Obama recently fulfilled a campaign promise to deliver a speech from a the capital city of a Muslim country with what some consider a ground-breaking speech in Cairo, Egypt (full transcript (Miami Herald)). It’s been a few weeks and already his masterful oratory has been credited with influencing the election in Lebanon, though it hardly can be blamed for what happened in Iran (or the rightward swing in Europe, for that matter).

The speech was a masterpiece, to be sure, though reading it surely leaves less... [More]

The following is an analysis and brainstorming of a problem in generalized database browser GUIs, like those generated by the Quino metadata framework.

The User Story

Let’s start with the user story that generated this idea:

“A user was entering data using our database software and complained of losing data. After verifying that the lost data was not due to an obvious software bug, we determined that it was because of how she was assuming the software worked. That is, she would use the... [More]”

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

At Encodo, we use the Perforce source control system. Recently, I created a branch specification in order to maintain bug fixes in a released product. See below:

//depot/branches/customername/versionnumber/projects/encodo/quino... //depot/projects/encodo/quino/...

Naturally, the next thing I did was to branch the files under //depot/projects/encodo/quino/ to the branch, using the P4V client. It... [More]

After what seems like an eternity, a mainstream programming language will finally dip its toe in the Design-by-contract (DBC) pool. DBC is a domain amply covered in one less well-known language called Eiffel (see ISE Eiffel Goes Open-Source for a good overview), where preconditions, postconditions and invariants of various stripes have been available for over twenty years.

Why Contracts?

Object-oriented languages already include contracts; “classic” signature-checking involves verification of... [More]

At any rate, it will not fall now during this so-called “crisis of democracy” as western media—the media with nearly zero access to the country—likes to put it. The history of the Islamic Republic is rooted not in the 1979 revolution, but rather in the overthrow of Mossadeqh in the 1950s and the subsequent U.S.-supported rule of the Shah for more than two decades. The Islamic Republic’s power drew from this wellspring of resentment over the Shah’s Western-supported autocratic power. When he... [More]

In recent years, supplemental spending bills for war funding have been passed with depressing regularity since the launching of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Over those years, the U.S. military apparatus has commanded declared budgets of well over $500 billion. That number is only a baseline which does not include other massive costs like those for maintaining over a dozen secret service agencies or the interest paid on debt incurred by spending so much money on the military over the last... [More]

Reporting a bug in software is no different than reporting any other problem you want addressed: the more specific you are, the better and quicker service you’re likely to get.

1. Always assume that the person responsible for the problem you want fixed is just as interested as you are in fixing it. If you’re working with good people, that’s usually the case.
2. Always assume that good people have 1000 things to do, but will still prioritize your issue higher if they think they can take care of it... [More]

Thanks to Twitter, we now have even better access to the splendidly corrupt, morally bankrupt and intellectually vacuous individuals that we send—every four years—to Washington to run America. As detailed in the article, Senator says Obama ‘got nerve’ to push lawmakers by Erica Werner (Google Hosted News), representative Grassley—who happens to be a Republican, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it matters—”tweeted” the following nugget of pith:

“Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us ‘time to... [More]”

June 20, 2008

• Took the 07:21 S3 from Kempten to Kloten.
• Continental Airlines flight #79 departed Zürich at 10:35 (about 1 hour late) and arrived at Newark at 13:40.
• We picked up one-way rental from Avis (for a small fortune)
• We drove upstate through pretty heavy traffic in New Jersey; further upstate, it’s much better and it’s smooth sailing.
• We stopped in Little Falls to eat at the East End Steakhouse (becoming kind of a tradition) and arrive in Ilion at around 21:00
• Annie Watkins was there... [More]

Say you’re excited about having finally upgraded from OS X Tiger to Leopard more than two years after everyone else has already made the switch. Let’s say you’re not so excited that you completely lose your head and do a clean install without making a backup, but excited enough to forget that several Apple applications have rather convenient backup features baked right into them.

OS X offers a Migration Assistant with which you can migrate settings from another OS X installation or a Time... [More]

With Memorial Day just past and Independence Day coming up in about a month, the parade of miliaristic emails masked as patriotism is making the rounds. The text of one of these follows (in quotes and in red), interspersed with my comments in reply:

“I HOPE THERE ISN’T ANYONE ON MY E-MAIL LIST THAT WON’T KEEP THIS GOING.”

Veiled threats are unbecoming. To my mind, this translates to: I hope I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree unquestioningly with the rather broad palette of jingoist sentiment... [More]

Installing OS X Leopard on my old 1.4GHz PowerPC 1GB Mac Mini went surprisingly well. I used Lacie SilverKeeper to back up my Tiger hard drive before wiping it out and doing a clean installation. I avoided installing all of the extra languages and printer drivers and managed to save several gigabytes of hard drive space for other stuff.

The only thing I had trouble installing was rdiff-backup, which is a UNIX utility for performing backups. OS X Leopard sports the vaunted Time Machine for its... [More]

There are many online services available these days through which a user can access a vast music library. One of the most popular is the iTunes Music Store, which offers a relatively large library of music for sale. It’s not even DRM-encoded anymore and has thus become more attractive. Amazon also has a pretty extensive library and has offered its music DRM-free from the beginning.

