I found the following analogies, offered in response to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the preclearance clause of the Civil Rights Act—the stipulation that certain U.S. states with a long history of discriminatory voting practice have to “pre-clear” changes to voting law with the Federal government—entirely apropos.

Gibney has quite a good string of documentaries behind him, but We Steal Secrets seems to be a good deal shakier. I have not seen it, but it’s a documentary about WikiLeaks that focuses on the personal weaknesses and personality characteristics of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange without having interviewed either one of them, indeed without having interviewed anyone in the WikiLeaks organization. I reserve final judgment until I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t bode well.

Given that background,... [More]

A couple of days ago, Gleen Greenwald, constitutional and civil-rights lawyer, former Salon blogger and current Guardian blogger and columnist, revealed some top-secret U.S. documents that lay out in quite clear terms the degree to which U.S. government agencies are proud to be intercepting data from myriad sources.

Phone records, social-networking sites, large cloud-data providers, chat tools, video-calling software—almost anything you can think of—were mentioned as current and past... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

Many improvements have been made to Microsoft’s Entity Framework (EF) since I last used it in production code. In fact, we’d last used it waaaaaay back in 2008 and 2009 when EF had just been released. Instead of EF, I’ve been using the Quino ORM whenever I can.

However, I’ve recently started working on a project where EF5 is used (EF6 is in the late stages of release, but is no longer generally... [More]

Web browsing has come a long way since earthli’s default style was originally created. It was high time to clean out the decade-old default style and apply some modern design ideas to it. Nothing radical, but any design of a certain age will end up being more appropriate for older browsers than more modern ones.

On the one hand, the style accumulates cruft engendered by browser limitations that no longer apply and, on the other, the basic layout no longer works well on the most common... [More]

It’s been raining a lot in Switzerland this year. The Tobelbach near Wetzikon was bound to be quite swollen with water after this Saturday so, despite the still-pounding rain, we took an evening walk to the Pfäffikersee to see just how drastic things had gotten.

A rainy day in Züri Oberland (YouTube)

The article Surprise! Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web by Peter Bright (Ars Technica) takes a (very) early look at asm.js, a compilation target that the Mozilla foundation is pushing as a way to bring high-performance C++/C applications (read: games) to browsers.

The tool chain is really, really cool. The Clang compiler has really come a long way and established itself as the new, more flexible compiler back-end to use (Apple’s XCode has been using it since version 3.2 and it’s been the default since... [More]

I’ve recently discovered (via Kottke.org) a deceptively simple game called GeoGuessr, which works as follows:

1. The game shows a random location using Google Streetview
2. The player has to click as close as possible to the location on the inset map
3. The game rates your guess based on distance from the actual location and comes up with a score (6500 points seems to be the maximum)
4. Repeat 5 times
5. Tally up the score

Depending on how you play, you may or may not care about the score. Kottke at the... [More]

1. Alien (1979) — 9/10
2. Hancock (2008) — 7/10
3. Daybreakers (2009) — 6/10
4. God Bless America (2011) — 5/10
5. The Cannonball Run (1981) — 6/10
6. Cannonball Run II (1984) — 3/10
7. Friends with Benefits (2011) — 8/10
8. Run, Fatboy, Run (2007) — 7/10

Alien (1979) — 9/10

The classic film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), John Hurt and Tom Skerritt. It documents the journey of a commercial deep-space mining ship on its way to investigate an... [More]

I’ve been following Lee Camp, a stand-up comedian/activist/blogger for several months now. He’s always been quite good, but he’s hit his stride lately. His “Moment of Clarity” videos are short and interesting and often funny.

The following videos were posted while he’s on tour in the British Isles.

The Most Dangerous Discussion In The World? − MOC #232 by Lee Camp (YouTube)

Citing from the video description:

“There’s a discussion that most people aren’t having and that our media will never dare mention. If we never have it, we may all end up dead. […] So here it... [More]”

It’s Euro-Vision Song Contest time again. Semifinals part II tonight. Don’t judge me. It’s like a traffic accident; you can’t look away. There were a lot of contestants, but here are the ones I found noteworthy.

• Finland: What the hell Finland? A few years ago you win with Death/Gore-Metal band Lordi and now you descend into the depths of bubble-gum pop with Krista (who was literally wearing bubble-gum–colored boots)? How did that number even get off the ground? It was, however, one of the... [More]

I continue to be mystified as to how Microsoft has not managed to create a backup system as seamless and straightforward and efficient as Time Machine for OS X. The software is, however, not without its faults. As is usual with Apple software, Time Machine becomes quite frustrating and unwieldy when something goes ever so slightly wrong.

When it works, it works very well. It is unobtrusive. You have hourly backups. It is as technology should be: serving you.

At the beginning of the year, I... [More]

X-Men: First Class (2004) — 9/10

Possibly the best of all of the X-Men movies so far, with Jean Grey coming from the dead as Phoenix and fighting with Professor X himself for supremacy. They took out Magneto—made him human—and man was I rooting for the Phoenix to make a clean slate of things at the end. Mainstream movies always cop out when it comes to destroying the world, though. Still recommended, though, and highly recommended for fans of comic-book movies.

Kill Bill Vol. I (2003)... [More]

I was recently asked a question about merge conflicts in source-control systems.

“[…] there keep being issues of files being over written, changes backed out etc. from people coding in the same file from different teams.”

My response was as follows:

tl;dr: The way to prevent this is to keep people who have no idea what they’re doing from merging files.

