HRW is clearly in the pocket of the U.S. government. From a recent tweet, which linked to the article Saudi Arabia: King’s Reform Agenda Unfulfilled (HRW),

“King Abdullah’s reign brought about marginal advances for women but failed to secure the fundamental rights of Saudi citizens to free expression, association, and assembly. […]”

King Abdullah's Twipitaph from HRW

The verb employed here is not accurate. You cannot fail at something without actually trying it. In the main tweet, they do it again, characterizing a purely... [More]

I have not seen American Sniper for the same reason that I have not seen Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty or Lone Survivor. I did watch one season of Homeland and lasted that long only because my watchin’ buddy refused to stop mid-season. This type of entertainment is mostly just the U.S. military advertising itself through Hollywood’s mouth. I’d rather read the news and come to my own conclusions without the hagiographies.

I watched Battleship ‘cause it had aliens and The Hurt Locker ‘cause the... [More]

After a few days of coverage, the Charlie Hebdo attack had already started to resonate with the same vibrant religious fervor in France as the 9–11 attacks quickly did in America. Through the entire (mainstream and largely fringe) spectrum, though, there was an utter lack of awareness that what happened at those offices was just another normal day in the many places where the West exerts its influence.

Just how sympathetic do the French suppose an average Libyan would be to Parisian wails... [More]

1. Bill Burr: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) — 10/10
2. Killer Joe (2011) — 7/10
3. Bringing Out the Dead (1999) — 8/10
4. Transcendence (2014) — 6/10
5. They Live! (1988) — 8/10
6. I Spit on Your Grave (1978) — 4/10
7. In the Mouth of Madness (1994) — 7/10
8. The Devils (1971) — 9/10
9. The Secret Of Nikola Tesla (1980) — 7/10
10. L’Artiste (2011) — 9/10
11. An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) — 7/10
12. Fast & Furious AKA Fast and Furious 4 (2009) — 6/10

Bill Burr: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014)... [More]

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) — 6/10
2. 50/50 (2011) — 7/10
3. The Graduate (1967) — 6/10
4. Red Dragon (2002) — 8/10
5. The Final Cut (2004) — 6/10
6. The Hundred-foot Journey (2014) — 7/10
7. Magic in the Moonlight (2014) — 7/10
8. American Graffiti (1973) — 5/10
9. Enter the Void (2009) — 6/10
10. Lucy (2014) — 6/10
11. Big Night (1996) — 8/10
12. Freeway (1996) — 4/10
13. One Hour Photo (2002) — 7/10
14. The Bank Job (2008) — 6/10
15. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) — 8/10
16. Happy People – A... [More]

A few month ago, a friend sent a link to this article, The Islamic State Panic by Michael Brenner (Huffington Post). I found this response in my inbox.

tl;dr: Michael Brenner makes the point that the West—especially America—simplifies foreign policy to the detriment of all. He argues that they should stop doing this. I heartily concur and feel that they should, in fact, stop blowing things up entirely.

HuffPo? Really? Ok, fine. Ignore stupid chain of articles littering the right-hand side. Avoid long diatribe about our... [More]

I’ve had a Garmin bike computer for years, so my data is stored “in the cloud” at Garmin Connect. This application underwent an overhaul several months ago. I gave it a chance for a while, but it appears that the redesign was only skin-deep. The look has changed, but some of the basic stuff just doesn’t work.

Upgrades are hard

Even the upgrade to the new style—”Classic” to “Modern”—is not consistent. Months after telling the site to upgrade to the modern style, I still end up on pages in... [More]

tl;dr: The login requirements for all of your linked applications and web sites should be 100% consistent. Data-entry on a Smart TV is hard enough; don’t make your users have to enter their login data 20 times.

