brilliant!

Is Amazon's associates program utterly useless?

I have had an associate program ID for several years and despite having many thousands of hits per day on my site I never -ever- make a cent from the associates program.

Google pays for clicks and I regularly get cheques from them, which I must admit I don't cash. (They probably really owe me several thousand bucks... ) but as far as I am concerned, Amazon is no good at all.

I guess anyone who visits my site has already got all the books they need.

More Honda Jazz miles per gallon results

I took my daughter to her horse riding exam today. A round trip of 367.6 kilometres. The reported litres per 100 kilometres was 4.2. This must have been a good 4.2 because it was still at that level after the drive back through the 'burbs to home so I reckon more like 4.1-4.2.
So, for a total of 228.416 miles, the fuel consumption was 15.43 litres or 3.396 imperial gallons.

This makes my fuel consumption 67.2 miles per gallon!

GetTemplateChild vs FindName

While creating a WPF control I searched for GetTemplateChild only to find that the help file says "Do not use. Use FindName instead".

Well, being a good developer used to following advice, I did just that and my control stopped working immediately.

I think in reality the help file should say use FindName unless you're trying to find a PART in your own custom control then you should definitely use GetTemplateChild.

Comments on this blog

I was unaware but the comment system on this blog seems to have been usurped by one which asks you to register by adding the email addresses of ten friends. Sorry about that. I will change it the first opportunity I get.

Where's my flying car?

Is a modern day complaint. Where are the sci-fi devices that the futurologists of the last century promised us?
Well, the telephone in my pocket holds more information than two million Sinclair Spectrum computers. It holds the text equivalent of fifty thousand 500 page novels.
To be honest. The idea that I could carry the entire library of Alexandria in my shirt pocket is way more impressive than something as brute-force as a flying car.

Grandad

Grand-child #3, Jasper Powell born May 1st 2010
The dynasty grows!

Technical hitch might be good?

So, what happens when a digger cuts your telephone cable and chops off your DSL?

Obviously, you tether your iPhone to the 3G network and share it from your trusty Mac to all the PC's in the house!

Given that I am more than 6 klicks from the DSLAM and my DSL sucks (see previous posts) I wonder if it isn't worth leaving things that way?

Hawking has finally lost the plot!

Stephen Hawking might be a brilliant mathematician, he might understand the cosmos enough to be able to visualise what goes on inside a black hole but the evidence of todays announcement shows that he shouldn't be allowed to give an opinion without some idiot filters in place.
His declaration of the existence of alien life and it's possible or probable hostility is so incredibly irresponsible that it beggars belief that someone hasn't pulled the plug on his voice box!.
Firstly, the world is full of people who will be gullible enough to listen to this rubbish. The press has splurged it in the papers and on the web and to anyone who might take Hawking as an authority on such matters could imagine that we are in imminent danger of invasion from an awful alien menace bent on stealing our metals and impregnating our women.
Secondly, there are so many reasons why what he suggests is complete hogwash that anyone with a modicum of sense would see that this is nothing more than the ramblings of a chap who doesn't get out enough!
Just ask yourself this. If dangerous alien races are so common and interstellar travel is so easy why are we not overrun by aliens? The fact is that its really really hard to travel from star to star and no one would do it without vast incentives.
This leads us to what might incentivise aliens to come all the way here to rob us. What could they want? Water?, air? metal?, oils and hydrocarbons?, diamonds?, gold?
All of these things are available in truly vast quantities right out there in space. What's more, they are cheaper to obtain if they dont have to mine the stuff and drag it up out of a gravity well too!
When you cut to the chase and think of the only things that aliens might want from us they boil down to two things. Creativity and manpower.
They won't need our knowledge of physics because they would already know more than us just by the fact that they could get here. The only other creativity would be our literature and art which might hold a great price on the interstellar market.
If they only want us for our manpower then that too would be a good thing because the human race needs to break the bounds of the earth just to get a sniff at the aforementioned vast resources that are out there for the taking but as idiot governments run by idiot risk averse lawyers are shutting down space programs right and left these days then its likely that the best we can hope for is to hitch a ride with the Vogons. If they stole the whole human race to use as slaves we would eventually escape in small numbers and breed enough to fill the galaxy on the back of their technology. BRING IT ON!!

User controls suck.