Those are sources where you pay for a license to an MP3 file. You can put it on any many gadgets as you like.
... [More]

When a .NET application exhibits behavior on a remote server that cannot be reproduced locally, you’ll need to debug application directly on the server. The following article includes specific instructions for debugging ASP.NET applications, but applies just as well to standalone executables.

Prerequisites

There are several prerequisites for remote debugging; don’t even bother trying until you have all of the items on the following list squared away or the Remote Debugger will just chortle at... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

At Encodo, we’re using the Microsoft Entity Framework (EF) to map objects to the database. EF treats everything—and I mean everything—as an object; the foreign key fields by which objects are related aren’t even exposed in the generated code. But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. We wanted to figure out the most elegant way of mapping what we are going to call enumerated associations in EF. These are... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

At Encodo, we currently run Debian Etch on our servers, with a Xen hypervisor managing a bunch of individual virtual machines (VMs). Most of the VMs also run Debian Etch, but one of them runs Windows Server 2003 instead. We use this machine for testing integration with Microsoft technologies like Sharepoint, Exchange and so on. Recently, we had to re-install the Exchange instance on that server and were... [More]

Wolfram Alpha aims to save you a bunch of clicks when searching information online. You should probably check out the screencast by Stephen Wolfram (13½ minutes) in order to get really charged up. The reality is that it kind of works like it does in the screencast. I started off by requesting some information about the town in which I grew up, namely its population. That worked just fine, but it couldn’t find historical information, so no fancy graphs for me. So, I chose a larger nearby city and it did just... [More]

Recently, Lindsey Graham said in a hearing: “[…] one of the reasons these [torture] techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.”

In that, Mr. Graham is 100% correct. Torture does work, but not in the way touted by its proponents. In order to examine the issue more closely, we need to first clarify—come to agreement on, as it were—the definition of the word “work”, in this context. It’s just tossed in there, at the end of the sentence, as if its intent were... [More]

Hold on to your hats, citizens of the world, the American president is rattling sabers at a former ally. A parenthetical was left off the end of his statement, though. It should have ended:

“…that you don’t end up having a [another] nuclear-armed militant state ... [More]”

The Convention Against Torture (CAT) is an American law passed during the Reagan administration. It extends the provisions to which America was already bound as a signatory of the Geneva Conventions.[1] Even if we assume—as so many of the leading light’s of America’s intellectual elite and media have already done—that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to America, we have to acknowledge our own laws, don’t we? We can assume that a 21st-century America doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Geneva... [More]

Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror by Tariq Ali

Ali’s scathing recap of the Blair/New Labour era in British politics reminds the world that the British have just as much to answer for as the Americans when it comes to picking absolutely corrupt leaders. It’s a very short book, but packed with a very succinct rundown of the depths of Blair’s moral depravity – depths which brings him to the nadir once monopolized by good old “iron balls” Maggie Thatcher.

Beyond Beef: The Rise... [More]

Modern discussions of law are very frequently mired down in discussions of minutiae of what is legal vs. what is moral. Very quickly, the discussion has narrowed further to niggling over minor quirks of American jurisprudence and precedence law.

For example, it seems that the relatively narrow topic of torture has become an almost impossibly unwieldy and unknowable problem for this modern age’s great thinkers, where hours and hours and hours are spent determining at what point a particular... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

A developer on the Microsoft C# compiler team recently made a post asking readers to post their solutions to a programming exercise in Comma Quibbling by Eric Lippert (Fabulous Adventures in Coding). The requirements are as follows:

1. If the sequence is empty then the resulting string is “{}”.
2. If the sequence is a single item “ABC” then the resulting string is “{ABC}”.
3. If the sequence is the two item sequence “ABC”, “DEF” then the resulting string is... [More]

The economy has been topic numero uno for many months now, including the almost three months of the Obama administration. During that time, the administration, Wall Street and the media have tried on explanations like they were trying on hats, changing stories and justifications as soon as it looked like the American people—despite all efforts—might be grasping just how thoroughly they were being screwed by what amounts to nothing more than a self-elected aristocratic elite. The following... [More]

If only this were really the way it was:

Jeff Danziger: On the Elevator to the Executive Suite

That would be awesome, if only the subjugated classes—the other 90% of us—would realize our awesome power and bring those responsible for our current plight to justice. Make them give up every dime and shred of power and settle our accounts. If only we were brave enough to jettison all the criminals instead of putting up with those only willing to work with them. I’m looking at you, pretty much all of the Clinton (Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and co.... [More]

Once you’ve been coding for a while, you’ll probably have quite a pile of code that you’ve written and are regularly using. It’s possible that you’ve got some older code in use that just works and on which you rely every day. At some point, though, you realize that you have to get back in there and fix a few things. That happened recently with the upgrade of the earthli WebCore and attendant applications from PHP4 to PHP5 (which is ongoing). The earthli codebase was born in 1999 and was... [More]