No matter how amazing our technologies become, they still fail in so many small ways that no-one seems to want to talk about. We manage to solve all of the hard problems in software development and then let our products die on the homestretch. Tiny failures turn what would be wonderful... [More]

1. Lee Camp: We Are Nothing (2014)
2. Godzilla (2014) — 6/10
3. Game Change (2012) — 7/10
4. The Hunger Games (2012) — 8/10
5. Central do Brasil (1998) — 6/10
6. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) — 6/10
7. Babylon A.D. (2008) — 6/10
8. Immortals (2011) — 5/10
9. Man on a Ledge (2012) — 5/10
10. Last Night (1998) — 6/10
11. 12:01 (1993) — 4/10
12. Bronson (2008) — 7/10
13. Spring Breakers (2012) — 5/10
14. Waydowntown (2000) — 5/10
15. Greg Proops: Live at Musso & Frank (2014) — 9/10
16. Die... [More]

1. Man of Steel (2013) — 5/10
2. The Birdcage (1996) — 6/10
3. Bad Words (2013) — 8/10
4. The Other Woman (2014) — 3/10
5. Life of Pi (2013) — 8/10
6. The Cold Light of Day (2012) — 4/10
7. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) — 5/10
8. The Wire (Season 5) (2008) — 10/10
9. True Detective (2014) — 10/10
10. Kingpin (1996) — 6/10
11. Interstellar (2014) — 9/10
12. X–Men: Days of Future Past (2014) — 6/10
13. Joe Dirt (2001) — 5/10
14. Barbarians at the Gate (1993) — 5/10
15. Battle of... [More]

I’d heard that the article In Conversation: Chris Rock by Frank Rich (Vulture) including some groundbreaking statements on race by Chris Rock. I like Chris Rock and I like his standup. He’s a comedian, though, so while his niggers vs. black people bit was funny at the time, in retrospect, it’s a savage attack on the poor and uneducated. Still, admittedly funny at the time.

On Bill Maher

Seeing that Frank Rich of the New York Times had interviewed him was not encouraging. So let’s see what Rock has to say. It starts... [More]

I haven’t really weighed in on this topic because I’m still digesting it. There are so many interlocking parts and so many reasons for why things are not right that an off-the-cuff article just doesn’t do the topic justice. A lot of what you read gives the impression that the fact that people are rioting in one town in the Midwest is a good excuse for trotting out more unsavory opinions in the guise of chastening those thugs and hoodlums who can’t abide by the rule of law.

If you assumed that... [More]

Hard drives => SSDs

In the old days, we cleaned up our hard drives because we didn’t have enough space for all of our stuff. Our operating systems, applications and caches took up a reasonable portion of that hard drive.

Then we had gigantic hard drives with more than enough space for everything. Operating systems, applications and caches grew. Parsimonious software was no longer in vogue because it was a waste of time and money.

SSDs replaced hard drives, improving speeds drastically and... [More]

In the previous article, I explained how we were using NDepend to clean up dependencies and the architecture of our Quino framework. You have to start somewhere, so I started with the two base assemblies: Quino and Encodo. Encodo only has dependencies on standard .NET assemblies, so let’s start with that one.

The first step in cleaning up the Encodo assembly is to remove dependencies on the Tools namespace. There seems to be some confusion as to what belongs in the Core namespace versus what... [More]

I received the post Maine Just Changed Their Food-Stamp Policy… Every State Should Do This (Conservative Tribune) from a friend.

The friend wondered whether the following was a good idea. They thought it might be, but asked if I could confirm.

“[…] adults 18 to 50 years old with no children and who are able to work must do so or volunteer for 20 hours each week. Otherwise, their benefits will be limited to three months over a three-year period”

This is one of those superficially seductive ideas that keeps coming... [More]

“What do you think of Obama?[1]”

He is Barack Hussein Obama,

44th—and first black—President of the United States of America.

Nobel Peace-prize winner.

So-called leader of the free world.[2]

O-bomber.

The Drone Ranger.

Mr. Guántanamo.

Mr. extraordinary rendition.

Mr. N.S.A.

The whistle-blower hunter.[3]

Defender of the 0.1%.

The question above is posed in different ways, in different tones. It depends on the person posing it. If the person hates Obama—for any of a variety of reasons,... [More]

Full disclosure

A while back—this last spring, I believe—I downloaded NDepend to analyze code dependencies. The trial license is fourteen days; needless to say, I got only one afternoon in before I was distracted by other duties. That was enough, however, to convince me that it was worth the $375 to continue to clean up Quino with NDepend.

I decided to wait until I had more time before opening my wallet. In the meantime, however, Patrick Smacchia of NDepend approached me with a free... [More]

The long and very technical article Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT by Filip Pizlo (Webkit Blog) provides a fascinating and in-depth look at how a modern execution engine optimizes code for a highly dynamic language like JavaScript.