I have rcently had occasion to go back to developing windows forms wigets and have reaffirmed my opinion that the UserControl model is a huge mistake for anything other than a one-off solution to a simple problem.
There are many problems with the model. First, the principle of polymorphism in a UserControl is utterly destroyed by the use of events within the user control. As soon as a UC has an initializecomponent that has event subscriptions then it is impossible to derive from the UC in any meaningful way because certain behaviours are set in stone and may not later be modified.
Another problem is the lazy way aggregation of function is treated by developers who utterly miss the boat with simple principles. An example being a job I'm working on now to replace a UC that is designed to emulate the function of a combobox with a datagrid in the dropdown.
This type of aggregation is uneccesary when we go back to the base functionality of the combobox and use the system of messages and overrides to create a real combobox that hosts something other than a lame listbox in the dropdown.
Even when dealing with Windows Forms the immediate reflex seems to be look at as high a level solution as possible and to ignore the underlying elegance of the system.

The mobile programmer

I am currently sitting in the back of my Land Rover waiting for my daughter who is riding in a show jumping competition.

I have an old UPS which I have silenced by ripping out the beeper, a car battery and my iPhone connected to my laptop.

I am currently getting better internet than I get at home. (See my previous post on how France Telecom is the worst provider in the world)

I should do this more often.

Hypermiling

Earlier in this blog I mentioned my Homda Jazz car and the fuel consumption figures attainable from the petrol fuelled motor.
In my recent trips made over the 300 kilometers between my work in Paris and Brittany where I manage a small property development company I have been using some easy to learn techniques to improve milage.
First, I try to accelerate gently and to get into top gear as soon as road speed permits the engine to work smoothly. On the Jazz this can be as slow as 40 KmH on the flat.
Secondly, I try to drive without using brakes. This means guessing distances and momentum to allow me to roll to a stop or to slow in traffic naturally.
Thirdly I coast where possible. Downhill is free! Coasting in neutral to save the clutch too.
Fourthly, I switch off the engine where possible. When coasting I switch off and restart just by selecting fifth gear. At lights I hit the key to start.
Lastly I check tyre pressures and keep them set right. I think that overinflating would damage tyres enough to offset the savings of careful driving.
As a consequence on a run this weekend I obtained 4.5 litres per 100 kilometers. I fit the drive in the time predicted by the GPS. Not slowly and hitting the limit on motorway stretches. That means 62.77 milled per gallon from a petrol engined non hybrid family car.

Is it a pattern?

I have noticed a trend in application design, one which I suppose became obvious some years ago when I really became interested in the use of reflection and the advantages of metadata in the form of attributes used at design time.

I was busy with a project for a financial sector client and had to come up with applications that were able to edit really complex data types but do it in a way that was easy for a developer to reuse in an application. At the time I was doing a lot of .Net design time work so my awareness of attributes such as TypeConverterAttribute and EditorAttribute came in handy. I also developed my own attributes to be used in presentation layer stuff and found that the idea of creating a tiny helper class that was instantiated when required, used and let go again was a recurruing theme. For example, when properties are read for databinding, the TypeConverter for the data type will be invoked and I found that I applied the same model to many other things in my applications.

Now I see the same trend in WPF for example when its so simple to write a tiny bit of code which is instantiated in the static resources and used to provide useful calculation, binding or conversion routines. As an application designer and, as I see this as a pattern, I wonder if there is really room for a formal "Granular instance" pattern and if it becomes worthy of mention.

Styles and storyboards in code

Today I have been playing wit some WPF to emulate the idea of the Mac dock in a scrollview that shows pictures.
I thought I would use a mixture of XAML and code to create storyboards that expand an image when the mouse is over it and reduces it again once it leaves.
For this I created a single style, programmatcally filling the EntryAction and ExitActiion for the trigger.
This all worked fine until I tried to cope with a resize. First I noticed that my effects ran slower as I resized. Obviously I had added and compounded the storyboards such that there were many being triggered at once. Upon trying to remove them I found that animations get "Sealed" and can no longer be changed. As this is interesting I think i'll do a wee article on it.
I had a discussion with a friend the other day who said that WPF still seems to be difficult for use in desktop line of business apps. My current investigation is in some way related to that idea because I think that with judicious use of code and XAML much more is possible.

Climate madness

I swear I just saw a glacier shoot past my window and take the roof off the house next door!

But unfortunately...

IPad has no camera! It should have two. One for videoconference and one for images and movies.

It has no slot for a flash memory! that's just dumb.

Ah well. Wait for V2 I guess.

iPad

Well, no big surprise really. I would never have bought a Kindle but the quasi-A4 format of the iPad makes it interesting as a book reader. I find that I use the iPhone a lot for reading books on the Stanza application. It's main drawback in this mode is the uselessness for reading technical books that may have illustrations or code. iPad will be good for that.