Extended version

Let’s talk about bad merges happening accidentally. Any source-control worth its salt will support at least some form of... [More]

Guantánamo is a war crime. It’s illegal by both U.S. and international law. And now, in the article Amid Hunger Strike, Obama Renews Push to Close Cuba Prison (New York Times), we hear that President Obama wants to try closing it again. Does he mean it this time? But what does he mean by close it? And why now? Should we believe his high-minded though glib reasons? Or is cynicism once again more justified than hope?

Why is he trying again? Why now?

As even the article states,

“Mr. Obama made his remarks... [More]”

The Swiss voted overwhelmingly to include a provision in their constitution to, as the campaign stated, “stop the ripoff”. The exact text (in German) can be found at Eidgenössische Volksinitiative gegen die Abzockerei. Rather than try to reformulate the result in a hyperbolic way, I’ll perform the service of just translating the relatively clear amendment to the Swiss constitution.

The letter of the law

See the link above for the full text; I include the original German for the parts I think... [More]

A friend asked me for my advice on buying a Windows developer machine. In case anyone else is thinking about doing it, here’s my $.02.

What about a desktop?

I’ve got a desktop at work. It’s easily the fastest machine in the office. The hard drive’s a bit loud though. I’m being upgraded by my vigilant crew to an SSD in the near future, though. Otherwise, if you don’t need portability, you’ll get the most bang for your buck in a desktop.

You’re also more likely to be able to find something... [More]

1. Blade: Trinity (2004) — 7/10
2. The Prestige (2006) — 10/10
3. Skyfall (2012) — 6/10
4. Flight (2012) — 8/10
5. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (S01E09) (2012) — 10/10
6. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (S01E10) (2012) — 10/10
7. The Bourne Legacy (2012) — 7/10
8. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (S01E08) (2012) — 10/10
9. Ghost Rider (2007) — 5/10
10. The Big Lebowski (1998) — 10/10

Blade: Trinity (2004) — 7/10

Wesley Snipes stars as the... [More]

Cornell West once again distinguished himself with insightful and unrelenting but respectful questioning, taking Rivlin to task for pleading for the status quo. She took offense when he said that her lofty but toothless rhetoric would lead nowhere but a shrug of the shoulders as it once again failed to have the espoused effect. She claimed that the poor were well-represented—and intimated that their representation was as successful as that... [More]

The article Time to Bury Pew Report on Wealth by Age Group by Dean Baker (CEPR) hits the nail on the head. Pew put together a report a few years ago on the wealth of various age groups in the U.S. This report has since been misused by many journalists to show that the wealthy elderly are exacting inter-generational warfare on the young. The report stated that “the median household over the age of 65 had $170,500 in net worth [while] households under age 35 had [a] median net worth [of] just $3,700”.

Though I’m going... [More]

tl;dr: If your Windows 8 is mysteriously moving your Windows and taskbar around, it might be because of your Windows Live account synchronizing settings from one machine to another.

Starting with Windows 8, you can connect your local user account to your Windows Live account, sharing your preferences and some Windows-App-Store application settings and logins.

I had this enabled for a while but recently discovered that it was responsible for mysterious issues I’d been experiencing on my... [More]

A friend asked me about the prices for refurbished Macs (Apple Store).[1] In case anyone else is thinking about doing it, here’s my $.02.

Is refurbished OK?

I can’t think of a reason why a refurbished Mac wouldn’t be a good idea. it’s good for the Earth, at any rate. My initial impression is that the price advantage is negligible—you can get last year’s model (June 2012) for only a 15% savings off of the price of a new MacBook. It’s impressive how little Macs depreciate. Still, 15% is better than nothing.

Retina... [More]

Ron Paul appeared on a recent Smiley and West show. He’s a bit slippery. He generally argues for absolute liberty and that the government’s role is to ensure liberty—in other words, the goal of the strict Libertarian that he always has been. If nothing else, he’s consistent. But he very quickly gets into trouble with issues that don’t work so well with a black-and-white political philosophy—in other words, almost any issue of consequence.

For example, the conversation turns to Hate-Crime... [More]

Disk Cleanup – Windows.old & Recycle BinDisk Cleanup – System FilesIf, instead of installing Windows 8 on an empty drive, you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the installation process retains a copy of your old Windows 7 installation in a folder named “Windows.old”. As you can see from the screenshot, this folder can be pretty big. If your Windows 8 is running fine and you have no plans of downgrading, you can safely throw away this folder.

What’s the best way to delete this folder? It’s probably protected and deleting it manually will be rife with... [More]

Opera started a public beta-testing program a few years ago called Opera Next. Whereas the stable version naturally moved along more slowly—but always rock-solid—Opera Next often had a more up-to-date HTML/CSS renderer (code-named Presto) and Javascript engine (code-named Carakan). Opera recently anounced that future versions—Opera Next Next—would be built on the WebKit HTML/CSS renderer and Google’s open-source V8 Javascript engine instead.

Why is it good news?

This is, I think, good... [More]

The paper Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism by Colin S. Gordon, Matthew J. Parkinson, Jared Parsons, Aleks Bromfield, Joe Duffy (Microsoft Research) is quite long (26 pages), detailed and involved. To be frank, most of the notation was foreign to me—to say nothing of making heads or tails of most of the proofs and lemmas—but I found the higher-level discussions and conclusions quite interesting.

The abstract is concise and describes the project very well:

“A key challenge for concurrent programming is that side-effects (memory operations) in one thread can affect the... [More]”