For we Mac-users still stuck in a pre-”Snow Leopard” world, the occasional glitches in the Finder still rear their ugly heads from time to time. Sometime over the summer, my system got its panties into a bunch to such a degree that, though the system was not technically crashed or unusable (or potentially rescue-able), it was just easier to kill it and reboot. Upon reboot, I was greeted with a “something awful seems to have happened; could you tell us what you were doing when it all went wrong?”... [More]

The web page, Ballpoint Afghanistan (EnglishRussia), includes images of artwork created during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. These are purportedly the work of a soldier and were done primarily with a ballpoint pen (and colored pencils, apparently). There’s some really cool stuff in there for fans of line-drawing and doodling. I particularly liked the drawing of a soldier gazing out over mountain ranges (reproduced below; click to enlarge).

Biden is at it again[1]:

Gaffe-Prone Biden Embarrasses Nation Yet Again By Sneezing During Meeting (The Onion)

The consensus on Biden and his constant slip-ups is summed up by one analyst thusly:

“It’s a stupid, stupid error from a half-human, spit-spewing gaffe machine. […] It’s our fault for voting Obama into office alongside a half-retarded adult baby.”

Version 1.5.2 of the Encodo C# Handbook is now available for download. It includes the following updates:

• Expanded “8.1 – Documentation” with examples (this section is now four pages long)
• Added more tips to the “2.3 – Interfaces vs. Abstract Classes” section
• Added “7.20 – Restricting Access with Interfaces”
• Added “5.3.7 – Extension Methods” and “7.17 – Using Extension Methods”

It’s also available for download at the MSDN Code Gallery.

DSL is a buzzword that’s been around for a while and it stands for [D]omain-[Specific] [L]anguage. That is, some tasks or “domains” are better described with their own language rather than using the same language for everything. This gives a name to what is actually already a standard practice: every time a program assumes a particular format for an input string (e.g. CSV or configuration files), it is using a DSL. On the surface, it’s extremely logical to use a syntax and semantics most... [More]

A usable API doesn’t usually spring forth in its entirety on the first try. A good, usable API generally arises iteratively, improving over time. Naturally, when using words like good and usable, I’m obliged to define what exactly I mean by that. Here are the guidelines I use when designing an API, in decreasing order of importance:

Static typing & Compile-time Errors

Wherever possible, make the compiler stop the user from doing something incorrectly instead of letting the runtime handle it.... [More]

C# 3.5 has a limitation where generic classes don’t necessarily conform to each other in the way that one would expect. This problem manifests itself classically in the following way:

class D { }
class E : D { }
class F : D { }

class Program
{
  void ProcessListOfD(IList<D> list) { }
  void ProcessListOfE(IList<E> list) { }
  void ProcessSequenceOfD(IEnumerable<D> sequence) { }
  void ProcessSequenceOfE(IEnumerable<E> sequence) { }

  void Main()
  {
    var eList = new List<E>();
    var... [More]

Fluent interfaces—or “method chaining” as it’s also called—provide an elegant API for configuring objects. For example, the Quino query API provides methods to restrict (Where or WhereEquals), order (OrderBy), join (Join) and project (Select) data. The first version of this API was very traditional and applications typically contained code like the following:

var query = new Query(Person.Metadata);
query.WhereEquals(Person.Fields.Name, "Müller");... [More]

August 1, 2009

Kath and Marco pick up Sean, Amber and Chloe from the Kloten airport in the morning and bring them home for their first brunch and the start of a long, jet-lagged day. After brunch, Chloe and Amber take a nap while Marco, Sean and Kath take a walk around the neighborhood, walking up to the waterfall in the Tobel before heading back to wake up the sleeping beauties. In order to keep everyone going and on their feet, we took advantage of the great weather and walked to the lake... [More]

This definition of World War II (Urban Dictionary) provides evidence that the dictionary is not just for looking up dirty words and colloquialisms in English. With minor edits, it is reproduced here:

1. Germany invades Czechoslovakia.
2. Britain and France tell them to stop that bullshit.
3. Germany invades Poland. (Russia also invades Poland from the other side: everybody forgets this.)
4. Britain and France declare war; this is the ‘official’ kick-off.
5. Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania all join the German side.... [More]

As detailed in the article, Strip search of Ariz. teenager illegal, court says by Jesse J. Holland, the Supreme Court weighed in today on the case of the young lady who was strip-searched to determined whether she had brought Ibuprofen—Ibuprofen!—to school with her. The facts of case are as follows:

“Redding was 13 when the educators in rural eastern Arizona conducted the search in 2003. They were looking for pills — the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs... [More]”

American football is not static and undergoes rule changes from season to season. One such change is documented in the article Best Intimidating Answer to a Legitimate Question, in which stiff-arming has been considerably curtailed for the 2009-2010 NFL season. Marion Barber can proudly and rightly claim to be almost the sole reason for the change, though he doesn’t seem too put out by the upcoming limitation on his technique.

“Barber made a habit last year of violently stiff-arming potential... [More]”

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]