To make a long story short: the compiler(s) and execution engine optimize by profiling and analyzing code and lowering it to runtimes of ever decreasing abstraction to run as the least dynamic version possible.

A brief history lesson

What does it mean to “lower” code? A programming language... [More]

I’ve recently started listening to the Gregg Proops podcast, called The Smartest Man in the World. He has a objectively terrible LA accent that really needs getting used to, but he’s a wonderfully extemporaneous, stream-of-consciousness, improvisational comedian whose claim to fame is “Whose Line is it Anyway?”.[1]

Let’s start off with a sample from the podcast called “Hearts”. Proops was discussing how the British newspapers were disparaging “pop royalty” Jay-Z and Beyoncé for not being... [More]

Congress may be at an ineffective standstill and the next two years are a legislative wasteland stretching before America and the world. The state legislatures, though, aren’t sitting still. Instead, they’re filled with the crème de la crème that America has to offer: from mildly racist to super-racist, from batshit crazy to crazier than a shithouse rat.

After introducing many of the lunatic creatures that will have an inordinate effect on ordinary citizens’ lives, Oliver notes that they are... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes in Quino. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

Data & Schema

• Applications can now choose a base class for generated ORM objects. (QNO-3107)
• Data driver: made various bug fixes and improvements. (QNO-4538, QNO-4554, QNO-4551)
• Improved schema migration for fields and constraint-violation messages under SQL Server. (QNO-4490, QNO-4111, QNO-4582)... [More]

The article The IMF’s New Cold War Loan to Ukraine by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch) provides some interesting insight into the IMF’s machinations on behalf of its masters in Europe and the U.S.

“[…] the IMF signed off on the first loan ever to a side engaged in a civil war, not to mention rife with insider capital flight and a collapsing balance of payments.”

The IMF has hard and fast rules for loaning money and is famous the world over for being an exceedingly unforgiving creditor…unless the creditor is the European... [More]

Quino is a metadata framework for .NET. It provides a means of defining an application-domain model in the form of metadata objects. Quino also provides many components and support libraries that work with that metadata to automate many services and functions. A few examples are an ORM, schema migration, automatically generated user interfaces and reporting tools.

The schema-migration tool

The component we’re going to discuss is the automated schema-migration for databases. A question that... [More]

The version of EF Migrations discussed in this article is 5.0.20627. The version of Quino is less relevant: the features discussed have been supported for years. For those in a hurry, there is a tl;dr near the end of the article.

We use Microsoft Entity Framework (EF) Migrations in one of our projects where we are unable to use Quino. We were initially happy to be able to automate database-schema changes. After using it for a while, we have decidedly mixed feelings.

As developers of our own... [More]

I know that pointing out errors in iTunes is a bit passé but Apple keeps releasing new versions of this thing without addressing the fundamental problems that it has as a synchronization client.

The software has to synchronize with hardware from only one manufacturer—the same one that makes iTunes. I’ll leave off complaints about the horrific, very old and utterly non-scaling UI and just regale you with a tale of a recent interaction in which I restored my phone from a backup. In that... [More]

On Wednesday, August 27th, Tymon gave the rest of Encodo[1] a great introduction to PowerShell. I’ve attached the presentation but a lot of the content was in demonstrations on the command-line.

1. Download the presentation
2. Unzip to a local folder
3. Open index.html in a modern web browser (Chrome/Opera/Firefox work the best; IE has some rendering issues)

We learned a few very interesting things:

• PowerShell is pre-installed on every modern Windows computer
• You can PowerShell to other machines... [More]

1. He’s Just Not That Into You (2009) — 3/10
2. Brother (2000) — 8/10
3. Sexy Beast (2000) — 8/10
4. Frozen (2103) — 5/10
5. The Waterboy (1998) — 6/10
6. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) — 8/10
7. The Jungle Book (1967) — 8/10
8. Ponyo (2008) — 7/10
9. Singin’ in the Rain (1952) — 7/10
10. Walk of Shame (2014) — 5/10
11. Prisoners (2013) — 8/10
12. The Lego Movie (2014) — 4/10
13. Big Night (1996) — 8/10
14. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) — 8/10
15. My Cousin Vinny (1992) — 8/10
16. District B13 (2004) (fr) — 6/10... [More]