I would hope that the screen is more robust than it looks. My iPhone has pixels missing and the chances of flexing an iPhone screen are far less than one of nine inches diagonal.

I guess that, aside from my attraction to all things geek, my main interest will be to develop applications for it. My wife said this morning that it opens up a lot of possibilities for new uses. I think that devices like this would benefit from having other sensors too. Ok, a compass and GPS are cool but imagine it with an infra red camera, ultrasound emitter and detector and a ruggedized version. You're talking tricorder here.

Pity that the thing uses an apple processor. An intel one would have made more sense. It'd be a great platform for Windows 7 multitouch. Ahh well. Maybe the fom factor will become sexy enough for Acer to do a copycat device with a PC architecture. For now I'll have to content myself with MonoTouch on iPad.

I like the idea that th 3G capable model will not be locked. I guess that it breaks the bounds of the mobile phone model enough that they don't have to cowtow to the phone operators or make exclusive contract deals.

I'm sitting on a train right now and I can see many other passengers who have iPhones. I wonder how they will look in a year?

In support of Internet Explorer

I have lived and worked in that strange country, the Internet, since, well, since before it was the Internet really. I began my days online during the era of Compuserve in the 1980's so I think I can say I have run the full gamut of experience in the feild.

Today, I have what I see as a particularly balanced view because I have use for, and use almost every day, a number of browsers. On my machines, which include Windows, Mac and Linux boxes I have IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari browsers as well as the browser built in to a couple of little Linux based netbooks I have around the place. They all have strong points and weak points in style and usability but generally, they all do pretty much the same thing. None of them however, have the sheer weight of user numbers that Internet Explorer has.

In recent days I have seen warnings issued by German and now French governments saying that Internet Explorer is dangerous and not reccommended for use and that they urge people to use Firefox or some other browser instead. Seriously. What the heck is a government doing even thinking about this kind of thing? They tout free market compettition to the world and then when product A does well, they slap a monopolies or anti-trust suit on it.

I know why Internet Explorer has a bad reputation in France. It's because the French in general, and I live in France so I know wherof I speak, are obsessed with paperwork and process and are very, very conservative in almost all subjects. Internet Explorer has a bad reputation in France because the large businesses and the government agencies have I.T departments that all like to preserve their working status-quo and who like to justify their existence by producing more barriers to change in the name of security and safety. False barriers I might add.

In the past I worked for one of Europe's largest banks. Their I.T department mandates the use of IE 6 because they say that they haven't had chance to test IE 7 let alone IE 8 yet so these latter two, being unknown quantities, are deemed to be unsafe. They also refuse Microsoft automatic updates.

In computer terms, this is the equivalent of refusing to drive a modern car with antilock brakes and airbags because these are operated by magical means and might voodoo away one's soul so we'll keep on driving our Ford Fairlane thanks very much.

Internet Explorer is the target of more attacks because they have more market share and a bad guy wants to affect as many people as possible. This is why there are no viruses for Apple computers. They are quite simply not a viable payload target. If Firefox had more share than IE, we would see more security warnings for Firefox and the French and Germans would start whining again about them, telling us to use something else.

I use Internet Explorer 8, I use Microsoft Security Essentials and I have zero complaints.

France Telecom are the worst ISP in the world

This is what I get on a 30 euro per month contract with "speeds up to 18 megabits"
I'm not sure but this used to be called extortion or fraud or something like that.

The patent process is fundamentally flawed

A patent is a way of telling the world that you had a great idea first. They work just fine in most cases but the big problem with ideas is that the patent grant must be made by an examiner who is expert in the field of the problem domain. And, as patents are often new ideas, there may be no experts other than the person who defines the patent itself.

Patents have to be non-obvious. We cannot patent the process of breathing for example, although I'm sure a healthcare company in the US is probably working on that right now. This leads me to the i4i patent which describes a method for storing word processing documents in an XML (or, if you read the patent, SGML) format.

Today, Microsoft have been forced to stop selling Word that saves in docx format because it supposedly violates the patent of i4i's document storage method but in reality, the patent should have never been granted in the first place because it does nothing more than describe a possible algorithm for storing data in an open and freely usable format. XML by definition is useful for storing absolutely any data so patents based on specific uses of the XML format are obvious and so should never have been granted in the first place.

This ruling, like so many rulings or grants on algorithmic processes, have obviously been made by persons with no domain knowledge and are completely arbitrary.

I believe that patents should be restricted to physical and tangible objects or manufacturing processes and that patents on algorithms and data codes, especially genetic ones, should be banned, relying instead on copyright law for the former and ownership of the original material for the latter.